Dead Man on the Moon (2 page)

"Bill!" she shouted as she dropped to the crater floor. "Bill, are you all right?"

"Oh god. Oh shit!"

Natalie hit the ground and tried to run, completely forgetting about the moon's weaker gravity. Her first step sent her bounding upward and she drifted back down with maddening slowness. Natalie's stomach lurched. When she touched down on the gritty surface, she forced herself into the careful lope she had only recently learned. A few more half-leaps got her into the shade of the crater's far wall. The light around her vanished as if she had thrown a switch. Ahead of her, she could make out Bill in his space suit. He was kneeling on the ground behind a small boulder. Natalie's stomach tightened and fear clawed at her chest. Emergency protocols flashed through her head—how to handle a small puncture in a suit, what to do if a victim vomited inside his helmet, which frequency to use for a distress call.

"Bill!" she shouted again. "Bill, say something!"

Harsh breathing came over the corn-link. Then Bill said,
"I'm all right. Jesus. I'm just
—
shit!"

Relief flooded Natalie's veins with cool water. "Don't scare me like that," she scolded as she came around the boulder. "You almost made me—"

The words died in her throat. Bill was kneeling next to a human head. It was lying face-up on the lunar sand. The skin had blackened and pulled away from the eye sockets and mouth, leaving behind a hideous mummy's grimace. Below the head lay a simple red shirt and pair of light brown trousers. Vague lumps inside indicated an emaciated, mangled mess of a body that occupied far too little space. No space suit. Natalie stared at it, not sure what she was seeing. It was like coming across a camel in a boardroom. Bill reached down to touch the corpse's neck, and for an insane moment Natalie wondered if he were going to check for a pulse. Bill's gloved hand brushed the blackened jaw. Tissue flaked away and trickled lazily into the collar.

Natalie's gorge rose and she tasted sour bile. Several deep breaths and hard swallows kept her from throwing up. Would Bill still want to ask her out if he saw her barf inside her helmet? The thought made her want to laugh and she tried to clap a hand over her mouth. Her hand hit her faceplate instead. She cleared her throat.

"I think," she said, "we need to call someone."

The itch was completely gone.

The acceleration pressure abruptly ended. For a brief moment, Noah Skyler floated weightless in his harness. Then he dropped back to the chair as the shuttle touched down with a lurch and a bump. Noah's stomach lurched and bobbled in sympathy. The passenger in the chair next to him snatched up an airsickness bag and held it in front of her face. Noah's insides oozed with nausea, and he silently begged her not to throw up—it would set him off as well. The passenger, a dark-haired woman about Noah's own age, took two deep breaths and held a third. Finally she exhaled and set the bag down. Noah swallowed with relief and reached for the stiff release catch on his harness. In the passenger bay around him, other people were doing the same, filling the space with clicks, clacks, and murmured voices. Several were already up and opening the overhead bins to drag out shoulder bags and backpacks.

A chime sounded.
"This is Captain Shelly Mills, hoping your flight was just the way we like 'em
—
straightforward, uneventful, and boring. We've touched down in a perfect landing and it is
now safe to unbuckle your harnesses, though I'm sure most of you have done so and are reaching for your carry-on."

The passengers doing just that paused, then laughed and went back to their business.

"We just want to remind you,"
Captain Mills continued over the loudspeaker,
"that the moon's gravity is about one-sixth that of Earth's. Not only do you weigh less, your luggage does as well. So don't
—"

A yelp as a blond man in his early twenties hauled a bag out of the overhead bin with too much force. It wrenched the owner around, tore itself away from his grip, and crashed into the opposite bulkhead, narrowly missing a flight attendant.

"—
pull too hard,"
Mills finished.
"We hope you enjoyed your flight, and enjoy your time in Luna City."

The red-faced owner of the errant bag retrieved it. Several passengers hid smiles behind their hands, others laughed outright. Excitement fluttered in Noah's chest as he got carefully to his feet. He felt light and airy, as if he could leap to the top of a skyscraper. After six hours on a windowless shuttle, he wanted to. Every muscle screamed for exercise. Moving with a meticulous caution that belied his trembling hands, he retrieved his backpack, unable to avoid rubbing elbows and bumping into the people around him. The shuttle carried two hundred passengers, and every seat had been taken. Everyone looked rumpled, and the air smelled of sweat and stale clothes despite the hard-working filters and fans. Still, a sense of anticipation hummed through the compartment, keeping the mood light.

Noah forced himself to wait patiently in the inevitable crush to exit the passenger bay, though inside he was jumping up and down like a little kid. He had arrived safely on the moon, and he was going to study at Luna U, the most prestigious university on . . . Earth? He grinned. The term didn't seem to apply. Still, he was here, and on an all-expense grant to boot. He couldn't wait to get out and explore.

Ahead of him in line was a guy barely out of his teens. He was bopping his head up and down, apparently listening to music piped in from his onboard computer. Noah shook his head. Was the kid even old enough to study at Luna? Look at him. He was dancing in place like a child who had to go to the bathroom. And his clothes were—

The line edged forward, and Noah grimaced wryly. Only twenty-seven, and he was already thinking like an old fogey He readjusted the bag on his shoulder and scootched forward, trying to see over the kid—okay, young man—in front of him. Noah was a little on the short side, with auburn hair, dark blue eyes, and a boyishly handsome face that often got him more attention than he really wanted. He had a whipcord build achieved partly from lucky genes and partly from hours spent clinging to near-vertical surfaces by piton, rope, or just his fingertips. Noah wondered if rock climbing on Luna was allowed—or a challenge. In this gravity, even free climbing would be a cinch, vacuum suit notwithstanding.

