Lunar day 217
T minus 55 minutes to Capsule Drop
Instead of going back to school, I went to look for my parents. If Zan was right, every minute counted for Nina.
I found them with Chang in the control room, examining an image of the blueprints for MBA on the SlimScreen. Daphne Merritt was there too, though she appeared to have something on her mind other than Nina.
“I don’t know what could have happened to them,” she was saying. She sounded unusually stressed out. “I’ve never had anything like this occur before.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Most adults probably would have told me it was none of my business, but Daphne did her best to flash a smile and said, “My robotics logs from the last week have vanished.”
Mom looked at me and said, “Aren’t you supposed to be in math right now?”
“Dr. Levinson gave me permission to leave,” I said.
“For what?” Mom asked.
I hesitated a moment before answering. I couldn’t tell my parents the truth about why I was there—the alien that only I could see had sensed that Nina was running out of time to live—and I’d been in such a hurry, I hadn’t concocted a suitable lie yet. So I went with bending the truth. “I was worried about Nina. I think she’s in serious trouble.”
For a moment, it looked as though Mom was going to say I still ought to be in school, but then she softened. “You’re probably right.”
“We’re doing everything we can to find her,” Dad said. He sounded frustrated with himself, and Chang looked frustrated too. Everyone in the room was extremely intelligent. They weren’t used to not understanding things.
“Have you found anything out?” I asked. “Did you get the text off her watch?”
“I don’t know that we should be discussing this with you right now,” Chang said.
“What could it hurt?” Dad asked. “Dash was the one who figured out who killed Dr. Holtz.”
“Or that he’d even been killed at all,” Daphne added.
“And he’s the one who told us about the text Nina got in the first place,” Mom pressed. “We might as well have another mind on this. . . .”
“All right, I give!” Chang raised his hands in surrender, then turned to me. “The text wasn’t quite as helpful as we’d hoped. It was only someone sending her some music.”
“Music?” I repeated.
Chang tapped on the computer keypad and brought a list of text messages up on the SlimScreen. “NASA gave me authorization to hack into Nina’s personal account. According to your parents, you came back from her room at eleven forty-five last night. This was delivered to her at eleven forty-one.”
He highlighted a text from someone named Charlie. All it said was, “Heard these and thought of you.”
There were two songs attached. One was “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room” by Coronal Mass Ejection, which was Violet’s favorite band. The other was “Gimme Shelter” by an old group called the Rolling Stones. I knew about them because they’d been one of my great-grandfather’s favorites.
“Are you sure this is right?” I asked.
“It’s the only message she received during the time you were with her,” Chang replied.
“Maybe she got another and erased it,” I suggested.
“It wouldn’t matter,” Chang said. “Every communication to and from this base is logged by NASA. Even if Nina erased the message, there’d still be a record of it having come in. But there isn’t. This is all she received within a twenty-minute window.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If you’d seen her then . . . well, she didn’t look like she’d only received some music. . . .”
“We know something’s important about this,” Dad told me. “Nina received other texts after this one came in, some of which were very important base business—but she didn’t open any of them.” He pointed to the list of messages on the SlimScreen. After the one from Charlie, they were all marked as unread. The first had come in at 11:47. “That’s not like Nina. It’s as though she disappeared right after Charlie’s music showed up.”
“And then,” Chang added, “this ‘Charlie’ isn’t a real person. It’s an alias someone set up.”
“Have you figured out who?” I asked.
“No,” Chang sighed. “Charlie did a darn good job of protecting himself through encryption. We’ve tipped NASA off, though, and they have people working on it.”
I said, “So, was whoever did this some kind of computer genius?”
“Probably not,” Chang replied. “It’s not all that hard to create a decent alias. I could do it when I was six.”
“But you are a genius,” I pointed out.
Chang laughed. “I’m not any smarter than anyone else on this base,” he said. “Including you.”
I was quite sure he was only being humble. Chang’s IQ scores were rumored to be higher than Albert Einstein’s. In addition to knowing everything about physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy, he could also fix anything that broke at MBA and was a world-class pianist.
“Was Charlie’s message really about music?” I asked. “Or do you think it was really about something else?”
