CisLuna_Hard-boiled Police Procedural_Murder Mystery Page 17

  Anyway, young Gaddo escaped the institution in 2060, age 15, and was not heard from again until he turned up at Vandenberg in 2070 under the alias Austen Miller. Police now believe Miller and Ugolino are the same and that Miller was the name he used while perpetrating the vampire killings that went from 2070 to 2072 in the Vandenberg area. They determined this by matching Ugolino’s DNA with samples from the dead Barnaby Brown and the blood sample from Jonathan Teach. All matched. We didn’t have a DNA sample from Miller. But Miller was concluded to be one of the aliases used in the similar vampire MO wherein all victims were killed by CO2 asphyxiation before being suspended from the ceiling and drained of blood. I drew a big evidence map on the wall to show matching DNA and matching MOs.

  I finally put the report down and took a long pull on my second martini. There was no information provided in the report as to Ugolino’s whereabouts during the period 2060-70 save that he was at large. That meant that he could have been in Missouri. He could have been the serial killer I had been in pursuit of. He could have been the murderer of my wife Hanna and my son Michael. He could have been.

  What evidence did I have beyond ‘he could have been?’ There was the garrote he’d used on his aunt. He used a similar garrote on his victims in Missouri, and on my Hanna and Michael. It was not implausible that he would have changed his MO when he came to Vandenberg. In fact, it would have been foolish for him not to change it.

  He had taken the four people I loved the most—Hanna and Michael, Emily and Devil. Dogs are people too. But I had taken him. I had killed him, my life-taking skills finally proving superior to his. Killed him in hand-to-hand combat, the fates having granted my secret wish. Killed him at close range. Close enough to see the deep wound that I put in his forehead with my own blade cast by my own hand. Close enough to see the life extinguished from his eyes as his blood ran down the side of his face. Close enough to watch that blood form an indelible pool around his head on the deck of William Borucki. And every time I passed that spot, I would look for that stain and be warmed by the memory of what I had done. That spot, more than any crater on the moon, would be the true headstone of Emily and Devil. Even if they replaced those tiles, as I was sure they would, I would remember… and remember… and remember.

  Acknowledgements

  Nobody writes alone these days, and I am no exception. I’ll start with my wonderful muse, Julie, without whom I’d not be a writer at all. She read the very first draft finding several typos and a few plot holes. She emerged from her ordeal declaring, “It’s good!”

  And I must also thank Douglas Shrock, as much muse as artist. He crafted the beautiful cover art and layout. How many times have I referred to his work for inspiration? You can see more of his fine work in this book a few pages from now where he has rendered a dramatic cover for Genesis, Book III of the Galactican Series, our first manned trip to Mars. That’s Amanda Blake on the cover with her red hair matching the Martian surface.

  Another reader of the first draft was my excellent friend and fine literary critic, Simon Cowan, from London, England. He declared it ‘a gooood read.’ I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to know if you’ve got something worthwhile in the early phases after completing your first draft. If first draft readers come away yawning, your best recourse is to trash it and start over on something else. His praise gave me courage to go on. And his excellent suggestions told me how to go on.

  Armed with Julie and Simon’s comments and advice, I pressed on to the Second Draft, sending review copies out to Randall Shaw of Kennesaw, Georgia, Trice Healy of La Quinta, California, Claudia Johnson of Portland, Oregon, Beau Riedel of Belmont, California, my stepson Stephen Pinto from Cupertino, California, and my Aunt Ellen Carter from Nineveh, Indiana.

  I got good responses from all and am deeply grateful. However, I needed somebody to read the mss who was not afraid (dare I say eager?) to give me both barrels. My good friend Chet Nagle of Alexandria, Virginia was more that equal to that task. I’ve edited and published three of his fine thrillers: The Woolsorters’ Plague, Iran Covenant, and Lazarus Man, so now it was payback time! He sent my mss back dripping with red plus three more pages of his expert advice. I am deeply thankful for all the time he took and CisLuna is a much better book for it.

  * * *

  Next, I would like to express my gratitude to another class of folks who, while they have not lent me their criticism, they have lent me the use of their names for my space stations, shuttles, and the lunar surface colony. There is a famous quote in the space exploration business:

  If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

  Isaac Newton

  Newton’s quote remains a popular sentiment among principal investigators to this day—their way of paying homage to the likes of Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo Galilei. The principal investigators and project managers of today will serve as the giants of tomorrow, enabling a new generation of PIs and PMs to achieve even greater discoveries about the Universe we live in.

  Since hard SciFi may be described as a history of the future, I decided to give a shout out to my friends and colleagues around NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California and the SETI institute at Mountain View, California. They have done and continue to do the noble work of science and engineering that goes largely unacknowledged in the public conversation. Let me start with the two fellows on the cover of CisLuna, William Borucki and John Marmie. I adopted the arbitrary convention of naming space stations after scientists and space shuttles after project managers.

