Kangaroo Too Page 10

  Goddammit, Surge, where are you going?

  Something heavy taps my shoulder. I turn around and see the bright orange muzzle of Breyella’s ray-gun resting next to my collar.

  “Everything good here, citizen?” she asks in a gruff voice.

  “Yeah. Sorry.” I wave at the bartender, who ignores me. “He’s just a little busy.”

  Breyella raises her other hand, and the bartender comes over immediately. I tell myself not to feel too offended. Maybe he’d pay more attention to me if I were wearing a saucy skintight outfit.

  “Same again,” Breyella says, pushing her empty glass forward. “And my friend would like a new vodka martini. From the top shelf this time, please.”

  “Of course, Miss Wilgus,” the bartender says, bowing his head. “Right away.”

  “They know you here?” I ask as the bartender slinks away.

  Breyella winks. “I come here often, Edwin.”

  Something occurs to me. “So you know this hotel pretty well.”

  “This is actually the most well-stocked bar in the sector,” she says.

  “Isn’t there another bar upstairs?” I ask.

  She makes a buzzing sounds with her lips. “Sure. For tourists who like watered-down drinks.”

  “Hey, I’m a tourist,” I say. “And I haven’t gotten a good view of the surface yet.” Certainly not from a high vantage point where I might pick up a transponder signal.

  “Oh, really,” Breyella says. I’m not sure what to make of the twinkle in her eye. How many drinks did she have before this last one?

  My eye doesn’t have very sophisticated chemical or biological sensors; the implants wired to my optic nerve are mostly good for seeing electromagnetic radiation. But the medical scanning mode does tell me that Breyella’s skin temperature is elevated, and it’s not because she’s wearing too many layers in this thoroughly air-conditioned hotel. Maybe asking her to take me to the roof wasn’t the best idea in the world.

  The bartender reappears with our drinks, and Breyella clinks her glass against mine. “Here’s to getting high.”

  “You mean that literally, right? As in we’re going to the bar upstairs?” I ask. She’s finished her whole drink before I take my first sip.

  “Come on,” she says, tugging at my sleeve.

  “Can I finish my drink first?” I ask.

  She grabs my martini and downs it in one gulp. “There. You’re finished.”

  “Thanks.” I stand up and gesture for her to lead the way.

  Breyella stands and stumbles, and I catch her elbow to keep her from doing a faceplant. Just her elbow. I don’t want to give her the wrong impression here.

  “Thanks,” she slurs, bracing herself against the nearest wall. “Heels and Lunar gravity don’t really mix well.”

  Neither do whiskey and vodka, Babs.

  The throngs waiting outside the ballroom have thinned, so I don’t have to maneuver Breyella around too many obstacles on our way to the elevator. She punches the button for the top floor of the hotel and turns to me with a crooked grin.

  “I think the bar’s on a different floor,” I say as the elevator starts moving.

  “You said you wanted to see the surface,” she says. “Best view’s on the roof.”

  “Are we actually going outside?” I ask. “Isn’t there a lot of, uh, radiation out there?”

  Breyella makes a face. “We’re inside the dome, Edwin. Inside the dome. An entire fucking dome of transductile crystal. You know what that is?”

  “Sure. I know about TDC.” Large windows weren’t popular on the Moon for a long time because of the constant and prolonged radiation hazards, but now we have transductile display crystal. With just a small application of voltage, TDC provides adequate radiation shielding for human life. Plus you can vary the voltage to turn those windows into translucent displays. “That’s how they display all those announcements and advertisements, right?”

  “Correct!” I wish she would stop gesturing with her ray-gun prop. I know it’s not real, but the sight of a weapon being pointed at me still makes me nervous. “But more importantly, TDC is a”—she pauses and enunciates very carefully—“negative-index metamaterial that refracts harmful radiation away.” She mimes something flying toward the wall and bouncing off. “Did I just blow your mind? Be honest.”

  I’m not sure what the right answer is here. “Um,” I say.

