2008

Like so many kids of her generation, Kristine Kathryn Rusch wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up. But she had trouble with math. Serious trouble. (Turns out that she’s dyslexic.) So, with actual astronaut training out of the question, she turned to fiction. The moon factors into much of her fiction, and from her Retrieval Artist series (mysteries set on the Moon) to her awardwinning “Recovering Apollo 8,” her fiction has reflected her interest in the stars. In addition to the Retrieval Artist series, she has written a series set in the far future called the Diving series. She also writes under a number of pen names, including (but not limited to) Kris Nelscott and Kristine Grayson. She puts a free short story on her website every Monday. Go to kriswrites.com to read more of her work.

SENIORSOURCE

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The little boy lay facedown in the dirt. Because the brown dirt was fine, loose, and powdery, I thought he had landed outside the dome, but that didn’t quite match with what I was seeing. His body was intact, which it would not have been if it had been exposed to the harshness of the actual Moon.

Then something wet collided with my shirt, spoiling the you-are-there illusion, pulling me back into my workstation at SeniorSource.

I yanked off my goggles and made sure I let go of them gently so that they’d float beside me. I also let go of my workstation so I floated as well. A half a dozen other people were clinging to their stations, their faces hidden beneath the goggles that covered their eyes, ears, and nose. A few folks had strapped themselves in so that, in their excitement, they wouldn’t let go and drift into some equipment on the other side of the work area.

My goggles weren’t the only thing floating beside me. So were half a dozen other drops of some brown liquid. They had gathered near my left side, as if they were a phalanx of brown marbles lined up for an attack.

“Marvin,” I snapped, “your coffee’s gotten away from you again.”

Marvin Pierce peeked at me from the doorway leading into the community kitchen. He floated sideways, hands gripping the edge of the door, only his bald pate, eyes, and nose visible, like a Kilroy-was-here drawing, something that one of the oldsters here had started sketching on the walls. (You couldn’t call anything a ceiling or a floor here—the place constantly rotated.)

Marvin’s blue eyes were twinkling. As he used his hands to propel himself into the VR work lab, he grinned like a naughty three-year-old.

Which he hadn’t been in more than 125 years.

“Sorry,” he said in a tone that let me know he wasn’t sorry at all. He caught the first three balls of coffee with his mouth, swallowed hard, then used a pair of chopsticks to go after the fourth.

It was the chopsticks that screwed him up. The fourth bubble of coffee slipped through the wooden edges and aimed for me at surprising speed. I floated away, and watched in disgust as the coffee splatted against my goggles.

“Hey,” I said. “I was working.”

“Work, work, work. You know, sometimes you gotta take a coffee break,” Marvin said, and then giggled. His giggle was high-pitched, like a little girl’s.

It was also infectious. But I didn’t let myself smile. Marvin had ruined too many workdays for me—cleaning things wasn’t easy in zero-g—and I didn’t dare lose this day.

I was on a schedule—a tight one. Maybe an impossible one.

And the idea of that made my stomach turn.

That little boy had been the son of Shane Proctor, head of the largest mining company on the Moon. This case was the first high-profile test run of SeniorSource’s new Moon crime unit.

Theoretically, detectives in SeniorSource would solve cases on the Moon from their little perch in Earth’s orbit. I used to think outsourcing detective work wouldn’t work.

But it did work—I’d solved more than two hundred cases, some of them cold—since I arrived here five years ago. SeniorSource outsourced all kinds of highly skilled jobs, from laser surgery to art restoration. Even detective work, with its combination of interrogation, observation, and forensic skills, could succeed from a distance.

However, I had never been a guinea pig before. The chance of failure was high, and I didn’t dare say no.

I was one of the youngest men at SeniorSource—and one of the poorest. I had to work full-time to pay for my healthcare as well as my room and board.

When the doctors told me that I would need full-time care, I investigated all my options. I didn’t like most of them. Residential care hadn’t changed much since I was a kid.

The old were warehoused with the terminally ill, and depending on how much money they had, they either got personal care or they didn’t.

But because I had Manhattan Police Department insurance, which had ties with off-planet organizations like SeniorSource, I could apply here. Which I did.

SeniorSource was the oldest pay-as-you-go orbital residence care facility. It advertised a fUll life for the long-lived, and for the most part, it lived up to that billing.

