“No. Just your ordinary kid. Three years old, three hundred years old—same thing, right? When you’re talking about China, five thousand years old? Fifteen times older than this kid?”
“Not your ordinary kid.”
Zhou Bao thought it over for a bit. “Maybe not.”
Ta Shu said, “You can’t make them small just by saying so. They’ve still got seventy percent of the capital in the world.”
“What’s capital?”
Ta Shu stared at Zhou. “Money?”
“And what’s money?”
Ta Shu said, “You tell me.”
Zhou laughed. “I can’t tell you! It would take too long. Even if I knew. Which I don’t. All I know is it’s more mysterious than we usually think it is. Money, capital—they’re just ways of organizing work. And it’s the work that’s real. So the other stuff is mysterious. What if every time you said money you replaced that word with the word trust. Here, I will pay you ten units of my trust.” He looked at Ta Shu and grinned. “A good deal!”
He drove the rover into the Shackleton garage. As they got out and walked through the inner locks and up to the greenhouse dining hall, Ta Shu said, “These Americans may begin to press you harder about young Fredericks being missing, even if just to put you at a disadvantage. And really there shouldn’t be any way to lose him here. Someone among us must know where he is.”
“The infighting can get pretty fierce.”
“But if the people up top want it to stop?”
“A warring agency will sometimes hold on and hope the other side takes the first hit from above. And first hit is worst hit, pretty often.”
When they got back to the greenhouse and had settled before a meal of rice and vegetables, a slender man approached them, graceful in the lunar g. Zhou Bao gestured to him to sit down. “Jianguo, you know about Ta Shu, I’m sure. He’s up from China to do one of his travel shows. Ta Shu, this is Inspector Jiang Jianguo. He runs this place, by way of the Lunar Personnel Coordination Task Force, isn’t that what it’s called now?”
Jiang nodded gloomily. “I’m just a policeman, that’s all. Maybe I used to be more like one of the old imperial district magistrates, but that’s changed.”
“Like Judge Dee,” Zhou said to Ta Shu. “He’s famous for solving all our oddest crimes. The information office writes up his cases in the South Polar Times. The Case of the Locked Air Lock, the Problem of the Faraday Cage, and so on.”
“The good old days,” Jiang agreed without enthusiasm.
“You’ve been here a long time?” Ta Shu asked.
“Maybe too long. When I first came I thought I’d stay six months, and now it’s been fifty-three all told, spread out over eight trips.”
“Jianguo and I are trying to see who can rack up the most moon time,” Zhou said. “So, Construct the Station, what’s up now?”
“We’ve got a problem,” Jiang said. “A couple of problems, actually. And I think you can help us with both of them.”
“What can we do?”
Jiang tapped his wristpad until it began to hum in an almost subsonic way; this was the audible part of a Faraday cage field, putting them under a cone of electromagnetic interference. Ta Shu had heard of these programs for individual use but never felt one in action, and he found it an unpleasant experience. “Testing,” Jiang said, and looked at Zhou’s wrist, which Zhou was holding out to him in a cooperative way. “Okay, we’re under an umbrella. Look, I’ve come into possession of that American who went missing, the one suspected of killing Chang.”
“My friend!” Ta Shu exclaimed.
“That’s good, right?” Zhou Bao inquired.
“Good but bad,” Jiang said.
“Why, who took him?” Ta Shu asked.
“It was the Red Spear.”
Zhou frowned at this news, and Ta Shu shook his head to indicate he didn’t understand.
Jiang explained to him. “They’re a superblack wing of military intelligence. They might be with the PLA’s Strategic Support Force, or their Skyheart program. Whoever they are with, they like to force the action.”
“Hostile pilot,” Zhou added, and Ta Shu nodded to show he understood. Hostile pilots were seemingly renegade officers who did something stupidly provocative at the front lines that could later be repudiated by higher-ups, but were secretly approved of as a warning shot to some foe. The pilots involved were afterward either sacrificed or rewarded, depending on the particulars. A whole unit of such dangerous actors was a scary thought, although not that surprising.
Jiang saw that Ta Shu recognized the tactic, and went on. “Now it looks like Red Spear is leading the military’s push to get on the moon. I didn’t even know they had anyone here yet, but it looks like some of them came up in an engineering team. Then they snatched this American out of the hospital. We ran across him when we were going after them, and took him back from them. So it’s getting tense.”
“Did they set Fredericks up for the murder of Chang? Did they murder Chang?”
“It’s quite possible. Either them, or a group like them from some other security unit. The political leader here, Commissioner Li, was sent home immediately after the attack. The two men who were with him when he introduced the American to Chang disappeared right after they left that room. They aren’t in any data banks or even our surveillance camera feeds, which shouldn’t be possible. Only a few people even saw them in the flesh. That smacks of Red Spear.”
“But why kill Chang?” Zhou asked.
“I don’t know yet. But Chang Yazu was adamantly opposed to any military presence on the moon. So that alone might have been reason enough to get rid of him. Also, the private encrypted phone that Fredericks was delivering to Chang looks like it was going to be his link to someone on the standing committee. I’m still trying to get the Swiss company to tell me who exactly has the other phone, but you know the Swiss and privacy. We’ve traced the company’s shipment records enough to suggest the other phone was sent to the standing committee headquarters in Beijing, but I’ll probably have to come at it from a different angle to find out any more about the phone. Right now I’m looking into Chang’s previous postings to see who he worked with, and if that might lead to anyone who would want him silenced.”
Zhou nodded his big head; the inspector was on the hunt. He said, “So how did you find the American again?”
“When we learned we had a Red Spear group here, we went to arrest them for using false IDs. We intended to kick them back to Earth where they belong, if they belong anywhere, and there your American was, in one of their rooms. Now we have to move fast on this, or else the Red Spear leadership in Beijing may get us overruled and convince our superiors to tell us to give him back to them. I don’t want my bosses back home to order me to do something I don’t want to. So the safest thing would be to get this guy off the moon as soon as possible. But it can be hard to clear the checkpoints without tipping people off.”
“So how can we help?”
“Two ways. First, we’d like to give this guy a cover and push him through fast. So, you know.” He looked at Ta Shu. “You’re famous, and you often travel with a crew. So I was wondering if you would be willing to go back to Beijing early, and insert this guy into your crew when you go.”
“I didn’t bring a crew this time.”
“We’ll generate a record of one for you, and it will show him in it. Then we jam him home with you, and let people deal down there.”
“What will you do with him down there?”
“Probably give him to the American embassy in exchange for some favor we want from them, but I’m just guessing. That’s a decision that will be made above my level.”
Zhou said, “It would be a shame to get Ta Shu embroiled in a war of agencies.”