Sabotage

This story follows “Wildcatter” and “Deputized.”

“Ready to take off,” said Anthony. The controls of the hopper were all green.

“See you in a week!” transmitted the director of the Lunar south pole base.

Anthony ignited the array of engines. The first firings built up into a roar like a massive bag of popcorn popping. Lift-offs began by putting the hopper into a hover over the pad. That gave him a chance to make sure the craft was balanced properly. Misplaced cargo could put them into a fatal spin.

This time they barely left the ground before the hopper tilted hard. The left side landing gear slammed into the pad. The emergency cut-off shut down the other engines. The right side landed hard enough to shake the teeth of both of the hopper’s crew.

Svetla cursed in Russian, then asked, “What happened?”

“Dunno,” answered Anthony. “Some of the left side engines stopped firing. I need to take a look.” He undid his seat belt and started climbing off the hopper. He took a rolled up tarp from underneath the bench which held them both.

The radio sounded with the voice of the tech monitoring the pad. “Hopper, this is Base. Are you okay?”

Svetla answered, “We’re fine. Just aborted the launch.”

“Do you need assistance?”

“We’re investigating the cause of the abort. Thank you for the offer.”

Anthony rolled the tarp under the hopper. The blast of the engines should have blown away any regolith lying there, but if even a few bits remained they could abrade his spacesuit. He wanted to make the suit last as long as he could. As a wildcatter, he couldn’t request a new one whenever he felt like it.

Wiggling under the array of nozzles was a slow process. If he pushed too hard, he could bang his head into one of the delicate nozzles and ruin it. Plus he wanted to move slowly enough to spot whatever the problem was. Everything had looked fine when he did his pre-flight walkaround.

It wasn’t hard to spot. One of the pipes feeding liquid oxygen to the left hand engine cluster had a hole in it. Not from a flying rock. It looked to be made by cutting pliers. Bits of vacctape clung to the pipe. A piece must have covered the hole until the pressure went to full.

Sabotage. Deliberate sabotage. The pipe was far enough in it had been hidden by thruster nozzles until he was under the hopper.

Anthony took pictures from several angles. He’d need help from the base to repair this. At home he could cast a new pipe as easily as he’d made the original, but he didn’t carry spares for them.

More importantly, he’d need to find out who did it and keep them from doing it again.

He climbed back on the hopper. Svetla was watching him with a curious expression. He usually would have been chattering on the radio about what he was seeing under there. He pulled a cable from his wrist cuff and plugged it into her suit.

Normally they saved hard-wired communication for when they were at the peak of their trajectory and didn’t want the whole Moon hearing their chatter. This time he was worried about malicious eavesdroppers.

“Well?” she asked.

He explained what he’d found. She let out a string of Russian curses he pretended to not understand. “I’ll ask the Base for repair help. Or should we keep that secret for now?”

Anthony shrugged. “I’m not sure we can keep it secret. But I’d want to meet with the base director first.”

“Right.” Svetla switched to the radio. “Base, this is Hopper. We’re going to need some time to fix this. Can we meet with the bossman?”

The young woman working the Base radio sounded puzzled. “Okay, Hopper. I’ll bring a rover for you.”

She arrived in six minutes. The rover was a four-seat version of the old Apollo rovers, just an open framework and wide wheels. Anthony took the back seat, letting Svetla sit up with the driver.

“Hello, Tammy. Thanks for the lift,” said Svetla. They’d only been at the LunaX south pole base for two days, and she seemed to be on a first name basis with half the crew.

“What was the abort caused by?” asked Tammy.

“Too complicated to explain,” Svetla deflected.

“Well, I’m glad you’re both all right.” The two of them drifted into a harmless discussion of LunaX’s progress in extracting water from the regolith.

Tammy’s spacesuit had a ‘TANSTAAFL’ patch on it. NASA prohibited ‘morale patches’ on suits, but the private enterprise workers had much more flexibility. It probably meant she had some favorite books in common with Anthony. He didn’t bring it up. The sabotage had shaken him. Was it a murder attempt? Or just trying to stop his trading among the Lunar outposts?