Some of the oldsters, like Marvin, had lived here for thirty years. He’d been nearly ninety when he arrived, written off by his family as near death, which he probably would have been had he stayed.

In space, in a place like SeniorSource, we lived in a germ-free environment, in zero-gravity that made each of us feel like Superman when we first arrived, along with a full-time medical staff (no one under eighty) who monitored us, kept our bones as strong as possible, made sure our circulation was good, as well as monitoring the physical changes of living in a hermetically sealed world so different from the one we had grown up in.

Guys like me, the younger guys, the full-timers, didn’t have the lifetime health benefits that the oldsters like Marvin had. We didn’t even have a mountain of assets to sell. The differences between my generation (dubbed, somewhere in the midtwenties, “the Sickest Generation”) and Marvin’s generation (the space generation or, as some still called them, the older baby boomers) were legion. Most of the folks my age had died of diabetes or heart attacks before we were old enough to send our peers into national politics. As a result, the younger generations wiped out most of the beneficial legislation that the baby boomers and Generation X had passed—the universal health care, the Retirement Savings Act, and all those others—keeping them intact for the boomers while grandfathering out people who were born in the twenty-first century.

So we didn’t get to retire. We had to work. The Marvins of SeniorSource worked as well, but they only had to put in one day per month, mostly teaching history to college classes via streaming holos.

When I applied, I expected to be turned down. I didn’t realize that SeniorSource badly needed trained detectives. They promised me a large private suite, an adequate food allowance, and midrange healthcare that was still better than anything I could get on Earth.

In exchange, I had to agree to work five days a week, eight hours per day, and exercise two hours per day seven days a week. I loved the idea of work; I hated the idea of exercise (I am a member of my generation, after all). But I agreed to all their terms, missing something important in the fine print.

My stay on this station was performance related. I couldn’t be fired, but I could be demoted, which meant that my life would become a living hell. I would get smaller quarters, a lower-level food allowance, and minimal medical care.

If I really screwed up, I could be banished from the station. I’d be sent to an affiliated residence center somewhere in the Northeast, and warehoused with the rest of the old-timers.

The problem was that most folks who were banished from SeniorSource died within six months. Very few elderly people could handle the transition back to fUll gravity after living in zero-g.

Even though I was still one of the younger elderly, I doubted my bones could survive the transition. My bones—strong as they once were—had become fragile. When I’d left Earth five years ago, I could no longer walk. Plus my arthritis had gotten so bad I could barely move my fingers. It had been clear, even to me, that I could no longer live on my own.

I’d come up here reluctantly, but after I got past the stomach issues caused by the perpetual freefall of being in Earth’s orbit, I loved it.

I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

Which was why I didn’t want this case.

If I failed to find the murderer of Shane Proctor’s son within twenty-four hours, I could get demoted. If I mouthed off about the impossibility of the task, I could get sent Earthside.

I didn’t want smaller quarters, and I didn’t want to experience full gravity ever again.

And I really, really didn’t want to die.

SeniorSource had recently branched into providing security and law enforcement services to various Moon-based communities, with an eye on capturing most of the Mars market by the turn of the century. If we did well on the Moon and had a proven track record in places outside of Earth, then we could open several care facilities in Mars’s orbit when the time came, and would use those folks to provide services to the new Mars communities.

The success of cases like mine would guarantee more Moon contracts and with those, enough money to build in Mars’s orbit even without full Mars contracts.

My boss, Riya Eoff, made it clear that any work I did on the Moon had to be flawless or I would suffer the consequences.

She didn’t need to scare me. I was already scared enough.

SeniorSource’s Earth-based companion investigation companies had robots and VR cameras and holographic imaging centers. We had weird little programs that I didn’t entirely understand that supposedly sent up puffs of air, filled with the smells of the crime scene. (David Sullivan, the oldster who had trained me, told me they didn’t actually send up air until two or three days into an investigation. What you got through the nose unit of the goggles was a simulation of the smells. Only since we were using Earth smells and Earth-based equipment, we tended to get it right more often than not.)

On Earth, there were still a few knowledgeable people who could answer questions, do hands-on examination of evidence as well as an old-fashioned autopsy if one of us old-fashioned detectives figured it was necessary.

