APRIL 8, 2074

LUNAR COLONY

Jin had to wrench himself from the pull of her wounded baby-blue eyes. In the corner of his vision, a charcoal mechanic drone had whirred across the hangar floor. It dodged a navy-blue dolly supporting a rocket engine stripped to look like a steely porcupine, and then halted, clacked, and swiveled its four bug-eyed cameras towards him.

“I want to go with you.” Her lip gloss was rosy and magnetic. His breath caught. He expected she’d ask, but couldn’t think of how to soften the blow. She smelled of the maple pancakes and coffee he’d made them for breakfast after they’d lingered in bed to make love. They’d rushed to shower and dress. She’d wriggled into the costume the Colony Tourism board forced on them, a blue shirt, the same color as her eyes, and navy pants, and then loosely braided her brunette hair through a denim baseball cap embroidered with the Lunar Colony Security shield and logo. The uniform was a throwback to twentieth-century New York City Police garb. As much as he’d complained about it, when Leyna wore police blues she looked like she could wrestle a bear with a machine pistol to the ground, and he very much wanted to be the bear.

When he didn’t respond, she followed his stare to the robot behind her. It clacked at her, too. Its bulging cameras remained locked on them.

“You’re paranoid, Jin.”

“The boss always says there is no such thing as too much paranoia in this business.”

The Lunar Colony’s spaceport hangar was otherwise empty, and they had clearance to be here. Yet, he could feel the robot’s four bug-like cameras feeding their image to its facial recognition algorithm.

“Sometimes they really are out to get you,” Leyna said. “I know. She says that a lot. But the machines are glitching on the surface three thousand kilometers away. Not here.”

“If they are glitching. We don’t know what’s happening up there.”

“We scanned the colony servers three times for malware.”

“We scanned for known signatures. It could be something new.”

“I also scanned for processes hogging CPU time.”

Leyna had been thorough, running all the tests he could think of, and adding a few he didn’t. But there was always a new virus on the black market, and a new back door to exploit. Miners were dead. One drone glitching he’d accept as random. But the odds of an entire mining camp of drones failing was remote. His lizard brain sensed someone watching.

“Spyware is low profile. We might not detect it.” For emphasis, he flipped his middle finger at the gawking mechanic drone.

“Who would be keeping tabs on us?”

Except for the occasional brawl in the red-light district of the Colony, mining companies fighting over dirt usually left them alone. They shunned unnecessary attention, especially from law enforcement. His mind whirled, always returning to one person. “Special Agent Barrett Sanders.”

“Mia’s old partner?”

“They put him in charge of prisoner transport for Lebofield.”

“Grrrr.”

“He’s a black widow from the tenth circle of hell, looking to drag her to his lair.”

“The Feds are the ones that let Lebofield go,” she said. “Plus, that wouldn’t explain the surface mining drones glitching.”

“There is no point trying to understand Federal pretzel logic. It’s wrapped up, folded in on itself, and shuffled so many times it’s arbitrary.”

“Don’t I know it.”

This was the part of the conversation where he never knew what to say. A corrupt agency director murdered two of Leyna’s four parents and her brother. For greed. She’d bottled all her anger and rage. It was like a nuclear reactor that drove her. But she was also still raw. Every door to this subject was booby trapped. Every sentence a tripwire. One misstep, they’d both be blown to smithereens. Her therapybot had the tortuous task of disabling her triggers, but its advice was like a database of cliches, one of which unironically was, don’t give vague offers of support. He’d seen her rage at the gym’s punching bag. He wished it on no one. Not even FBI Special Agent Barrett Sanders, as much of a prick as he was.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He pulled her close, wrapping her tight against him in a hug. “I won’t be gone long.”

The mechanic drone chirped and then pivoted to resume its zig-zag across the hangar floor. It vanished behind dusty gray supply pallets. An orange forklift drone lingered nearby, awaiting a signal from the logistics algorithm, which would order it to carry the pallets through the hangar airlock to the lunar launch pad, and then into the belly of a supply shuttle destined for low Earth orbit.

“I’ll go with you.”

“Someone needs to stay here to keep the office open.”

“Maybe you won’t want to come back.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to come back?”

“Because I’m crazy.”

“You are only a seven crazy, same as me. You are a ten hot.”

“What if one of those fryer drones at the lunch counter glitches and throws hot oil in my face and melts it off? I’ll be a zero.”