They were led right into Chuck Marles’ office. The base director had been thrilled at the prospect of powering his operation with a thorium reactor. Scaling up solar arrays on the crater rim was being more expensive than originally planned. “Hi. I wasn’t expecting to see you until you brought the next batch of thorium out.”

“Neither were we,” said Anthony. “Can I put something on your screen?”

Chuck granted access. The wall displayed a picture of the torn liquid oxygen line. Anthony explained how the launch had been aborted and where he’d found the damage.

“Damn. Damn. This is—is there any chance that could have been done before you landed here?” Chuck’s face was pale.

Anthony shook his head. “We came from home, and the Indian base before that. If someone did it at Chandra Base, that piece of tape survived two full flights then blew the moment we powered up here.”

“Not likely, no.” He shook his head. “Damn.” His face worked as he considered all the implications. Then he managed a sickly smile. “The good news is we have the Moon’s best detectives here to solve the crime.”

That murder investigation wasn’t something Anthony considered one of his finest achievements. He still felt he’d been a patsy.

Svetla jumped into the silence. “We were paid well for solving that case.”

Recovering from the shock, Chuck put his deal-making smile on. “Don’t you have an interest in solving this yourself? Finding who did it could be its own reward.”

She gave him a cold smirk. “If you can’t afford on site detectives, you could outsource it to the true crime fans on Earth. A crowdsourced investigation should be able track down who’s responsible if they have all the data.”

Anthony barely kept himself from laughing at the look on Chuck’s face. Letting it be known that someone was sabotaging vessels landing at the LunaX base would cut off their resupply shipments. Even their parent company might be reluctant to risk a sending a ship here.

“No, no, we certainly want a more discreet approach. And we’d be keeping you from your other work, I recognize that. How much would be appropriate?”

The ensuing bargaining session was painful to watch. Chuck was used to corporate specialists negotiating his contracts for him. He wasn’t prepared for Svetla.

Anthony limited his contribution to making sure LunaX would supply the parts for repairing the hopper.

They were given the same guest room they’d had the night before. It was easy to find. LunaX lined its corridors with murals of hydrogen-fueled spacecraft exploring the Solar System. Their door was by the Io lander.

It wasn’t Anthony’s favorite moon but it was a good illustration of what the water mining at the Lunar South Pole would enable. Shackleton Crater was in permanent shadow, letting water accumulate at its bottom. LunaX planned to extract it to power interplanetary rockets.

Once the door closed behind them, Svetla said, “What do they ask in your detective novels? Motive, method, opportunity?”

Anthony grimaced. “Method is too easy. Anyone with a pair of pliers could do it. Opportunity would be the loading or unloading crews. Motive . . . Could they be after the bounty on you?”

The Russian Mafia had offered a reward for her death after she killed one of their members in self-defense during their first investigation.

She shook her head. “That only pays off if they turn in my scalp. I think it’s just symbolic. The bratva needed to take some revenge for Yuri, but don’t want to spend any money.”

“Okay. Then why? NASA can’t be that pissed at me for quitting.”

That drew a cynical smile from Svetla. “You made them look foolish. Some might take that personally.”

“Seems a bit much, even for the career types. Could we have offended someone directly? Maybe someone here?”

Svetla leaned across the room to give him a hug. “My darling egocentric husband. It might not be about us. This could be an attack on LunaX. Or on lunar mining in general.”

“They could have killed you. That’s pretty damned personal.”

She kissed his cheek. “Collateral damage is a thing. I think more people hate LunaX than either of us.”

“Well, there’s those ecofreaks who complain about ruining the Moon’s environment.” They both laughed. “But I don’t think LunaX would have hired any of them. It has to be a LunaX employee. They’re the only ones who had access to the hopper.”

“True. They might have been bribed. What other companies would have motive?” Svetla took out her tablet to make notes.