  Bill Borucki is the father of the Kepler mission. He first conceived of Kepler in 1984 as a space telescope that could detect earth-sized planets and determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars. It did not launch until 2009, 25 years later, a testament to Bill’s stubbornness or his courage or perhaps both. Kepler changed planetary science. Before it launched we thought our own Solar System was the template for most stellar systems around the galaxy. In finding over 5000 candidate exoplanets (over 2400 confirmed), Kepler and its follow-on K2 mission have taught us that our solar system is anything but typical. Bill Borucki is to exoplanets as James Hubble was to Galaxies.

  John Marmie was the deputy project manager of the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission. The Moon will figure prominently in future space exploration, largely because of LCROSS’ confirmation of large deposits of water in the northern and southern polar craters which, because of the moon’s 1.5° axial tilt, remain permanently shaded from the sun. Water can be broken down into its constituent elements oxygen and hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen (LH2) is extremely important as a propellant in nuclear thermal rockets. We could haul it up from the Earth’s surface to the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1, but that would cost 13 km/s in Delta V. Or we could haul it up from the lunar surface for only 3 km/s in Delta V. You do the math.

  Nathalie Cabrol is a Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Carl Sagan Center at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in Mountain View, California. She is a planetary scientist, an explorer, and a leader of research projects in astrobiology and extreme terrestrial environments, planetary missions, and robotics. She is a science team member of the NASA Mars Exploration Rover mission and was the main advocate for the selection of Gusev crater as the landing site for the Spirit rover on Mars.

  Anthony Colaprete is NASA Ames Research Center’s ‘Mr. Moon.’ He has been principal investigator of both the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission and the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission. LCROSS confirmed the presence of copious amounts of water ice trapped in the permanently shaded craters of the lunar polar regions. It did so by shepherding a Centaur upper stage to a crash landing into one of the southern craters. Instruments on the LCROSS spacecraft would directly observe the ejecta plume from the

  crash for about four minutes before it too crashed into the lunar su
rface. A companion mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) would then fly through the ejecta plume to further characterize its constituents. LADEE orbited the moon about its equator to study the composition of its exosphere and its dust before it too crashed into the lunar surface on the far side of the moon.

  David Koch was the Deputy Principal Investigator of the Kepler mission. Noted for his work in spacecraft instrumentation, David developed the Kepler Technology Demonstration that showed the transit method could detect Earth-size planets. Regrettably, David passed away in 2012—he will be missed.

  Butler Hine was project manager of the LADEE mission and also of the development of LADEE’s Modular Common Spacecraft Bus (MCSB). MCSB is a low-cost interplanetary bus developed at NASA Ames Research Center. Spacecraft such as the MCSB are essential to NASA transitioning away from expensive custom-built spececraft into less expensive multi-use designs that can be produced on an assembly line at far less cost. The MCSB can be equipped as a lander or an

  orbiter on missions to near earth objects, the Moon, and Mars.

  This acknowledgement is not exhaustive, limited only to the ones who happened to show up in this story. There are other project managers and scientists around town who have allowed me to name various SpaceCorp equipment and infrastructure after them, including Dan Andrews, Carol Stoker, Brian Glass, Victor Parro, Alfonso Davila, Pascal Lee, and Jill Tarter. They will be featured in future editions of The Galactican Series. These folks are my heroes, the genuine articles of space exploration.

  I am also a patron of Winchell Chung’s website. Any writer of hard SciFi who is not a student of this site has rocks in his head. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

  Coming in 2018

  In Book III, SpaceCorp has completed construction of SpaceCorp Interplanetary Spaceship (SIS) Pascal Lee for man’s first trip to Mars. She’s not pretty, but with a total Delta V budget of 211 km/sec she can get you there. Her nuclear thermal rockets will allow her to make the full round trip to Mars in 64 days with 12 days loiter time.

  Half the crew consists of 100 humans, plus a contingent of six Pan astra ‘stellar chimps,’ genetically altered to resist interplanetary radiation. The other half consists of AIs, led by ISAAK, the ship’s main computer avatar. She will carry four landers, two crewed by women, two by AIs. No men, you ask? Fifty years ago, the citizens of SpaceCorp would have raised a similar eyebrow. In 2100 nobody noticed, a testament to SpaceCorp’s sociocultural evolution. The greater issue for the crew is whether the AIs will outperform their human counterparts.

  Spoiler: Pascal Lee will discover microbial life on Mars. Billions of years ago, life on Earth had a chemical, non-biological origin. It was our genesis event. Finding proof of a second, distinct genesis event on another planet is the holy grail of astrobiology. The question is which genesis event produced the better survivors when the two life forms finally meet?

  Preview of Genesis Prologue and first chapter

  Prologue

  November 2101

  SSS Jill Tarter, EML1, CisLuna

  She opened the encryption app on her communicator and felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. She had composed her message off-line, then sent it in burst-mode to prevent snooping keyboard monitors from capturing her text. Pain in the ass. Even with the communication lag of less than a second it still took two hours to exchange information that could be shared in twenty minutes in a face to face conversation. Still, what do you expect when you’re 320,000 km from Earth and your business partner is who knows where on Earth?

