Dead Man on the Moon (8 page)

Dread settled into Noah's stomach. He carefully repacked the kit, left it on the airlock floor, and returned to the locker area, where he pressed his palm to one of them. He felt a brief warmth as the computer scanned and cleared him. The locker clicked open and for the second time that day, Noah stepped into a silver vacuum suit.

The thought of going outside into that deadly nothingness made his hands shake and his chest turn cold. But the thought that he had screwed up on his first day pushed him forward. He might find something that made up for it. He
would
find something that made up for it.

Noah reentered the airlock, removed the wedge, and let the door roll shut behind him. He forced himself to pick up his kit and operate the control on the wall. He forced himself to stay still as the air was evacuated from the airlock. And as the door ahead of him rolled open, he forced himself to step out onto the lunar sands.

"What do you think of him?" Linus asked.

Karen Fang, who was readying a scalpel for some serious cutting, looked up at Linus. It had taken her two hours to gradually repressurize and remove the storage unit, and the body was now exposed to open air for some final testing. Linus suddenly realized he liked Karen's eyes. They were wide and warm and brown. Very pretty. He forced himself to look back down at the dreadfully wizened corpse.

"What do you think I think? He broke my patient," Karen said.

Linus sighed tiredly and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

"Putting that aside for the moment, though, I think he's seriously cute," Karen said, and snapped the wrist of her glove in a way that managed somehow to be salacious. "I could eat him with a spoon. A really
big
spoon."

Linus snorted. "On the hunt again, K? He could be your

"Jealous?" she said archly.

"Should I be?" The words popped out before Linus could stop them. Karen blinked at him. The moment stretched out for too long, and Linus realized his face had grown warm. He should say something, anything. Fill the silence. But words wouldn't come. He became aware of the tiny wrinkles around Karen's eyes, the way her chest moved when she breathed, the pulse at her neck. Karen looked back at him, herself motionless. Still Linus couldn't speak. In the end, Karen rescued them both.

"Jealous," she snorted. "Only if you think I'm into fingerlings, love. And just for the record, I could have been his babysitter, not his mum. Since I'm holding the scalpel, you'll do well to remember that."

Linus forced a laugh, and the moment was smoothed over. Karen bent over the victim. Linus moved behind her so he could watch over her shoulder as she made a careful slit in the desiccated tissue just below the victim's collarbone. He tried to avoid breathing, reflexively expecting some kind of eye-watering smell. Corpses always had a smell, depending on how long they'd been dead. But this one had no smell at all. It was unnatural, and it gave Linus the creeps. Not only had the killer taken away this person's life, he had taken away something so fundamental as the right to smell like decayed meat after death. All Linus could smell was morgue antiseptic and Karen's perfume. The latter scent was far more pleasant than the former, a floral smell that made Linus think of lilacs.

When was the last time he had smelled lilacs for real? They appeared in various walkways and gardens in Luna City once a year—even all the way up here they seemed to sense when May had arrived—but to Linus, lilacs were meant to be enjoyed on long early-morning walks in chilly spring air, when the sun was just rising yellow and the day hadn't yet shaken off the mystery of the previous night. You needed a faint breeze to waft the sweet scent to you, and your boots needed to swish through damp grass that hadn't been mown yet this year.

But when you woke up in your room on Luna, the lighting was the same as when you went to bed. The sounds and smells changed little. Oh sure, the Luna City and the University had a calendar—yearly celebrations, parties, little traditions. But the seasons never changed. The temperature in the corridors and domes never varied by more than a few degrees. The artificial sunlight beamed relentlessly down, come May or December. You could change the view of your holographic window, but you couldn't open it and smell the changes of the seasons. Some days it didn't bother Linus. He never had to rake or mow or shovel. Seasonal allergies were a thing of the past. But other days . . .

Linus became aware that he was standing so close behind Karen that his breath was stirring her night-black hair. He could feel the heat from her body. Karen wasn't moving away, either. Her scalpel stood poised over the victim's dry skin, and Linus noticed her perfectly shaped nails, un-painted, and steady, sure hands.

I'm admiring a woman while we're both standing over a corpse,
he though.
How sick is that?

He took a firm step back with a small cough. Karen cleared her throat without turning around, then slid scalpel across skin. The tissue flaked and powdered more than it cut, but after a moment Karen had an opening. She inserted a pair of forceps, came up with a wafer the size of Linus's thumb, and popped it into a small covered dish. It made Linus think of a tiny, obscene potluck.

"There you are, love," Karen said. "John Doe's onboard."

Linus accepted the storage dish, feeling oddly confused. He thanked her to cover his consternation. "I'd better get this down to Hector," he said. "The boys down there will know what to do with—"

"Boys?" Karen interrupted, waving her scalpel.

"Generic term," Linus said, leaning away from the moving instrument. "Just like you use 'blokes.' "

"Right," Karen said. "Though I notice no one ever uses 'girls' as a generic term, even in this day and age." She
sighed and turned back to the body. "You go play with your computer toys. I have more tests to run."

"And I definitely don't want to watch," Linus said. He exited quickly, feeling even more uncertain. He'd been working with Karen Fang for years. Why was he only now noticing ... noticing her? It wasn't as if he could ever act on any kind of attraction. Like most Lunarians, she was only here temporarily. One day she would go back to Earth while he . . .

Linus rubbed his chest, feeling his heart beat slow and steady. Well, he wasn't going back to Earth anytime soon. And there were other complications.