“Anyone with an orbital propellant depot. That’s who LunaX is going to take business from.”

She frowned. “But the biggest depots are owned by the same parent company as LunaX.”

“It could be an internal company struggle. Someone from another corporate division trying to keep the new venture from obsoleting them.”

“That does make sense. Shame. I’d hope they’d have more loyalty to each other.”

Anthony shrugged. “It’s a huge company, and ever since the old man retired it’s becoming more of a regular corporation.”

“That goes at the top of the list then.”

More brainstorming added other possible enemies of LunaX to the list, but none claimed the top spot.

It was late in the day cycle. They visited the cafeteria for a quick meal then turned in.

First thing in the morning they were back in Chuck Marles’ office. He quickly produced access to the video records of their landing pad, and lists of the crews who’d worked on loading or unloading the hopper.

“We let the workers organize themselves mostly, so we get little teams forming. Your load of thorium ingots was taken off by the Space Cadets and the Roughnecks. Trade goods were loaded by Ex-NASA and the Fast Track. I’ll pass the word to managers that you have the authority to call them in for interviews.”

They borrowed some conference rooms. Watching the video of the crews working on the hopper wasn’t useful. Shackleton Crater was totally dark. There was only artificial light to see by. When you combine two lights casting overlapping shadows with a moderate-resolution camera placed far enough away to be clear of regolith cast up by rocket exhaust, there wasn’t much you could make out. Crews arriving and departing were clear. People moving boxes between hopper and rover were distinguishable. The ones at the hopper were just a tangle of flashes and shadows.

“I can’t tell if anyone took a minute to go under the hopper,” said Anthony after the second run through.

“Would they need a full minute?” asked Svetla.

“Hmmm. Time me.” Anthony took a pair of pliers from his toolkit, then put a short piece of vacctape on his shirt. He lay down before the room’s table, said, “Start,” then pulled himself under it. He pinched the underside of the table with the pliers, then put the vacctape on. A few wiggles had him out from under. “Stop.”

“Twelve point six seconds.”

“That’s pretty short. I definitely can’t tell if anyone’s going under for that long.”

“Then it’s time to start the interviews.”

Anthony could tell how the Space Cadet team got their nickname at a glance. They all had morale patches with fictional spaceships or other sci-fi imagery on their flight suits. Tammy was one of the team. She wasn’t the only one with a TANSTAAFL patch.

Svetla took Tammy into a conference room. Anthony waved one of the guys into another room.

They took seats on opposite sides of the table. “What’s your name?” Anthony asked.

“Daniel Smith,” the young man said warily.

One of the morale patches was bigger than most, a black rectangle with a yellow cannon and a diagonal red stripe. Another classic book reference.

“What’s this about?” demanded Daniel.

“We have some questions about operations you’ve supported,” said Anthony.

“Is this some kind of investigation? I have the right to have a lawyer when I’m being questioned.”

That earned a cynical smile from Anthony. “No, you don’t. I’m not a cop. What you do have is the right to resign. Or be fired if you refuse to cooperate with me.”

The self-important I-know-my-rights expression vanished from Daniel’s face. LunaX financed employee travel to the Moon as an interest-free loan, to be forgiven after three years labor. If he lost his job he’d have to pay the loan back—and even with the improvements in launch technology, that was not cheap.

The money likely didn’t even matter to him. By the patches he and his friends wore, he’d been dreaming of going to the Moon since he was tall enough to swipe books off his father’s shelves. He wouldn’t give up a place here easily.

“What do you want to know?”

Much better. Anthony opened with some diversionary questions about the mining operations. LunaX was still a small operation and rotated its people through the available tasks.

“There’s not much mining yet,” said Daniel. “We’re power limited. Processing the regolith to extract water and the other valuables takes a lot of energy. So we’re still setting up infrastructure.”

After a couple more mining questions, Anthony shifted to his real concern. “Did you notice anything unusual when you were unloading the thorium ingots?”