  Partner. Something about that word implied far too much trust than she felt at the moment. They’d initiated the conversation, what, six months ago? She’d ignored it for a week. Comm security on the stations was lax and every now and then you would open your mail to some scam from Earthside. That’s all it was. Some stupid real estate scam. Villas high up on the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast of Italy? How was she supposed to get there from CisLuna? Still, the beautiful images of tiled verandas with chaise lounges arranged under grape vines to look out over the Mediterranean. Where had America gone so wrong?

  The prices were ridiculous of course. Especially for someone living on a space station in CisLuna. Nobody got a salary in SpaceCorp’s ‘work-for-food’ economy. Three hots and a cot, plus all the blue fitted coveralls you could stuff into your closet. And recycled air. Suck in all you want. Who cares if a hundred people had breathed before you? And state of the art space suits, especially for the Mars crews. Guaranteed to protect landing crews from cold, vacuum, wind-blown perchlorates, and other crap expected from the martian regolith. Bulky, heavy, cumbersome. Not stylish. Not designed to let balmy ocean breezes waft through the fibers tickling your skin underneath. Tickling your skin… Oh, yeah!

  She was twenty-seven, born 2074, one year after The Dissolution of America. It had been ten years since she had last stood on Earth. Ten years since she had felt the wind in her face, blowing through her hair. That was at a beach party at Vandenberg the night before she shipped out to begin her astronaut-scientist apprenticeship. She’d done well. One of eight of a class of seventeen to not wash out. She was in line to be a primary, not a backup. If she didn’t screw up, she would become one of the first humans ever to set foot on the surface of Mars. She just had to collect her core sample and return to the Pascal Lee. Instant fame.

  The next clue was a link to an article about Swiss banks and their Byzantine numbering schemes designed to keep dishonest people dishonest. The part about IBAN number formats was yellow highlighted. A week later she got an account number.

  CH93 0076 2011 6238 5295 7

  CH was for Switzerland. She remembered that much. The 93 was a check sum. Then some meaningless digits followed by an account number. Whose?

  A few days later she got another app. The IBAN was filled in along with an encrypted password followed by a big button with the word SUBMIT in the middle of it. She stared at it for a full minute before she clicked on it. The page that opened had her full name, date of birth, and citizenship. The computer camera studied her face for a moment and decided she was who she was, then presented her with a big button with the word BALANCE in the middle of it. Was there anyone on Earth who could have resisted clicking that button? …Anyone?

  Chapter One – Launch Day

  12Nov2102

  SIS Pascal Lee, EML2, CisLuna

  The now defunct National Aeronautics and Space administration—what historians currently refer to as NASA—funded its first exobiology project in 1959, one hundred and forty-three years ago. It was a simple instrument designed to detect microbial life in extraterrestrial environments. Somewhere along the way, exobiology renamed itself astrobiology—it sounded better—and became a program. The charter for said program was at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. It was probably no accident that the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence or SETI institute headquartered itself a short distance away in Mountain View. Their charter was to search for any kind of alien life that had a high enough IQ to invent the television or some other device that could send a detectable signal through its atmosphere and into deep space. From insentient microbes to a sentient exosociety, the two organizations had bookended the spectrum of life.

  Both organizations survived and to some extent thrived on the belief that life was not limited to Earth alone. They lived by scant data and soft inference. Everything they thought they knew about life not of Earth was based on analogs about life on Earth. If life on Earth needed liquid water, then life not of Earth must need water as well, and a great hunt was launched to find stellar systems that harbored Earthlike planets within their so-called habitable zones where liquid water could exist. If life on Earth was based on DNA, then life not of Earth must also be based on DNA. Lifeforms similar to DNA, say, with different nucleotides, were only fleetingly covered in the literature. And lifeforms not based on DNA at all were relegated to science fantasy film and literature. Even in those mediums, the really far o
ut lifeforms always ended up looking like sea anemones. The less far out resembled humanoids with various sea creature accoutrements, e.g., tentacles, fins, and gills. Hollywood, later Bollywood, was not nearly as imaginative as it thought it was. Anyway, the astrobiology community remained faithful to this belief structure well into the 21st Century when the Age of Ignorance led to the Great Dissolution of the once great nation of America in 2073.

  Fortunately, fifty years prior to that in 2023, SpaceCorp bought the rights to NASA’s and the Air Forces’ space exploration infrastructure. They got SETI for free since it consisted mainly of a community of brilliant scientists who had survived up to then on government grants—SETI was essentially a brain trust with no significant infrastructure to speak of. With no more grants, SETI’s scientists moved out of their rented offices on North Bernardo Avenue across the freeway onto the Ames campus, happily subsumed by SpaceCorp’s work-for-food economy where living accommodations and other necessities were provided in exchange for research.

  While all this was going on, space travel was pretty much limited to Low Earth Orbit or LEO where SpaceCorp was occupied with the challenge of maintaining satellite services in the midst of growing clouds of high velocity space junk. They succeeded, not by providing more satellites, but by moving the satellite’s instruments onto heavily armored space stations a kilometer in diameter. The first one, SSS Wernher Von Braun, was completed in 2038 after eight years of effort and a cost of forty-five astronauts killed and some 427 wounded by debris strikes. Despite the cost, it was a huge economic success, given that the world had had to go without satellite services since 2028 when Lloyds of London declared it could no longer insure commercial satellites in LEO.