  The elevator dings, and the doors open. “We’re here!” Breyella leaps out into the hallway, then steps back and grabs my arm. “Come on!”

  She drags me to a stairwell, waits for a cleaning robot to pass us, then pushes the door open and shoves me inside first. I wait while she yanks open the gate with a NO GUEST ACCESS sign on it and bounds up the steps to the next landing.

  “Slowpoke!” she shouts down to me as she covers the next flight of stairs in a single leap.

  I walk up behind her. She holds the door to the roof open, and I step into one of the most amazing views I’ve ever seen.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’ve witnessed lots of incredible things. My uncomfortably long and monotonous outer space travels do get me into visual range of some of the most vivid astronomical wonders in the Solar System: Saturn’s rings, the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, any number of comets shedding their icy mass in huge glowing tails. But nothing compares to seeing Planet Earth from space.

  “Wow,” I say, staring up at the blue-and-white marble in the black sky.

  “You like what you see?”

  I turn back to look at Breyella. She’s put down her ray-gun and taken off her jacket. The climate inside the dome is controlled, so it’s not too cold out here. But the way she sways her hips while walking toward me indicates she’s reached the unwanted-sexual-advances stage of drunkenness. I quickly blink my eye to search for Jessica’s transponder. Nothing. Either she’s out of range already, or the dome is blocking the signal.

  “I’m actually feeling a little chilly out here,” I say. “Maybe we should—”

  “You don’t think this is romantic?” She points over my shoulder. “That’s Earth up there, Edwin. Fucking Earth. The cradle of fucking civilization.” She stumbles forward and nearly falls.

  “Okay.” I put out both hands to grab her bare shoulders and hold her upright. “This was a great tour, thank you very much, but let’s go back inside now, okay?”

  Still nothing from Jessica’s transponder. I try turning up the gain on my receiver. Breyella glares at me for a moment while I blink to work my eye controls. Then her lower lip quivers. Then she starts bawling like a baby.

  Aaand here are the sudden mood swings. I really hope she doesn’t throw up on me.

  I hold Breyella steady while she cries. After a moment, the blubbering turns into words I can understand.

  “She refused,” Breyella says. “She refused to come up and see the Earth.”

  “Who’s that, then?”

  “Mack.” Breyella sniffles. “My girlfriend.”

  “Oh.” I probably could have guessed that. “She visited you here?”

  “She just wanted to see all the stupid tourist stuff.” Breyella takes off a glove and wipes some tears from her face. “I wanted to sit on the roof with her. Just the two of us, no pressure suits, enjoying the view through the dome. She refused.”

  “Well,” I say, “maybe next time—”

  “She said she didn’t want to risk damaging her reproductive system,” Breyella says. “Her genes and shit. Because of the radiation. I told her about the TDC, but she said she didn’t want to take any chances.”

  “That seems sensible. Listen, how about we—”

  “It’s ridiculous!” Breyella sputters. “We’ve only been dating for like a year! She’s already talking about making babies? Who the fuck wants to get pregnant before thirty? I want to start my own life before I take responsibility for someone else’s!”

  “Also sensible,” I say. “Look, I don’t—”

  “You get it, right?” Breyella looks at m
e with bloodshot eyes and grips my arms with both hands. She’s got a really strong grip. And long fingernails. “Do you think I’m wrong? Is there something wrong with me? Do you want a baby, Edwin?”

  “Not at the moment,” I say. “And you’re not wrong. This is just a difference of opinion.”

  “I should call her back.” Breyella releases my arms and pulls her phone out. “Shit. Three missed calls.”

  Well, at least someone’s comms are working up here. “You and Mack clearly have some stuff to talk about.”

  “I’m just going to sit down for a second.”

  “Okay.”

  I rub my arms to get the circulation going again, follow Breyella back toward the exit door from the stairwell, and watch as she sits down and rests her head against the wall.

  “Just gonna rest real quick,” she says, closing her eyes. “Then call.”

  “Sure.”

  Within a minute, Breyella’s snoring. I walk to the edge of the roof, toward Jessica’s last known location, and scan for her transponder again. Still nothing.

