He started running down the dimly-lit tunnel toward his quarters.
Doug almost laughed at the pathetic stupidity of it. Under the mattress. Killifer had hidden the cermet cover beneath his mattress.
Maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all, Doug thought. It had taken a real effort of will to work up the strength to touch Killifer’s roiled, sweaty bunk.
Doug held the cover in his hands. The murder weapon. He stepped over to the desk and placed it down on its surface, gold side up.
And the door flew open.
Killifer’s eyes were so wide Doug could see white all the way around the irises. The man stared at Doug, then his eyes flicked to the gold-plated cermet cover, then back to Doug again.
“Why did you want to kill Brennart?” Doug asked quietly. “Or was it me you were after?”
Killifer slid the door shut behind him. “It was you. Brennart-’ he shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped.”
“Couldn’t… be… helped.” For the first time in his life Doug felt real anger, a fury that threatened to shatter his self-control.
“He wanted to be a big-ass hero, now he is one,” Killifer said. “So what?”
Before he knew what he was doing, Doug lashed out with a stinging left that snapped Killifer’s head back and a hard straight right, blurringly fast. Killifer slammed back against the rock wall and crumpled to the floor, blood gushing from his nose.
Doug bent down and grabbed the front of his coveralls. Yanking Killifer to his feet, Doug cocked his right fist again.
And stopped. Killifer made no move to protect himself. His arms hung limply at his sides. Blood streamed down his chin, spattering his coveralls and Doug’s hand, still gripping the coverall front.
Doug pushed him onto the bunk.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why did you do it? Why did you want to kill me?”
“Because you killed me, you snotty sonofabitch.”
“Me? I never even saw you until ten days ago.”
“Your mother,” Killifer snarled. “She killed me. She took away everything I ever had. She exiled me to this goddamned cavern in the sky.”
“I know that,” Doug said. “But why? Why would she do that? What did you do to make her hate you so much?”
Killifer stared at him, wiping at his bloody nose. Slowly a crooked smile worked its way across his face.
“You don’t know, do you?” he asked, grinning at Doug. “You really don’t know.”
All of a sudden Doug felt slightly ridiculous, standing over this beaten smaller man in a dangling hospital gown that barely covered him.
Killifer was cackling with laughter. “You don’t know! You don’t know a friggjn’ thing about it! She never told you, did she?”
“Never told me what?”
“About your brother! She never told you what your brother did!”
“Greg?” Doug felt suddenly uneasy, as if he were teetering on the edge of a tremendous precipice. “What’s Greg got to do with this?”
“He killed your old man!” Killifer roared. “He murdered your father, kid.”
“That’s a lie,” Doug snapped.
“The hell it is. Your brother salted the nanomachines your father was using. The nanos didn’t malfunction. They did exactly what they were programmed to do.”
Inwardly Doug was falling off that precipice, dropping like a stone into the darkness. He heard his own voice, hollow with shock, “They were programmed to destroy the spacesuits?”
“Yeah. Your brother asked me for a sample of nanobugs that could eat carbon-based molecules. I didn’t know what the fuck he wanted ’em for, but he was big shit with the corporation so I gave him what he wanted.”
“You gave him—”
“Gave him the bugs that killed your old man, that’s right Nobody else knew. Just your big brother Greg and me. But your mother figured it out and shipped me up here.”
Feeling his legs trembling, Doug pulled up the plastic chair and sat on it. Hard. “But why would she send you here to Moonbase?”
“To get me outta the way, wise ass! She didn’t want me where I might rat out her son.”
“Greg.”
“That’s right.”
“Greg murdered my father and you helped him.”
“Hey, I didn’t know what he wanted the friggin’ bugs for. Not until after it happened.”
“You were just following orders,” Doug muttered.
“Right.”
For what seemed like hours Doug sat there, running the story around in his head, over and over again. Mom protected Greg. She knew he’d killed my father and she protected him. And she never told me.
Never told me.
Never told me.
“So, whatcha gonna do now, kid?” Killifer taunted. “Beat the crap outta me? Kill me?”
Slowly Doug got to his feet. Killifer cringed back on the bunk, his bravado suddenly evaporated.
“Get out of here,” Doug said quietly.
“What?”
“Get off the Moon. Quit Masterson Corporation. Take early retirement and go back to Earth.”
“And if I don’t want to…?”
Doug looked down at him. “If I see you here after tomorrow I’ll kill you.”
From the look in Killifer’s eyes, Doug knew the man believed him.
ALPHONSUS
Doug walked alone across the floor of the giant crater, his boots stirring clouds of dust that settled languidly in the gentle lunar gravity.
He had lost track of time. For hours now the universe had narrowed down to his spacesuit, the sound of his own breathing, the air fans softly whirring, the bleak cracked, pitted ground. He passed the rocket port, where an ungainly transfer ship sat on one of the blast-scarred pads, waiting for tomorrow’s launch Earthward. Past the solar farms he walked, where nanomachines were patiently converting regolith silicon and trace metals into spreading acres of solar panels that drank in sunlight and produced electricity. Off in the distance he could barely make out the dark bulk of the half-finished mass driver, a low dark shadow against the horizon.
Turning, he looked through the visor of his helmet up at the worn, rounded mountains that ringed the crater floor. Mount Yeager, he saw. And the notch in the ringwall near it that everybody called Wodjohowitcz Pass.
My father died up there. Greg murdered him and my mother covered it up, kept it even from me. Protected him, protected my father’s murderer. My half-brother. Her son. He’s just as much her son as I am and he murdered my father. And got away with it.
“Doug? Is that you?”
The voice in his earphones startled him. He would have turned the suit radio off, but the safety people had fixed all the suits so that you couldn’t.
A small tractor was approaching him, kicking up a plume of dust that looked almost silvery in the sunlight. Must be the safety guys, Doug thought. I guess I’ve wandered too far out for them. Broke a rule.
“Doug, are you all right?”
He realized it was Bianca Rhee’s voice.
“I’m okay,” he answered as the tractor approached him. Sort of, he added silently.
He stood there as the tractor pulled up and stopped in a billow-of dream-slow swirling dust.
“Where’ve you been?” Rhee asked, stepping down from the tractor. It was a two-seat machine with a flat bed for cargo: the lunar equivalent of a pickup truck.
“I needed some time by myself,” he said.
“Oh! I’m interrupting—”
“No, it’s okay. I was just about to start back anyway.”
“Everybody’s looking for you. Your mother’s just about to roast the infirmary staff under a rocket nozzle for letting you walk off like that.”
Doug looked at Rhee’s stubby, spacesuited figure and felt glad that their helmet visors hid their faces. He did not want anyone to see his expression right at this moment. Nothing but an impersonal, faceless figure encased in protective plastic, metal and fabric.
“How’d you find me?” he asked.
“I like to be by myself sometimes, too.”
“And you come out here?”
“No…’ Her voice faltered. “I, uh, I find some cubbyhole where I’m alone and I… dance.”