Kangaroo Too Page 8

  “Doctor,” she says.

  “Can we talk about that, Doctor?”

  “Good. That’s all you need to know.”

  Now I’m confused. “I don’t know anything.”

  “‘I don’t know anything, Doctor,’” she says.

  Now she’s just messing with me. “Seriously?”

  “We are not friends,” Jessica says. “We’re not even colleagues. You work for me. You only need to know two things. One, always address me as Doctor. Two, always do whatever I say, no hesitation, no questions.”

  “And what if I don’t know how to do what you want, Doctor?”

  “I’m not going to ask you to scrub in for surgery. You’ll mostly be recording data. You know how to do that.” She leans toward me and lowers her voice. “And if you don’t, just pretend. We’re only interfacing with the hospital personnel so we can get to Clementine.”

  “You know, Oliver actually wants to teach me things,” I say. It’s not a lie. He would prefer for me to learn more sci-tech stuff on my own, but my lack of enthusiasm for self-directed study usually results in him spitting impromptu physics lessons at me. “Don’t you think more medical knowledge would benefit me in the field?”

  “No,” Jessica says, “you’d just want to show off the last interesting thing you learned and would quickly get in over your head.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “I always have at least two or three things I want to show off.”

  Jessica points at herself. “Doctor.” She points at me. “Do what I say.”

  I do my best to stare daggers at her, but my eye-daggers can’t beat her eye-daggers. After a few seconds, I grumble, “Understood. Doctor.”

  “I’m taking a nap.” She puts her earbuds in. “I suggest you try to do the same.”

  Several baby-shriek-filled minutes and one long safety briefing later, the countdown finally begins.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Moon—nearside—Armstrong Spaceport

  2 hours after I learned the words to all four verses of “America the Beautiful”

  When we get to the Moon, the capsule at the top of the rocket separates, and the rest of us orbit while those extra-super-special first-class folks get the full historical experience of landing on the Moon in a replica of the original Apollo Lunar lander. They’re really getting their money’s worth, and the rest of us get to watch their flimsy little module spiral down to the surface, with the descent explained on our seat-back screens with diagrams and historical NASA footage in surreal grayscale vid images.

  The rest of our Saturn 5000 rocket orbits once, passing over farside and highlighting landmarks below us, before touching down on nearside. Jessica and I ride our rocket’s central elevator directly into the underground hub of Armstrong Spaceport, where we join multifarious crowds disembarking from other arriving flights. Talking signs and service robots direct us toward the intake areas for each nation’s citizens.

  One quirk of the Moon Treaty—created way back in the twentieth century and later amended to allow commercial and military uses—is that each national sector operates as its own little island. The U.S., Russia, and China have most of the historic sites, but other nations have found different ways to attract tourists. The Moon itself isn’t much to look at—the scenery’s mostly a bunch of gray craters and gray rocks, and if you’ve seen one Moon rock, you’ve kind of seen them all. But there’s also plenty of open space for low-gravity shenanigans, including a variety of stadiums and arenas for sporting events that emphasize leaping.

  All those national sectors are joined together by a network of underground public transit tubes—originally a UN colonial project, now maintained by robots and supported by advertising. Being an unregulated commercial district makes every Lunar tube trip vibrant and somewhat unpredictable in terms of what you can’t unsee, but we’ll have to get used to it. Surface transport options are limited due to the rough terrain and radiation exposure hazard of staying topside for too long. The tube is the safest and most efficient way to get around the Moon.

  Jessica and I are met just outside the spaceport’s U.S. arrivals area by a tall blond woman holding up an electronic sign with DR. J.S. CHU in big letters underneath a red-and-white Stanford University logo. Subtle.

  The blonde introduces herself as Breyella Wilgus and shakes our hands enthusiastically in turn. “Welcome to the Moon, Dr. Chu, Mr. McDrona! I hope your flight was enjoyable?”

  “More or less,” Jessica says. “And you can call him Edwin.”