“Well, this Charlie actually sent the songs,” Mom said. “We listened to them. They weren’t encrypted files or anything.”
“And no additional files were piggybacked on them,” Dad added. “So we figure the music meant something to Nina somehow. A message of some sort. Only we have no idea what it could be.”
Mom asked me, “Can you be more specific about Nina’s reaction to this text? How was she distracted exactly? Was she scared?”
I thought back to my encounter with Nina the night before. “I don’t think so. It was more like she realized she had to do something.”
“Was she excited?” Daphne asked.
“No.” It was hard to even imagine Nina expressing excitement. Or think of anything she would even be excited about. “She just wanted to get rid of me.”
The adults all looked from one to another, like this might have meant something.
“Have you checked the video feeds from last night?” I asked. There were thousands of cameras around MBA, inside and out. Even in the bathrooms. The only place we weren’t recorded was in the privacy of our residences.
“That was the first thing we did,” Chang told me. “Only there was a glitch. The entire system went down for an hour last night.”
“Every single camera?” I asked.
“Yes,” Chang replied. “Starting a few minutes before midnight and lasting until shortly after one a.m.”
“That’s weird, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Definitely,” Chang agreed. “I’ve never really dealt with the cameras before, so I don’t know if them all cutting out like this is common, but the fact that it happened on the same night that Nina disappeared is certainly suspicious. We’re assuming both events are connected.”
“Is there any way to recover the lost footage?” I asked.
Chang sighed. “Maybe. Unfortunately, the two people who knew the most about this system aren’t here. Garth Grisan is back on earth and Nina is missing.”
“Just our luck,” Dad muttered.
“Do you think that all this could be connected to the robots, too?” Daphne asked. “I mean, I haven’t had any trouble with the logs like this the whole time we’ve been up here. And now, the same night Nina disappears and the cameras go down, they get wiped out too? That can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“There’s ten million things that can go wrong at this base,” Chang said. “To have three happen at once is easily within the realm of probability. But my gut says they’re probably linked.”
“What’s in the robot logs?” I asked.
“Detailed reports of everything the robots have done each day,” Daphne explained. “For some, like the maintenance bots, it’s nothing much, only a record of where they went and what they did. But for the drones and the surveillance bots, it’s all the data they’ve collected.”
“Patton and Lily were fooling around in the offices last night,” I reported. “Roddy saw them—and they got really upset when they realized he was spying on them. That’s why Patton tried to beat me up. He thought I was spying with Roddy.”
Daphne frowned at the thought of this. “He tried to beat you up for that? I’m glad you stuffed that jerk’s face in the toilet.”
Chang looked at me accusingly. “Patton and Lily were in here? Why didn’t you say anything about this before?”
“I only found out from Roddy this morning,” I said. “And then I heard about Nina being gone and kind of forgot all about it.”
Chang still looked annoyed about this, but Mom put a hand on his shoulder to calm him. “That’s perfectly understandable,” she told me.
Dad said, “So maybe Patton and Lily are the ones who wiped out the logs. And whatever they did might have knocked out the cameras, too.” He looked to Daphne. “Did you find any evidence of tampering on the computers?”
“No,” Daphne admitted. “But someone who knew what they were doing might have been able to hide that.”
“We’re talking about the Sjoberg twins here,” Dad said. “I’m surprised those two can even breathe, let alone hide evidence of hacking a computer.”
“Maybe their dad helped them somehow,” I suggested. “He’s not that dumb, right?”
“You don’t earn a trillion dollars without some smarts,” Daphne agreed.
Mom asked, “What if the Sjobergs were connected to Nina’s disappearance? Like, Nina caught them doing something they weren’t supposed to and they retaliated.” When everyone stared at her, she added, “I know it sounds crazy. But I can’t think of anything more rational.”
“The Sjobergs have been acting very suspicious lately,” Daphne said supportively. “Lars and Sonja haven’t come out of their room in days. It’s like they’re plotting something. And we know they were angry at Nina for making them stay at MBA when they wanted to go home.”
“Nina didn’t make them stay here,” Dad countered. “There was no room on the rocket to send them back. All Nina did was deliver the bad news.”
