Moon Shot Read online

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Sure, fantastic, no thanks to that bitch. I swear I’m going to jettison her into space before her stay here is over.” Though his eyes looked tired, they burned with hate. He sucked on the straw in his coffee bag.

  I looked around the module. Almost everyone was gathered together, sitting in silence after his outburst. Only Chrissie was missing.

  Within an hour, I discovered her corpse.

  * * *

  I found the replacement trio, James, Bam Bam, and Janet, in the Unity module. They were setting up the astronomical experiments that would form the bulk of their work for the next few months. When I entered, all three were maneuvering the bulky equipment for experiment XTS-51 into place. That was going to be the most promising experiment on their docket over the next few months. If they could get it to work, I mean. XTS-51 had a daunting protocol for setup, requiring a precise chain of events with an exact timeframe between stages. I hated to interrupt their work, but did anyway.

  “Group meeting, guys,” I announced. “Let’s meet back in the Zvezda module. Where are the others?”

  “Pete and Mike are working on the shuttle’s flight deck, and I saw Tom, Keith, and Scooter heading towards Zarya. I don’t know where Chrissie went. What gives?” Bam Bam asked. “I don’t see a group meeting on my schedule, and you don’t have the authority to preempt our work. Pete’s the commander.”

  “Plans change. Something’s happened, and I want to tell everyone before we call Houston.”

  Janet zoomed over, her face filled with concern. “Just tell us what happened! Has the air seal been breached?”

  In space, humans were terribly vulnerable. The simplest breakdown, one that on Earth would be an annoyance, here could mean the difference between life and a horrible suffocating death. I hadn’t meant to frighten Janet by being mysterious.

  “The equipment is fine. I want to wait for the others before explaining further. Just wait in Zvezda and I’ll go get the men out of Zarya. Bam Bam, stop by Atlantis and get Pete and Mike.” I pulled my way back into the corridor without waiting for his response.

  By the time I brought the last astronaut into Zvezda, the team was angry. Commander Pete began his attack as soon as my head appeared in the module.

  “Damn it, Jonathan, you have a lot to answer for! Where do you get off calling a meeting? We aren’t a herd of bureaucrats putting in our eight-hour day—we’ve got real work to do!”

  I put up a hand. “Just hear me out. Something terrible’s happened, and I think we need to discuss it before we call Houston.”

  I took a moment to right myself. I had been drifting upside down, and felt vulnerable. Pete had his feet in the foot loops on the floor, so he was upright and stable. The rest of the team clung to the walls, while Scooter hung from the ceiling like an avenging angel.

  “All right, drama queen, let’s have it,” Janet said. She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh! I didn’t mean it like it sounded,” she said.

  I ignored her. “Chrissie’s been murdered.” I scanned each of their faces for a reaction, but could discern only shock.

  I loved reading mystery stories in my spare time back home, but now I wasn’t so sure I could force the killer to confess. Too bad we didn’t have a psychologist on board.

  “That’s impossible!” Mike said. “There’s no one here. We’re 200 miles up in space! There’s no way someone could sneak on board and murder one of us.”

  I met his eyes. “We’re here,” I said.

  James was furious. “You mean you think one of us killed her? That’s bullshit!” His fists balled up. I wondered if he was planning to take a swing at me, and what would happen if he did. The force would throw him as far back as it threw me. In the crowded module, we’d both end up black-and-blue.

  I forced my mind back to the matter at hand. “Shades of John Dickson Carr! If one of us didn’t kill her, then she’s not dead, and believe me, she’s dead. And, if no one can enter or leave the space station, that means one of us is the murderer. Ergo, my dear Watson, the only remaining question is, who did it?”

  Janet asked, “Are you sure she didn’t die accidentally? Or even kill herself?”

  “I examined her body. She was stabbed in the neck with a scalpel. That would be pretty hard to do accidentally, and a suicide would have slashed, not stabbed.”

  “Maybe she threw the scalpel away, and it bounced back and stuck her,” Tom asked.

