8. What's Going On?

Li watched the trip on closed circuit with everyone else, but it was boring to spy on a man driving a loader truck 60 meters across moonscape, and eventually the station returned to half-hearted and mostly drunken preparations for evacuation. When Peter made it to the wadi an hour and a half later, Angie finally turned away from her computer screen, where she had watched every meter of his trip.

"That’s it, then. He’ll arrange everything and we’re out of here." She put her head in her hands.

"You won! Act like it." Cookie sat behind her, counting pencils. She stopped and inspected Angie. "What’s the matter?"

"This isn’t like him," said Angie, and spun her chair a couple times in a circle. Li agreed, but he was surprised that Angie was questioning her victory.

Her feet hit the floor hard, the rubber soles squealing like bad brakes. "Take me to Sam."

Li took Angie into the heart of the LMS-7 corridors, where three engineers where tearing apart several electrical boards that looked half rusted out. Angie stopped to watch their work, and they stopped to stare back. Sam crawled out of an access hatch, a screwdriver clinched in his mouth and his eyes dead set on Angie. Several people backed away from the standoff, but Li folded his arms and drew himself up to full height. In the cramped corridors, his six-foot-two frame touched floor to ceiling, and he wasn't above using that to their advantage.

"I don’t remember seeing this particular rerouting on the schedule," Angie said.

"Angie, I’m following orders, okay?" Sam handed the screwdriver to an engineer, who wiped it on his pants leg.

"Mizmo’s?"

"Peter’s."

Angie frowned. "What’s going on, Sam?"

Li had a bad feeling about it, which only got worse the more Sam explained. He liked Sam, who was a straight shooter and very damn smart, but everything coming out of his mouth about Peter sounded plain stupid.

Angie and Sam were at the stage of waving their arms aggressively at each other when the ground shifted. Explosions were silent in the vacuum of the Moon’s atmosphere, but they were never quiet. The blast vibrated through the mining offices, knocking furniture around and making things and people crash to the floor. For a few stunned seconds Li thought an old, overlooked mining charge had gone off in the tunnels. That illusion only lasted for a moment, though.

"No way that was from the mines, that was surface level!" Sam ran down the corridor next to Angie, Li trailing behind them so they could talk without his bulk in the way.

"He’s right. Something screwy about that blast, it came from the wrong direction," Li added, slowing down in order to keep from running Sam over.

"Fine! Whatever it is, I want to see it." Angie led the charge into Central Station, the heart of the mining complex. It was running on low-power automatic life support, and no one was even posted there full time anymore, so it was a dark and moody den. Its view of the plains inside the crater was magnificent, but disappeared instantly in the glare of the lights Angie and Li turned on as they swooped through the room, throwing switches and pushing buttons to bring everything online. Sam was already sitting on a chair, his feet tucked under him for height, reading the security logs.

An engineer and a helmsmen barged in and stopped when they saw Angie.

She turned on them. "Tsiklauri, take the communications station; Khalid, help Sam with the data he’s reviewing."

Li watched as everyone settled in quickly to start figuring things out. He drifted between communications and the helm station, which given the circumstances was the best place to run queries on internal station damage.

"Angie!" Sam called out after he spent a few minutes with Khalid. Angie left Tsiklauri to field all the incoming verbal reports from their departments and issue whatever comforting words were called for. She pulled Li behind her, and he was glad to be out of it because he did not want to comfort anyone until he knew what happened.

"It was out by the Wadi. By their shipping dock," Sam said, and Khalid looked away. Angie’s lips went pale. Li put a hand on her shoulder, trying to ground both of them.

"Peter—" Angie whispered, her voice hard and shocked.

Li's mind went back what Sam was telling them right before the explosion about Peter's suspicions. Ten minutes earlier, it had seemed like a ludicrous idea.

"We got coverage?" Angie asked, her throat sounding dry.

"Working on it, sir. I do not know if the cameras facing the Wadi were left on—" Khalid said as he worked at a board, typing and punching buttons in a fury. Sam leaned back and let him go. Khalid finally looked up, his mouth tight. "No."

"Damnit!" Angie blasted the word and hit the side of a console, making everyone in the room jump.

"Wait!" Sue appeared from the doorway and talked directly to Khalid. "There has to be a satellite overhead, there always is. Maybe Go-Go3?"

Khalid shook his head. "No, not Go-Go. But the Deathstar, maybe."

It was an ancient machine that was the largest and oldest satellite still in continuous operation around the Moon. Its official designation was DS-IV but it had worn its nickname for two generations and would likely continue to wear it for two more. It was bulky and slow but incredibly reliable. Sam and Khalid tapped it, which took a few minutes of hacking since it was currently Latvia’s paid access time, and brought up the surface pictures from the time of the accident.

The blast was visible from thirty kilometers up, but it was not until they dialed down the image that everyone saw what actually happened.