  “Of course, Doctor. Edwin. If you’ll take a seat?” Breyella gestures behind her toward a small, four-person go-cart. “Your checked bags are being delivered to your hotel rooms right now. I’ll get you through customs.”

  Jessica and I follow Breyella onto the go-cart. She selects our destination on the control panel, and the vehicle chirps and starts moving through the spaceport. The auto-drive does an impressive job of gently weaving us through the multitudes of flying cam-bots and luggage-toting service robots streaming everywhere.

  “We’re so happy to see you both!” Breyella swivels her driver’s seat backward to face us. “Dr. Chu, I know our hospital staff are very excited to show you around the facilities and get your opinions of how we’re set up here.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” Jessica says, “are you going to be escorting us the whole time?”

  “Oh, yes,” Breyella says with a broad grin, either not picking up on Jessica’s lack of enthusiasm at this prospect or simply choosing to ignore it. “As you might imagine, with the big anniversary celebrations all over Luna, there’s increased security everywhere. We’ll get both of you badged at customs, but I’ve been here long enough to warrant higher clearance levels, and it’ll just be so much easier for you to get around if I’m with you to present my credentials.”

  “Great,” Jessica says, unconvincingly.

  I can guess what she’s thinking: it’s going to be harder to sneak around if Breyella’s tagging along the whole time. But at least she’ll be more cheerful company than Jessica promises to be. And who knows? Maybe we’ll learn some fun new Moon facts.

  * * *

  As promised, Breyella breezes us through customs, then delivers us to our hotel and gives Jessica and me a few minutes to freshen up. We have adjoining rooms, and barely two minutes after Breyella leaves us—just enough time for me to slip out of my shoes and start massaging my feet, which always swell up something fierce after going through variable gravity—Jessica knocks insistently on the door between our rooms.

  I sigh and walk over to open the door. My aching feet will have to wait. I’m surprised to see Jessica wearing completely different clothes than she had on during the flight. How is it humanly possible for her to have changed from a souvenir coverall into a business suit in less than two minutes?

  “Let’s pick up our dead drop,” she says, walking into my room. She pulls the chair out from the work desk opposite the bed and sits down.

  “Yeah.” I open the pocket and pull out the insulated valise containing our mission computer. We stored any mission-critical supplies in the pocket so we wouldn’t need to worry about getting them through customs. I unzip the valise, pull out the laptop, and hand it to her.

  Jessica sets the computer down on the table and opens it. The camera above the screen glows red until she leans in and lets it scan her biometrics—face, retina, palmprint, subdermal transponder, and so forth—and then the screen lights up with a progress bar.

  Oliver didn’t have time to finish compiling reconnaissance data before we left, so he uploaded a briefing packet to an agency access point on the Moon. Our mission documents finish downloading in just a few seconds, and Jessica starts paging through them faster than I can follow.

  “Are we going to push to see Clementine right away?” I ask. “Or do we let Breyella give us the dime tour first?”

  “We don’t want to be too obvious,” Jessica says. “We let Miss Wilgus run her program, do whatever soft sell she’s
supposed to do. You don’t need to pay much attention. They don’t care about you; they’re only trying to impress me.”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re going to scope out the place.” Jessica opens a map of the hospital. “Look for patient records, network access points, anything that might help us get to Clementine later without being detected.”

  “Got it.” I verify that all the mission data has uploaded to my eye. Lunar General is new enough that we don’t have detailed maps of its interior—especially anything that was added or changed after the official construction blueprints went into the public record. “Too bad Intel couldn’t do all this legwork for us.”

  “Civilian medical facilities aren’t generally hotbeds of espionage. Intel has other things to worry about.”

  “And robot spiders from the Moon sabotaging an agency shuttle wasn’t serious enough to merit their attention?”

  “Intel’s working leads on farside. Clementine’s a long shot, but she’s our long shot.”

  “So Lasher just doesn’t want to share.”