The young man tensed. “No.”

“Did anybody drop something, or lie down on the pad?”

“No.”

“Anyone stay behind when the rest of you returned to the rover?”

“No.” After a few moments of silence, he added, “The stuff was radioactive. We didn’t want to be there any longer than we had to.”

More questions didn’t find anything useful. Anthony sent Daniel out and received another ‘Space Cadet’ for his next interview. This one had a smiley face with devil horns and a goatee among the other morale patches.

This interview revealed more information about LunaX operations, but nothing useful about the unloading of the hopper’s cargo.

Anthony and Svetla traded notes once the interviews were done. She said, “They seem nervous about the investigation, but neither of them reported another member of the group doing anything suspicious.”

“Same for me. They’re doing something they don’t want to be caught at, as a group. I can’t see a corporation hiring all four of them to do sabotage. Would cost too much.”

Svetla nodded. “And risk one of them tattling.”

“Plus I can’t see Heinlein fans sabotaging a lunar development project.”

“Heinlein?” she asked.

“The revolution on the Moon book I loaned you. They all have patches for it.”

After some sandwiches, the Roughnecks team was called in. Anthony was expecting military Heinlein fans, but instead found they were all transfers from the oil extraction industry. Morale patches advertised motorcycle, beer, and cigarette brands. All were at least ten years older than the Space Cadets.

Anthony’s first interview was with J.T., a man who hit the height and diameter limits of the largest spacesuit size. His first question was unplanned. “How the Hell do you fit that beard into a pressure suit?”

The Roughneck grinned and ran some fingers through the mass descending to his bellybutton. “I just braid it and fit it under the thermal control layer. You the thorium guy?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s awesome. You need to get enough to get the reactor running. This place is desperate for power. I’m doing too much inside time because we can’t run the gear for outside work.”

“You want more outside time?”

“Hell, yeah. Outside time pays double inside time.”

That convinced Anthony this wasn’t his suspect, but he went through the questions in case another member of the Roughnecks was the saboteur. J.T. hadn’t seen anything suspicious.

Neither had his second Roughneck interviewee.

Afterwards, Svetla said, “I can’t see it being them. They want to do the work, and they want the power.”

Anthony agreed.

Team ‘Ex-NASA’ were, as expected, NASA veterans who’d quit to take jobs at LunaX. Their patches were official NASA-issue ones designating missions they’d supported. Anthony knew two of them from his time at Armstrong Station. He took the other two as his interviewees.

The first was a Dr. Swoboda. “Hey, you’re Anthony Antonelli! I love you. You’re my role model.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“Striking out on your own, revolutionizing lunar transportation, that’s amazing. When I heard how you were doing trading runs I couldn’t take the paperwork any more. Didn’t have the nerve to make my own homestead, but came here. I figure it’s going to grow like hell.”

“I wish you luck.” Anthony took control of the conversation and went through the list of questions, distractions first, then the key ones about loading the hopper. Dr. Swoboda had seen nothing suspicious.

The second interviewee wasn’t a fanboy but had heard of Anthony. He had no useful observations either.

When they met afterwards, Svetla opened the conversation with, “I had to promise you’d meet them for dinner if we had the time.”

“Well, that’s nice. Do you think they did it?”

“Neither of mine saw someone going under the hopper. I don’t think they’d cooperate to sabotage it. They like you too much.”

“Yeah, one of mine was a member of my fan club. Let’s try the next batch.”

The ‘Fast Track’ team were members of a corporate leadership development program. They were spending six months each at several corporate divisions to prepare themselves for future management posts. There were no patches on them. All wore the mandated identification markings and nothing else.

Anthony took one of the interchangeable parts into a conference room. “How is progress going on the mining?”

“We’re applying proactive methods to optimize the accumulation of hydrate-bearing material for prospective extraction.” It was said with total seriousness.

Anthony suppressed the desire for a buzzword bingo card. He needed to extract some evidence from this drone. It would just take more filtering than with the earlier ones.