On the Moon, we had robots, VR cameras, and holographic imaging— and very little else. The human medical professionals residing there had enough to do with their living subjects, and had never really received training in modern forensic pathology.

Not that it mattered, since the Moon was still a collection of bases and mining operations. There was no real legal system there, so prosecuting the criminal would fall on the mining company or whatever Earth-based conglomerate owned the thing, or maybe on the country in which the conglomerate was registered.

As soon as I got the case, I asked one of the oldsters who was fulfilling his monthly day of work doing legal research to find out who owned the mining company and what laws I might have to operate under.

But that would only get me so far.

First I had to solve the case.

And I wasn’t sure I could do that.

Here’s the thing: I know how things work on Earth. If I fall, I bruise. If I grab someone’s arm hard, I could break the bone. If I shoot a gun, I know that the bullet might tear into blood and tissue and bone, leaving a trajectory that makes some kind of sense.

If I shoot a gun up here (not that I could, since firearms are the first thing confiscated before a resident boards the company shuttle), I know that bullet will follow some kind of straight line based on the amount of force from the explosion that released it. If the bullet doesn’t encounter a lot of resistance— meaning it misses a bone—it’ll slam through a human body in that same straight line, go through a wall, maybe another human body, and so on, until the energy that released it is spent.

With luck, that energy doesn’t send the bullet through the walls of our little space habitat, punching a hole into our protective walls and forcing us to vent atmosphere.

The rules of physics still do apply; you just have to subtract for the lack of gravity.

On the Moon, you have domed environments with full Earth gravity, domed environments with two-thirds Earth gravity, domed environments with one-third Earth gravity, and domed environments with no gravity at all.

You also have the Moon’s surface, which has one-sixth Earth gravity— and no atmosphere at all. Like everyone else sent up to this station, I learned what could happen to someone who let himself through both doors of the airlock without a space suit, and I found that lesson too graphic even for my concrete stomach. All I took away from the thing was this: you let yourself outside this place—or outside the Moon’s domes—without an environmental suit, and you’ll die one of the ugliest deaths imaginable.

So before I could do a full-scale Earth-type investigation, I had to find out several nontraditional things. Not only did I have to learn the exact location of the body, but I also needed to know what the gravity level was, and what the oxygen level was. I had to learn if the kid had access to an environmental suit, if he spent time outside the dome, and if he often went to domes with lesser (or greater) gravity.

I had to learn what Moon dust did to the lungs, whether the stuff could be made toxic with little effort, whether it changed from region to region.

Then I had to find out about the kid’s family life, his daily routine, and whether or not he had any friends. I had to factor that routine into my investigation, and see if—say—the bruising that was fairly obvious even from the first glance at his poor little body was the normal result of his everyday life or if it had come from some unusual event.

I had to be not only a detective but also an expert scientist, a lawyer, and an authority on the Moon in just a few short hours.

And I didn’t dare make a single mistake.

Which was why cleaning the coffee off my goggles irritated the hell out of me. It cost me time I truly didn’t have.

I wished I could just change out that pair of goggles for another. But I couldn’t. These goggles, our most high-end, had already been synced with the devices sent to settle the Proctor case, and it would take hours to sync another set of goggles with the Moon.

Not to mention the fact that those goggles would be technologically inferior to the ones I was using.

Cleaning things up here is perhaps the most difficult part of life in zero-g (if you don’t count the first few times you have to use the bathroom). You can’t just turn on a faucet and run the goggles underneath the tap. Everything here floats—including water.

You have to use a series of cloths, all treated with cleaning and drying fluids (but not wet enough to drip, of course). Then you have to put the fluid-covered cleaning cloths in the right containers and place them in the recycler, testing the item you’re trying to clean to make sure the dirt—or in my case, the coffee—has finally been removed.

I got the goggles cleaned, but I lost nearly a quarter of an hour.

During that quarter of an hour, however, I had had a chance to think. And to listen to what little bit we knew about the son of Shane Proctor.

I used the audio function of my own personal computer. We’re all assigned an onboard computer when we arrive; we can choose whether or not to have its component parts attached to our bodies. The oldsters prefer to have the computer as a separate item; I like my ear bud and my fingernail cam and the tiny screen that appears in the palm of my hand whenever I need to view some information.