  Jessica turns around and glares at me. “Office gossip later. Did you review the file on this neurologist?”

  “No,” I say, and I’m not sure why she seems unhappy about that. “That’s your deal, isn’t it? I’m just the assistant. Why would I need to—”

  “Because you’re my assistant,” Jessica says, closing the laptop. “You get to do all the work that I don’t want to do.”

  “You don’t want to talk to this neurologist? Dr. Raoul Helman?” I blink up his file in my eye and start reviewing it.

  “I don’t think talking will be the problem.” There’s a knock at her door.

  “What does that mean?” She ignores me and walks toward the door. I see something interesting and stop scrolling through Helman’s file “Wait. Sealed lawsuit? Is this what you’re talking about?”

  “Hello, Breyella,” Jessica says loudly from the other room. “Yes, of course we’re ready to go. Edwin!”

  I put the laptop back in the pocket. “Be right there, Doctor.”

  “Shake a leg! We don’t have all day!”

  She might be enjoying her legend a little too much.

  * * *

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Madrona,” Raoul Helman says, smiling as he shakes my hand. He towers over both of us and Breyella. I wonder if living on the Moon for however long he’s been here has increased his height significantly.

  “McDrona,” I say, correcting his pronunciation of my fake name.

  Helman raises a thick eyebrow. “You don’t look very … Scottish?”

  “I’m adopted.” One of these days I’m going to figure out how Paul chooses all these ridiculous aliases for me. And why they’re always so ridiculous.

  Helman moves on to Jessica and doesn’t so much shake her hand as fondle it, ignoring her deepening frown. After he releases her, she makes no effort to disguise the motion of wiping her palm against the side of her suit jacket.

  Breyella begins reciting our tour schedule in great detail, but Helman ignores her and continues talking to Jessica. I bring up a biomedical scan in my left eye. Helman’s pulse, respiration, and body temperature indicate some kind of excitement, and the warm spot around his groin tells me exactly what he’s getting excited about.

  Well, this’ll be interesting.

  I think I might have an inkling of the reason for that lawsuit in Helman’s file. On the bright side, I’m sure Jessica can fend off one horny neurologist, and with him distracted, I’ll be free to scan as much as I want. I turn to say good-bye to Breyella, but her face doesn’t look like she has any intention of leaving.

  “I thought it would make sense for you to see the radiology section first, Dr. Chu,” she says. “And then I’ll walk you and Edwin through the intensive care unit and introduce you to some of our attending physicians.”

  “Oh, I can take it from here, Bree,” Helman says, waving his hand in a downward, dismissive motion. “I’m sure you’ve got better things to do with your time.”

  The medical overlay is still in my eye, and I see Breyella’s vital signs spike when Helman calls her “Bree.” She obviously doesn’t like that nickname.

  “Dr. Chu is my responsibility, Dr. Helman,” Breyella says, and I don’t need any tech to hear the edge in her voice. “I’m afraid I just wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving her for someone else to escort.”

  Time to run the numbers: if I agree with Helman, it might make my job easier for the next few minutes. But if I take Breyella’s side, it’ll probably make my job easier for the next few days. I think I’d rather take the latter odds.

  Also, I don’t like arrogant physicians very much.

  “Actually, Doctors,” I say, “if you don’t mind, I suspect the two of you will be talking neurology the whole time, and I would appreciate the opportunity to pick Miss Wilgus’s brain about other aspects of the hospital’s operation.” I turn to Breyella. “If you don’t mind, that is. I do have to stay with Dr. Chu, of course, just in case she needs me for something.”

  “Of course,” Breyella says. “I don’t mind at all. Dr. Helman?”

  If Helman doesn’t like the idea of being chaperoned while he tries to work himself into Jessica’s good graces—and, I’m sure he’s hoping, eventually her pants—he hides it pretty well. I suppose that’s a valuable skill for a medical practitioner too. I note with some relief that the hot spot in his own pants has cooled down a little.