Several questions had to be repeated from a different angle to extract a factual description rather than “processes were optimized to maximize deliverables.” Pressing on whether anyone had lain down during the unloading won “There were no extreme deviations from the specified procedure.”

He shifted to the closing question list. The fast-tracker continued answering them all in the same style.

The next interviewee wasn’t as fond of management jargon as the first, but still answered every question with a long ass-covering paragraph. He confirmed no one had gone underneath the hopper.

Svetla was still in her interview when Anthony turned his loose. She didn’t have the experience with management buzzwords he’d picked up in his NASA meetings, so must need longer to filter through it to the answers.

He only had to wait five minutes for the last one to leave. He went into Svetla’s room and closed the door. She looked tired. Anthony felt tired. All the interviews were exhausting. They were used to hardly talking to anyone except each other.

“They didn’t report any suspicious activity,” said Svetla. “Though I’m tempted to space them just so I don’t have to listen to them babble any more.”

“None from mine either. This seemed the team most likely to take a bribe, or just do something out of corporate politics. I suppose the whole team might be in on it.”

She snorted. “Other teams might act together. Any one of these would be a stukach for a lollypop.”

He knew that word for informer from her stories of growing up. Things were better under the Czarist Restoration, but it was still Russia.

“True. Ready for a break?”

She nodded. They went back to their guest room. Someone had helpfully placed a covered tray on the table.

Anthony lifted the lid. Two plates with meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy, and a handscrawled note saying ‘GO AWAY.’

“Our investigation must be getting close if they’re trying to scare us,” said Svetla with mock cheerfulness.

He dropped into one of the chairs, settling slowly in the lunar gravity, and stared at the tray in horror. He was tired and hungry and had greeted the sight of the tray with joy. He’d’ve eaten at least half the meal before having second thoughts. “I guess this proves whoever’s doing this doesn’t want to kill us.”

“Mmm?”

“Stirring a handful of regolith into the mashed potatoes could’ve been fatal.”

Sand grains on Earth were rubbed against each other by wind and water until they were as rounded as potatoes. On the Moon, each grain was as sharp as when it fractured from a rock, like a handful of razor blades stuck together. Every few years someone failed to clean his suit properly and ingested enough regolith to give himself bleeding ulcers. More often they’d inhale some and need to be evacuated to Earth. If the symptoms didn’t show until Anthony and Svetla were back home, they might die before reaching a doctor.

After brooding over the tray for a few minutes, they carried it to Recycling and went to the cafeteria for a meal of items too solid to have something mixed in. Neither discussed the case in public.

In the morning, a call to Chuck revealed there were no cameras covering that corridor. “We need to let them have some privacy.”

The detectives sat in their room looking at each other. “Think there might be some suspects we haven’t talked to?” asked Anthony.

Svetla shook her head. “The launch pad cameras confirmed no one else approached the site. Aren’t sixteen suspects enough?”

“They would be if one confessed. Instead they’re all being each other’s alibis.” He brooded.

She waited a couple of minutes, then prodded him. “Maybe it’s not one saboteur. Maybe a team is acting together.”

Anthony snorted. “Who? The Space Cadets are idealists. The Roughnecks want the reactor. The Ex-NASA guys like us too much to hurt us. And the Fast Track couldn’t cooperate on a conspiracy.”

“Idealists would want to scare us away without hurting us. What was that book they all had patches for?”

“The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. It’s about a revolution on the Moon.”

“I remember. You urged me to read that one. The war in it started because the lunar colonists were running out of water, yes?”

He froze, pulling up his memories of the old story. The rebels had forecast that exporting their limited water supply would lead to food shortages and then cannibalism, and fought to prevent it. Maybe there was an idealistic reason someone would want to prevent a reactor being built at the South Pole. “You think they want to keep the water from being dug up?”

“Maybe they just want to keep it from being exported. Water used for interplanetary propulsion is gone forever. Water used on the Moon is recycled.”

