The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection

I

Drew Zeigler was finally alone.

People, people, everywhere. That had been his life for so long he’d forgotten what alone was like. First Earth, then the spaceport, then the shuttle. People whose presence made his skin itch, like the emergency suit he’d been forced to wear for the last ten days.

The suit never let him forget what would happen should the shuttle hit a century-old chunk of space debris. The vision of it exploding from beneath his clothes like the swelling chest of Superman was a reminder he always needed to keep track of the nearest air tube, so he could plug in before it ran out. A mental itch to go with the physical.

The people were a different type of itch, one that made him feel not as though he were about to explode, but always on the brink of collapse. So many. Always there, always strangers. Everyone else was gone, always would be if he’d done things right. If nobody found the childhood friends who knew he’d once dreamed of space. If … too many ifs. Better just to keep his distance, hyper-vigilant for unknown faces in an unknown crowd.

It was impossible. But it had to be done. And it wasn’t impossible. It was like running the 5,000 meters, back in college, before life launched the collapse that had landed him here, alone. Running—at least at the level that paid your tuition—isn’t something you just do, like a kid on a playground. Relax the arms. Lower the shoulders. Don’t try too hard or you’ll wind up working against yourself. You get that so drilled into you that you can’t run without self-monitoring. It was how you became good. No … how you went from good to the best you could be. A small difference but significant.

Now that he’d landed, he could at least get rid of one of the itches. From now on it was his decision when to wear the emergency suit, and in most of Luna C there wasn’t much more risk of being caught in a blowout than of dying of botulism from a plasti-sealed meal. On the periphery … well that was his choice. Itch and be safe, or don’t itch and maybe die. Here, a man could make his own choices.

But the people-itch? Could he let that go too?

I am Drew Zeigler. This is who I am, who I always will be. I am Drew Zeigler, and this is a new life.

After ten days of Velcro gloves and slippers, Drew had been looking forward to the pleasure of weight. But the Luna C grab plates felt peculiar, as though the simulated gravity was pulling him down through the center of his bones rather than weighting his body more evenly. Not to mention that you were under Earth-normal grav only when actually touching a plate. It felt like the Velcro slippers, only more so.

Customs was a formality. Nobody who’d not been pre-cleared made it aboard a shuttle. Still, getting through was a relief. I am Drew Zeigler, he told himself again. I am on the Moon and I am a new man.

The grab plates were for tourists. The locals avoided them. A macho thing, Drew had figured when he first heard about it. Like not carrying an umbrella in Seattle or never complaining about cold in Minnesota. Or maybe their muscles had simply atrophied to the point where full Earth gee was uncomfortable.

The guidebooks warned that walking the plates was a skill and cautioned against trying to move too quickly. Each had its own term for what could happen if you missed a plate. Ceiling bait was the most colorful although Ping-Pong also got the idea across. He’d wondered why they didn’t just convert the plates to strips, or plate the entire corridor. Then he looked up the power requirements. Yowsa, as his no-longer-gramps would have said. It said something about the Moon’s power economy that there were any of the things at all.

In the spaceport, in fact, there were three aisles of them, marching down one side of the corridor. One was too close for his natural gait, another too far apart. The third was just right. He was on the Yellow Brick Road to the city of the Three Bears.

He couldn’t remember what happened to Goldilocks, but suddenly he felt an overwhelming need to act like a Loonie. He angled off the plates, stepped into native lunar grav … and launched the next step straight upward. Happily, he didn’t bounce off the ceiling, though he did float for what seemed like forever, windmilling like an ice skater on a badly launched triple axel.

Everyone noticed, though most were polite enough to pretend they didn’t. He might as well have painted newby across his forehead. When he finally came down, the next stride was more bounce than step and now he was indeed the off-balance skater, moments from crashing. He lunged for the nearest grab plate … only to regret it as the force yanked him into itself with a jerk.

Not exactly his most inconspicuous moment.

Collecting himself, he fiddled with the strap of his duffel bag while watching his fellow passengers. Some had been met by guides. Tourists, on short-term visas. Technically that was him too, but it wasn’t who he needed to be. Others had been met with hugs, kisses. As they headed into the corridor, their strides were low—a slow-rhythmed, shuffling glide.

One of the early astronauts, he’d read, had been a cross-country skier who claimed skiing taught the best motion for low-gee. Since most tourists didn’t come from Norway, it wasn’t anything the guidebooks had latched onto. “Use the grab plates,” was all they’d said. “You’ll find them everywhere you need to go.” But Drew didn’t want to be a tourist, so he studied what the Loonies did. Cock the knee, dip low, then push backward, making sure the force drove you forward, not up. It worked on the grab plates, too, he discovered, though you needed to take three at a time. In fact, with the extra traction, leaping the plates should be the fastest means of locomotion. But nobody was doing it. “Don’t run,” was advice all the books agreed on.

Still, for a few glorious paces, he couldn’t resist, zipping by everyone in the corridor, Terran or Loonie. Back home, life was a cocoon of don’t-dos, but the Loonies really didn’t care if you broke an ankle, so long as you could pay the bill. Which, unfortunately, he couldn’t. The joy faded, and he slowed to a walk, alternating between practicing his Loonie glide and Terran plate-walk. He wasn’t sure which he’d need, but he wanted to have both down pat.

Other than the gravity, the shuttleport might as well have been on Earth. A terminal full of uncomfortable-looking seats and a corridor leading to the real world. Underground, of course. Everything here was underground except the domes and some of the trains.

The nearest dome was a transit hub, a full klick away. From there, you could catch the rail to Luna C’s central domes. But for the moment, there was only the corridor. No carts or moving walkways. If you couldn’t walk a klick, you weren’t fit enough to ride the shuttle anyway.

Everything was purely utilitarian. Airport ordinaire a’ la neglect. Winnemucca, Nevada, not Heathrow or O’Hare.

The transit hub was more of the same, as was the train. Only the fare was out of the ordinary: thirty-five credits—the first dent in finances never designed for this adventure. Drew would have preferred to walk, but the spaceport was a dozen klicks from the rest of Luna C. Nothing like living in a vacuum to make you leery of things falling out of the sky.

But the dome his thirty-five-credit train ride eventually spilled him into—that was a different matter. It was as though he’d stumbled from Winnemucca into Universal City or the Mall of the Arctic. Or maybe Las Vegas. He was at the edge of a plaza, several hundred meters across, limned by storefronts and cafes with the jingling of slot machines beckoning from the center. Many tourists never made it farther than this dome, though why people would travel so far to lose their money here rather than on Earth, he’d never understood … until he looked up.

The guidebooks had given him facts. Now the Skyview pulled at his vision the same way the grab plates pulled at his feet.

Windows were rare on Luna C. The transparent nanoweave that made large ones possible wasn’t cheap. But the city planners had decided that if they were going to do it, they were going to do it right. And the Skyview was the rightest of the right.

Beginning just behind the shops, the windows—there were four of them—blossomed like tulip petals, spreading wide, then returning to an apex two hundred meters above. It was like being inside a giant puffball—with windows.

On the shuttle there was always one set of windows pointed toward Earth, another shuttered against the Sun. From here, only klicks from the Moon’s south pole, the Sun was never visible. Nor was the Earth. Outside was permanent shadow, colder than the nitrogen snows of Pluto. Inside was light, warmth, food, and frenetic fun. Above was endless night, the stars hard, diamond-bright, and oddly renewing.

Drew wasn’t sure he had a soul. But the view, more than anything else, told him the past was a memory. Earth was gone, the life ahead new.

If he would be allowed to live it.

He ducked into a kiosk and bought a download, then treated himself to a sandwich and the cheapest beer available. There were too many people here—not as tightly packed as on the shuttle, but still too many—and as he scanned the want ads he also found himself looking for exits.

Always know your lines of escape; that rule had become so engrained it was like monitoring his running form in college. It was something you automatically did, like old Wild Bill Hickock’s rule of never sitting with his back to a door because if you do, they’ll wind up naming aces and eights for you as the dead-man’s hand. Only in Drew’s case, it would be ham-and-provolone on rye. And how the hell do you keep your back to the wall in a damn dome, where corridors, storefronts, and storebacks spilled in all directions like goddamn tentacles?

He forced himself to take a deep breath and close his eyes, imagining he was back in college, an hour from the start of a big race, high on adrenaline that would do no good until needed. Slow your breathing, hear your pulse, take control and feel your heart rate reduce—that was the trick.

When he did open his eyes again, it was to look upward, at the stars. Earth was gone. The life ahead was new.

If he would allow himself to live it.

In theory he had four weeks to find a job before his visa expired. In practice he was going to need one sooner than that.

He studied the download, trying to ignore the activity swirling around him. He didn’t know this place well enough to spot a threat, anyway. The job listings weren’t laden with options but there were glimmers. Would retail pay enough for provisional residency? What about a temp agency? Could that lead to something permanent, soon enough? And what the hell was a sun harvester?

Too late to find out today. What he needed now was a safe place to sleep. Preferably cheap.

The Overway to Central was clearly marked, as were the routes to a half-dozen other domes. Anyplace would be cheaper than here and the trains weren’t the only way around. Most of the central domes were only a klick or two apart, separated by underground passages, some of which would have grab plates. Even the richest tourists didn’t always take the train.

Maybe one of the tentacles that had so frightened him before would offer a hidey-hole for a quick nap. Maybe he could grab a snooze on one of the benches beneath the Skyview.

He chewed the last of his sandwich, looking for a recycler for the wrapper. It was still too early for sleep. Better to do some exploring. He’d once been an athlete. He could walk.

II

Artemis Razo was drinking coffee, watching vids of the afternoon shuttle spitting out its occupants.

Most were tourists: rich, young, and trying to don that been-there/done-that look that said being here was no big deal. Although there were always a few who hadn’t believed the warnings about synth-gee or thought they were too tough for spacesick meds. Part of being young and rich, he supposed, especially if you were male. Once he’d been full of young testosterone, but that was a long time ago and it had gone elsewhere, along with a lot of other things.

One idiot was trying to run the plates. Raz had seen that before, too. Maybe this one wouldn’t wind up in an emergency room. He should care, but that too had gone with the years. The guy had the right to break his bones if that was what he wanted.

But there were always a few who were different. Rich and young, yes, but trouble in Luna C’s more permissive clubs. Low gee and alcohol were a poor combination for the uninitiated. If you threw in a world where most people worked hard and blew steam even harder—well, it sometimes gave Raz more reasons than he wished for wanting to blow steam himself at shift’s end.

Then there were the dreamers, hoping to find places on the Moon before their visas expired. Raz had seen these a thousand times, too. Even in the low-quality vid, you could sometimes see it in their eyes. They wanted this place too much—enough that not getting it would crush them. Twenty years before, that had been him, though in his case it had been getting the dream that had crushed him. Still, for years he’d been sympathetic to other wannabes. But that too was long ago.

This one’s name was Fidel Franko. Son of a strip-mall mogul from Philadelphia. A lot of F sounds there. Why do parents do that to their kids, he wondered, then flicked off the image.

Unless they had jobs lined up in advance, most wannabes failed. He couldn’t let himself care. Better to just wish the guy luck in a vague sort of way—about as personal as how, as a child in South Jersey, he’d wished well to the frogs that every spring insisted on trying to hop across the highway. Some made it. Most didn’t. That’s the way it was, always would be. Every spring, the frogs would hop. Statistically, not a good bet, but enough would make it to ensure there were always more frogs.

The last Raz had heard, Jenn was still in Perth. That’s where she’d gone when her visa ran out, taking his unborn baby with her. They’d not known she was pregnant until they got here, and for her, pregnancy and low-gee were an even worse mix than low-gee and alcohol. Nobody would hire her, throwing up all the time.

He’d thought that once he got established, he could bring her and the child back up. But Loonie immigration was a lot less permissive than its clubs. Had he and Jenn been married when they left Earth, it might have been possible. As it was, she’d had the same one-time shot as anyone else. It was a game of chance with much bigger stakes than any in the casinos, and she’d lost. She could come as a tourist as often as she wanted, but there were no second chances on immigration. Raz could have gone back and joined her once he’d figured that out. But he hadn’t. And in a dark recess of his mind, he wondered if he’d have done the same even if he’d known from the start.

His com buzzed.

“I’m on site, boss,” came the hoarse voice of Officer McHaddon.

McHaddon’s natural tone was a soft tenor—an embarrassment to an increasingly paunchy man who thought it undercut his authority. For the past three loons, McHaddon had been trying to intensify his tone. Overcompensation? Raz wasn’t about to ask. All he knew was it didn’t have the desired effect. The man now sounded like perpetual laryngitis.

How long had McHaddon been on the force? At least since Jenn’s final disappearance, when she told him it was better if his daughter thought her father dead than unreachably distant, and he’d realized no amount of guilt would ever return him to Earth.

McHaddon’s voice was unusually raspy. Maybe he’d been up all night. “The plates are still there,” he said, “but we’ve got about ten meters of corridor in Luna gee, right off the Skyview. Looks like somebody crowbarred the plates up, snapped the wires, and put ’em back. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt. Just a few bruises, plus some folks threatening to sue you, me, the city, whatever. You want for me to call City Services?”

“I already did.” Raz sighed. “Sounds like kids. Use your discretion.”

