“How was your shift?” Mara asked as Jasleen slumped into their quarters.
“Eventful,” she said, sitting with a groan upon the couch. The couch also doubled as their bed, but Jasleen didn’t feel like converting it just now. The small apartment she shared with Jasleen was in the dome’s interior and didn’t have a window, a fact which pleased Jasleen just now. But Mara had the room’s wall screen tuned to an external camera that gave a sweeping panoramic view of the Sea of Serenity. Mara never tired of looking at the lunar landscape. “Great view, no atmosphere,” she had joked when they first arrived. Jasleen found herself checking the screen for naked figures, and turned away. Her body was beginning to become stiff and sore, which Dr. Cole had predicted.
“Yeah,” said Mara from the kitchenette. “I heard on the base feed. Did you know about it?”
Jasleen squeezed her eyes shut, saw only flashes of that thing killing Morrison, and opened them. “I was there.”
She heard a pot clang behind her, then a moment of silence. “Really? Jesus. Are you OK? What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. In fact, I’m under orders not to talk about it. So can we change the subject?” She said this last a bit more forcefully than she intended, and winced.
“All right,” Mara said carefully. “I talked to Mom today. As much as you can talk to anyone on Earth with a two-minute delay. Roger got their home solar array up. And Mom says hi.”
Jasleen nodded. Roger was Mara’s stepfather. She heard the words, but they sounded as if they were coming from miles away. Her thoughts were on Morrison, and the thing that killed him, as well as the people covering it up.
“When are our contracts up?” she asked.
Mara plopped onto the couch beside her. “Uh, let’s see. December? We’ve got a while.”
“Oh.”
“Are you thinking of breaking our contracts?”
“I’m thinking of where we might go after this.”
Mara shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought we’d stay here. I like it here. I thought you did too.”
“I did. I do. It’s just…”
“What happened today.” It was a statement, not a question.
“What happened today.”
“Well, when you feel like talking about it, I’m here. You know that.”
Jasleen took her hand, always so soft and warm, and gave it a squeeze. “I know. Hey, what’s for dinner?”
Mara fixed her with a playful smirk. “I was just about to ask you the same question.”
* * *
They made dinner—grilled chicken and salad fresh from the Luna 1 hydroponic gardens—in relative silence, the quiet ritual of cooking bringing Jasleen back to herself. After an hour in the living quarters they shared, Jasleen could almost believe what took place today had happened to someone else, as if this tiny safe place was as far from the surface of the Moon as their apartment in SoHo back on Earth. But it was still there nonetheless. Something had shattered the tiny bubble they all lived in, every semblance of false security even she might have felt as the base’s chief of security and, according to Mara, the World’s Most Cynical Human, was gone.
Could she get her and Mara away from here? Should she? If so where would they go? Should they return to Earth and stick it out with everyone else, or head for Mars or one of the Jovian stations just getting established? If the supply chain between Earth and the Moon were completely cut off, rather than just delayed as it was now, they would all die in a few months. On Earth, they might survive another year, maybe even less. Everywhere else they could go was bathed in hard radiation. It wasn’t a rosy outlook. There was no more paradise. Humankind had befouled the one place it knew it had.
Sometime during the cooking, Mara had switched the wall screen to a newsfeed from Earth. Russian and Chinese forces were ganging up on Ukraine again. A Christian nationalist terrorist cell had taken control of a courthouse in Alabama. Climate-related hostilities in the Philippines. Wars and rumors of wars. And shining above it all, Luna 1, staffed with the greatest scientists and academics the pitiful little blue-green world had ever produced, working to save it if they could. And it was even now being torn apart by forces all its own. It was all so damn disheartening.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Jasleen ate and went to bed, but every time she closed her eyes she saw that thing reaching for her in vacuum, her suited form reflected in the black mirror of its face.
She got up a few hours later and did busy work. There were messages to send, reports to catch up on. Mara was accustomed to her moods and avoided her, watching the wall screen for more depressing news from Earth. Sometime later she queued up the latest episode of Clash on Titan, a sci-fi show about female space marines that Jasleen thought was unrealistic and melodramatic, but Mara loved in spite of her wife’s protestations. Jasleen simply shook her head and went back to answering messages on her slate.
At some point, she slept fitfully, her night punctuated by strange dreams of her reaching for someone in the dark and being unable to grasp them before they fell into a dark, silvery abyss.
She rose and checked the time. It was almost the start of her shift, so she gave up on sleep and shrugged into her jumpsuit. Mara moaned softly, lying warm and soft beside her. Her shift in the hydroponics lab wouldn’t begin for a few more hours.