True enough. Anthony’s recycling system at their home was keeping the two of them alive.

“God damn it. I like those kids,” he burst out.

Svetla said, “I like them, too. I even sympathize. I want there to be enough water on the Moon to support our grandchildren.”

Grandchildren were a very hypothetical issue for them. Svetla had mentioned her contraceptive implant would run out in another sixteen months, and left the consequences unstated.

She continued, “But I don’t want them trying to kill us again. Or anyone else.”

“I agree. Problem is, a possible motive isn’t enough evidence for a conviction.” He frowned. “The pliers have probably been disappeared. There’s no fingerprints. Any footsteps would’ve been erased when we tried to take off.”

“Do we need a conviction? If we convince Chuck to fire them all, the problem is solved and they’re back on Earth, blacklisted from the industry.”

Anthony’s frown deepened.

“I admit it’s a poor ending for a detective novel.”

He let out a sigh. “Not if it’s noir. Do you think it’s enough evidence for Chuck? It’s completely circumstantial. He might be hard to convince. Especially if he has to pay for them to be shipped back.”

Svetla thought on it. “That’s true. But the real question is if the Space Cadets would believe Chuck would fire them based on it. Then we can get them fighting among themselves and extract a confession.”

“You mean we’d lie to them?” gasped Anthony.

That drew a grim smile from her. “No. You will stand there silently and glower. I will lie to them.”

It took a moment of internal struggle before he nodded.

“I thought you’d read those stories you gave me. Detectives lie all the time.”

“Not all the time. I never liked the noir books as much as procedurals.”

“We are in Shackleton Crater. It’s one of the darkest places in the Solar System.”

Thirty minutes later Anthony and Svetla were facing the Space Cadets in a conference room. The young workers sat on one side of the conference table, Tammy and Daniel on the ends, Woodrow and Bob between them. Svetla sat across from them. Anthony leaned against the wall to one side.

Cameras normally used for supporting remote meetings were recording.

The Space Cadets waited in silence. At one point Woodrow started to speak, but cut himself off at a gesture from Daniel.

Svetla let the silence go on for three minutes. Then she pressed a remote. A picture of the sabotaged LOX line appeared on the screen behind her.

“Two days ago someone cut a line on our hopper. If the vacctape had held one minute more, the hopper would’ve wrecked and killed us both. One of you four made that cut. There’s not enough evidence for an attempted murder trial, but Chuck Marles will fire all four of you, returning you to Earth with all the legal and financial penalties involved. You will be listed as unsuitable for work off Earth. No one else will hire you. You’ll spend the rest of your lives as groundhogs.”

From his spot at the end of the table, Anthony saw all four lean back, the low lunar gravity amplifying their involuntary responses as if Svetla had blown them back with a grenade.

They babbled at her. “You can’t—” “He can’t—” “We have rights!” “There’s no proof!”

“Hush, children.” Her cold voice cut across them. “I have already reported this to the director.” Not true. “He has the right to fire you, and suspicion of homicide makes it ‘For cause’ which activates some unpleasant clauses in your contracts.” True, though the implication he’d already done it was a lie. “The other suspects have been cleared. It was one of you.” Probably true, though they couldn’t prove it.

She waited. A couple of the cadets began to object. Daniel snapped, “Shut up. That’s what they want. For one of us to blurt out something they can manipulate into a confession.”

All four went silent. But there was a lot of shifting in their seats and looking at each other. Lots of looks at Daniel.

Svetla gave them a few minutes for the tension to increase before she spoke again. “Yes. A confession. Only one of you can confess to committing the crime. The other three are accomplices, or maybe only accessories.”

“What’s the difference?” asked Tammy.

“Whether you planned the crime, or only helped with the cover-up. Those are crimes which are traditionally given less punishment. If the aspiring murderer confesses, then perhaps the others would only be reprimanded and perhaps transferred, rather than being banned from space for life.”

Then she let the silence stretch out again.