With one hand around her waist and one around her back, he squeezed her as hard as he dared without crushing her. “You’ll always be a ten hot.”

She leaned up. Her breath smelled like warm maple syrup. She whispered, “You know we haven’t done it in the hanger yet.”

He let his hand slide to her rear, but the forklift drone twenty steps away glared at him like a Catholic nun. Its amber caution lights flashed his direction. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off.

He exhaled raggedly. She pulled away and jabbed his belly. “And do what while I’m here? I can monitor Vega from the rover as good as I can from the office.”

Behind him, the Lunar Transport Vehicle resembled a boxy cargo van, but its dual pulsed plasma engines would race him across the surface at over seven hundred kilometers an hour. Four hours there, four hours return, plus eight hours in between at the mining claim to retrieve evidence. He and Leyna had packed it with spare oxygen, a spare EVA suit, cases of tools to pry the electronics out of the glitching mining drones, empty cases for the evidence, plus two rifles, two pistols, ammo, body armor, spare communications equipment, food, and a sleeping bag in case he needed to bed down in it.

But this was no camping trip. The LTV was designed for short trips, less than a week, and the lunar surface was cruel and unforgiving. It was a deserted vacuum, where unfiltered sun would roast him, or shadows would freeze him. He’d run out of power first. Then its scrubbers would stop making oxygen. He’d suffocate eighteen hours later, when he’d drained the spare oxygen tanks.

“I am going to be gone at most a few days. The boss needs you here.”

“She needs you here. She doesn’t like me.”

“She likes you. She is overprotective. Anyway, service is spotty up there. Someone needs to be here, on comms. Plus, we need to trace the registry of Vega and then write up the impoundment warrant and transmit it to her.”

“Those bodies won’t get any deader. Just wait.”

He chuckled. “You sound like the boss.” The forklift drone’s yellow lights blinked to green, and it hummed alive. It aimed for the stack of gray pallets.

“We are impounding the ship and bringing it back here?” she asked.

“That was always the plan.”

“We don’t know why they changed the name.”

“Find the registry, find the reason. My guess, it was a dark ship, moving goods between outlaw countries to evade sanctions.”

“I can check insurance.”

“Insurance will be dodgy. Hack bank records. They can’t transmit cash across space, so there will be payment records on servers somewhere.”

“Let’s just bring Vega back now.”

“First, let’s see how deep the shit is before we dive in. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something that gives us cause to send Vega straight back to Earth so we don’t have to deal with it here.”

“You know, the girl always dies first in a horror movie after they split up.”

He kissed her on the top of her head. “This isn’t a movie, sweetheart. It’s safer here. Plus, there is always a last girl standing who faces the killer, the one battle-hardened, and that’s you.”

She pulled him in for another squeeze and then leaned into a kiss. Her lip gloss added mango to the maple syrup taste of her tongue, and she ran her hands down his spine, feeling every bump, ending on the spot at the base that turned him to jelly.

She pulled away, saying, “I love you. You better come back.”

“I love you too. One day. Not even. I’ll be home for breakfast tomorrow.”

He watched her derriere undulate away. A heart, upside down, leaving him alone. Her right cheek winked at him, and then the left. He wondered whether he’d been too conservative with the fuel calculations. Pump more helium gas into the tanks, run the throttle hotter, and he’d still have thirty minutes to spare. They had time for a quickie.

As he opened his mouth to call her back, another forklift drone breached into the open, swiveling and blinking its amber lights his way.

What was happening with these drones?

“When you get to the office, start a new malware scan. Look for recent code changes.” His voice echoed in the hangar, more agitated than he intended.

Leyna gave a thumbs-up as she passed behind the disassembled rocket engine.

On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. The ‘off’ timing seemed longer than the ‘on’ timing, like the dots and dashes of Morse Code. ‘S.’ The forklift seemed to be blinking out an 'S.'

Before he could decode further, the forklift swiveled and chirped toward another stack of pallets.

He puffed his cheeks. He’d been on edge since he learned FBI Special Agent Sanders was on his way. That man was a scorpion.

He exhaled. A year ago, they’d had a murderous AI roam the colony, so now they were vigilant. Leyna was right; he was paranoid. There was no ghost in the colony machines. If there was, they’d have found it.

He turned to don his pressure suit, and then board the LTV.