"Ohmighod." Sue's hand went to her mouth.

On the monitor the loader truck rolled away from the Wadi, small and slow and stupidly ordinary, the way it had looked on the closed circuit an hour ago when watching it had been boring. Then the front of it went white. The whole frame blew out to a soundless flare and collapsed back to gray, and the playback caught and started over: the truck, rolling, small and slow. The white. Again. The truck. The white. Khalid had set it to loop and no one had told him to stop it.

Angie made a sound Li had never heard from her. She took a step back and her hip caught the edge of the console and she put both hands flat on it, hard, like the floor had moved under her again. For a moment she just held on. Her head was down. Her knuckles went white on the panel.

Li went to her. He did not say anything. There was nothing in any language he had that was worth saying. He put a hand between her shoulder blades and felt her breathing go ragged, then catch, then hold.

He had buried men underground. He knew the shape grief took when it hit the body first, before the mind caught up to it. And he knew the McDonnell story the way everyone on the station knew it: six months ago this woman had lost her father to an airlock and a filter exchange gone wrong. Now her brother. Another lock, another soundless flash, another body the vacuum took before anyone could reach it. She had lost both of them to the same thin door between pressure and nothing, six months apart, and she was going to have to run this room in about four seconds.

The room had gone silent. Even the loop seemed quieter. Sue was frozen at her station. Tsiklauri had stopped typing.

Angie lifted her head.

Li watched her put it away. It was heartbreaking but it was fast, and it was the most impressive thing he had seen a person do in years. She straightened off the console. She wiped her face once with the back of her hand, like clearing a faceplate. When her voice came it was flat and level and entirely under control.

"Have we heard from the Ranchers?"

"No, sir. But I can ping them, if you want." Tsiklauri stood at the board, looking as if he were willing to smash it into 1000 pieces if she asked that too.

"Do it."

Sam sat up and eyed Sue, who was holding herself up at the console next to him. Nobody talked at all, though, while Tsiklauri kicked a message to the Wadi. Finally a reply came back.

"Sorry, Commander McDonnell, but we’re still trying to understand what happened ourselves. We can’t get out the lock."

Angie spun on Sam. "What does he mean?"

Li waved a hand at the screen, talking softly because he knew his words would land like blows. "Look at the explosion, Angie. It was right next to their main lock. They’ve only got three, and the other two are on the far side of the entire complex. If that blast structurally compromised that particular door, they can't open it." He glanced over at Khalid, who knew the numbers better than he did. The engineer nodded his head in agreement.

Angie looked murderous. "So what are they doing?"

Several looks were passed back and forth between everyone in the room.

"Damnit! I asked a question!"

"Angie, are you seriously asking us to spy on the Ranchers?" Sue was astounded.

"Hell yes I am! It’s an executive decision and you can lodge your complaint about it with management the second your feet are back on the ground—Earthside!" Angie turned away from Sue, who stood speechless and motionless to face Khalid and Sam. "Do whatever it takes, but zero the Deathstar in on the Wadi. I want to know where every single Rancher is, right now!"

Khalid nearly pushed Sam out of the chair as he sat down to comply with orders. Sam wandered over to Tsiklauri. Li shuffled toward them. "Are we getting pinged Earthside?" He asked under his breath while Angie stood guard over Khalid, ignoring everyone.

"Oh hell yes sir. China is already lodging complaints with the U.N., and Mizmo is threatening to terminate the contract of anyone standing in this room if we don’t stop. Now."

"The Ranchers?" Li asked, breaking in.

"Silent as the vacuum, sir," Tsiklauri said gravely.

Li nodded. The smart play was to ignore everyone down below and clean it up later, after they knew what they were cleaning up. He looked at Sam.

Sam had not moved. He was still by the helm, arms crossed, eyes on the floor, and he looked gray and scraped out. When he spoke it was not really to Li.

"He didn't have a motive." Sam said it quietly, barely loud enough to be heard. "I sat in my own office drinking my own rotgut and told him he had a great conspiracy and no motive, and he just took it. He always just takes it." He laughed once, with nothing behind it, then stopped.

Li did not understand what he meant, although he was starting to have suspicions. Tsiklauri glanced over, lost, and Li gave him a small shake of the head. Leave it.

Sam wiped his nose with the back of his wrist and looked up at Angie, who stood over Khalid's shoulder with her jaw set, already three moves into a problem the rest of them had not finished reading.

"Peter trusted her in a room like this." Sam was still talking too quietly for her to hear, even she would have even paid attention to anything else in the moment, but he looked directly at Li. "He'd never tell her, the stubborn idiot, but he did. She doesn't make a move without three ways out, and if he were standing here he'd be standing where she is." He uncrossed his arms. "So that's where I'm going."

Li had been thinking the same thing in fewer words. He put a hand on Sam's shoulder, and the two of them went to stand with her.