  “Possibly, but I couldn’t find the scalpel. It should still be stuck in her neck or floating near her,” I said.

  “Let’s watch the video,” Pete suggested. “Where did she die? Most of this place is under observation.”

  “Excellent idea!” I said, annoyed that I hadn’t thought of it. Some detective.

  The video did indeed capture the murder. The grainy images showed Chrissie working, her hands stuck inside the workstation containing the rats. Then, as we watched, a male figure drifted in from the node.

  His head was shrouded in a neon yellow t-shirt, which he had duct-taped across his face, hiding all but his eyes.

  I’d seen that shirt before.

  “Hey, Scooter, that’s your shirt!” Mike said. “That’s the one you had on yesterday.”

  “That doesn’t mean I killed her!” Scooter said. “I was with Tom and Keith all morning.”

  As we watched, the killer pulled a scalpel from its magnetic holder.

  “She never heard a thing!” Janet said. “It’s too quiet up here. I’m never going to be able to relax.” She crossed her arms across her chest and shivered.

  The masked figure fumbled the scalpel, sending it flying behind Chrissie’s back. He lunged for it and caught it clumsily. Chrissie turned to face her killer. Her mouth opened, but before she could scream or say the man’s name, he struck.

  The scalpel jammed into Chrissie’s neck, then was withdrawn. Blood spurted out, powered by the pumping of her heart. By the time the blood reached the killer, the surface tension of each droplet caused the liquid to form beads. When the blood balls struck his shirt, he shook them off. His shirt was still clean.

  He wiped the scalpel with gauze, removing both blood and fingerprints. He placed the scalpel back in its rack, then stuffed the gauze into the hazardous material receptacle.

  “How long has she been dead, Jonathan?” Pete asked. He looked pale.

  “I don’t believe forensics in space has been studied,” I answered. “The body was no longer bleeding, indicating her heart had stopped, but the blood had not yet clotted. I’ll need to examine the body more closely to try to determine time of death.”

  “The video clock shows 95 minutes ago,” Janet said, pointing at the monitor.

  Some detective.

  “Okay, who did this?” I asked. A confession at this point would help solve the crime.

  Silence.

  “I was with Tom and Keith,” Scooter said again. Doth he protest too much?

  “Not the whole time! You left to go to the bathroom.” Tom said.

  “I did go to the bathroom!”

  “Pete and I were together the whole time,” Mike said. “We were catching up on the flight paperwork.”

  “I was below deck inventorying supplies,” I offered.

  “Well, James and I were together, setting up an experiment, and Bam Bam was in the same module,” Janet said.

  “So no one killed her?” I asked. “Did we have a stowaway on Atlantis, perhaps?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Bam Bam said. “Obviously you killed her. You’re the only one who was alone.”

  “Scooter was too, and you weren’t working closely with James and Janet the whole time,” I pointed out.

  Bam Bam defended himself. “I might not have been in their pocket the whole time, but I was working on my experiment. You can see from the protocols of the XTS-51 experiment that I spent exactly the right amount of time setting it up.”

  “Who has motive?” Pete asked.

  We
looked at each other, calculating. Finally Janet said, “I guess we all do, to some extent. I didn’t like working with her because she always blamed others for everything that went wrong.”

  “Scooter has the best motive,” I said. “Chrissie nearly killed him yesterday.”

  We argued for half an hour before calling Houston and explaining the problem. After discussing it further, we agreed that Scooter was the most likely suspect. It was his shirt, he had slept with Chrissie months before the other two men, and she almost killed him yesterday.

  Neither the space station nor the shuttle has a brig. After more discussion, we decided to use duct tape to bind Scooter. None of us thought he was a serious flight risk given our present location, but a desperate man might decide to crash the shuttle on landing rather than face the consequences of his actions.

  * * *

  We went home the next day. We spent the morning stowing our equipment aboard Atlantis. Scooter reclined in one of the seats below decks, duct taped to the armrests and foot rests. He was already fastened into his flight suit, which made a man nearly immobile anyway. He watched the rest of us work in silence.