Sometimes the worst thing you could do to a juvenile was throw the book at him. Raz had always wished he could thank the cop who’d remembered that when he was sixteen and set him on the path that got him away from his mother and her boyfriends and eventually to a fresh start. Except … the fresh start had come at such a price. Why hadn’t he and Jenn been more careful? What would have happened had he gone back? A lifetime of resentment? Or just a different lifetime? Damn that wannabe. Raz might not want to care anymore, but even the effort of not-caring stirred up memories.

Luckily he’d put McHaddon on voice only. Or maybe it wasn’t luck. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been feeling this way more and more often of late. Not the type of thing you want your subordinates to see.

He reached again for his coffee. There were days when he might as well mainline the stuff the way his mother and her boyfriends did the crackerjack. “But if it’s some drunk tourist, I want him out of my domes.” The coffee was cold. He drank it anyway. “Even if you have to put him in an emergency suit and roll him out an airlock.”

“Got it, boss.”

“Emergency suit optional.”

McHaddon’s laugh forgot to sound tough. “We all know you’re the baddest of badasses.”

Despite himself, Raz smiled. “Someday, someone’s going to push me too far. Just wait.”

Another laugh. “Whatever you say.”

That was the trouble with the Moon. Everyone knew you too well. Or thought they did. Nobody knew about the crackerjack. Or Jenn.

The security vid was still playing. Raz reached for the off button, just as a cough at his office door announced he wasn’t alone.

Caeli Booker was leaning against the doorframe as if she owned it. Which, on occasions, it almost seemed she had. Tall, with frizzy red hair, green eyes, and a pale, oval face flirting on the border between pleasant and pretty, she was an imposing enough figure she usually got what she wanted—and a frequent enough visitor that none of his subordinates was going to challenge her.

With a twitch of Earther-strong shoulders she shoved herself upright, walked in, and settled into the visitor’s chair. “You ever miss an offloading?”

He wasn’t sure if she’d detected his mood but she always brightened his day. “Not when you’re flying. Gotta keep you out of trouble.”

“Or in it?”

The green eyes sparkled and Raz had to fight to hold back his own smile. “I’ve never done that.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Those seeds were a controlled substance!”

“If you’re a flower pot. They weren’t opium poppies for God’s sake!” When she smiled her face definitely kicked over the border into pretty.

“And probably allergenic as hell.” The seeds were how they’d met. “The council would have had my ass if the Vantage Vista had been stupid enough to plant them. You finally going to tell me how you got them through?”

The grin was pure wolf. “Gal’s gotta have her secrets.”

Then the smile slipped, revealing a trace of something that lasted just long enough for him to realize she might have other secrets. Like him and Jenn. Him and the baby—Lily, who would never know him. In space, everyone had something. Some talked. Most didn’t.

Then the deeper glimpse was gone as quickly as it had come. Caeli glanced over her shoulder, leaned in conspiratorially. “Oh, hell. I just walked through with them. Called ’em baking supplies. You know, for muffins.”

Raz knew more than he wanted about hiding from deeper truths. Light conversation was safer. Flirting better yet. “That’s a damn lot of muffins!”

“And who the hell thinks flowers are toxic waste? Though I guess I wouldn’t have planted ’em on my shuttle. Had a damn cigarette smoker a couple of runs ago. And I have no idea how she got those through customs.”

“So, how long you up for?”

“Twenty-five days, can you believe it? Nearly a whole loon of sleep and R’n’R. But first, I wanted to tell you I think you’ve got a gwipp.”

“A what?”

“Gwipp. G-W-I-P-P. Government Witness in Personal Protection.”

“You made that up.”

“Yeah. Sounds good, though, doesn’t it?” She leaned close, for real this time. “I’m trusting you, okay. If I’m right, I wasn’t supposed to figure it out.”

“Got it.” His tone startled him. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know her story. “What can you tell me?”

“Not much, specifically. I’ve got a friend at the other end. Someone in Immigration who has been known to … imbibe. She told me that putting together the passenger list was odd. Said they weren’t allowed to do more than standard checks.” She cocked her head, looking for words. “Usually they pick a few passengers at random and work like hell to dig up skeletons.”

Lily. Everyone had them. Immigration might not care, but nobody wanted them found.

“Anyway, she told me the order seemed to come from very high up. Said she’d never seen anything like it. A gwipp’s the only thing I can think of.”

“Any idea who?”

“Nope. Those folks don’t just get a new past, right? They get plastic surgery, bodywork. I bet they can make a twenty-year-old look fifty. I wish they could do it vice versa.”

“You’re nowhere close to fifty.”

She laughed. “How do you know? Maybe I’m not really me and I’m a hundred-year-old crone from … where is it they live practically forever? Moldavia?”

“Yeah, with the legs of”—he tried to think of the latest vid phenom, but came up blank. At first, he’d ignored them all because they reminded him of Jenn. Then he was out of the habit.

She leaned back, crossing said legs for his inspection.

They’d played this type of game before but suddenly he was uncomfortable. “Maybe it was the Lebdekov assassination.”

“No way!” Caeli uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, the debater returning. “Whoever that was is long gone or dead! More likely some refugee from the mob crackdown in Philadelphia.”

That was interesting. Could it be that easy? McHaddon would probably have the grab-plate vandals within the hour. Would the Feds leave such an obvious trail?

Meanwhile, Caeli needed her rest. “Thanks,” he said. “You’re the best.”

She leaned forward again, but instead of a peck on the cheek deposited the barest touch, right on the lips. “Be good to yourself,” she said. Then, before he could react, she turned to go, auburn mane blazing in a halo of backlight.

III

He called himself Beau Guest. He liked it when people laughed. As far as he knew, no one knew his real name. Sometimes he’d been the one to make sure they could no longer remember it.

This assignment was lucrative but a bitch. If the intel was right, the hare had gone to the Moon: a move both stupid and smart. The smart part was that LunaShuttle security was as tight as it got. So, once the hare made it off Earth, it had reason to feel safe. Not to mention that here, even the cops didn’t carry guns. Earth might never figure out gun control but the Loonies knew bullets and vacuum made a bad combo. In the domes, there could be no clean kill from afar.

On the stupid side, there were plenty of other ways to kill. And if you had enough money, you didn’t need to deal with shuttle security. All you needed was a spacesuit, a private launch, and a willingness to hike. And then, the target would have nowhere to run.

IV

Finding a place to sleep proved harder than expected. Eventually, Drew wound up back in the Skyview, where dimming lights heralded the official sleep shift. Not that it seemed to matter to the bars and slots.

Above, the view was grander than ever, the stars simultaneously closer and more remote. For the first time he noted that there was more to the view than the sky. By climbing to the Overway platform, he was able to see the lights of Luna C’s other domes—bright curves rising above the regolith. And not everything else was dark. High on the crater rim, sunlight etched brilliance—a wire-thin slice of heat and light that would always be up there, never down here. Higher yet, set back far enough from the rim to be barely visible from this angle, dark rectangles rose on enormous stilts: power panels for grab plates, casinos, dome lights, farming, and everything else.

Then fatigue hit and the awe faded. He needed a place to sleep. But he wasn’t sure what would happen if he tried to duck into a side passage. Would cameras bring police to roust him out? Would Loonie derelicts roll him for what little cash he had?

Anger at his handlers helped wake him up. All he needed was a bit more money. As a kid, wanting to get as far from the things he’d been born to as possible, he’d dreamed of space. And now, if he was going to do this, then by hell, space was where it was going to be. But he’d been too confused to think of that, back when he’d turned traitor to all he’d been born to protect. And now, while they’d reluctantly agreed to let him try, they’d insisted it be as the person they’d already created.

Drew Zeigler barely had the assets to get to the Moon. He certainly wasn’t going to be able to live in luxury.

He studied the hotels, eventually picking the Grand Eclipse. Back home, its twenty stories would have been minimal, but in the Skyview, it rose halfway to the stars.

Getting into the hotel was easy. Drew slipped through as a guest was leaving, found a stairwell, and started climbing. At this hour, most floors were quiet, although one echoed with voices and clattering dishes. Up was high-rent territory. Lower was cheaper. Eventually, he found a dark corner, hugged his duffel to his chest, and dropped asleep.

After what seemed like only an instant, he was awakened by voices.

—“I dunno. A guest…?”

—“Or a drunk Loonie Too. Didn’t the BelleView get one last week? Maybe we ought to ask Erin.”

A door closed and Drew was up like a shot. Down, he headed. Down and out. But on the second floor he spotted a men’s room, and moments later was inside. Time to get back to the plan. Clean up, get out of the hotel, start calling about jobs.

Using hand soap, he washed his hair and face over a miserly spigot of slow-falling water. At long last, he peeled off his emergency suit, sponging off as best he could. He stuffed the suit into his duffel, found a semi-clean shirt, and tried to assume the guise of a tourist. But it was only once he was outside the building that he again breathed normally.

The light was still dim. He glanced at his watch but couldn’t remember when he’d bedded down. Four hours ago? It would have to be enough. His stomach growled, so he bought a candy bar along with the latest download from a sleepy-eyed clerk who assured him his shop wasn’t hiring.

Job. Any job. He needed a job.

There was a bank of public coms on the far side of the dome. Calling up the news holo before him, he headed that way to wait for the start of the business day.

Seven hours, no food, and twenty-eight calls later, he was talking to a male voice—no holo—at SEA Technologies, which was seeking a “solar-panel maintenance technician, EDA experience preferred.” He had no idea what SEA was—much less EDA—but he was running out of prospects.

“Yeah, the job’s still open,” the man said. “You’ve got to come in, fill out an app, then interview. You got experience?”

“No. But—”

“Well, come in anyway. Luna II, west side, third tier, room 312. Got that?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Okay, then.” And the line was dead.

Luna II snuggled in the bottom of a secondary crater that broke the main rim’s symmetry like a giant divot. It wasn’t all that far away, but it was a long way up, which meant Drew had no option but to splurge on rail fair on a train whose backward-facing seats tilted at a forty-degree angle that only made sense when it started to climb. It moved at a decent clip, however, and he reached Luna II still in early afternoon, hoping his quick follow-up would show sincerity. Only then did he realize he hadn’t had a real bath since leaving Earth orbit. But didn’t that also show sincerity?

“Hi,” he said to an impressively tattooed and nose-ringed man behind a metal counter. “I called about the job.”

Nose Ring motioned to a com station. He appeared to be in his mid-fifties. “Fill out the app and hit ‘send.’”

This was probably the best chance Drew would ever get. Everyone else had turned him down cold. Earther. Nah. Why you when we got plenty of locals? But good luck elsewhere. As if any of them really meant it. None of the others had even suggested he show up in person.

But the form was full of potential traps.

Name? No problem. Immigration number? Easy.

El Paso would stand scrutiny as place of birth and he could answer questions about it, even though he’d never been there. Desert. Yucky rock mountains. A good place to leave, even if the university did have history as a track powerhouse. Though on his official resume, he’d never been an athlete. Next question?

That was the problem. His official employment history was an eclectic mix, mostly designed to make him marginally employable in anything other than the fields in which he was actually qualified, the theory being that anyone chasing him would think he’d be stupid enough to still bill himself as a CPA/lawyer. Why couldn’t he have been either a CPA or a lawyer? And what the hell use, here on the Moon, was a stint as a taxi driver? Though he had to admit the Moon hadn’t been where they’d wanted to send him.

But that was just the beginning. There were also questions he had no idea what they meant. What the hell was photovoltaic rehab technology? Eventually, he said a prayer to a God who might or might not be in the answering mood and figured he’d done the best he could. If experience in photovoltaic rehab technology was critical, he was screwed. At least he now knew that EDA was exta-domal activity. That wasn’t on his resume, either.

“You have to list an address,” Nose Ring said a moment later. During the twenty minutes Drew had been struggling with the form, the man had been busy with a computer, but, Drew realized, the com had never buzzed. What kind of job had he just applied for that nobody wanted?

“I, uh, don’t have one.”

The man studied his screen.

“I’m on a tourist visa.” Drew hesitated, then poured out his cover story, which involved the recent deaths of his father, a brother, and what seemed like half his extended family. “So you can see I’m very motivated. Your ad said experience preferred, not required. I’m a fast learner and I need a new life.”

The man hesitated. “Okay, kid.”

Drew started to object that at thirty-six he was nobody’s “kid” but thought better. Surgery, he reminded himself.

“Show up at 0730 tomorrow and we’ll start your training. Show up at 0731 and you’re on the shuttle back to Earth. We’ll know soon enough if you can hack it. On the pel, it’s my rules, or no rules. Leave now if you can’t take it.”

“The pel?”

“You really are desperate, aren’t you?”

Drew hesitated, then nodded. “I want to stay here.”

For the first time, the man seemed to look at him, not his application.

“Good. That’s probably better than a decade’s experience steaming gas, driving EDA donkeys, or punching tunnels.” Another look. “We really don’t care about your past. You do the work, you’re one of us.”

The man looked again at his comp. “The PEL is the Peak of Eternal Light. No surprise you ain’t heard of it. It’s not in the travel guides. The guy you’re replacing snagged his suit on a panel bracket and vacuum-froze his arm and half his shoulder.” He paused again and Drew wondered if this was an attempt to scare him. If so, Nose Ring had a surprise coming.