“She probably could have handled it better,” Daphne said. “She was awfully blunt with them. I know they don’t like her very much.”
“They don’t like any of us,” Chang pointed out. “And they’re certainly not holding Nina in their room. I searched it myself with Balnikov. Twice. She’s not there.”
“Maybe they’re holding her somewhere else,” Mom said.
Chang blew out a sharp breath, sounding exasperated. “Where?” He brought the MBA blueprints back up on the SlimScreen. “We’ve been poring over these for an hour. There’s no crawl space or anything like that in this building large enough to hold a person Nina’s size.”
“Maybe the blueprints are wrong,” Daphne suggested. “Maybe there’s a hidden space somewhere.”
“And the Sjobergs know about it while we don’t?” Chang snapped.
“Don’t be so testy,” Daphne scolded. “I’m only trying to help.”
Chang rubbed his temples, trying to calm himself down. “I’m not angry at you. I’m frustrated. I can’t make any sense of Nina’s disappearance. It’s completely impossible!”
“Obviously not,” Mom pointed out calmly. “Nina must be somewhere. She didn’t evaporate. So maybe Daphne’s right. Maybe there is a secret hatch or something in the base.”
“Why would there be a secret hatch?” Chang asked, still sounding testy.
“I don’t know,” Mom admitted. “For military purposes, maybe. After all, NASA let the military send Garth Grisan up here without telling us about it. Maybe there are other things they didn’t tell us as well.”
Everyone considered that for a bit. It was hard to believe there could be any hidden spaces at MBA, though. The base was kind of like a boat; it had been built to utilize every last inch of space. When room was limited, you couldn’t afford to waste one bit of it.
I suddenly found myself wondering if my mother was wrong. What if Nina had evaporated—or something like that? A month before, I would have thought this was ludicrous, but now I was friends with an alien who vanished into thin air all the time. Could Nina have been an alien too? I knew she wasn’t a mental projection the way Zan was—Nina had touched me, while Zan couldn’t—but what if she was a more advanced species? Maybe she had posed as a human and then disapparated somehow. Or beamed herself out of MBA, like they did on Star Trek. Yes, it sounded crazy, but I of all people knew it wasn’t impossible to encounter alien life. And Nina being from another planet would go a long way toward explaining her almost complete lack of emotion.
Only Zan had said that she sensed Nina was in trouble. If Nina was a fellow space alien, wouldn’t Zan have known? Or perhaps she had known, but had chosen not to tell me.
“Fine,” Chang said curtly. “Maybe there is a secret hatch somewhere. Frankly, I don’t have any better ideas. But to find it, we’ll have to measure every inch of this base and compare that to these plans. If there are any differences, then we’ll have a lead as to where the secret space might be.”
“That’ll take a lot of time,” Dad said.
“We’ve got a base full of people willing to help,” Chang replied. “And now we finally have something productive for them to do. I’ll pull everyone off their projects and get them working on this.”
“We’ll start with the mess hall,” Dad said, putting his arm around Mom.
“Thanks,” Chang told them, then turned to Daphne. “Run some security tests on your computer. If you find any evidence of tampering, let me know.” He stood and headed out the door. “Dash, come with me.”
I did as ordered, following him into the air-lock staging area. “Need me to help measure?”
“You and all the other kids. Go tell everyone school is canceled for the rest of the day on my orders. Why don’t you guys start with the gym?”
“Sure thing.” I started toward the rec room, but Chang caught my arm.
“Dash, one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
Chang knelt before me so we were eye to eye. “Your parents were right about you earlier. You’re a really smart kid, and you sometimes pick up on things other people don’t. Even though this base is full of brilliant scientists, I trust your ideas as much as any of theirs. So if you come up with anything that you think is important—or even odd or strange—anything at all that could help us figure out where Nina is, come tell me right away, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Thanks.” Chang hopped to his feet and headed into the science pod. Normally, he was a proud person who walked with his head held high. Today he sagged, looking angry and frustrated.
I was flattered to hear how highly Chang thought of me—but it was disconcerting to see him so upset. After all, Chang was one of the smartest people I’d ever met. If he couldn’t figure out where Nina had gone, what chance did the rest of us have?