Shane Proctor’s son was named Chen, a Chinese name that meant great.Oddly enough, he had no middle name.

Chen Proctor had been born in 2070 on the Moon in Proctor Mining Colony, with two midwives presiding. His mother, Lian Proctor, was Shane Proctor’s third wife. A quick search did not tell me what had happened to the previous two wives. I would have to dig for that information.

Chen Proctor had been home-schooled most of his life, partly because he went from mining operation to mining operation with his father and partly because he learned faster than anyone else in his age group.

He had a younger brother named Ellsworth and a baby sister named Caryn. Another quick search told me that Ellsworth and Caryn had different birth mothers than Chen—wives four and five.

No other child lived at home, and all three seemed to stay with their father, rather than their mothers. I couldn’t even do a standard search on where the mothers lived. Proctor Mining Company shielded a lot of personal data about its president and chief shareholder, so I had reached the extent of the public information I could find out about Proctor’s three children.

Or his last three children.

I wasn’t sure which.

I grabbed my goggles and floated back to my workstation. This time I strapped in.

I needed to concentrate fully, and the last thing I wanted to do was drift.

The Proctor Mining Colony took up most of what was once called the Descartes Highlands. The highlands were unrecognizable from the place where Apollo 16 had landed over one hundred years before. Now highlands were covered with mini domes, robotic equipment, newly dug holes, and not so newly dug holes. Lights covered the entire area, and what had once seemed like a dark grayish brown place now continually glowed.

Chen Proctor had spent the last two years of his life in the settlement dome, several kilometers from the current active mine. According to his family, he was never allowed outside. Apparently there had been an incident, and Chen had nearly died.

I let some of the androids—although they were really just talking robots—do the preliminary interviews, using a standard list of questions that I had tailored to this investigation. I would ask some of the tougher questions myself a little later.

But first, I wanted to examine the body.

A pan-back and a comparison with GoogleMoon showed me exactly where the body had been found. It was at the edge of the new dome, which was being built to replace the settlement where the boy lived. The new dome had just inaugurated its gravity and environmental controls.

It was supposed to replicate the environment inside the settlement— meaning full Earth-normal, down to the oxygen and carbon dioxide mix in the air. The terraformers were working on the Moon dust, trying to make it more like Earth dirt, but that experiment was failing.

It was beginning to look more and more like the new dome would be exactly like the old settlement, only with better filters.

I had to use all five of SeniorSource’s robots, as well as the three VR cameras and the single holoimager, to get a good three-dimensional look at the body.

For an eight-year-old, Chen was tiny. He had the look of a boy raised in low gravity instead of full gravity, like his bio suggested. He had narrow little shoulders, a back so flat and slender that I could see his spine and his shoulder blades outlined against his shirt.

His pants seemed too big, and oddly enough, he was barefoot. His face was turned sideways, his mouth partially open and filled with dirt.

The holoimage showed hair that should have been black turned almost gray with Moon dust, and slightly almond-shaped eyes that were tightly closed.

I made the robots go around him, zooming in their own cameras for a level of detail that the human eye couldn’t see. I needed to know if what I thought were bruises were actually something else.

The bruises ran along the side of his cheek and under his chin, then again along his forearms. The marks on his forearms were small. They ran from the elbow to the wrist and were not evenly spaced.

The mark on his face was large, covering most of his visible cheek, his jawline, and running all the way down to the middle of his neck.

If they were bruises, they had been created before he died. In that case, someone had grabbed him and hit him. But I wasn’t ready to take the easy solution. I was afraid these were some kind of marking I wasn’t familiar with—something that a person who lived in the Moon colonies would see as normal and not suspicious at all.

So I had the robots give me as much information as they could without disturbing the body. The photographs and vids were great, but I wanted more.

If I had actually been there, I would have leaned over the boy and sniffed. You learn a lot from the way a corpse smells—and I’m not just talking about decomposition. Perfume on the shirt, the scent of cedar oil on the hands, the faint odor of grease on the back of the neck might be all it takes to wrap up a case.

Only I had no time and no way to order up a little whiff of air.

So I did the next best thing. I had the robots take the chemical composition of the air, unit by tiny unit. I hoped I could feed those chemical signatures into our own forensic lab computer and get an analysis of the odors—not quite as good as smelling things myself, but good enough, maybe, to give me an idea of what I was facing.