The silence stretched. When it broke, Drew had won something, though he wasn’t quite sure what.

“It’s supposedly the only place on the Moon that’s always in sunlight,” Nose Ring said. “The Peak of Eternal Light, get it? Bullshit, of course, but near enough true, not counting eclipses and a couple of damn big mountains.”

Drew wanted to ask about salary, but didn’t. He had no other options, and they both knew it. “See you at 7:30,” he said instead.

V

There is a song they sing in Loony Too, where the workers toil on the Peak of Eternal Light and wish for shade. Razo had heard it many times on visits to the outlying dome.

Back in Central, most people disdained Luna II’s working-class culture, but Raz found himself drawn to it ever more strongly as the years mounted and pains refused to fade. Could he have gone back to the life he’d left? It wasn’t Jersey he’d fled, per se. It was the family that wasn’t a family, the life that was a living death. It had taken years of working two jobs to save enough, but he’d had to get a new start or the nameless cop had saved him in vain. Then Jenn couldn’t handle it, and he’d had to choose.

At its best, Luna II reminded him of childhood—the good parts, of which there had been a few—though if you looked hard enough you could still find the crackerjack. But not much, even though here the stuff was legal. People who’d worked that hard to escape to a new world didn’t hide in a chemical one.

But that didn’t mean they didn’t like their synthanol. At shift’s end, you could find them, the stench of suit still thick upon them, descending from the always-day above to this dome on the edge of the never-light below.

They were singing as he walked into Archie’s, one of two bars in Luna II’s main lobby, the other being the Waddup Widdat.

It was one of the better verses, referring to the way the photovoltaics drew dust, even though the eggheads claimed it wasn’t possible. Nothing like an egghead who got it wrong to make the workingman happy—that was another thing Raz remembered from youth. Even though the egghead was never the one who had to clean up the mess.

Archie Skaggs was behind the bar. He and Raz had known each other for years, the respect more than grudging. Arch ran a business. Raz ran the domes. Neither liked trouble.

Archie smiled, reaching for a shelf under the bar where Raz knew he kept the good stuff, but Raz shook his head. Sober tonight. Then, before he could speak, Archie’s patrons launched into another verse. There were a lot of verses, not to mention those invented on the spot. Sometimes the new ones even made sense.

Raz stepped for the courtyard, motioning for Arch to follow.

“Hey, Art,” Archie said when they’d reached the relative quiet beyond the bar.

Arch had never explained why he refused to call Raz by his nickname. He certainly wasn’t formal about anything else. Perhaps he too had a secret. Before Jenn, there’d been a woman who wouldn’t call him Art. For her, that name would always be her abusive father. To her, Raz had always been Artemis. Secrets didn’t have to be deep. Just painful.

“Long time, no see,” Archie continued. “I got up some Johnny Walker, couple a’ shuttles ago. Nobody better to drink it. Where ya’ been?”

“Busy. Damn council won’t hire new cops. We’re all working overtime. They figure as long as the tourists keep coming we can get along with the force we had a decade ago.”

“So is this business or pleasure?”

“Business, I’m afraid. There’s a young man just up from Earth, trying to hook on with SEA. Drew Zeigler. You heard of him?”

“Can’t say’s I have.”

“Well, he’s the kid with the duffel bag, over there.” Raz hooked a thumb toward a dome-side table.

He had no proof Drew was Caeli’s gwipp but Philadelphia Fidel had not only been too obvious, he’d been applying for top-line jobs at places like Lunar Nanosystems and Vacuum Molecular BioSyn. Zero-prospect applications: not the type of thing a well-schooled “gwipp” would do. Zeigler was the next-best guess.

“So do me a favor and let me know if you hear anything.”

“Anything like what?”

Raz flapped a hand. “You know, if he’s doing okay with Lum. If he gets into trouble. Stuff like that.”

“Is he trouble?” Archie feigned a disinterested glance. “Kinda scrawny for an Earther. He do somethin’?”

“No. And this is just between you and me, okay? No reason to make trouble for him.”

Archie leaned back, took a sip of whatever drink he’d carried from the bar. Probably nonalcoholic. There’s a difference between making your customers feel at home and blending in too well. “Sure.”

Behind them, the song showed no sign of winding down. Raz wondered if anthropologists back on Earth, the ones who loved to prattle about what the Moon “meant,” had ever tried to count verses to songs like this, and if so, how they distinguished “official” ones from those made up on the fly. If it even mattered.

VI

For the second time in a row, Drew had no idea where he was spending the night. He’d remained in the Luna II dome because he’d not known where else to go, but he still needed a place to stay. Not that there were hotels in Luna II. It was just a dome full of people who worked for a living, sans Skyview, casinos, and fancy restaurants.

He’d never been this broke before. Never been truly broke at all, actually, though going into the program certainly felt like it at first. For good or ill, he’d gotten used to the money he’d once shunned. Odd. Work like hell for that track scholarship so he didn’t have to let the family buy him college … then let them buy him again afterward, until eventually he was laundering their damn money for them. Though that final step hadn’t just been the money. It’s time to step up, they’d insisted. Because blood was thicker than water. Because it was his duty. Duty to do what, he only asked later. Throw away his life as though “family” was some kind of disease everyone succumbed to eventually? If that was family, who the hell needed it?

The Moon was his chance to prove nobody owned him. If only he’d thought of it before he went in the program. When he’d suggested it afterward, his handlers had been livid. Too risky, they’d said. We can’t protect you there. You can’t afford it. Even if we gave you the cash, any sudden source of money isn’t going to pass unnoticed. Better to disappear into suburban … where? St. Paul? Spain? Seattle? Not a place where real, true new starts were the name of the game. Live or die, it was useless without the new start.

“Don’t tell me I can’t do it,” he’d said, shocking himself with his vehemence. Everyone had told him he couldn’t do things, all his life. First, running in middle school. Then high school. Then college. It had only been in the Olympic Trials that he’d finally hit his limit. I will save enough money, he’d told them. But making it last now that he was here—that was a different problem. Middle class people who visited the Moon saved for years. Immigrants cashed everything and rolled the dice.

Luna II wasn’t a good place to hide. Every centimeter seemed to be in use, making him realize just how profligate the tourist area was, with its Skydome, promenades, and hotels. Here, there was open space, but not a lot. When the locals wanted more they went and rubbed elbows with those whose travel dollars paid for it.

If only Loonie immigration hadn’t forced him to buy a return ticket. Then he’d have money to stay anywhere. But to claim a refund he’d have to be able to convince them he was securely employed … by which time he wouldn’t really need it. Nothing like a perfect Catch-22.

How long could he remain awake and still functional? Could he get by with bits of sleep here and there, with a real hotel every second or third day? At least the pseudo-beer was cheap. Cheap-tasting too, but better than nothing.

A voice startled him from his reverie. “Hi, Drew. I’m Detective Razo.”

He turned to see a large man behind him. Not fat, just big. Tall and broad, with most of his strength in his shoulders. Where’d he come from? Since the shuttle, Drew had definitely let down his guard. Or maybe it was the fatigue. Still, even half-asleep, he didn’t need the introduction to know the guy was a cop. In the last couple of years he’d seen just about every imaginable type. Good, bad. Friendly, gruff. This one seemed to be going for world-weary.

“Mind if I sit down?” the cop said. “Just like I would if I were asking friendly like about what a tourist like you is doing here in Luna II?”

Drew nodded cautiously.

“Good.” The detective eased onto the bench beside him. “But I don’t need to ask any of that because I already know.”

There were a lot of responses to that. Drew went for the simplest. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Sleeping in hotel stairwells, by the way, isn’t legal, even on the Moon.”

“Oh.” Briefly, Drew thought about saying he hadn’t done it, but another rule that had been drilled into him was never to deny the undeniable.

The detective said nothing, but Drew had seen that one before, too. He took the tiniest sip of his beer. Eventually the detective gave up. “You’re a cool customer.”

Drew didn’t feel like it but he’d become good at acting. “I figured there’d been a camera.”

“No. We don’t have a lot of those. We may live crammed together, but Loonies like their freedom.”

This time, Drew saw no reason not to bite. “So how’d you know?”

“Locator beacon on your emergency suit.”

“And you just happen to track those things?”

The detective chuckled. “So now you’re curious. Let’s just say I don’t care about a little bit of vagrancy, so long as you don’t break anything.”

“I didn’t.”

“Didn’t think so.” The detective leaned back, to all appearances totally relaxed. “And while I have to admit you make me curious, there are a lot of things that make me curious.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Whether there’s life at other stars. Why frogs cross the road. What makes for quiet, cautious types like you.”

“I’ll keep out of stairwells.”

The detective gave a theatrical sigh. “Well, I don’t know everything, but sad to say, I don’t rule the universe. If you’ve got secrets, kid, as long as you keep your nose clean, that’s none of my business. Folks here, most of us came to start over.” He glanced at Drew’s duffle. “And by the way, those transponders are never off. Luna Tourism is dead-set against losing tourists. Though, of course, you’re no longer a tourist, right?”

The detective levered his bulk off the bench, grunting even in the plaza’s Luna-gee.

“And when Grace asks, be smart and say yes. Lousy sunner but that woman can cook.”

What the hell had that been about? Drew picked up his beer, preparatory to nursing it for a long time. Inexpensive, yes. Free, no. It was odd how the liquid sloshed, slow motion, as he raised it. So much about this place was similar to what he’d grown up with, but so much was different. And not just the gravity.

Maybe it was the fatigue, but this cop seemed different. He’d practically told Drew that someone—his handlers perhaps—had tipped him to … well, something. Then, the cop had hinted that he really could have a fresh start. And what was the bit with the emergency suit? Why give away his advantage by telling him he could be traced simply by carrying it around?

He took another sip of the beer. It would take a long time to figure this place out. As long, perhaps, as it might to discover who he really was and re-invent himself in its image.

Detective Razo was barely out of sight when Drew became aware of yet another person heading his way. What was this, Grand Central Station? Or was it just that he was new in what amounted to a small town, where anything new drew attention?

This one was a gray-haired woman in coveralls, nearly as large as Detective Razo but moving with a much more purposeful-seeming stride. No cop-act world-weariness here.

“You Zeigler?” Even in the continuing racket from Archie’s, her voice had no trouble covering the distance.

Don’t lie beyond the cover unless absolutely necessary. But nothing said caution wasn’t good. “Last time I checked.”

If smiles were in her, she didn’t offer one. “You need a place to stay, right?” She turned and started walking away, her gait as quick as Detective Razo’s had been slow. “You hungry? I’m starving.”

“Who—? Why—?”

She twisted back without bouncing out of contact with the ground, oddly graceful in the low gee. “You always been this stupid or you been practicing? I’m Grace. Grace Dorfman. Lum asked me to keep an eye out for you. Said to give you a hand if you looked all right. My husband Bernie says it’s okay and Raz didn’t arrest you, which means you must be all right.”

Too much information. He grabbed one bit. “Who’s Lum?”

“Geez you really were born stupid. Luckily, he’s got a soft spot for wannabes ’cause he was one himself. Likes to make sure they got a place to stay, first coupla’ a nights till they get on their feet. So c’mon if you’re coming.” She did the pirouette thing again and started off, again at the surprisingly brisk pace. Maybe on the Moon extra mass was an advantage.

That night Drew ate better than he had in weeks. It left him feeling wonderful, then sick, then hurled him into slumber on the Dorfmans’ couch.

The next thing he knew it was 8:00 am.

How could he have been so stupid as to not set the alarm? But no, he remembered setting it.

It must have been the food. Or maybe that for the first time in years he’d felt safe, the first time he’d felt truly content since the day Coach happened to be walking by as he was getting out of the car he should have known better than to accept. The gift car from his uncle. The bright red Python all the girls had loved, with its gyroscopic suspension, full-immersion senses, ultracapacitor electrics that recharged nearly as fast as they went zero to ninety.

He knew what gifts meant in his family. But somehow he’d pretended “no strings attached” was for real. Until, in a series of steps he later could never quite reconstruct, he found himself turning his back on the family-away-from-family he’d worked so hard to build. He could still see the slump of Coach’s shoulders when he’d dropped his scholarship and sold his soul back to his birthright—the tightlipped disappointment that was the only rebuke Coach ever needed to give. Coach knew Drew’s past, had helped him escape it. And then Drew had gone back because … because of the damn car. Or maybe the girls. They really had liked it. Enough that most never wanted to know about the lifestyle that paid for it. Enough that most never really wanted to know Drew.

The good thing about sleeping on a couch is that you’re already dressed. Drew yanked on his shoes, the resulting gravity bounce reminding him in the nick of time not to move too abruptly. Then he was in the corridor, hitting the grab plates at full stride.

That at least was the plan. He’d not gone twenty paces before he nearly crashed into a tattooed man with a nose ring, dodged, lost the grab-plate trail, hit a wall, and bounced ignobly to the opposite side of the corridor.

Nose Ring appeared above him, as Drew tried to find a graceful way to lever himself off the floor.