Vacuum. If he wanted to climb, he'd have to go . . . outside. Well, all right—maybe there was a climbing gym somewhere.

Eventually Noah filed past a smiling Captain Mills, through an airlock, down a corridor, and into the receiving gate at Luna City port. It looked rather like an airport, complete with a blue-carpeted waiting area and rows of hard plastic chairs. The crowd of rumpled passengers threaded their way through them, following an arrow-shaped sign that pointed them toward baggage claim and customs. The people walked with an odd, bounding gate. Occasionally someone leaped above the crowd and drifted back to the floor. Green plants bulged and arced out of pots and planters around them, breaking the cold monotony of white ceramic walls and floors. Voices and conversation bounced and echoed.

One entire wall of the waiting area was a window that looked out across the lunar surface, and Noah paused at it. The lunar outdoors looked like a dirty beach studded with
rocks and boulders spread beneath an utterly black velvet sky. Stars, thousands of them, shone hard and unmoving as diamonds. It was stark, beautiful, and deadly. Noah stared, entranced. Pictures and holos didn't do it justice. He put a hand on the cold Plexiglas. Death lay only a few centimeters away.

Something cracked against the window like a rock hitting a windshield. Noah snatched his hand away and a jolt of fear touched his stomach. A tiny puff of dust spurted up from the ground a few steps from the window, leaving a tiny crater. The window wasn't even scratched.

"Micrometeor ricochet," said a woman standing beside him. She had long blond hair that reached almost to her waist, enormous brown eyes, and a round, merry face. Pretty. Very pretty. Noah's practiced eye picked out the fact that her matching beige blouse and trousers—raw silk— were hand-tailored to fit her well-toned body. She had a suntan, and her shoes were Italian leather.

"Glad we're in here and not out there," she continued, looking out the window with him.

"Yeah," Noah said. "The weather's gonna put a crimp in my workout schedule. Hard to jog when your lungs are getting sucked out of your chest."

She laughed and held out her hand. Her fingernails had been done by a professional. "I'm Ilene Hatt."

"Hi," he said, shaking. Her grip was firm and dry. "I'm Noah Skyler."

"I know. We're rooming together."

He blinked at her. "Say again?"

"A friend of mine works in the housing office," she said. "I got a copy of the assignment roster, and apparently we're rooming together."

"Oh. Um . . . hooray?" Noah said, feeling off-balance. "I mean—"

She laughed again. "It's obviously a mistake. We'll just have to go down there and straighten it out. Come on—the line at customs and immigration is going to be horrendous."

They stopped at baggage claim to pick up their single allotted pieces of checked luggage—Noah had a duffel bag, Ilene a leather suitcase—and followed more arrows down plant-lined corridors to customs, chatting along the way. Ilene, Noah learned, was a second-year graduate student at Luna University. She was studying chemistry, and she had gone home to visit her family for a couple months before the new semester started. Noah suppressed a small start at that. A trip from Earth to Luna City was a two-stage process. First step was riding the tether up to Tether Station. Second step was a six-hour shuttle trip to Luna itself. It was expensive as hell, and Noah had only been able to afford it because it was part of his grant. Then the penny dropped.

"Ilene Hatt," he said. "As in, Hatt Testing Laboratories?"

Ilene sighed. "Yes, that's them. Us. I'm rich, I'm wealthy, let's move on. What about you?"

"I'm not rich."

"Most people aren't," Ilene said with a touch of exasperation. "I mean, what you are studying?"

"Material science," Noah stammered. "You know that low-gravity orbital construction that just got underway—"

She cut him off. "Well, this is the place for it. So what were you back home? An engineer?"

"I'm a crime scene investigator."

"A cop?" she asked, brown eyes wide with interest. "What are you doing up here?"

Oh great, he thought. She's one of
those.
People like this really burned his butt with their ignorant assumptions about his world: I'm a cop, therefore by definition, I must be an uneducated and ineducable pinhead.

"I told you—getting my master's," he said with all the patience he could muster.

They joined the long line before the customs and immigration station. A hint of her perfume—something floral— hung in the air around her. "So why does a cop need a master's degree from Luna U?"

"That was arrogant," he said.

"No more arrogant than what you're thinking," she shot back.

"And what's that?"

" 'Why would someone with her kind of money need a master's degree?' "

"Well? Why would she?"

"I'll answer yours if you answer mine."

Noah paused and looked at her chocolate-brown eyes. "Are we arguing or flirting?"

"Not sure yet." She reached out to straighten his collar, and a cool fingertip brushed his neck. Noah swallowed hard. "If we're roommates, it'd be inappropriate and awkward for us to flirt."

"Then let's hit housing right after customs," Noah said, and managed a grin.

"You," she said, "have an amazingly cute smile, Noah Skyler. I can say that, since we've decided we won't be roommates."

"And you... you ..." He floundered. "You should probably move forward," he said. She gave him a questioning look. "'Cause, you know, the line is moving."

Customs and immigration went surprisingly quickly. Their bags passed through the scanner without a hitch, and an efficient official dressed in blue took their retina prints, fingerprints, and an oral DNA sample, all of which were entered into the Luna City identification database. Noah answered a few questions about the reason for his visit ("student"), his birthplace ("Wisconsin, United States"), his place of residency ("same"), how long he planned to stay on Luna ("between two and four years"), and his source of income ("grant, scholarships, and work-study"). He wondered if Ilene would answer the last question with, "You're kidding, right?"