I also had one of the robots take images of the area, and was startled to see signs in English, proclaiming this part of the new dome completely off-limits.

No one had mentioned that.

In fact, no one had mentioned how the boy’s body had been found in the first place.

I put through a series of instructions—no touching the body until my investigation was finished, no one (human or nonaffiliated robot) allowed on the scene while the work progressed, and no second-party release of information.

That last was the most critical, because information acquired through nonhuman means often had more than one legal owner. I had no idea if the robots I was using belonged solely to SeniorSource or if they were being leased from Proctor Mining.

I had no idea about too many things.

My stomach turned, and I felt queasy for the first time in years. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

When I had worked for the NYPD, I occasionally clashed with my bosses. I became known as one of the most opinionated and successful detectives in homicide. If you wanted a case closed, you picked me to investigate. But you also put up with my attitude and my mouth.

I’d kept both under control here—I knew the risks, and they weren’t worth the hassle.

I could usually succeed without mouthing off.

On this case, however, I couldn’t. SeniorSource had given me an impossible task with an impossible deadline, and somehow expected me to get it done.

Maybe if I confessed about my own inadequacies early enough, I’d only suffer a demotion. Maybe I’d just get a demerit.

Maybe, if I documented everything, I’d have enough evidence to take to one of the elderly lawyers up here and get him (or an Earthbound colleague) to fight my inevitable banishment back to full gravity.

Because I couldn’t work with what I had.

I set my goggles and the nearby computer backups to store each piece of information that was sent through the equipment on the Moon. When I was done, I peeled the goggles off and hung them on the Velcro strap designed especially for them.

Then I headed to my boss’s office, trying not to think of everything I risked.

My boss, Riya Eoff, had decorated every available space of her office with pictures from home. Photographs of her family, starting with her great-grandparents and running all the way to her own great-granddaughter, a baby she had never met. Riya suffered from advanced osteoporosis and had had to sign a special waiver just to get approved at SeniorSource, since space life often leached calcium from the bone.

But it was easier to survive up here with weak bones than it was on Earth. Her doctor had signed her up as an experimental guinea pig—to see how long a severely weakened person could survive in zero-g—and the study had long since ended. Riya was now in her second decade at SeniorSource, and if you didn’t know her history, you’d think the thin, silver-haired woman who haunted this office was one of the most athletic elderly people who had ever come into space.

“This better be important,” she said to me. “You’re on a deadline.”

“I know,” I said. “If you want results by tomorrow, you have to give me the full detective squad plus a few scientists.”

My voice didn’t shake, and that was a plus. I tried to imagine myself back on Earth, making this same pitch in the precinct, but that was hard.

We didn’t float in the NYPD.

“We don’t have the budget for a full squad.” She didn’t quite look at me. Instead, she threaded her hands over her stomach. Her fingers were covered with rings, some as old as she was. A necklace floated around her chin—she had once told me she had worn it since she was twelve and had never taken it off.

My stomach twisted. That queasiness was getting worse.

“If you can’t give me the help,” I said, “then you’re not going to get this contract.”

“Are you saying you can’t solve this crime?” she asked.

I tensed. I never said I couldn’t solve a crime. But I didn’t let her bait me. I spoke slowly, so that I didn’t say something I would regret.

“I’m saying I can’t solve this case in the timeline you gave me with the knowledge I have.”

“You’re the smartest investigator I have,” she said.

That statement should have relaxed me, but it didn’t. “Maybe with Earth crimes,” I said. “But I know nothing about the Moon.”

“You know enough.”

I shook my head, then regretted it as the movement sent me sliding in two different directions at once. I’d gotten rid of most of my counterproductive Earth movements, but head-shaking was one that snuck up on me—I never thought of it as movement, only as communication.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Tell me who you suspect and why.”

“I suspect no one,” I said. “I’m not even sure about the kid’s family relationships. I don’t know if he snuck into that spot in the new dome. I’m not even sure he was murdered.”

I could hear an old tone in my voice—an edge, one that threatened to become strident.

Riya grabbed onto a handhold built into one of the walls. She should have reprimanded me—SeniorSource never admitted that it examined crimes that turned out to be nothing more than an accident—but she didn’t.