“I’m Lum Arbuckle, and the only reason you still have a job is because you were running. What, Gracie get you drunk?” He laughed and hauled Drew to his feet, like a fisherman landing a big one. “Of course, if I ever catch you running the grab plates again there better be a damn good reason. I don’t like paying workers’ comp for stupid injuries. You got me?”

There was only one response. “Yes, sir.”

A few minutes later Drew found himself in a chamber that looked and smelled like the locker rooms that had once shown the path to something better than the life he’d thought himself strong enough to flee. Though this locker room’s ancestors must have mated with a dry-cleaners. Looping behind the benches and stools ran one of those overhead chains used by dry-cleaners the world over to recall sweaters, slacks, and blazers from the establishment’s bowels. But rather than pinstripes and tweeds, this one carried spacesuits. None of which, apparently, were his.

“Sarah, your new trainee is here!” Lum called toward the doorway from which the suits emerged.

He cocked his head, nose ring dangling, as if looking at Drew from an angle gave him a better shot at sizing him up. “What are you? A little over one-eighty cm?”

“One-eighty-three.”

Lum turned back to the doorway. “Get him a trainer. Medium ought to do.”

Wherever Sarah was, her voice echoed. “One medium glowball coming up.”

Drew didn’t like the sound of that. “I went through the class, back on the shuttle … “

“Obviously,” Lum said. “But it’s different to work in one all day. You get the training suit. The controls are simpler and people know to keep an eye on you. You’ll be less likely to get yourself killed before your first paycheck.”

Then the overhead chain was whirring.

Drew looked around. “This place is … kind of large.”

“And you’re kind of late.”

The suit arrived. A near-fluorescent lime green, larger than the others—not for a bigger man, but in design. Built for safety, not mobility. Behind it came a woman in a skinsuit built more for mobility. Or maybe exhibition. With the helmet off, it didn’t leave much to the imagination, even with the billow of blonde hair that tumbled semi-discreetly across its formfitting torso.

Lum had obviously seen this reaction before. Surprise, the most beautiful woman on the planet is about to be your boss. Even if it is a small planet. Maybe it was a test. Stare too much and you’re too easily distractable for the job.

“Drew, this is Sarah,” he said. “Sarah Janes. When you’re here, consider her God.”

More like a goddess, but that was clearly the wrong thing to say. “Uh, sure.” Once, he’d been good with beautiful women. Now they made him nervous. Past attacking present. Maybe that was how it always went.

And maybe this really was a test. It couldn’t be like she didn’t know the impact she’d just had. She had to be at least thirty. No woman like her got to that age without knowing the effect she had on men.

If so, he apparently hadn’t failed yet. She pulled the suit off the rack, shoved it in his arms. “No way you’ll get lost in that.”

“I’ll never be able to walk far enough to get lost.”

“Hah, he’s a quick one.” Sarah turned to Lum. “You want me to take him all the way up?”

“No, just to the rim. Walk him around, make sure he’s not a vomiter. Cut him loose when swing shift shows up. He can go to the PEL tomorrow.” He turned to Drew. “See me in the office when you’re done. If Sarah doesn’t shitcan you, I’ll give you an advance. Can’t have you mooching off Gracie forever.”

VII

Razo was reviewing shift reports when Archie rang his private line.

Nobody used that line for chitchat. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Remember that guy Zeigler?”

“He in trouble?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so. But Leo just told me a guy came by asking about him. Definitely not a local; called himself Beau Guest.”

“And?”

“Well, that’s a novel, not a name. Beau Geste, get it?” Archie pronounced the G the soft, French way. Like gendarme. “It’s a classic. About mercenaries, among other things.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, don’t you read?”

Raz snorted. “Wish I didn’t have to. Nothing worse than admin stuff. What’s the point?”

“It’s like he thinks we’re stupid. What kind of guy names himself after a novel?”

“What did Leo tell him?”

“Whaddya think? Told him to get vacced.”

Raz laughed. He wasn’t sure who Leo was, but he knew about the hello outsiders got from Looney Toos protecting their own. It spoke well of Zeigler that the boy had gotten so far in only a few days. “He still up there?”

“This Jester guy? I’ve not seen him.”

“Damn, I was hoping for a—”

“Picture?” Archie was all grin. “All you gotta do is ask. Gimme a moment and I’ll zip over what my bar cam got.”

Raz chuckled. “Thanks.”

“No problem. But be careful. This guy gave Leo the willies and Leo’s seen a lot. You and your folks may take a lot of flak out here, but fact is, not much of it amounts to much. Without you, a lot of us would’ve long ago packed it in and moved central. Leo says this guy’s serious as a pressure leak.”

VIII

When he’d had the car and all the things that eventually went with it, Drew knew why beautiful women were attracted to him. Scrawny guys who ran cross-country and track didn’t get them. Football players did. Or people with hundred-thousand-credit cars.

Drew still wasn’t a football player. And he no longer had the car. But Sarah seemed to like him. Off-duty anyway. She was always there, in Archie’s or the Waddup or just sitting in Dome Gardens. Twice, he’d spent no-longer-so-precious credits to take the Overway back to Central, with all that a night on the town entailed.

For his new identity, it was perfect. They were simply two of 17,000 residents, blending in with the other 16,998. Him because his life depended on it. Her … well, he wasn’t quite sure. All he knew was that when she fell asleep on the Overway, which she did both times on the return, her mouth dropped slightly open, revealing ever-so-slightly crooked teeth. Teeth that on Earth would have been fixed, but which here didn’t matter. More than anything else, her sleeping face revealed total, complete trust. Trust in him as protector? Or simply that the Moon was a safe place—safer, for sure, than anything he’d known on Earth?

Off-shift, that is. On-shift, both Sarah and the Moon were different. In the case of the Moon, the reasons were obvious. The job involved vacuum work, with heavy equipment and sometimes-long hours. Tourism wasn’t Luna C’s only cash cow. Lunar industries relied on power. But power generation had never been the safest work. And the damn solar panels were dust magnets—even the rim-side reflectors for the volatiles stills down on the crater floor, where the only sunlight in four billion years was that focused in by the panels’ adaptive optics.

Nobody knew why every grain of dust seemed to wind up on the panels—which, of course, everyone found immensely amusing, at least when they weren’t stirring up more dust, changing out panels for refurbishing or hoisting new ones onto the ever-growing array.

For once, Drew was glad his cover gave him a degree in political psychology. It spared him from being the brunt of egghead jokes. “Four years of campusology,” he explained, risking a word he’d picked up from his maternal grandfather, who’d always managed to stay at least a bit aloof from the family business. “With just enough basket-weaving to graduate.”

Meanwhile, on-shift-Sarah was his boss.

“Darkness,” she was saying. “How long until it starts?”

In his prior life, he’d have had such things memorized. But the new Drew had a degree in political uselessness that probably meant otherwise. And he was stuck in a bright-colored pressure suit that marked him as too … green … to have yet gotten beyond it.

“Um—”

There was a click and Sarah’s voice switched channels. To a more private one, reserved for personal conversations … or scoldings.

“Listen,” she said. “Last night was last night.” Not that anything more than an almost-kiss had happened. Before she fell asleep on the train. “Here, your life depends on paying attention. Lum doesn’t care what we do off-shift. Hell, he’s probably hoping we’ll marry and have two thousand kids, so long as they’re all sunners. But when you put on the suit, you’ve got to keep your mind on the job. If you don’t, you won’t just get shipped back to Earth. You’ll get yourself killed. Maybe along with someone else. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“So, Darkout. When is it?”

Drew knew. “Drew” wouldn’t. Which pretty much sucked when he wanted to impress both his boss and an increasingly interesting woman.

He gazed around the horizon, his suit automatically blotting out the Sun’s unviewable glare. Two big peaks to the … what do you call it when all directions are north? A smaller one, thirty degrees to the right. The Sun barely above the horizon, as it had been for billions of years and always, ever, would be.

Three hundred sixty degrees in twenty-eight days was a bit less than fifteen degrees per day: that’s how fast the Sun would move. He made a show of holding his hand against the horizon, counting handspans. Ninety degrees was eight, maybe nine. Was he supposed to be able to figure that out? Screw it, he was tired of playing the role he’d been assigned. “Wednesday?”

Sarah’s expression was unreadable through her suit visor. “Care to be more specific?”

He went back through the show again. “Maybe 1100? A bit before noon. Though I might be off.”

Sarah turned so she was facing him, her visor de-opaquing, though her face was still unreadable. “Not bad. Not bad at all. It’s 1122 to be precise. You know, the suit electronics do allow you to look it up.”

“Oh.” Damn the handlers who’d decided to make him blandly useless. Of course he knew it. It was how he’d made his “guess.”

He and Sarah were standing a couple of klicks from the rim, the nearest of the PEL’s solar panels rising just behind, like the Solar System’s largest billboards. Hectares upon hectares of cells atop spindly stilts like old-fashioned fire towers. Towers that were sturdy enough here because there were no windstorms, tornadoes, or earthquakes to knock them down. Tall because “up” meant more light, shorter Darkout, better power for industries that gobbled it like a kid with Halloween candy.

“Keep on the lights” was a joke. The lights would run a long time off batteries. The real industries, the power-hungry ones, couldn’t. Three times a month they took expensive shutdowns. Not that the employees minded. Or the owners of the clubs where they partied. But they weren’t the ones who drove Luna C’s economy. Every new hectare of cells brought in new, power-hungry industries … new voices clamoring for the PEL to live ever closer to its name. And the higher it went, the shorter the shutdown became. The PEL was ever expanding and would ever expand so long as Luna C herself did the same.

“What’s Darkout like?” he asked.

“It sneaks up on you. Kind of like a really slow sunset on Earth, from what I’ve heard. Then poof, all of a sudden the light is gone.” She waved a gloved hand at the crater below. “Like suddenly being down there. Kind of disconcerting, even when you’re expecting it.”

Drew stared across the crater floor. Luna II was invisible, tucked out of sight behind the rim of its own crater. But the other domes were clustered below, their lights like swarms of fireflies. Elsewhere, the crater floor was dark as only vacuum shadows can be, except at the volatiles mines, where the rimtop reflectors focused giant beams of sunlight wherever it was required. No electricity needed for the mines; just pure, concentrated light to bake everything from water to mercury and silver out of soils that hadn’t seen heat in four billion years.

“Those shut down too.” Sarah had seen the direction of his gaze. “We’re pretty much the only ones who don’t get to party when the Sun goes away.”

There was just a hint of a smile visible in the backlight seeping through her visor, a trace of off-work twinkle in her eyes. Enough to say that next time they went to Central the kiss would be there if he wanted it.

Suddenly, he felt crushingly tired. If he did kiss her, he wanted it to be without pretense.

“Sarah, there are things I need to tell you.”

She read his mood right but mis-guessed the cause. The twinkle vanished, replaced by Sarah-boss.

“Damn right. Where’s the nearest emergency shelter?”

“Sarah—”

“Uh-uh. Use the suit’s weblink if you have to. If your suit suddenly sprung a leak, where would you go? Hell, if my suit sprang a leak, where would you take me? Now. Hiss-hiss. Time’s wasting. You’d better have grabbed an emergency patch by now, or we’re already in trouble. Quick now!”

Screw being “Drew.” He probably wouldn’t know. Drew did.

“Over there.” He pointed to the base of the nearest pylon “Though the one over that way isn’t much farther.”

IX

The Loonie Toos weren’t the only ones whose workload increased during Darkouts. Razo’s tended to as well, especially during First Darkout, when the biggest of the three mountains blocked sunlight for a full thirty-seven hours. By Second Darkout, most of those inclined to do so had already blown their paychecks, and by Third, only the diehards were left. But First Darkout? “It’s kind of like TGIF on steroids,” he told Caeli the first time she’d joined him on one of his pre-Darkout soirees. “And normal off-shifts can be bad enough.”

Which meant that just before Darkout was a bad time for Raz to blow steam. That would come later. Pre- was for true relaxation. Although this time he might have relaxed the wrong way.

“I’d never have taken you for the ballet type,” Caeli was saying as they found their seats.

“You ever been before?”

“Once. Swan Lake, I think. That’s the one they do at Christmas, right?”

“No, that’s The Nutcracker. Though not here. The classics just don’t work well in low-gee unless you grab-plate the entire floor. Earth ballet is all about defying gravity. Up on the toes, lifts, leaps, and all that. If you try that stuff here it just comes out weird, probably because anyone can do it, so what’s the point? This is a bit more … gymnastic.”

“How so?”

This particular ballet was one he’d seen before. It was a tale of loss and longing and things abandoned forever in a chase for a pot of gold that kept receding—like a lot of Loonie art and music, really. Powerful chords in minor keys, with always a hint of major-key resolution just a few bars in the future, but never quite found. The art-crowd answer to the bar tunes that tried to revel in this frontier that drew so strongly but demanded so much. Had frontiers always been like that? Raz wasn’t historian enough to know. There was a day when crossing an ocean was more permanent than going to space. But the Moon wasn’t just a new continent. There was nothing here except what you brought … or invented.

Like the ballet.

“You see the checkerboard parquet on the floor?”

“Yeah … “

“Well, the dark pieces are grab plates. The light ones are Luna gee. You use the dark for traction, the light for bounce.” In some productions, the grab plates even led up the walls onto the ceiling.