Jasleen tugged on her boots, the room dark save for a few telltales and a bioluminescent strip that ran along the ceiling. Then she grabbed her gun and her slate and left.
Her slate started chiming with alerts almost immediately, and Jasleen gave them a perfunctory review as she walked to the security office. Someone had inhaled too many epoxy fumes trying to seal an air shaft without proper ventilation, and there had been some semi-naked, drunken cavorting in one of the maintenance tunnels in Aldrin Dome.
Jasleen shook her head. What had once been a key part of her duties now seemed so trivial. There was an actual threat looming, and her biggest concern was corralling a few drunks.
As she made her way to the security office, Jasleen replayed the events of the previous twenty-four hours in her mind, free of the shock and fear that had originally accompanied them. She was able to see things with a fresh perspective that almost startled her. She decided to leave the emotion out of it and look at the facts. Forget sinister speculation. What did they actually know?
One, that a naked man had been running around on the surface of the Moon, covered in some silvery metallic substance that allowed him to survive in sub-zero vacuum. He didn’t even have a sunburn.
Two, that someone else removed the body and cleaned up the crime scene as best they could.
And three, made their escape through an old, unused airlock not part of Luna 1. A facility Donovan had given Commander Teague a map of on an encrypted drive moments before he was killed in a shuttle explosion.
All of this added up to one thing. A fifth column working in secret on the Moon. But to what end?
It didn’t matter, Jasleen decided as she rounded a corner. A fifth column would still leave clues. Especially up here. Anyone living in another tunnel network would need the same things Luna personnel did. Air. Food. Water. Power. Luna 1 managed pretty well, but it was far from self-sufficient. It took regular supply runs from Earth to keep it going. But a secret base wouldn’t have that level of infrastructure. That meant they had to have help, which meant someone—perhaps several someones—inside Luna was in on it. Maybe back on Earth too.
She turned left and entered the security office. Briggs glanced up from behind the desk looking sleepy and bored. “Chief,” he said with a nod.
“Quiet night?”
The big man shrugged. “Pretty much.” Briggs was tall, lean, tan, and corn-fed, hailing from one of the flyover zones. He stood, grabbing his baton from the desk and inserting it into the ring on his belt. The display on the desk showed a variety of cameras all over Luna 1, mostly in large high-traffic areas. Jasleen watched the formerly empty corridors fill up with base personnel running to start their shifts. Just another normal day on the Moon. Nothing to see here. Move along.
“All right. I’ll take it from here. Good night.”
Briggs nodded once more and left, a look of relief on his face. Jasleen smiled after him. Since time immemorial the new guy always got the graveyard shift, and he was happy for the base to be someone else’s problem for a few hours.
Jasleen wondered how long the outer semblance of peace would last. Already she had heard whispers about what had happened to Morrison on the lunar surface, about how his reported death by electrocution didn’t make any sense, which it didn’t. The people of Luna 1 were smart, maybe the smartest Earth had ever produced. They were starting to see through Commander Teague’s hasty charade. The question was, what would they do about it? Tension manifested itself in subtle, yet numerous ways. Her training and experience told her there would be a hundred different hostilities and microaggressions. Trivial arguments turning into physical violence. She would have to be ready.
She thought about the schematics Teague had shown her the previous shift. Secret schematics the outgoing commander had been blown up to keep that way, and wondered what was coming. Would she be able to handle it?
The security team had some live ammo, but most of their countermeasures consisted of rubber bullets, baton rounds, and riot foam. They were rigged for pacifying occasionally drunk and unruly scientists, not repelling boarders or preventing an incursion. She noted the faces that flicked by the cameras, looking for signs of distrust, unwariness, or unease. She found no evidence, but that didn’t mean those things weren’t there, boiling just beneath the surface. Something was coming. Jasleen could feel it. And she felt powerless to stop it. All she could do was pivot and react once it got here.
Or was it?
As she leaned back in her chair, still warm from where Briggs had been riding it all night, she recalled the scarred and half faded logo stenciled onto the airlock door she and Teague had found. And she remembered where she had seen it before.
Jasleen sat up, tapping her slate to wake it up. A moment of research on the base's feed jarred her memory. The logo belonged to a company called Daedalus Corporation, a defense contractor. She opened the personnel files and began quickly swiping through them. At the start of her contract, she had familiarized herself with them, and she had read mention of Daedalus in one of them before. But where? Who?
Jasleen stopped at a familiar photo, her eyes zooming directly to the right spot. Her heart hammered, and her mouth went dry. She needed to see Commander Teague. Right now.