He leaned across and touched helmets. “Relax. That’s the ship. United Nations Spaceship Hope .”
Miles above us, the frame drifted slowly past us. Fireflies twinkled and zoomed all around it. “ The ship? The one that we were going to build five years from now? The one that’s going to Jupiter?”
I understood. She would be ready in months, not years. The biggest sucker punch in history.
I looked again. The hundred fireflies must be supply barges, construction-crew transports, tugs. It was the greatest show on Earth. Well, not on Earth. I touched helmets. “Why build it up here?”
“ Hope’s transplanetary. She’s strong enough to travel between here and Jupiter but if we set her down on Earth, or even here on the moon, gravity would collapse her. Hope was born in vacuum. Someday she’ll die there. Her orbit’s calculated so the moon or Earth is always between her and Ganymede. Any observer out there won’t know she exists.”
If nobody on Earth knew she existed, no spy—and no captured Spec Four—could give her away.
In orbit, Hope dwindled to a speck above the lunar horizon.
We zigzagged as we dropped toward the flat crater floor while another object grew against the moon’s black sky. A shuttle craft, looking much like the ones I had seen at Canaveral, powered down to the surface, its wings useless in vacuum.
A hundred yards away the UN flag stood stiff, framed to keep it flying in the nonbreeze.
We rolled past building after building. The building we stopped at was like every other building there, a white half tube you could fit a football field under, with a man-sized air lock sticking out one side. Two sergeants wrestled Sluggo loose as Metzger and Howard climbed down from their GOATs.
My driver grasped my elbow, holding me in my seat. Crap. They were separating the Bad Boy from the heroes.
Three buildings farther the GOAT halted. Stenciled on the building’s air lock door was “Detention.” Whether it was Judge March or Captain Jacowicz or the Grand Poobah of the Dark Side of the Moon everybody wanted me in the slammer.
My cell was a windowless room eight feet on a side with a bunk, sink, and toilet. They gave me fresh coveralls, a shaving kit, and freeze-dried rations no worse than Meals-Ready-to-Eat.
I planted my palms against the wall, hung my head, and shook it. I lay on the bunk and wondered why.
The door clanked; an MP in coveralls like mine stepped in and waved me out of the cell with a white-gloved hand.
He led me down into the tunnel system that linked Luna Base’s buildings. Our footsteps echoed down the rock tube. I asked him, “How’d they make the tunnels?”
“Melted with lasers.”
We walked for ten minutes, stopping at intersections to let electric trams pass. They shook the floor and bounced me in lunar gravity.
Cargos of hull plates flexed and rumbled toward the shuttles that would lift them to orbit.
Returning trams bore off-shift welders and riveters, swaying shoulder on shoulder and sound asleep with lunch therms in laps.
I smirked. “Union labor, huh?”
The MP glared at me. “Sixteen-hour shifts. Twenty-eight days every month. Quarter million miles from home.”
One thing you had to say for war, it got people off their butts. A century ago, humans flew in canvas-covered airplanes. World War II started, and six desperate years later humanity had jets, radar, and nuclear power. The Slug War had pushed humanity farther into space in months man all the idealism of the post-Cold War had in fifty years.
Finally, another MP at a desk looked over papers the first one gave him, then at me. He buzzed me in through a steel door behind him.
I stepped into an operating room, all stainless steel, bright light, and white sheeting. Chill enough that I saw my breath. The lights brightened a pedestal operating table in the room’s center, and a couple rows of amphitheater seating rose behind the table.
On the table was strapped my slimy sparring partner, Sluggo. He looked none the worse for wear after we’d dragged him from Mare Fecunditatis. Still short, green, and tapered.
A guy stood behind him, skinny, bald, and beetle-browed. Civilian, because a last-century soul patch smudged his chin. He wore a white lab coat and a hands-free headset with a mike that cherry-stemmed around his cheek. His headset was wired to a Chipman that stuck from his coat’s breast pocket among a cluster of pens.
He nodded at the Slug. “You did this?”
I stuck out my chest. “Yeah.”
“Tragic.” He snapped on latex gloves as he circled the operating table. “Our first meeting with extraterrestrial intelligence ends in violent death.”
I nearly laughed. The Slugs had killed how many million people, and he wept for this one?
He bent and sidestepped alongside the slab, lifting, then plopping down the carcass like a gob of liver. “You killed it?”
“He committed suicide.”
He sneered. “An alien psychologist. Did it leave a note?” He stabbed his finger like a cross-examiner at the carcass. “This body bears bootprint bruises!”
“He died before I made those.”
His eyes narrowed.
“We both got shot out of a cannon. I dropped on him.”
He snorted. “This is no joke.”
“Neither was that. We landed on a commissioned officer.”
He pouted at me, then spoke into the mike. “ Reported cause of death, self-inflicted.”
“You think I killed a POW? Did you talk to Howard Hibble?”
“I’ll ask the questions.” He adjusted his glasses, then sniffed. His eyebrows flew up, and he bent and sniffed the length of the carcass. He pulled his mike to his lips and his voice quivered. “Subject emits an unmistakable odor of urine! This suggests Earthlike excretory system and metabolism! An unexpected phenomenon!”
“It’s mine.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll get credit for your kill!” He snorted.
“The urine. It’s mine. We zipped the body inside my EVA suit for the trip from Mare Fecunditatis. I kind of had an accident in the suit, before that.”
“Oh.” He grumbled, then pressed the erase button on the Chipman in his pocket. “Anything else you haven’t shared with me?”
“If you’re really interested in how it excretes, I think it was on the toilet when I first saw it.”
He sneered. “Don’t tax your brain, killer. I’ll analyze behaviors.”
I shrugged. “Just a hunch.”
“Well then, let’s have a look, shall we?” He lifted the corpse’s tail end, peeked underneath, plopped it back, and smirked. “Nothing. And I know an anus when I see one.”
I stared at him. “Me too.”
The MP marched me back to detention after that.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The MP leaned against my cell doorframe while I sat, elbows on knees, on the side of the bunk. He was as bored as any GI. I told him I didn’t kill Sluggo.
He shrugged. “It was a preliminary inquiry with a cryptozoologist, I’m guessing. And you wised off, I’m guessing.”
“You guess. I guess. Is everything here secret?”
“Not once you’re here. Nobody’s going anywhere. Unless we win the war.”
“How the hell did this get here? How can they keep it secret?”