Earth ballet wasn’t merely about defying gravity. It also involved occupying space. Ballerinas with heads held high, shoulders spread, arms swept in grand, passionate gestures. Here, it was all about occupying space. Pun fully intended. “The good ones spend a lot of time upside down,” Raz said. “Handsprings are a big part of it.”

“And heaven help them if they hit a grab plate?”

He chuckled. “They call that the Lunar dip. Not a good move. But you’re not really all that interested, are you?”

She shrugged. “If you’re interested, I am.”

Suddenly, he felt uncomfortable. “That’s not necessary.”

She stared at him a moment, then changed the subject. “Did you find my gwipp?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“Oh, I’m just worried about him.”

“Him?”

“Ha! It’s a him, isn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe, hell! But is he safe? Guys like that … I’d hate to see him draw the wrong attention.”

She hesitated, stared at him again. “Why are we doing this, Artie?”

“Doing what? Going to the ballet?”

“No. Everything else. You, me, this type of conversation. How long have we been doing it? I won’t hang on the shelf forever.”

“So you don’t like ballet?”

“No, you can’t hide like that!” There was fire in her eyes. “We click. We have fun. Then you arm’s-length me. Just like you did there! Why? What is it you’re so afraid of?”

“Well, you do cut an imposing figure.”

“Don’t give me that. What the hell is going on?”

Raz tried to meet her gaze. Flinched away. Just like the guiltiest of guilty perps. Tried again, gave up. He’d known her for two years, but always through a self-created screen of flirty confidence. A pretense, not the real him.

“I had a daughter.”

“Had?”

“Yeah.”

“She died?”

“No.”

And then the story. The two-decade secret he’d never told anyone—never thought he would—tumbling out until the music started, underscoring the loss, the longing, and the unreachable pot of gold that didn’t really matter because it’s the being here that trumps everything, and which you’d sell your soul to achieve … all over again. That was when he leaned close, lowered his voice, and dared the words he feared even to ask himself. “What if I did it all over again? To you?”

Caeli’s breath was warm in his ear. “You couldn’t. Because I’d never ask you to go back to Earth. This place … it’s who you are.”

Then the dance began and conversation was impossible.

Sarah was glistening in sweat, fresh off the dance floor, her golden hair limned in blue, red, and green from the Waddup’s synthband diodes. Drew took her hand to lead her back to their table for drinks and a rest.

Darkout was tomorrow. Thirty-seven hours of dusting, looking to bring as many panels as possible back to optimum efficiency before the Sun returned and made the main arrays too hot even for the best skinsuits to handle. The busiest time of the month, because each panel dusted was 1,700 credits in Luna C’s industrial bank, as best Drew could calculate. As if “Drew,” without the MBA, had a chance of figuring such things out.

He was tired. Tired of the pretense. If he couldn’t trust Sarah, who would he ever be able to trust?

She must have read his mood. A moment before, she’d been the one who was going to kiss him. Now she drew back, let herself be escorted to the table.

“You know, you’re a real conundrum,” she said.

“How so?”

“Sharp as a tack one moment, dumb as a post the next. I mean, there you were last week, gazing at the Sun and estimating Darkout within minutes, and then, next thing, not knowing you could have simply answered the question by calling up the weblink on your suit. And you’re one hell of a good dancer. I mean, I’ve been around more than I’d like to admit. Comes with spending too much of your life in places like this. I know the difference between the barroom grope and an actual dance. You were trying to hide it, but you’ve taken some lessons. I know because Lum made me do it.”

“Lum?”

“It figures you wouldn’t know. He’s just like you: wonderful one moment, idiot the next. He’s my father. Which I gather he didn’t tell you. Janes is my mother’s name. Long story. But he’s always trying to set me up. Usually with idiots. Well-meaning idiots, but idiots. So … what are you? You try to act dumb, but you aren’t. In case you’re wondering, dumb doesn’t impress women. At least not this one.”

Drew laughed, though it sounded forced, even to him. “I was beginning to figure that.”

His gaze swept the bar. Caught the eye of a pale, hawk-nosed man who suddenly developed an interest in his menu. Probably nothing. Probably just staring at Sarah. But suddenly his Wild Bill reflexes were on full alert.

“Let’s get some air.”

They moved to the courtyard, the stranger not following. False alarm, Drew thought. You’re safe here. Relax. They couldn’t follow you even if they knew where to go. Immigration would get them before they even tried to board the shuttle.

That was too close, Beau thought as the quarry and woman moved outside. It had taken two weeks to find him, and now he’d almost blown it. But who would have thought the guy would stuff his suit transponder beneath an Overway seat cushion? Beau had followed the damn thing to hell and gone before he realized the hare wasn’t on an endless job hunt. Then nobody in Luna II would talk to him, and there wasn’t anything he could do to improve their cooperation because there weren’t any good places for a nice, private talk.

That was also when he realized that making a hit on the Moon was going to be harder than anticipated. The place was simply too crowded. The kill would be easy enough. But getting away—that was the rub. Until he saw the quarry with the woman. LunaNet security was a joke, but she’d done nothing to hide her profile, anyway. The quick holo he’d snapped before they’d seen him was all he needed. Sarah Janes Arbuckle, shift sub-supervisor for SEA Industries, PEL Division. The rabbit had been idiot enough to accept a job that took him outside.

Beau prided himself on being good at his work, but sometimes, when it all came together, it was almost too easy.

He rose, remembering at the last instant to do so slowly lest his Earther legs reveal him as an outsider. Not that he ever expected to be back here again.

If he left now, he had time to climb the rim and hike to the scooter that would take him back to his hidden crawler. Not that it was hard to hide things in this land of eternal shadows.

The crawler had everything he needed. Beau had never been one to head out on an assignment without being as prepared as possible. If he hurried, there was time to make the trip, do the job, and be back in civilization next week. A million credits richer, to boot.

Beau often smiled. It made people like him. But the social smile rarely touched his eyes. He’d practiced but could never quite get it. Now, though, he knew his smile was genuine.

“So what the hell is going on?” Sarah’s eyes were a cool grey, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t spark with anger. “And why couldn’t you tell me about it in there?”

“Too much noise.” Drew paused. “No. I just don’t like crowds.”

All the way out of the Waddup, he’d been looking for words.

“I’m not who you think I am.”

Sarah’s eyes clouded. “Oh-oh. Who is she?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“You’re married.”

“No. It’s nothing like that. It’s me. I’m not Drew.”

Her expression was unreadable. “Who are you then?”

It was amazing how hard it was to make himself say the words. His indoctrination had been thorough. Never, never, never. Never trust. Never bond. Always float on the surface. But they were wrong. Ultimately, there came a time when it was better to risk. What was the point in being not dead if you were never alive?

“I’m Dimitri. Or I was, until last year. Dimitri Katsaros.”

Her eyebrows rose. “That’s a mouthful. I can see why you might prefer Drew.” But there was no humor in it. The Sarah he knew was on hold.

“Son of Leander Katsaros.”

Her headshake was quick. “If that’s supposed to mean something it doesn’t.” Her lips thinned. “Or maybe that just makes me a dumb Loonie.”

“No. It just means you have better things to do than follow the Greek mob in Baltimore.”

It wasn’t just her eyes that were unreadable now.

“I betrayed my family.”

Darkout was only hours away and Razo should be thinking about sleep. Instead, as he and Caeli left the theater he turned toward Central and the soul-searching infinities of the Skyview.

She was right, this place was part of him. Had been, really, since before he left Earth, since the nameless cop’s compassion had shown him a glimmer of hope. Jenn had given him an impossible choice. No—not Jenn. Loonie laws. They were all about fairness and equal chances. But fairness and hope weren’t always compatible. Maybe that was why Raz wound up in law enforcement. He’d thought it had just kind of happened, but his first job had been driving EDA donkeys for the solar stills, helping Lunar Air & Water capture precious resources as the rimtop mirrors baked them out of the soil. Police work came later, when he’d found there was no way to bring Jenn back. He’d thought he’d just kind of drifted into it, but he’d never forgotten the compassionate cop who’d saved him.

Caeli squeezed his hand. “You’re quiet.”

“Sorry. Just thinking.” He wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking, but her hand had been in his since they’d left the theater.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

More than okay, in fact. What he felt was a sudden lifting of age. For some time, he’d been feeling increasingly run down. Thinking, even, of taking early retirement and doing … well, something else. But that might have to wait.

“Talking about it after all these years … I feel … It’s going to take a while to process I guess.”

“That’s okay. Trust me, I know all about processing.” He gave her a sharp glance, but she shook her head. “Some other time.”

Then the Skyview was overhead.

“You know,” she said, “I never tire of this place.”

“Is this what it’s like piloting a shuttle?”

“Yes. And no. This has more grandeur. The shuttle has … freedom. You know, you can come with me sometime.”

The thought brought back a touch of the old pang. Yesterday he’d have said no way. Now … well, who knew? Though there was a practical concern.

“I’d never be able to handle the gravity.”

“Oh, pfoo! You’d just need to work out a bit.”

“More than a bit.” He paused. “You weren’t all that fond of the ballet, were you?”

They were leaving the Skyview now, heading down a corridor toward … Raz wasn’t sure where. Just heading. For the moment that was enough.

“Not really. But that’s okay.” She laughed. “And it does give some interesting ideas.” She stepped on a grab plate, shoved off sideways and bumped hips hard enough to make him stagger. Then she stepped on the next plate and pulled him back. “I never realized the plates could be so much fun!”

“Only if you’re an Amazon!”

“A Celtic Amazon. We’re not into ballet. We’re into feasting, Finagal, Fimbulwinter … or was that the Vikings? Damn, I shoulda’ paid more attention somewhere along the line.”

He laughed, too. It was the old banter, but somehow different. Fun for fun’s sake, not for hiding.

“Not to mention blarney,” he said.

“Got me there. I was raised in Duluth for God’s sake. On the shores of Gitchegume with lutefisk. And Finns. For some reason they all went to Lake Superior.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“What, the Finns? It’s true—”

“No. About you.” Was confession really this good for the soul? It was like something long-pent, suddenly released.

She braked on a grab plate, so suddenly that again her Earth strength nearly pulled him off his feet.

“That’s because you never asked.”

“I—”

She leaned in. Gave him a gentle kiss. Friendly, not passionate. Though with a suggestion of more.

“You can’t relive old decisions forever.” She was gripping both his hands now. “That was twenty years ago. You are who you are now. Not who you were.”

He started to kiss her back, but suddenly his mind clicked over. “Oh, hell. The gwipp.”

“What about him?”

“He’s not who he is now. Not to those he left behind. And those folks never give up.”

His mind was spinning. The stranger asking Leo about the kid. Where do strangers come from? Would a hit man really risk Immigration?

Celtic Amazons. Ballet. Earther strength.

He’d spent hours combing immigration records. If there was a hit man, his record was as well forged as the gwipp’s. Raz had put traces on every incoming passenger who’d come close to matching the holo (which wasn’t as good as Archie had thought; the guy had done a good job of staying in shadows), but none had done anything out of tourist-ordinary. Nor had anyone named Guest, Gueste, Jest, Beau, Beauregard, or pretty-boy-anything thumbed an ident or registered at any of the hotels. Raz had about come to the conclusion the whole thing was a figment of Leo’s imagination.

Chasing rainbows.

Chasing, with Earther strength.

Grab plates on the walls.

“Hell,” he said again. “Double hell.” He tapped his com. “McHaddon? I don’t know where you are, but we’ve got work to do.”

He squeezed Caeli’s hand, gave her a quick, more-later peck on the cheek that was more than he’d once planned, less than he now wanted. “I think the guy’s really in trouble.”

She kissed him back—again more than he’d once expected but less than he now dreamed of.

“Go. Save a life.”

It was, he realized, the best possible atonement.

“The Greek mob in Baltimore?” Sarah’s voice was still cool.

“Yeah.”

“Did you kill people?”

Drew shook his head. “No. I just accepted money from those who did.”

“Why?”

“They were family. And it was a lot of money.”

How could he explain?

“When I was young, I wanted free of it. I even found a way out.” Track scholarships, universities clamoring after him. “But it didn’t quite work.” Olympic prospects fading away. Then the car. The girls. No strings, just come back. That’s what family is for. Except, of course, there were expectations. Because those too are what family was for.

“And then … I would have lost me. No, I was losing me. When I was a kid, it was mostly gambling and protection. Loans to people dumb enough to take them. Nothing Darwin wouldn’t approve of. Would you believe my father actually told me that?”

Sarah shook her head. “That sounds … my life always centered around the PEL. Without us there’d be no Luna C. Just a big, dark crater. It always made me feel like a hero.”

Drew was still in the past. Trying to expunge it. Trying to atone. No, to justify his atonement.

“Darwin was actually a theologian of sorts. Did you know that? He wouldn’t have approved of what my father said. Me learning that was part of what the family got for letting me go to college. Though by then they were into prostitution, drugs, whatever else would make a credit.”

He’d been staring across her shoulders at the accelerating pulse of dance lights. Now he forced himself to meet her gaze.

“Eventually, I knew I’d start helping make the money more directly. In my family, it’s what you do. So when the Feds got a handle on a couple of killings … that was my second way out. And this time I made it stick.”

“So you didn’t kill anyone.”