  I adjust my eye’s scan parameters to verify that I’m receiving radio signals through the dome. That means Jessica’s out of range. There’s no way to tell where she might have gone, and I’m not going to go on a wild goose chase across the Moon after her.

  Hope you’re having a better night than I am, Surge.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Moon—nearside—Hotel Tranquility

  Probably not long enough after our first cup of coffee

  “So how was your evening?” I ask Jessica at breakfast the next day. We’re dining very early in the hotel restaurant, which is still fairly empty. Our server left us a large carafe of coffee at Jessica’s request. I suspect he was also happy that he wouldn’t need to keep checking on us so often to maintain the hotel-mandated attentive service.

  “Fine,” Jessica says.

  “Meet anyone interesting at dinner?”

  She glares at me over her cup of coffee. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

  “Just making small talk,” I say. “Nice weather we’re having, yeah?”

  She grunts and sips her coffee.

  I don’t want to be too obvious about this, but it’s killing me that I wasn’t able to snoop on her date last night, and I really want to know what happened.

  I could, of course, tell when she got back to her hotel room, since she’s staying right next to me. The agency’s standard “away from home” kit includes all kinds of nifty miniature sensor packages designed to be hidden around a living space to detect unusual motion, noise, electronic activity, or radio signals. I set up an additional sensor to watch for humanoid heat signatures entering Jessica’s room, and the background job I left running in my eye after going to sleep reported that she got back to her room around four o’clock and stayed there. Her transponder showed up in the Hadley-Apennine tube station before then, and her signal trail led from there straight to the hotel. Guess she parted ways with her date after whatever carousing they did out there in the mountains.

  I’m sure it wasn’t anything sinister—this is Jessica we’re talking about, after all. She probably just wanted to be let off the leash for a while. Especially since she’s dealing with the emotional aftermath of losing her mother recently. And we’ve established that she doesn’t want to talk about that.

  “At least the coffee’s good,” I say. “You think it’s expensive for them to ship it all the way up here? I mean, it’s not like they can grow coffee beans on the Moon, right? We can barely grow them on Earth.”

  “They grow in specific equatorial temperate zones on Earth,” Jessica says. “Here on the Moon, every habitat is climate-controlled anyway. It’s not that difficult to adjust the settings to meet specific botanical requirements.”

  My phone chimes to tell me there’s an incoming text message. I blink it into my eye. It’s from Breyella Wilgus. “Hold on. Message from our liaison.”

  Sorry about last night, the message says. Hope I didn’t do anything too embarrassing. Thanks for not telling the hospital.

  You were fine, I reply. How’s the hangover?

  I’ll live, she says. See you & Dr. Chu at 0800.

  kk, I send. I hope that’s still an accepted quick-messaging abbreviation for “okay” and I didn’t just deliver a nasty insult.

  “Everything okay?” Jessica asks the second I blink my eye into standby mode. I don’t know how she does that. The heads-up display implant is supposed to be invisible to other people, even when I’m using it, but Jessica always seems to know when it’s on or off.

  “Fine,” I say. “Breyella was just confirming our appointment. She’s meeting us here in about half an hour to escort us over to Silver Circle. Do you want to talk about how we’re going to do this?”

  “Same as the hospital,” Jessica says. “But we’ll be under less scrutiny at the hospice.”

  “Isn’t the preferred term ‘retirement community’?”

  “This institution is attached to an inpatient medical facility. Every person at Silver Circle has some kind of chronic illness or other medical condition which could be ameliorated by living in a low-gravity environment. It’s a hospice.”

  “I thought you were a doctor,” I say, “not a barber.”

  She frowns. “What?”

  “You’re kind of splitting hairs, aren’t you?”

  Before she can respond, the server brings our breakfast, and I switch the conversation to asking about how they get fresh eggs up to the Moon. Turns out you can actually raise chickens in Lunar gravity and they don’t freak out. Who knew?

