9. Show Me

Angie told Tsiklauri to broadcast the explosion to the rest of the stationers. The drinking stopped but the work did not as the image of the loader truck exploding outside the Wadi was piped out to everyone. Angie wasn't surprised when several people marched into Central to accost Angie about what she was doing to help Peter (no one could voice the idea that he was certainly dead, which she appreciated in a small, distant part of her soul) but Li managed to draw them off and direct them out of the room quickly. It was just as well, since Angie was oblivious to all of them anyway.

The Ranchers were making a show of trying to get to the damaged truck, but it was clear to everyone watching the illegal feed that the terraformers where not going out of their way to do it. Angie seethed but kept her temper mostly in check as she paced back and forth between stations.

Sue had backed off since the earlier confrontation but she finally approached. Angie watched her warily.

"Angie, they are going to shut off all feeds from the Deathstar if we don’t break off," she started.

"Tsiklauri’s keeping a lid on the comm but the fact is, they’ve been threatening that for twenty minutes now. What’s your point?"

"Spying is one thing. I’m not against it, I don’t care. But the long term—"

"The long term? What does that mean? Sue, if the Ranchers did this, then they purposely killed Peter and set out to damage their main lock."

"That’s still outrageous and you know it."

"Sue, sit down and shut up." Angie pushed her into one of the empty stations.

Angie made them crawl through the images coming in. They confirmed the two backup locks were still usable, though Tsiklauri verified they could only be worked from the inside. Khalid tried to get into the Ranchers' network and got nowhere. It was locked and sealed with encryption that had never come from Mizmo, and that was its own kind of evidence. Mizmo crew did not buy black-market crypto to hide their own house from the company; that was an immediately fireable offense that would get you shipped Earthside faster than a reload. Angie filed it away with the rest of it and said nothing.

She had clocked Sue working the terminal station Angie had pushed her into for a while now, head down, out of the firewall conversation, scrubbing back and forth through something on a private monitor. Sue had not said a useful word in twenty minutes. Angie had assumed she was sulking about being told to sit down and shut up.

"Angie." Sue did not look up.

"What."

"Come here."

"Sue, I’m busy."

"Angie." Sue turned around, and there was something in her face that stopped the rest of the sentence in Angie's mouth. Not grief. Everyone in the room had been wearing grief for the last hour. This was Sue’s ‘I mean business and it’s your problem now’ face, which Angie loathed on principle but everyone knew to take seriously.

"This isn't about your paln, and it isn't about me being right or you being right. For once in your life, will you come look at something without deciding first what you’re going to say?"

The room had gone quiet. Angie was aware of all of them being quiet, of Li at her shoulder, of the loop still flickering on the main monitor where nobody had thought to kill it. She crossed to Sue's station.

"Show me."

"While the rest of you were on the live feeds, I went back over the explosion. Over and over." Sue's hands were not quite steady on the board. "Then I stopped looking at the explosion and went back further. Before."

She threw it up on the monitors throughout Central.

There was Peter, in his suit, hopping around the loader in a standard pre-drive check. He stopped at the back tire. He looked at the wheel well, and kept looking at it, longer than the check called for. Then he straightened, turned, and hopped back toward the Wadi lock, and for one frame it looked like he was simply walking away to safety, and something leapt in Angie before she could stop it.

Instead, he turned back again. He climbed into the cab. The loader rolled, swung to line up with the drive—and Peter came back out of it. He dropped off the other side, the one out of sight of the Rancher’s cameras, dropped in the long slow fall of lunar gravity, landed, and went in a string of heavy bounding leaps toward a rock formation off the road, something dark slung over each shoulder. The truck kept going. It came off the level apron onto the Moon road and gave its little habitual bounce. Five more seconds, then to the start of the familiar scene, ending in a white flash.

Nobody in Central made a sound.

"He got out," Angie said.

She said it again, quieter, and then a third time, and somewhere in the third time the thing she had been holding flat against the inside of her chest since the truck disintegrated came loose. Her eyes stung. She let them sting for exactly as long as it took to be sure of what she was looking at, and not one second longer, because a single person out in the open on the rock had a finite amount of air and crying was not on the list of things that put more in his tanks.

"Tanks," Li said. "He's carrying tanks."

"Spare oxygen off the cab rack. Both of them, looks like." Sue ran the footage forward, fast. "I lose him behind the rocks after the blast. I can't tell you if he's still moving. The Deathstar's angle is going bad, it's swinging out of range."

Li was already doing the math, looking out the window at the crater as if he could pick the rock out from here. "Two spare tanks plus what's in the suit. Call it four hours, maybe five if he's smart and stays still. He's got better than a tank and a half left." His mouth tightened. "That suit's rated for a heated cab. It is not rated for sitting on a rock in the dark. He'll be cold long before he's out of air."

Cold, but alive. Angie turned the two words over and found she could stand them. Cold and alive she could fix.

She was going to go get him. She knew it the way she knew her own name, knew it before she had finished deciding it, and underneath the knowing ran a second, colder current she did not examine too closely with the room watching: that she wanted to be the one who reached him first. There were things she meant to do about the Ranchers before this was finished, and she needed a clear line of sight, not people getting in her way.

She looked at Li.

Li would come if she asked. Li would want to come—he had the build for vacuum work and the nerve for it, and he had been staring at that crater like it personally owed him a debt. But she needed him elsewhere for this.

"Li." She snapped her fingers, brisk, official, nothing personal in it. "I need you here. You're the only materials man we've got, and I am not riding that flying coffin through re-entry on a tile inspection somebody did in a hurry. Suit up the LMS-7. Make it perfect."

Li's jaw worked. For a second she thought he would argue, then he looked at the loop on the monitor, at the white flash nobody had turned off, and whatever was in his face when he turned back to her had decided to trust she had a reason. "Yes, sir."

It cost her something she had not budgeted for, lying to him with the truth. She vowed to make it up to him.

Angie turned to Sam. "You're lead on the LMS-7. Get us off this rock alive."

"According to Mizmo, we’ve got eighteen hours until all the windows line up for launch and re-entry," Sam said, looking at the skeleton crew around him in Central. He turned to Khalid. "That’s according to Mizmo, and I don’t trust them either."

Khalid did not even nod; he was already checking the numbers.

Sam looked at Angie suspiciously. "What are you planning?"

Angie just smiled. "A rescue mission.”

Sue looked doubtful.

“What's the status on my transportation?" Angie turned to Sam.

He looked over the screen in front of him, did some mental math. "Loader 45 is almost ready. They’re juicing it now. It will be ready to roll in eight minutes."

"Tell them I’m on my way." Angie took off in a flat run, unsurprised that Sue was on her heels.