“No.” Unless his uncle really did get the death penalty.

“Didn’t sell drugs?”

“No.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I took the easy way out.”

“What, the one that didn’t quite work?”

“No, I wasn’t strong enough for that.” It wasn’t like he’d lost his place on the team. He’d been the star. Then quit. “My father is in jail because of me. Plus my uncle and a couple of cousins.”

“And that makes you a bad guy?”

“It sure as hell doesn’t make me son of the year.”

Sarah was looking at him oddly, but Drew no longer cared. If he didn’t come clean, he’d be no better than he was before. And he needed to be better. Even if it cost him the only decent woman—the only real friend—to come his way since he’d accepted the car.

“My father and uncle killed six people I know of. If they did one good thing in their lives, I don’t know what it was.”

He started to turn away, but Sarah’s voice called him back. “Your father did at least one that wasn’t half-bad.”

“What?”

“You.”

Beau didn’t mind hiking. It cleared the mind, gave him time to think. On Earth, his favorite place was the desert. Nobody there but himself, nothing to disturb him but the occasional snake, scorpion, or tarantula. A simple land. A land where people might never have existed.

Which meant he particularly didn’t mind hiking on the Moon. Especially now that he knew what he was doing. The quarry had a job outside the dome. A job that would guarantee he’d be outside in a few hours and would remain there until Beau could get back.

Beau was again smiling. Ultimately, most assignments were like this. Wait, gather information, and the hit itself was trivial.

Outside the dome, he didn’t need special skills to make the kill. Even if he didn’t score a bull’s-eye, the Moon would finish the job for him. It was amazing how stupid the rabbits could be. It was as if they were begging him to do his job. End the chase and put them out of their misery.

In a few hours, the rim and its Peak of Eternal Light were going to be dumped into thirty-seven hours of darkness. If Beau couldn’t make the hit then, it was time to retire.

A few minutes after Razo reached his office, Caeli showed up.

“Sorry, I got bored.” She was leaning against the doorframe again, her theater wear swapped for blue jeans and a nondescript tee. “Anything I can do to help?”

Raz started to shake his head, then changed his mind. “Yes. Can you get me coffee? There’s a pot—”

“I know.”

A minute later, she was back, nose wrinkling.

“I think it’s been there a while.”

“Doesn’t matter, so long as it’s got caffeine.”

“You might also want one of these.” She offered him a pink pill. “I don’t know about you, but the drink I had at intermission was still with me a bit.”

“Thanks.”

He swallowed the pill, took a swig of coffee, grimaced. “It’s been there more than a while.” He took another swig. “But it’ll do the trick.”

“So, what’s up? Or would you rather I made myself scarce? Don’t worry about me.”

“No.” Two heads and all that. “Your gwipp’s got a stalker. I’d gotten a hint, but how could a really bad guy get through immigration?” He leaned back in his chair. Talking it out beat searching the net, anytime. “I mean, your gwipp made it in, but he had help.”

“So you’re saying this other guy’s also got a government behind him?”

“No. Just that I’ve been stupid.”

Here he was, a ballet fan, of all things. Ballet required remaining Earth-strong. But it wasn’t until Caeli’s talk of going back to Earth and the hip-bump that nearly knocked him off his feet that he’d fully realized what Earthers could do. Like Drew—the gwipp—running the plates. Everyone knew Earthers did stupid things in low gee. But they were also strong. And fast.

He tried to organize his thoughts. “He’s got a lot of money behind him. And he’s smart. He didn’t come through security. He went around it.”

“How’s that?”

“He has his own ship. Not that that’s uncommon.”

“Of course. There are always a few at the port.”

“But this guy didn’t land at the port. He must have come in low behind the rim, probably way out, and landed somewhere out there. Maybe drove some kind of buggy as close as he dared. Then walked. How far could you walk in this gravity?”

Caeli shrugged. “Quite a ways. But he’d have to get down from the rim. Kinda steep.”

Raz noted that she’d not said high. What’s 4,000 meters to an Earther?

“And dark,” he added. “Even here that could make a nasty fall. And if he took much of a light, he’d stand out like a radar beacon. I’d bet you credits to cranberries he had grab boots.”

“Grab boots?”

“Like grab plates, but portable.”

“What powers them?”

“Battery.” A big battery, which was why they weren’t common. “They use them sometimes in the ballet, but not much. Any battery that lets you do more than a few moves isn’t the most graceful thing to carry.”

“So he’s not going to get very far with it.”

“But he could get far enough. He only has to use the boots when he needs them.” And he was an assassin, not interested in grace. An Earther. He could carry one hell of a battery.

Raz’s phone chimed.

“I’ve got him,” McHaddon said. “He registered at the Ambassador as Barton Fink.”

“You sure he’s our man?”

“If not, we’ve got two of ’em. That’s another damn movie.”

Despite himself, Razo laughed. “You’ve been talking to Archie.”

McHaddon returned the chuckle. “Who doesn’t? Anyway, this guy blew the hell out of a whole floor’s power stats two weeks ago.”

“Nice job,” Raz said. Then to Caeli’s unasked question he added, “That’s what we were looking for. We knew he’d been nosing around two weeks ago, so we were looking through hotel guests who’d not yet checked out.”

“That’s still a lot of people,” Caeli said.

“Yeah, but I figured he’d recharge as soon as he could, which narrowed it down. And”—nothing like a guess that panned out—”he just seemed the type who’d be at the Ambassador. Or maybe the Grand. If your client has that much money to spend on a grudge, why not live it up?”

He picked up the coffee cup, downed the last dregs. “Only problem is, where’s he got to now?”

X

Like all good hits, it was indeed proving easy. Even the long hike had been uneventful, though more time-consuming than Beau had expected. Topping off the boots’ battery pack from the crawler’s generator had been worthwhile, but frustratingly slow. Then, just about the time he’d closed in on them, the sunners finished cleaning one set of towers and trooped off to another—irritating because shifting positions this close, he couldn’t risk more than the dimmest of lights. Just enough for his heads-up to amplify to a grainy image of the rocks he was about to trip over.

At least with his radio locked on receive-only, nobody could hear him curse. The sunners, on the other hand, chattered endlessly on a dozen channels, the hare’s voice prominent among them. Even when he switched channels, Beau’s state-of-the-art eavesdropping equipment tracked him seamlessly.

One of the rules of his trade was never to ask why. The hare had done something that meant he deserved to die. That was all Beau needed to know. But while some jobs were pure business, this one smacked of revenge. His clients might like to hear the hare’s last, unsuspecting, words. There might even be a tidy bonus. He twitched a cursor with a shift of his eye, ordering his suit to record everything that came in over the radio.

Drew was dusting. Not the way his mother once made him do it during a brief between-maids phase, but with an electrostatic wand that made the dust fly off in a fountain of motes that sparkled in his suit lights. He wondered how much would eventually end up on other panels he’d wind up dusting next Darkout. Nobody knew how the dust found the panels, though he’d been told that when power generation was at max, the stuff practically seemed to climb the towers. Luckily his job wasn’t to figure out why. It was just good, physical work that left him feeling like he’d actually accomplished something useful.

Dozens of other workers were spread across the array like sailors on an ancient frigate, but somehow Sarah had wound up next to him on the same panel. “Just looking after the newby,” she said. But Drew knew better. Not to mention that he was no longer the newby. That honor, along with the ridiculous spacesuit, had been handed over to Damien something-or-other. Drew was now in a professional skinsuit that not only made him feel like a full member of the team, but finally, blessedly, allowed him to move.

“Why don’t they just make panels that do this automatically?” he asked.

They were on their first break, sitting on a scaffold fifty meters above the surface.

She shrugged. “Why do they do anything?”

In Darkout, her face was unreadable. A black void behind her helmet light, just as everything beyond the range of his lights was now dark as the pit of Hell. But she’d been here her whole life, knew how to communicate when vision failed and voice was all you had.

Maybe her shoulders shrugged. Maybe not. Her voice did. “You’d never have asked that on Earth. There, you’d just know labor is cheap, technology expensive. Here, nothing is cheap, but I guess we’re cheaper than redesigning the panels. And hey, it’s a job.” She touched his arm. “With a view.” Again the maybe shrug. “When you can see it. Would you really rather be inside?”

“No way.”

Sarah checked her tether. A reflex. She’d not unclipped during break, never would. Most accidents, she’d told him more times than he could count, came simply from falling off. Even in lunar gee, that could be deadly.

“Me neither,” she said. Then she shifted to the general com-channel. “Break over.”

Beau was finally in position. He unlimbered his rifle, set up the tripod. Watched, looking for surprises. Not that he expected any, but it was the watching and waiting that kept it that way.

He removed his overglove—the inner would be enough for thirty or forty seconds, more than enough time. Dialed the range into his autoscope.

Three hundred forty-two meters. He couldn’t miss. He’d made hits from three times that range. He put the outer glove back on to warm his hands. The hare was on the scaffold far above, doing nothing. Break over. The perfect epitaph.

He removed his glove again. Slipped his finger over the trigger. Lined up on the helmet, just below the visor light. Breath in. Hold it. Pulse low, hands steady. Squeeze the trigger, not pull it. Nothing new. He’d done this countless times.

“Damn it, Damien!” At Sarah’s shout, Drew’s head swiveled to the new guy, at the far end of the scaffold he’d been sharing with Sarah. “What kind of idiots is Lum hiring these days? Tether up! Never unclip this high off the ground. You got me?”

Drew stood up, glad he himself had graduated from beginner to journeyman, or whatever you became when you no longer had to wear the training suit. Damien clipped in and started to wave a desultory hand. Drew knew what he was thinking. Yeah, yeah. Sorry boss. Only, of course, he wouldn’t be truly repentant because the scaffold was wide, the railing secure, the tether a nuisance. How could you fall off?

Then, suddenly, the panel shattered. Cracks ran across it in a starburst ripple and sections began falling away in a slow-motion scattering of giant daggers.

Drew’s first thought was that he himself had somehow broken it. But he’d barely moved, hadn’t even touched the panel. If they were this fragile, why hadn’t Sarah told him?

The unthinkable had happened. Beau had missed. At first he was simply stunned. Then he realized: the autoscope was calibrated for Earth. Six times higher gravity. The damn shot had gone high.

For the first time in his career, he’d made a mistake. Two, actually. Trusting the autoscope was the second. The first had been going for the head shot. Yeah, it was the classic kill. But in a vacuum? Any hole should be good enough.

Luckily, the hare was frozen in confusion. Beau lowered his aim. Forget finesse, go for the center. His fingers were cooling, but still comfortable. He tuned out the explosion of chatter pouring in over the radio, squeezed the trigger again. Once. Twice. Three times.

Drew was staring at the panel, trying to fathom what had happened. Then Sarah’s voice was in his ear. “Meteorite. If something had to get hit…” She switched to the all-suits channel. “Just a bit of rock. Nothing to worry about…”

Then Damien jerked and a strangled gasp came over the radio, fading as the training suit went flaccid. He staggered back, then slumped forward, restrained only by his tether.

Later, Drew would wonder if he already knew. If so, it hadn’t yet penetrated his thinking brain. But even on mental autopilot, he was remembering Sarah’s safety drills. Vacuum wasn’t death. Not instantly. And he and Sarah were closest to the victim. Faster than even she could react, he unclipped his tether and sprinted for the newby, being careful not to run so hard he hurled himself over the rail into a long fall.

“Hang in there!” he yelled, as if the guy could hear him with a suit full of vacuum. At the same time, he was ripping a patch from his emergency pouch, letting the vacuum activate its glue for instant application.

The holes in Damien’s suit were round, about a centimeter in diameter, a fog of frozen red spicules still jetting out of them. Three holes in a tight triangle, only centimeters apart. What kind of meteorite did that?

Then his thinking brain clicked in.

He’d always wondered how he’d react if the long arm of his family found him. Sometimes he’d deliberately pondered it, uselessly trying to plan. More often he dreamed it in time-frozen nightmares. But now time wasn’t frozen, although there was the stark clarity he’d once known just before the starter’s gun, when you were simultaneously aware of everything and nothing.

He braked hard just before another bullet shattered more of the panel, right where his head would have been.

He wanted to yell a warning, but there wasn’t time. Instead, he yanked the emergency release on Damien’s tether, while more shards erupted around him, fragments stinging like angry bees. Then he was pushing off like a sprinter out of the blocks, grabbing a stanchion with one hand, Damien’s suit harness with the other, swinging around toward the far end of the panel just as he saw a quick succession of tiny flashes in the darkness below. The stanchion vibrated with impact, but if he’d been hit, he couldn’t feel it.

Then he was on the backside, as more sniper rounds pierced the panel above him. No scaffold here, just a maze of braces connecting panels to machinery that kept them always pointed at the sun.

In the bulky training suit, navigating this would have been impossible, but now it was like monkey bars on a Jersey playground, made easy in the low gravity. He wedged Damien in an angle between two braces and slapped on a patch. Then he yanked another from his kit, the biggest available, holding this one for a slow count of three, as Sarah had instructed, so the vacuum could fully activate the glue. He was feeling lightheaded, but ignored it. Damien needed him to focus. Sarah needed him to focus.