  “Fine,” he says. “We’ll start in the neuro lab.”

  Jessica nods. “Great.”

  Breyella leads us toward the elevator bank on the other side of the reception desk. I notice Jessica’s hand flapping at her waist as I follow her and Helman and Breyella into an elevator, and after a second I realize she’s telling me to close formation—one of the few X-4 hand signals I actually recognize. I position myself just behind and between her and Helman, ready to jump in and separate them if necessary.

  While the elevator ascends, I use my implanted controls to open a secure radio channel back to the office. The Moon is close enough to Earth that I can get real-time comms with Oliver, with less than a second of transmission delay. The catch is, though he can talk to me through my cochlear implants, I have to send him silent text messages. I hope nobody thinks it’s weird that I’m fidgeting so much.

  Equipment, Kangaroo, I text to Oliver. We’re at the hospital. How’s my signal?

  “Five by five,” Oliver replies in my ear. “Remember to look around as much as you can. Keep your head on a swivel, as the saying goes. I’ll prompt you if I want you to give anything a second glance.”

  Wilco, I send back.

  I see the faint wireframe of my map data outlining the edges of the floor, walls, and ceiling. My eye is streaming some basic sensor readings back to the office—so Oliver can monitor my progress—and also recording a lot more for later analysis.

  I’m doing my best to sweep my eye over everything, so I’m only half listening as Helman walks us around the neurology lab. Right now we’re in some kind of control room, with a large window above a bank of computer consoles looking into a scanning chamber, where a transparent plexi chair is mounted inside a spherical metal lattice.

  “How many beams?” Jessica asks Helman.

  “Six, naturally,” he says. I have no idea what they’re talking about. I do notice that Helman’s putting his hands on Jessica’s shoulders a lot—guiding her around the room and also just groping her. I hope she can resist the urge to break some of his fingers. At least until I finish my scans.

  I keep looking around—at the floor, at the ceiling—to make sure I give Oliver a good overview of the space. There’s probably some shielding in here, but the location and composition of the shielding will give an indication of what it’s supposed to protect.

  “Bored?” Breyella asks. She’s joined me at the back of the room, where I’m turning slowly in a circle. I suddenly realize how that must look to someone who doesn’t know what I’m
doing.

  “Just getting a look around,” I say.

  “Most people are interested in the shiny expensive machines.” Breyella points at what I can only assume is some kind of body-scanning setup.

  “Sure,” I say, “but the sideshow tells you more about what kind of circus it is.”

  Breyella smiles and scrunches her nose. “That’s an odd analogy.”

  I shrug. “Credit Dr. Chu.” Jessica has very strong opinions about hospitals.

  We move on to another area with a similar setup—control room overlooking a second chamber—but these two rooms are much smaller, and the machine in here is a large apparatus that looks like a dentist’s chair with a salon-style hair dryer bubble on top. A wedge-shaped bank of equipment sits behind and below the chair. I look closer and see that the bubble is a plexi dome shot through with wires and electrodes, mounted on a moveable arm.

  “This calls for a demonstration,” Dr. Helman says. “Breyella? Would you mind?”

  I don’t even need to see the panicked expression on Breyella’s face to know that this is a shady request. “I’ll do it,” I say before she can respond.

  “No,” Jessica says quickly. “Not you, Edwin.”

  Helman frowns at her. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  “Not for him,” she says. “That’s some kind of neural stimulator?”

  “That is the latest in multifocal transcranial induction technology,” Helman says, his chest puffing up. “The dome rests over the top of the patient’s head. It’s made of a programmable plexi material. We can sequence a patient-specific treatment, combining both magnetic and direct current stimulation in the most effective pattern to address the medical complaint.”

  Jessica nods. “Edwin’s got a metal plate in his head. He’ll have to stick to pharmaceuticals. And I don’t need a demonstration, I’ve seen finger puppets before. What’s next?”

  She walks out of the room. Breyella follows her.