Instead she said, “What makes you say that he might not have been murdered?”

The hair rose on the back of my neck—or the hair would have risen if it weren’t already standing at attention from the lack of gravity. Still, that feeling, the one my grandmother used to say was like someone walking on your grave, made me shiver.

Something was going on here. Something I wasn’t sure I liked.

I took a deep breath to keep my temper in check.

“The dome is new,” I said. “The environmental equipment was just turned on. So was the gravity. The boy had a mouthful of Moon dust, but some of the information I received said that scientists were trying to turn that part of the dome into an Earthlike area, one that could grow grass, crops, and trees. So what happens if the boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Go on,” she said, and that feeling crawling along my spine grew worse.

I knew I was supposed to be a guinea pig, but I was supposed to solve the case. Only Riya was acting like she already knew the solution.

Maybe the test was more complicated than I had originally thought.

“The oxygen mix could be wrong,” I said. “He doesn’t look like a boy who suffocated, but I’m not sure what certain chemical mixes would do to a body.”

She tilted her head at me, her expression neutral. I didn’t like that either.

“Then there’s the so-called soil. If he fell and got a mouthful of it, did it poison him? And what happens if the gravity came on too hard? The human body can survive four, five, six times Earth-normal. Healthy adult males can survive as much as eight times Earth-normal for a few minutes. But me? I couldn’t survive that and neither could you. Our bones would shatter and our lungs would collapse. I have no idea if the same thing would happen to a fragile-looking eight-year-old, but I’ll wager it might.”

She nodded, but since she clung to the handhold, she didn’t really move much.

I continued. “He has marks that look like bruises on his face and arms, but that’s the only visible skin I can see. The bruises on his arms look like finger marks, but what if they’re hematomas from shattered bones? What if the long bruise on his face is some kind of darkening agent from a poison he ingested?”

“You’ll find that out,” she said.

“Not by tomorrow,” I said. “Because even if I found out that the gravity was too high and it crushed him, how would I know if he stumbled in there accidentally or if someone told him to sit there and wait, then went to the controls and turned the gravity to nine times Earth-normal?”

“The robots could give you those readings,” she said.

“No, they can’t,” I said. “They’d give me the readings for now, not then. And we both know that computer readings can be tampered with. So the old data is as useless as my guesswork.”

She stared at me.

“Give me a team,” I said, “or I’m going to have to withdraw from this case.”

“You can’t withdraw,” she said, and my stomach clenched. Here came the final moment—the moment when I chose my integrity or I chose my life.

“Watch me,” I said, and shoved my way out of the room.

I’d be lucky to get a demotion. I was probably heading Earthside, to gravity that would feel as heavy to me as 9 g’s would have felt to poor little Chen Proctor.

Riya caught my ankle and tugged me back inside.

“Talk to me,” she said. “There’s something else you don’t like about this case, besides the unfamiliar terrain and the deadline. What is it?”

Whatever you could say about Riya Eoff, you couldn’t call her dumb. I actually hated how perceptive she was.

I also wasn’t fond of the way her hand still clung to my ankle. She wasn’t going to let me out of here until she ruled the conversation over.

But I figured I couldn’t make matters worse—at least, not for me. So it didn’t hurt to be honest with her.

“Ninety-five percent of child murders,” I said slowly, “are committed by a member of the family, usually a parent or stepparent.”

She let go of my ankle. I drifted a little past her and had to grab a handhold to keep myself from spiraling back into the center of the room.

“You think Shane Proctor did this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have a prime suspect. But if I did have a prime suspect, and if it was someone that Shane Proctor loved, then what? How would we prosecute? How would we even arrest? This whole setup is flawed, Riya. It’s not enough to find out whodunit. We need to know how we’re going to catch them, and even more important, how we’re going to stop them—and anyone else—from ever doing this again.”

She let go of her handhold and crossed her arms. Then she smiled at me. The smile was slow, but effective.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret it.

“You do realize that you have a gift for investigation, don’t you?” she said.

I clutched the handhold. I had no real idea why she was flattering me.

And then I understood. “You do know who killed Chen.”

“Yes,” she said. Then she frowned. “No. Well, maybe I do. The death was ruled accidental. He was crushed when the gravity test malfunctioned. Chen had a penchant for wandering into test areas. He liked to be alone. It wasn’t the first time he’d been caught somewhere he shouldn’t have been. It was the first time he’d been injured.”