  * * *

  I have to hand it to Breyella: she doesn’t look hung over at all, and if she’s wearing more makeup than she was yesterday to conceal her fatigue, I can’t tell. And her PR spiel is not noticeably less energetic than before.

  Our tour of the Silver Circle retirement community takes a bit longer than the hospital tour, largely because the residents are more mobile and talkative than most patients at Lunar General. I suppose they’re not getting a lot of visitors. I wonder how many of the residents’ families sent their aged ancestors away to be enshrined here.

  Gladys Löwenthal’s room is on the fourth floor of H-wing, at the other end of the facility from the main lobby. Just like Hotel Tranquility, Silver Circle is circumscribed by a round dome that keeps a breathable atmosphere inside. The grounds here also feature aboveground planters, decorative shade trees, and a community vegetable garden. The greenery is easily the fanciest amenity of all: nothing grows on the Moon without incredible effort.

  Our tour ends with a private subsurface tunnel connecting Silver Circle to Lunar General. Breyella explains that the tunnel is used for discreet movement between the hospital and the nursing home—if there’s some kind of medical emergency, for example, and paramedics need to transfer a resident to the hospital without causing a scene.

  “Positive pressure in the entryways?” Jessica asks as we approach the end of the tunnel that leads into Silver Circle.

  “Oh, absolutely.” Breyella places her palm flat on the scanpad next to the entry doors. The pad flashes green and beeps, and the doors slide open with an exhale of atmosphere blowing back any stray particles from the unsanitary tunnel. “There are airlocks at all dome exits, and they’re biometrically secured to only let specific staff personnel through.”

  We follow Breyella out of the airlock into the lobby of the nursing home. Two figures in dark blue uniforms are standing at the reception desk, and they turn around as we approach.

  “Dr. Jessica Chu?” says the one on our left.

  Those aren’t hospital uniforms. They’re wearing badges and patches that say UNITED STATES MARSHAL SERVICE—the service that handles law enforcement in all American sectors on the Moon. The marshal on our right—her name tag says GURLEY—takes a step forward and out, flanking us.

  That’s arrest formation. That’s not good. The marshal who spoke, WECKS, is holding out his i
dentification holo card, and both marshals have their hands resting on the stunners on their equipment belts, holsters unbuckled, ready to draw.

  This is really not good.

  “I’m Dr. Chu’s personal assistant,” I say, stepping forward to meet Wecks and scanning his ID with my eye. It’s legit—the agency database in my implanted computer core contains information on all law enforcement outfits in the Solar System, and that’s a real United States Marshal Service badge, encrypted hologram verified. “May I help you, officers?”

  “We need to ask Dr. Chu some questions,” says Gurley. Wecks puts his badge away.

  “What kind of questions?” I ask.

  “We should probably do this in private,” Wecks says. He leans over to project his voice over my shoulder. “Don’t you agree, Doctor?”

  His tone implies he thinks she should know what he’s talking about. Worse, the expression on Jessica’s face tells me that she actually does.

  What the hell did you do, Surge?

  * * *

  Breyella leads us down the hall into an empty and rather sad-looking space with a few round tables and chairs. Most of the tables and chairs are stacked up against one wall, along with bins and boxes of other supplies, most of which appear to be for arts and crafts. Breyella closes the door once we’re all inside and stands in front of it, as if to guard against any intrusions.

  Marshal Wecks sits down at one of the few tables that’s actually set up in the center of the room. His partner, Gurley, stands to one side. Wecks pulls another chair up beside himself and gestures for Jessica to sit down.

  “I’ll stand, if you don’t mind,” she says. “What’s going on?”

  Wecks pulls a small tablet out of his vest pocket. “Dr. Chu, are you a guest at the Hotel Tranquility?”

  “We both are,” I say. “We just had breakfast there. You can call and ask—”

  “That’s fine,” Wecks says. “Dr. Chu, did you sleep in your hotel room last night?”

  “Yes,” I say quickly. “She was snoring like a wildebeest—”

  “It’s okay, Edwin.” Jessica raises one hand. “I was out for most of last night. With a friend.”