Chapter 1 - The Body
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I go to the scrub lands to think.
The lunar planetia is silent, with no vibration, movement or sound. It is truly dead, and it's there that you can truly feel alone.
Daylight on the moon lasts for two weeks, followed by two weeks of night. The Earth is usually hidden behind the horizon, except when libration (the rocking of the moon in its orbit) causes it to pop up into view.
I was sitting there, enjoying the last hours of our two weeks of day. The fourteen day night gets bad up here. Nobody goes outside. We just all hit our duties, hit the bottle, and sometimes each other.
I was sitting alone in the dust, radio off, watching that perfect dark swallow everything beyond the floodlights. There is no equivalent to a lunar night. It's just, emptiness, like being in space but with the tug of gravity. You sit in a suit of mylar, padding, gel and plastic. You are inside yourself. The suit is a womb. History speaks to you. Biology discourses while the uncountable hours click by.
I was quiet, listening to the insides of my eyelids rub against my corneas. A dull thud announced an arrival from the rear.
I swore. Proper way to break any holy silence.
That's how Richardson found me, sitting at the edge of an unnamed crater made by some lunar impact. He parked the ETAV and got out. He'd been drinking.
"Lieutenant Caine."
"What is it," I asked him.
He didn't immediately answer.
Richardson approached me from behind. He should have known better. Since the last big fight between the Chero scientists and the Sanxing ecologists over a cache of valuable biofuels, we'd all been talking about 'sides' and 'corruption'. Standing orders were instituted, the 'standing' part being 'at at least twenty feet' in unspoken suggestion made by intelligent, well-armed claustrophobes.
I stood and turned, whipping to full length a three-piece telescoping baton.
It's a short list what weapons work well in EVA combat. Shanks won't shear the armored Kevlar. Guns won't fire. Compressed air can kick up a dust storm. But there are ways. These were strange, craven days to be alive. You looked in shadows and opened unlocked doors with a bread knife ready. A subtle, dangerous martial art had developed around our collective rituals of sex and self-abuse.
I actually kinda miss it.
Richardson looked me in the eyes, or where he thought he could see them beside the reflection of the Earth on my helmet.
He raised his hands.
"They told me to come get you."
"Why?"
"They need your help. There's been a murder."
I didn't bother asking him what else was new.
I closed the baton and he noticed how I did it. Specifically, he noted the six inch blade I'd welded to the tip.
"Let's go."
Highpoint Station came out of a partnership between three multinational corporations: Glenco, Chero and Sanxing. The ostensible purpose of the station is the exploitation of H3 deposits on the lunar surface. Three sectors of real estate were claimed in the lunar dustbowl, establishing the contested rind surrounding the base. Glenco owned the most lucrative formation, the Narghul Plateau. Sanxing and Chero operated their own parcels, each as secretive as you can manage in a closed environment. The remaining sector remained unclaimed colonial property for whomever wished it. Here was where the scrub land toilers collected rocks, surface-stored energy-giving molecules, or whatever the hell they sell back on Earth to keep us solvent.
The corpse was found in the Narghul Plateau, which is so perfectly black we had to bring in spotlights to illuminate the crime scene.
Richardson stopped the ETAV and chewed his gum. I sat there and looked at the corpse in the headlights, lying there like a mannequin wrapped in crumbled newspaper.
We exchanged a tired look conveying a hatred of duty, and exited the vehicle.
The corpse was lying on her chest. I turned her over while Richardson took the CSI photos with a crank-powered minicam. The spotlights put a ten meter ring around the scene. There were no footprints but hers, no tracks but the ones trailing the ETAV. Just flat, undisturbed dust tapering off into perfect dark in every direction.
Her name was Donna Douglas. They called her Donna Racecar. The name was from how many times she'd been around, but later times proved she was the sort to run circles around all of us. Richardson found her in his headlights just off the LOR109 tractor line. She was found at the end of a long march, desiccated and frozen with exploded eyes and a suit slashed open down the middle.
It's hotly debated what it will be that causes death in a person exposed to a vacuum. No one has the balls to suggest we test their theory.
On a related note, we have a rule for all the new fish that if you're caught quoting Neil Armstrong or singing "Paper Moon" we're allowed to space you. We've only had to follow through on it twice, and both managed to get the suit on in time. But one day, we'll finish one.
"What do you think?"
"I think I want to go home," said Richardson. He had the look of a man who hated puzzles.
Richardson was a quasi-retired Air Force major sent to the moon for his own mixture of insubordination and incompetence. He had a handlebar mustache and kept mostly to himself. He liked porn and cheap women and screwed in the ass habitually. Lunar everyman, really.
"They're going to go apeshit over this," he told me.
"Just another murder. We have those."
"Not in Narghul. Out here is different."
I wanted to ask him, but I already knew the answer and hearing his Kentucky twang say it wouldn't help. We were on Glenco property. When we had a military murder of military personnel, we filed our paperwork and sent the bad man home. This was a civilian, which made it political. I didn't know the woman but already I hated her.
After reviewing the body, noting the ruptured suit and the telltale signs of decompression, I turned to the footprints. The nearest airlock was a good 500 yards off through the pitch black.
"So she left C Dome and walked the length of five football fields. Her suit ruptured and she died."
I looked out into that perfect dark again, this time with much less serenity.
"Where the hell was she going," I asked.
Richardson said nothing.
Out beyond the halo of the crime scene lamps was nothing but black. No light. No stars. Not even "dark". Just black.
The Narghul formation. Everything about it, including its owners, said 'stay away'.
"Do we know what's out there?"
"We've never looked too hard, but nothing special I'd imagine. No incline. Minimal vegetation. Limited running water. Maybe a bar or two, but no good hotels."
"Hardy fuckin' har har."
I rolled my eyes and swore, then politely excused myself to the dead.
"What were you doing out here, girl?"
"Can we just load up the corpse and go back inside?" Richardson looked around fervently. Something in the dark made his flesh crawl. "I don't like it out here."
We did as he suggested and loaded up the corpse. She was light even for low gravity. Richardson took note of this as we placed her in the back of the tractor. We drove away in silence.
"Well?"
"Well what," he asked.
"You know her?"
"Nope."
"But you heard her nickname."
"I heard stories. She partied with some guys from my unit. She got pointed out to me once or twice in the cantina."
"So you never spoke to her?"
He shook his head.
"Not my type. Too wild. Too fast."
"Hence the name."
"Every bitch goes around. Some you have to set up trip wires to get a hold of. That's the only reason I know what people call her."
"That a fact?"
"Yep."
"Donna Racecar."
"A name I've only ever heard said in anger."
He ended the sentence on a down note, indicating that he was done. But it was the starting gun. Donna Racecar, dead in the dust. My job to find the party responsible. Better than boredom. Worse than a real job. Just a dead girl with a lot of enemies. I remember thinking as we drove back that had she lived longer, I would've probably been one of them.
Chapter 2 - Autopsy