  As the crew strapped us into our seats, I noticed Bam Bam stuff a bright yellow shirt into Scooter’s pack.

  This triggered a memory for me, a memory of the exact protocol of experiment XTS-51. This experiment needed to rest for nearly half an hour between stages. Bam Bam had time.

  I looked at him in wonderment, and as I did, I noticed a small nick, like a scalpel wound, on his hands.

  Astrophysicists don’t use scalpels.

  Virtual Crimes, Real Consequences

  By Elizabeth Hosang

  When the alarm went off Ortiz jumped, causing the construction drone to yank the power cable out of its connection. The commander of the lunar base swore under her breath and held the cable up to the drone’s visual sensor, checking the cable for signs of damage. The three-fingered “hands” on the drone responded to the movement of her hands in the control gloves. However, the strength of their grip could go from delicate enough to pluck the petal off a rose without bruising it to being strong enough to crush a rock. A slip in her concentration while using them could ruin months of work.

  As she turned the cable to inspect it visually, she ran the robot fingers along it to see if she could feel any irregularities through the rubber. The sensors in the remote hands allowed her to feel the textures of items she gripped, from the softness of the petal to the rigidity of the wire under the rubber coating of the cable. If the wire had snapped she wanted to know before she stopped to address the alarm.

  Satisfied that the wire was intact, she reconnected the power cable, then spoke. “Local view.” The visor covering her face switched from showing the components of the half-assembled radio telescope on the moon’s surface where the drone stood, to the control room around her. Mike Blair, her second in command, was seated in one of the other three drone control stations, but wasn’t yet wearing the gear. “Can you see where it’s coming from?” she asked.

  He was already looking at the command and control PDA on his wrist. “Infirmary.”

  “Damn.” Ortiz pulled the robot arms back into the drone’s body and shut down her connection to it, leaving the drone idle on the lunar surface. She unstrapped the Velcro keeping her hands in the control gloves and removed the visor. They were already behind schedule for assembling the telescope. Beauregard, the robotics expert who was supposed to have been working on it, had spent most of the previous day throwing up. The base medic had diagnosed acute appendicitis, and the surgery had taken place that morning. An appendectomy was routine, but Mission Control on Earth had insisted that a robotics expert be on hand to assist the crew’s medic, just in case. As a result she’d spent the morning on standby instead of catching up.

  Ortiz undid the seat restraints and pulled herself out of the chair, leaping towards the doorway. Landing just inside the hallway that joined the robotics pod to the rest of the lunar station, she grabbed the rail on the wall and started pulling-shuffling along the hallway. Running on the moon was impractical, so crew members learned to drag themselves along using the hand rails on all of the walls while only moving their feet minimally.

  In the hall connecting to the medical sciences pod she met up with Josh Silverstein, the medic and life sciences payload specialist, coming from the living quarters.

  “Sorry, boss. I thought Beauregard was stable. I just stepped out to get some lunch. Looks like his blood pressure dropped.”

  The doors to the medical pod opened to the shrieking of bedside alarms. A few careful steps past the door took them to the cubical where Neil Beauregard lay strapped to a bed. A display on the console above him was flashing red. Another console showed the faces of Mission Control back on Earth, including Doctor Green, the surgeon who had performed the appendectomy.

  “What’s going on?” Doctor Green demanded.

  Ortiz watched as Silverstein ran his hands over Beauregard, tugging on wires connecting the sensors on his skin to the bank of devices on the cubical walls, checking for a loose connection. She stepped to the other side of the bed and grabbed Beauregard’s wrist, placing her fingertips just below the base of his thumb. His skin was cold to the touch, his complexion deathly pale. She held her breath, straining to catch any hint of a pulse, but the flesh under her fingers remained still. She counted to five slowly, then moved her hand to his throat, pressing deep into the lifeless skin. She waited, but again there was no sign of life.