“I thought you said he died.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “But I don’t think anyone considered that he hadn’t wandered in there. I’m not sure if anyone thought about the fact that the controls could have been tampered with.”

“Except you,” I said.

Her smile widened. “I needed confirmation.”

“Because you already knew that prosecuting anyone for this would be impossible.”

She nodded, and this time, the movement made her bob like a buoy in a rough sea. “It’s one thing to investigate crimes. It’s another to prosecute them.”

I thought I had just said that. But I didn’t point that out to her. I didn’t dare.

“I needed a simulation,” she said. “I needed to show management that although our investigators can handle anything given the time and the resources, we need support on the ground. And the Moon colonies don’t have that support. I can’t even imagine what it would be like on the frontier, if we went with the settlers to Mars.”

Not that we would be with those settlers. We’d only be observing them. And then we’d only be observing the very darkest sides of them.

“So this was all a simulation,” I said. “The commands I gave the robots, the things I saw through my goggles. You’d set all that up so you had some footage to take to the brass.”

Her smile faded. “It’s not all a simulation,” she said. “Chen Proctor is dead. And there will always be a lot of unanswered questions about the death.”

“I could still investigate it,” I said before I had a chance to think. I wanted to mitigate some of the damage I had done with my harsh tone.

“That boy’s been dead for two years.”

Which explained why I was told I had only rudimentary equipment to work with. Which was why the answers I got to the questions sounded as mechanical as the robots asking those questions.

“Two years,” I repeated. “I suppose the body’s long gone.”

“They don’t bury the dead on the Moon,” she said. “Cremation is more efficient.”

“And no one took the requisite information.”

“Who would?” she asked.

“So who tried to hire us?” I asked. “It wasn’t Proctor Mining, was it?”

She didn’t answer me. She probably couldn’t. It could have been anyone from a Proctor Mining competitor to one of those government unification types who wanted strong central oversight of the Moon.

“I need you to make a complete report,” she said. “I want you to list every single thing we would have to do to successfully prosecute that boy’s killer—if indeed he had a killer.”

“Even if the killer was one of his parents,” I said.

“Even if,” she said.

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to be banished. I wasn’t going to get a demotion. I had done the job she wanted. I had passed the damn test, not even realizing exactly what it was.

“Essentially, then,” I said, “I’m designing your Moon outsourcing program, using this one case.”

She winced. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Because,” I said, getting warmed up, “if you said that, you’d owe me more compensation. I’d have moved up from investigator to management.”

She nervously caught her floating necklace with one finger. “You once told me you don’t want to be management.”

I’d been taking risks all day, so I decided to take another. “If you’re going to work me like management, you have to compensate me like management.”

“Not without the job title.”

“I don’t want the job title,” I said. “And I’ll do the work, if you guarantee me my quarters for life, a richer food allowance, and the same medical care that the oldsters get.”

“That’s a lot,” she said.

“I’m designing a brand-new outsourcing program for you.”

“You’re just suggesting it,” she said.

“Still.”

“How about more free time?” she asked.

I shook my head and felt my body sway. I clutched the handhold tighter. “Quarters for life, richer food, oldster-level medical care. Nothing less.”

She made a face. I felt the tension return.

Then she extended a hand. “Done.”

I let out a small sigh as I took her hand.

“Good,” I said. “As soon as we have a contract, I’ll do your report.”

She sighed. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for such a tough negotiator.”

I usually wasn’t. Except when someone’s life was on the line. And this time, it was my life. With those guarantees, I could stop restraining myself. I could speak out about my investigations. I could stop worrying whenever I told the truth.

And I never again had to worry about going Earthside. I would stay here until my heart stopped beating.

I could do what I wanted without fear of losing this grand adventure.

I could truly live out my days, instead of waiting them out. I could float, gravity free, instead of sitting in a tiny piss-scented room, being crushed by the weight of the world and the lack of a future.

“Sometimes,” I said, “you have to be a tough negotiator. It’s the only way to get what you want.”

“And you want to stay here,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

She smiled. “I don’t think there’s any worry about that.”

Not anymore, I thought with more relief than I’d felt in my life. Not anymore.