He slapped the patch over the two remaining holes, then reached behind Damien to turn his air up full blast. Blood spicules continued to escape, even as the suit inflated, but before Drew could pull a third patch from his kit, Sarah was with him, slapping on one of her own. Then she turned to him. “You’re leaking,” she said. “Raise your arm.”

The lightheadedness was back with a vengeance, fireflies now flickering at the edges of his vision. But Sarah’s voice was an anchor. “Shit,” she said. “There must be a dozen little holes!”

He looked down, saw fog. Air, not blood. But the fireflies were multiplying.

Sarah’s voice pulled him out of a mounting daze. “One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. Three-one-thousand. Okay, that got the biggest ones. Stay with me Drew! One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand…”

His head was clearing, drawn back partly by the urgency in her voice, partly by the rapidly thickening air in his suit.

“—one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, that’s the worst. The rest are just nicks. You still there?”

He nodded. The emergency patches were contracting, as the glue pulled the holes together. Putting pressure, too, on any wounds. Not that they’d be major. He’d been hit by shards, not bullets. He could even feel the patches warming him as they did their job to ward off frostbite.

“I’ll be fine.”

Sarah’s voice carried the smile he couldn’t see.

“Good. You scared the hell out of me there for a moment. Damn this place. How can you love it so much, only to … Never mind. Still got a leaker. One-one thousand, two—”

Beau’s hand was near-frozen, his aim useless. Time to put the outer glove back on while he still could. What the hell had happened? He’d seen the impacts, watched the blood fog, seen the suit deflate. And still the hare’s voice kept coming through the radio. First he’d shot high, then he’d shot the wrong man. How could he make so many mistakes?

Briefly he’d thought of just shooting everyone he could see, hoping one might be the hare, just as he’d shot, on general principles, at the two who’d snatched the original target and dragged him out of sight. But whatever his clients wanted, it was either business or vengeance. Neither thrived on that kind of publicity. His job was a hit, not a massacre.

Meanwhile, he listened to the radio chatter, filtering voices.

“Meteorite swarm,” the one called Sarah was saying. “Do you have any idea how rare those are? Damn! Second day on the job and he was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Damn.”

Beau remembered the image of the two of them in the bar, heads together. A couple, incipient. If the woman came into his sights, shooting her might be useful. Apparently she and the hare had been the ones who’d dashed to the rescue of that Damien guy. What would he do for the woman if she was hurt? Shooting her could be a very good idea.

“Is he alive?”

Drew’s brush with vacuum had left him oddly energized. Like the time he’d gotten tripped and fallen in the 10,000-meter nationals. Get up, take control, and move, move, move, back into the race. But methodically, not purely on emotion, or you burn out and crash a different way before you reach the end. He’d gotten a school record for that one.

“I don’t know.” Sarah’s voice seemed kilometers away. “Damien, can you hear me?” Her light illuminated his face, but if he was breathing, it was impossible to tell.

Drew didn’t need to consult the web to know the nearest shelter was the access passageway beneath the array. “Gotta get him down.”

He pulled the emergency release on his own tether, clipping it to Damien’s suit. Wrapped the other end around his wrist. Thank God for lunar gravity. How much could the man weigh here, even with the training suit? Thirty pounds? Surely no more than forty. “I’ll lower, you steady.” Suddenly he remembered who was boss. “If that’s okay.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Sarah switched channels. “Christophe, Andrea, get your butts over here. We’re on pylon—”

“No!”

Drew grabbed her gloved hand, switched off his suit mike, leaned over to touched helmets. Waited until a click told him she’d done the same.

“Damien was shot. Whoever did this is still out there. People need to keep out of sight. Damien wasn’t his target.”

“Who was?” A pause. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry. I thought I was starting over. I don’t know who got bought out, where … I never thought I was putting anyone else in danger. When we get him down, maybe I should just walk out and announce myself. Get it over with.”

“No.” There was surprising fire in her voice. “And that’s an order.”

He nearly laughed, but was already bracing to lower Damien to the next level.

“Yes, boss.”

Even in one-sixth gee, fifty meters of Jungle Gym wasn’t easy. Especially because Sarah had ordered everyone to extinguish their lights, forcing him to work by enhanced starlight. But five minutes later they were down, and moments after that, they were bundling Damien into an airlock, a half-dozen other sunners crowding in with them. Then there was air, someone had a first aid kit, and he and Sarah were stripping off Damien’s suit.

He was alive, but not by much, his chest making awful noises as air went in and out through the bullet holes.

“Shit,” Sarah said. “We need a medic, now.”

Someone reached for a panel marked emergency com, but Drew stopped him. “No.” He flipped the latches on his helmet and took it off. Sarah understood immediately and did the same, while the others, puzzled, slowly followed suit.

“Is there any way to make that com private?”

Sarah shook her head. “No. It’s designed to bring help even if you’re too badly hurt to know your location.”

“And no way to lock that door?”

“Crap. You think whoever did this is still out there.”

“‘Who’?” one of the others asked. “I thought it was a—”

Sarah waved him to silence. “Later.”

“Right now,” Drew said, “he may think we’re still out there too.” He tried to remember what they’d said over the radio, bringing Damien inside. “Either way, we need to give him as little information as possible.”

He tried to think like the type of man his family would entrust with making sure he paid for his betrayal. But Sarah was a step ahead. “Eventually, he’s going to figure it out.”

“Yeah.” His mind was functioning again. All that time he’d spent wondering … even the nightmares had prepped him for this.

But again, Sarah was ahead of him. “So we need to get Damien somewhere else.” She turned to the rest of her crew. “Take him outward, away from the dome. At least two or three pylons out. Far enough nobody’d expect us there. And if you run into anyone from Snellman’s or Wang’s crews, for God’s sake, no radios.”

“Good.” Drew said. “I’ll go get help.”

There were grab plates along one side of the corridor. He had no idea why. Maybe they were for traction, hauling loads. Sarah had been right. Even on the Moon, labor was sometimes cheaper than equipment, but power was one thing sunners had aplenty.

This part of the PEL was ten klicks from Luna II. Drew had once run that far in twenty-eight minutes, fifty-four seconds. And that had been in full Earth gravity—the day he’d fallen.

He stepped to the nearest plate and started to jog. Found his rhythm and stretched it to a long, low lope. Four plates per stride. Five. Six.

Beau wished he knew more about the hare. What had he done? What type of man was he? If he was right that this was about vengeance, then it was about someone who’d done something stupid back on Earth. And there was only one kind of stupid that could produce a hit as expensive as this.

Stupid people stayed stupid. Which meant there was really only one thing the hare would do now. Character and geography constrained him.

Not for the first time, Beau was glad he wasn’t similarly constrained. His grab boots still held a fifty-two percent charge. He knew where he needed to be next and had been running for it from the moment the suit radios went quiet. That should give him enough of a head start.

For reasons known only to the tunnel drillers, no corridor in Luna C was perfectly straight. Maybe it was fear of staring endlessly into vanishing-point distances. Maybe it was simply a desire to avoid monotony. Whatever the reason, they progressed in short straights, bounded by easy curves, like a gently meandering road or trail.

Drew was rounding one of these curves when a figure loomed in front of him.

A man in a jet-black skinsuit.

A man with a rifle, emerging, as if by magic, from an airlock a scant thirty meters ahead.

Drew attempted to brake, missed the next plate, and slid across the lunar-gee floor, flailing until his hand caught a plate with a jerk, just as a bullet pinged the floor and zinged down the tunnel behind him.

Then something he belatedly registered as a spacesuit helmet flew over his head in a fast, flat arc, smashing hard into the black-suited man’s hand.

“This way!” Sarah yelled, waving him back around the curve he’d just rounded. “What, you think you’re the only one who ever tried to run the plates? Move!”

More bullets pinged, but these were wild, barely aimed, as he and Sarah dived around the curve. A moment later she ducked into an airlock, pulling him after her as the door shut. Already the air was cycling for space.

“Wait!” he yelled, scrambling to lock down his helmet. “You don’t have any air!”

But she’d already grabbed a helmet from an emergency locker. “One size fits all.” She clamped it down. The outside door opened, and they were on the surface. Alone, in the dark.

He stared back into the airlock, wondering how much lead they had. Not much, but maybe he could extend it a bit. He grabbed another helmet out of the emergency locker and used it to wedge the outer door open.

“Good move,” Sarah said. Then she was on the broadband. No need for silence now. “Base, we have a casualty in pylon corridor four, near airlock twenty-seven. Please send a medic. And be careful. We have an assassin with a gun. Repeat, assassin with a gun.” She paused. “And you, creep, if you’re listening, you leave my crew alone. If you want me, come get me. You know where I went.”

She cut out. Touched helmets with Drew. “I guess it’s just you and me. Any brilliant ideas?”

XI

“Assassin?” Raz was on his fourth cup of coffee but the sleepiness he’d been fighting was suddenly gone. “Where?”

He clicked off the com. “McHaddon. With me. Caeli—” Damn, what could he give her to do? “Duty roster. On my computer. Password Booker2Much@Earth.”

He caught her glance.

“Yeah, I know. Call everyone. Tell them to get their butts on the com to me now. Okay, that might not be the best metaphor. But get them off whatever they’re doing and in touch with me, no excuses.”

He was already half out the door. “And if you come up with some brilliant way to stop an invisible sniper in the dark, give me a call.”

Then he was in the corridor. Not that dashing off to Luna II really did much good. But where else could he go? Luna II was where the action was.

At the last moment, he stopped, hurried back to his desk. Thumbed the lock on the bottom drawer and fumbled inside until he found his sidearm. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched it. In the domes it just wasn’t safe.

He wondered if the damn thing even worked. Not that it mattered. If it came to a shootout, a professional assassin would have him before he even knew he was under attack. But he strapped the holster beneath his jacket, even as he was back on the com, demanding that the Luna II Overway be at the station, now.

For one brief moment, he was glad Caeli was here, in the office. She’d have his back, as best a civillian could do. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, but sometime in the past few hours he’d realized she would always do that, even if the person she was defending him against was himself. And here in the office she was only a com call distant, while still out of harm’s way.

Both mattered. A lot.

Drew stared across the regolith. Lights off, vision enhancement at max. Rocks were grainy blurs, slopes indistinct, tripping easy.

Somewhere beyond was the crater rim. A 4,000-meter drop into the land of eternal dark. Not that at the moment it would be any darker there than here.

His air gauge told him he was good for forty-seven hours at minimal exertion. Maybe he and Sarah could just hide.

Then he looked down. Even enhanced, his footprints were barely visible. But they were there.

“Leave me,” he said. “Circle back. It’s me he wants.”

“No.” There were a lot of things in her voice, not all of which he could parse.

Then light burst from an exit 400 meters down-tunnel.

Running for Luna II was no longer an option, and circling back would get them trapped at the PEL. The only choice was into the void ahead.

Drew pulled away, breaking the tenuous helmet-to-helmet contact. His family wanted to kill him. Sarah was willing to risk dying with him. Just as he’d risked dying for Damien, who he’d never even met. He hoped he lived long enough to figure out what it all meant.

Meanwhile, they had to move. A one-time runner and a born-and-bred Loonie in a marathon of unknown length: one that only ended when they escaped and lived … or didn’t.

Raz was in Archie’s, the only place he could come up with for his informal field office. Archie didn’t even try to offer him Scotch. Coffee was the order of the night. Technically it was a breach of regulations not to pay, but paying would be a mortal insult. Especially since Archie had chased out a sea of Darkout revelers, many of whom still hovered in the plaza, wondering what was happening.

“So let me get this,” Archie was saying as he filled Raz’s mug. “Some Earth goon’s chasing him, up on the rim?”

“Something like that.”

“So why doesn’t he just come back in here?”

“Maybe because he can’t. We’re pretty sure the bad guy’s got grab boots, so he can move pretty fast. He also shot up the PEL pretty good.” The story was still garbled, but it sounded like a miracle Damien was even barely clinging to life. “If you were him, would you lead someone like that back here?”

“Hell no. These folks are like family to me. You get that bastard, okay?”

“If I can, Arch.”

For the nth time, Raz pulled up a holo of the PEL. Smooth ground, sloping toward the rim. A few boulders, but nowhere to hide. Drew and Sarah had shut off their transponders, presumably fearing their pursuer could home in on them. But where would they be going?

He flipped on the com. “Harken?” She’d been one of the first to check in, so he’d made her com coordinator, relieving Caeli. “How many folks you got up on the PEL, so far?”

“Three. Two more coming.”

“ETA?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Don’t wait.” Drew, Sarah, and the bad guy could be halfway to anywhere. “Tell them to track footprints and keep us posted. No lights. And for God’s sake, tell them to be careful. Follow, not engage.”

“Got it. No lights. No contact. You know they’ll never catch up, anyway.”

“I know. I just want to know where everyone’s going. I don’t want to recycle a bunch of dead cops.”

Drew was counting advantages and disadvantages. His advantage was that he’d once been a runner. He knew how to marshal his energy efficiently. Sarah’s was that she knew how to move in lunar gee. Their disadvantage was that that they could barely see where they were going. Much of the time, their image enhancement was good enough, but then a boulder would loom, and they’d have to veer, leap, or brake to avoid it. A waste of energy that their pursuer, following their tracks, could avoid. The bastard could even use lights if he needed. Not to mention that he had some kind of tech that allowed him to run just like he was on Earth. Drew had seen him burst into the corridor, stop, raise the rifle, never touching a plate. Without Sarah’s helmet-pitch Drew would be dead.