Linus exited the medical center into the Dome. Although there were several domes in Luna City, there was only one Dome, with its high, arching roof and parklike atmosphere. It was getting on to suppertime, and registration offices were closing, which meant the paths and sidewalks were crowded with students heading home or to their secondary jobs.

Because of the labor shortage on Luna City, the government had long ago decreed that each resident had to take on a primary and a secondary job. The primary job was always related to the person's main reason for being on Luna. Chemistry students helped out in the chem labs. Botany students kept up the gardens and parks. But other jobs also needed doing—washing dishes, janitorial work, clerical duties, and maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. Many were the sort of jobs that would garner low or minimum wages back on Earth. Except on Luna, you couldn't pay minimum wage for anything. Just transporting the workers to Luna City would cost a small fortune, let alone housing and feeding them. And so the residents were forced to spread the scut work out among themselves.

Some people had regular secondary jobs based on talents and skills they already possessed. Others simply drew jobs from a weekly pool, like pulling a slip of paper from a
household job jar. A few jobs were assigned as punishment for infractions, either civil or criminal. Linus had a jail, but it was small, and he preferred to keep nonviolent offenders busy. Why should they get the chance to lounge around in bed all day when there were air ducts to clean and gardens to fertilize? It wasn't as if prisoners could escape. Where would they go?

A few people were exempted from secondary jobs. Linus, as Chief of Security and a permanent resident of Luna City, was one of them. Karen ran the medical center, and that was deemed sufficient to keep her busy without another job. Mayor-President Ravi Pandey technically had no secondary job, but if you counted being President of the University as one job and Mayor of Luna City as another, she certainly had more than enough on her plate.

Linus crossed the Dome on a winding garden path and entered an alphabet-block building. The interior smelled of rubber flooring, and the halls were crowded with people loping carefully in the low gravity. At one time, it would have been impossible for anyone to stay on the moon for more than a few months without suffering a debilitating loss of muscle tissue and bone density. Stem-cell treatments, however, now took care of that—a simple customized injection once a month allowed students to return to full gravity with few side effects and let people like Linus set up permanent residency on Luna.

Linus bounded up the stairs to the second floor of the building, which was completely occupied by the University's information technology department—computers to everyone else. Tiny offices alternated with giant rooms divided into ever-shifting cubes. An area was set aside for recreation, where two technology students were batting a slow volleyball over a net and using holographic styluses to scribble code in midair between hits. One of the students got so engrossed in his coding that the ball, drifting with low-gravity laziness, tapped the ground before he noticed.

"Out!" called his opponent.

Linus hadn't bothered to call ahead and make sure Hector would still be in his office. Hector was
always
in his office. You couldn't really call it a second home—the man spent more time there than in his apartment. Linus quickly wound his way back to the man's office door, rapped once and entered.

Hector Valdez, head of Luna University's information technology department, was a dapper, tidy man. Every hair on his head was slicked into place, the handlebars on his mustache turned up with exact precision, and every crease on his clothes stood out crisp and sharp. His spacious office was absolutely spotless. Not a datapad or stylus was out of place. Off-white walls stood guard over beige carpet. A neatly made cot waited to one side. Small pieces of abstract sculpture stood guard in the corners, and a holographic window showed blue waves lapping at a Mexican beach. A trio of grad students chattered over a terminal that occupied most of one wall. Code zipped across the display faster than Linus could read.

Hector stepped around his desk with a grin and a hearty handshake. He was three or four years older than Linus and was another of the few people who didn't have to take a secondary job. "What can I do for the Chief of Security?" Hector asked.

"Get what you can off this." Linus handed him the closed container containing the victim's onboard. "It was taken from a murder victim who spent an unknown amount of time outside."

The grad students stopped talking to stare. Hector looked down at the container as if it might explode. "A dead person's obie?"

"Yeah. Don't worry—it's safe. Karen checked it for nasty microbes. Not very many can survive out there, anyway."

Hector regained his composure and shot the grad students a quick glare. They returned to their work, though their chatter was considerably muted. "I don't know how much I can get, but I'll try. Anything in particular you want to know?"

"Who it belonged to," Linus said. "We haven't been able to identify the victim. We're also having a hard time fixing the time of death, so any clues in that arena would be helpful, too."

Hector held the container up to the light. "Obies are partly organic, you know. Exposure to vacuum isn't good for them."

"Whatever you can get will be a help," Linus said. "How long will it take?"

"No idea. At a guess—two days? Three? It'll depend on how much damage was done. Check back with me tomorrow and I can be more specific."

"You're the best, Hector," Linus said, already moving for the door.

"I want dinner when it's over," Hector shot back. "Those home-made crepes you do."

"Done."

Linus was just heading for home when Karen phoned to let him know she had a cause of death. He all but ran back down to the morgue.

"What do you have, K?" he asked a little breathlessly.

"Take a look," she said. The holographic imagers hummed to life, and Karen zoomed in on the lower half of the corpse's face. She magnified several thousand times, but the dry little blobs that appeared on the table in three dimensions meant little to Linus.

"What am I looking at?"

"Pulmonary material," she told him. "One of the worst things you can do when exposed to vacuum is try to hold your breath, though almost everyone does it. The air in your lungs bursts outward in all directions, shredding them inside your chest as effectively as a shrapnel grenade. Pulmonary material bubbles out of the mouth and nose in a terrible mess, but the liquid part of it evaporates, so it's hard to detect without a microscope. These are desiccated pulmonary cells, and their presence tells me the victim was alive and kicking when he was exposed to vacuum."