  Twenty minutes later Ortiz made her way slowly to the control hub of the lunar station. Julie Anders, another robotics expert and remote drone operator, was sitting next to Teresa Orlando, the experimental astrophysicist, half-heartedly reviewing something. Blair was at another console, completing a report without much enthusiasm. All three stood up as the base commander entered the room.

  Blair spoke first. “What happened?”

  When Ortiz failed to respond, Orlando let out a little gasp. “But it was supposed to be routine surgery!”

  Ortiz shook her head. “His blood pressure dropped, and his heart just stopped. It looks like he started bleeding internally.” She tried to smile, but failed.

  “Couldn’t they do anything for him?” Blair asked.

  Again Ortiz shook her head, and struggled to keep her voice even. “We couldn’t just open him up to find the leak. The alarm was triggered when his blood pressure dropped below a certain threshold. By then his abdomen was full of blood. Even if Josh put the scope back in, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything.” She put her hand to her mouth, overcome by the memory of standing by helpless as she watched a member of her crew die. After a moment she cleared her throat and forced herself to speak. “They won’t be able to do a full autopsy until we get him back Earth-side.”

  Silence filled the control room as the crew digested the news. Finally Anders spoke. “Now what, commander?”

  Ortiz sighed. “Unfortunately, we have a schedule to keep, and we’re down one crew member. I’m afraid everyone needs to get back to work. We’ll, uh, we’ll work a shortened day. And Doctor Morales will probably want to talk to everyone.” One by one they made their way out of the hub, back to their assigned tasks.

  “I don’t understand. I thought you said this was a routine operation.” Giles Lattimer, Earth-side Mission Commander, stood at the head of the table glaring at the medical staff.

  Doctor Angela Green, chief surgeon, had her arms wrapped around her torso, clutching a tablet computer to her chest. “It’s routine here on Earth. This is the first time we’ve attempted surgery of any kind across a distance this great. The tele-presence system is good, but it’s not perfect.”

  “I thought this system had been used to perform surgery in the Antarctic,” Lattimer growled.

  “It has,” Lisa Quinn, head of the Mission Control robotics lab, confirmed. “But that was still under Earth gravity.”

  “So?”

  “So, the tele-presence surgical sui
te was designed to compensate for the time delay sending messages between the surgeon and the patient at the remote site. But this distance is greater than any other case where the system is used. And the program was designed based on Earth gravity. If there are significant differences between how the tissues in the body move in the lower gravity…” she trailed off.

  “What?” Lattimer snapped.

  Doctor Green spoke up. “Even the smallest difference between where I thought I was aiming the laser and where it actually contacted the tissue could cause significant damage.”

  Angry voices erupted around the room. Lisa Quinn bit the inside of her cheek. She had warned them, but the manufacturer had insisted that the difference was insignificant. The organs and vessels in the body were held in place by connective tissue, not gravity.

  Lattimer glared around the room. “I want a full audit. I want all the equipment locked down, I want all the computer logs frozen, I want Beauregard’s body on ice, and I want the launch window for the next crew moved up.”

  “You really think we need to change them out so soon?” Doctor Morales, mission psychologist, asked.

  “I think without a full crew they won’t be able to complete their mission on schedule. I think the death of a teammate is going to affect the morale of the remaining crew. I think the loss of a crew member from a simple surgery is going to scare the crap out of anyone who relies on tele-presence for medical help in a remote location. I think we need to bring the body back to Earth as soon as possible, because this is going to be a crap storm of gigantic proportions and we need answers.” Around the room computer tablets sprang to life as the mission head’s instructions were translated into emails and directions to other staff. “And I want Beauregard’s condition reassessed. I want samples reanalyzed, and another ultrasound of the body. I want the forensics team going over every inch of that surgery footage. I want to know what the hell went wrong.”

  Five hours later the atmosphere in the tele-presence control lab was tense. A stack of empty pizza boxes in one corner of the room was surrounded by empty soda cans and paper coffee cups. Printouts were scattered on desks, and everyone was bleary eyed. The clock on the wall said three in the morning, but no one showed any sign of leaving.