Anthony watched the fidgeting and looks. It was the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ from game theory in almost its classic form. Three of them agreeing another did it would be functionally equivalent to a confession. Some hardened criminals might be tough enough to stand up to the stress, or afraid of a mob boss who’d punish them for squealing, but these kids might never had gotten a speeding ticket.

With three innocents, it was just a question of which one would break first.

Tammy slapped the tabletop, pushing herself up in the air. “Why did you have to bring the damn thorium here? The reactor’s too much! The solar arrays need trackers, they need power lines, they can only support mining the outer edges of the crater. The reactor will let the company strip it bare!”

“Shut up!” said Daniel.

“Now they’re going to use all the water for rockets and there’ll be no water for settlers. We’d all be fine if you hadn’t brought it.” She dropped her face into her hands and began to weep.

“Did you cut the line, Tammy?” asked Svetla in a mild tone.

“No, no, I didn’t think he was going to do it, none of us realized he would until he’d done it, and we didn’t want to say anything.”

“Who did?”

“It was—I don’t want to say.”

“Shut up!” Daniel produced a screwdriver from a pocket of his flight suit and lunged toward her.

Woodrow blocked him, bouncing Daniel back to the empty end of the room. He examined a bloody cut on his hand. “What the hell, man?”

Svetla retreated toward Anthony. He stepped in front of her. Woodrow and Bob stood before Tammy.

Light gleamed off the blood on the sharpened screwdriver. “Fuck you all,” said Daniel. He went over the table—no feat on the Moon—and out the door.

A fist smacked him back into the room. J. T. stood in the open door. “That the one you were worried about, boss?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” said Anthony.

A second Roughneck peered over J. T.’s shoulder, clearly wondering if he’d get a piece of the action.

Daniel picked himself up and stood at bay in the end of the room, screwdriver wavering among all his enemies.

Anthony said, “Daniel, it’s over. What you just did is enough to send you back to Earth. Drop that thing and give up.”

“I’m not going back to Earth.” He turned over the screwdriver and shoved it into his throat.

Anthony was too far away to intervene.

The other Space Cadets were too shocked to intervene.

J. T. had no interest in intervening.

Blood sprayed across the table.

Svetla had called for the base’s paramedics when Woodrow was cut, but they still arrived too late to do anything for Daniel other than bag him and carry him off.

The three surviving Space Cadets were placed in front of cameras in separate conference rooms with orders to make “Full, complete, and honest” statements about everything that happened.

Chuck Marles listened to the detectives report with a grim face. “God, what a mess. And what am I going to do with the body? I could ship it back to Earth, but he wouldn’t want that.”

A bit from the book they’d been discussing leapt to Anthony’s mind. “Is your hydroponics module built out?”

“No, we don’t have power for all the lights yet.”

“Get some flower seeds. Mulch the body into one of the beds and use it for flowers.”

Chuck thought for a long moment. “Yeah, that’ll do.”

They went through the rest of the loose ends. The remaining Space Cadets received formal reprimands for “Failure to report unsafe conditions.” The detectives received their fee. The Roughneck crew would help Anthony with the repairs to the hopper.

When they were finished, Svetla said, “I’d like to add a clause to the thorium contract.”

“I’d be happy to discuss that,” said Chuck neutrally.

“That as condition for receiving the thorium, LunaX will commit to not exporting more than one percent of the Shackleton Crater water reserves off the Moon.”

The director’s eyebrows went up. “Given the size of the reserves we’ve detected, that would take decades.”

“I understand.”

“By the time we reach that limit, there’ll probably be enough ships among the asteroids and gas giants they’ll be extracting more water from chondrites and comets and, hell, the rings of Saturn than this site can send out.”

“I want to establish the principle that Lunar water is for Loonies.”

“Loonies? All right. Let me check something.” Chuck tapped on his console for a couple of minutes. “Fine. Our thirty year plan has us only taking two tenths of a percent out. So I accept your clause.”

“Thank you,” she said. Anthony gripped Svetla’s hand.

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.