Every runner had heard how unarmed hunters once ran prey into the ground, killing them with their bare hands. An antelope might be faster, but the hunter, whether Native American, Kalahari bushman, or sport-hunting ultramarathoner, was more efficient.

As far as Drew could tell, the dis- advantages outweighed the ad-s. Sarah had saved him in the tunnel, but had she condemned herself by doing it? Now they were the antelope, running in energy-wasting spurts and lunges.

Think, he commanded himself. Think.

Meanwhile, he did the only thing he could, and ran as fast as visibility allowed. Maybe he and Sarah were fitter. Maybe they could outlast their stalker, even if he had more advantages. Maybe that was how the antelope thought, right up to the moment the hunter’s hands closed on its neck.

Raz was out of ideas.

Not that he’d had many to begin with. Outside, it was dark as only Darkout could be. Sarah and Drew, or whatever his real name was, would try to hide, but on the Moon, footprints are forever—or as close to it as made no nevermind. If this Jester guy was on their trail—and Raz had no doubt he was—he’d gradually run them down … then fade off into the dark. On Earth, they had IR tech to track him, but here, nobody’d ever seen a need for that stuff. As long as he stayed in shadows, the guy might as well be invisible. And odds were that his crawler was even better stealthed.

Drew was also thinking about footprints. The antelope only lost if the hunter knew where it went. He tapped Sarah’s shoulder, pulled her to a stop. Behind, a pale wash of light blinked on, then off. A suit light on ultra-dim, just enough for easier pursuit. He’d seen it several times before, a little closer each time.

“We can’t beat him this way,” he said. “We’ve got to do something about the footprints.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Find firmer terrain. Or a beaten path. Anything that at least makes him work to follow us.”

The helmet-to-helmet contact stuttered as Sarah looked around—for what little good that did in the dark.

“—Too bad … cut off from the PEL, but … harder rock and boulders … if we can find a break in the rim.”

The light appeared again. He could feel the panic rise. If the antelope bolted and escaped a hundred and one times, but got caught on the hundred and second, it made no difference. The end was the same, either way.

“How far?”

“Two, three klicks.” Her shoulders were already turning.

And then the antelope were off again.

Razo stared at Archie’s walls. Like any bar’s, they were cluttered. Sports vids, not only from Luna C and Earth but also the O’Neils, as if any ground-dweller could figure out the sports played in their zero-gee hubs. A pair of carved-wood carousel horses, all the way from Earth. Dozens of soccer shoes. What in the world would Arch want with soccer shoes? Holos of the first PEL: a single tower on a rotating platform. Flat pics of the construction of the Luna II dome. More, showing a row of reflectors on the crater rim, paired with shots of miners under banks of construction lights, building the solar stills, far below.

A rustle of motion brought him back to the present. Caeli. She’d turned up several coffees ago, when Harken had relieved her on the com, and had been helping Archie serve drinks to the revelers on the plaza. At first Razo had been worried, but wherever the action was headed, it clearly wasn’t going to wind up in Archie’s. Still, he should send her away, tell her to get some sleep. Instead he motioned her to sit beside him.

“I’m going to lose them,” he said. “Everything we’ve got is aimed at finding people who want to be found. I never dreamed of anything like this. How could I have been so stupid?”

“Because you’re human?” Her gaze shifted, then returned. “And just because we do things we regret, way back—it doesn’t mean we’ve got to be perfect ever after. No matter how badly we want to atone.”

“Do you have regrets?”

“Who doesn’t? But most weren’t things I could control.” She smiled. “Right now, I only wish we could have had these conversations loons ago. Though then, we wouldn’t be doing it now, and I’m not sure I’d wish that away.”

There was nothing accusing in her gaze—which made it all the harder to hold. Instead, he looked back at Archie’s photo collection. Bright lights and ultimate darkness: the contrast was what produced the drama, especially in the construction photos, with all the workers under the lights. Perhaps it was the contrast that made the Moon itself worthwhile. Forging a home out of the most inhospitable place humanity had yet reached.

Caeli must have read his mind. “The kid’s right, you know. This is a place for starting over. However many times it takes. And quit beating yourself up for not anticipating this. Nobody thinks of everything.”

Then abruptly she was back to business. “So how much air does our bad guy have?”

“I have no idea, but you can bet it’s more than Drew and Sarah.”

XII

They’d had to use lights at the rim. A quick flash, as dim as possible, then move before their pursuer could draw a bead. Another flash and another move.

One of the many things Drew knew that “Drew” might not was that much of the escarpment dropped at nearly a forty-degree angle. Not vertical, but steep enough they couldn’t just descend anywhere. But within 300 meters, they had what they needed. A boulder-choked crack, perhaps an ancient fault, where exposures of solid rock looked like they might not roll underfoot and at least some of the wedged boulders looked free of footprint-holding dust. Not that this would fool their follower for long. When there is only one way down, that has to be the way they went. But it was the best chance they were going to get.

No need to speak. Drew took Sarah’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze. Then they started down. Together.

“They’re heading for the crater,” Raz said. Caeli was still sitting with him, nursing a cola. “Harken’s team says their footprints are making for the rim, looking like they’re moving fast. They probably reached it quite a while ago.”

“Wow,” Caeli said. “It’s steep on that side. Landing, I never have much time to gawk at the scenery, but if the Sun’s on the rim, it’s hard not to notice. I sure wouldn’t want to climb down.”

“I don’t think they have much choice.”

Raz closed his eyes and rubbed his fingertips across them, brightness shooting in a starburst as he did. When he opened them again, everything seemed brighter but fuzzier, with nothing to see but the clutter on Archie’s wall, slowly coming back into focus.

That’s when it hit. Probably impossible, but when all else is impossible, the probably impossible looms as a beacon of hope.

Archie was behind the bar, wanting to help but also wanting to keep out of the way. Raz tapped the rim of his cup, the universal signal for a refill. “Thanks,” he said as the bartender drew near.

“For what?”

“Giving me room to think.”

Arch shrugged. “Anyone would do that.”

For the first time in hours, Raz felt himself smile.

“And for collecting things.”

Then he was back on the com, feeling the energy mount within him as he watched his friend’s puzzled face. “Get me McHaddon,” he said.

He turned to Caeli. “Can you do a calculation for me?” It was five hours, give or take, until the end of Darkout. The Sun wouldn’t be fully up until a couple of hours after that, but he didn’t need full Sun. Just enough of it—whatever that might be. “Figure out how much air Drew and Sarah have left.”

Then his com came alive again.

“McHaddon, I need you to roust some folks out of bed, parties, or wherever they are.” He rattled off a list of names and titles. “Don’t waste time on the ones you can’t find. Get those you can and turn ’em over to Lum.

“Arch—can you find Lum? He’s got to be around here somewhere. And Caeli, find out who’s into astronomy. I need the biggest-ass portable telescope we can get, ASAP.”

Beau flexed his hand. Back at the PEL, he’d left the outer glove off too long, and his hand had been only beginning to warm again when the woman hit it with that damn helmet. For a bit, he’d thought she’d broken it, but it was just the pain of a hard blow on near-frozen digits.

Maybe he’d kill her first. His clients wouldn’t mind. Even if he was wrong about this being a revenge job, killing the guy’s friend/lover/whatever-she-was would send a warning that his clients weren’t to be messed with.

He flexed the hand again. It had taken hours, but he was sure he could make the shot now, even from a thousand meters. On Earth, anyway. Why the hell hadn’t he thought to reprogram the autoscope? But there was nothing to do about it now. He’d always prided himself on clean kills, but this might be better. He flexed his hand yet again. That had hurt. Damn lucky bitch.

He checked the power on his grab boots. Still thirty percent. He’d been conserving, waiting for his hand to return to normal, using the boots only when he had to, to make up time lost when he had to stop, looking for tracks. Which hadn’t been all that often. Yes, there were fewer footprints here, but no matter how careful you were, you couldn’t move fast without dislodging rocks … and those too left marks.

Keep ’em moving. That was the goal. Moving and dislodging rocks. Moving and burning air. They had to be running low, and there were only two places they could go for more. One was the domes of Luna C Central, and the moment they got within a klick of those, there’d be enough light from the windows for his night vision to have them like bugs on a carpet. He could feel his lips pull in a smile. He’d heard their silly song. From now unto then, just leave on the lights. How fitting if their own motto was their undoing.

Drew was running out of gas, both literally and figuratively. Slipping downslope without dislodging any more rock than he could was painstaking, thigh-burning work. It didn’t matter that the gravity was one-sixth what he’d once been used to. Thousands of meters of downgrade were still thousands of meters of downgrade. Brake, brake, brake, brake, brake. Slip, and brake again, hard enough he could feel the energy draining from his legs, even as he knew he was yet again leaving telltale marks. He wondered how Sarah did it. Women were just plain tough. There’d been one on the track team named Becky who ate mile repeats for breakfast. He himself always had to fight off butterflies before anything longer than 800s.

Meanwhile the lights of Luna C beckoned like the warm glow of a campfire. But it was a dangerous glow he knew they could never approach, even though his air gauge seemed to drop each time he looked at it. They had to flee, but flee efficiently, until Sarah could lead them to more gas. If they lived long enough to reach it. And then, they had to run, yet again.

Maybe he should just quit. Behind him he could occasionally see light, appearing and disappearing, relentlessly following. The man was a machine, indefatigable. Nothing could stop him, nothing could tire him.

Which was exactly the thinking that had lost him the conference championship his sophomore year in college. The guy chasing him then hadn’t been superhuman. Drew had just thought he was. A year later, he’d come back with more confidence and had the pleasure of watching the other guy puke at the finish. Some people only looked indefatigable. When they broke, they broke totally.

Keep going, he told himself.

Meanwhile, his air gauge crept lower.

First Darkout was ending. Beau watched as light blazed a crescent on the rim: a mere hairline, but enough to change everything. Here in the shadows it was still dark, but soon the backwash would be a hundred times brighter than the light of the stars. Dislodged rocks and footprints would no longer need to be sought out.

The crater floor was still a thousand meters below, but already Beau could see better. It was time to use the grab-boot power he’d been sparing—get in close enough that even the damn autoscope would score a hit in this gravity that wasn’t real gravity.

The prey was down there somewhere. Running out of air. With him following their tracks, they couldn’t simply hole up and hide. And on the move, their standard-white suits would show up a lot better to him than his would to them.

The time had come.

“What do you mean you can’t see him?”

Yelling at McHaddon wasn’t doing anyone any good, but Raz could apologize later. He desperately wished he could be up on the rim with him, looking through the damn telescope himself. But delegating was the cost of being in charge. Which meant he was still in Archie’s, five hours more tired, five coffees more wired. Caeli had never left his side.

The only place Drew and Sarah could be going was the volatiles mines, and they had to get there soon or run out of air. Or get shot. But just because he knew where they were going didn’t mean McHaddon could spot them in the damn scope.

“Too many rocks,” McHaddon said. “Or maybe the scope’s not big enough.” The biggest portable Caeli had been able to find had only been forty centimeters. “The image isn’t exactly bright.”

Raz thought a moment, then shifted from the scrambled channel he and McHaddon had rigged up with the help of one of Raz’s hastily roused techs to the all-police band. Com security was another of those things he’d never had to worry about before. In the main domes, the com was private. But emergency coms and suit radios were meant to be found, not hidden.

“Barker, Kowalski, Gardner,” he called to Harken’s crew. “Turn around, and flash your lights. Just once. Then move, in case this guy wants to take a pot at you.”

“Got ’em,” McHaddon said, a moment later. “They’re definitely heading where we thought they would.”

“Good. The folks we’re looking for should be in the same direction, farther ahead.”

The silence stretched, nearly broke.

“Sorry. Still too dark.”

“Damn.”

Raz checked his watch. Time was running out. How soon, he didn’t know, but his gut told him he couldn’t wait much longer. He flicked on the com.

“Lum, tell your folks we need some light.” He hated to do this because the Geste guy might have lost Sarah and Drew’s trail, and he might just lead him back onto it. But somehow he doubted that. The guy’d had them out-teched all along.

“Still working on it. How much?”

“Not a lot, but over as broad an area as you can handle.” He gave the coordinates. “They’re down there somewhere but McHaddon can’t see them. We need to give him a little help.”

Lum’s voice was clipped, tense. Not for the first time, Raz wished he’d been able to find someone who didn’t have so much at stake. But Lum knew everything above the rim better than anyone else in the domes, even the parts that weren’t technically his domain.

Beau heard the radio chatter, saw the headlamps.

Hours before, the cops trailing him had wised up and shut off their radios, but not before it had become clear they did not like descending endless talus and had no experience at it. Now, the distant lights confirmed what he’d suspected, that he, the hare, the girl … all were moving twice as fast as the best cop.

When it came time to get away, that too would be easy. The bottom of the crater was a maze of crawler paths and bootprints, and not by coincidence, his boots were identical to a thousand others. Once he hit those trails they’d never find him.

Which, of course, was the hare’s plan, too. But first he and the girl had to get more air. And there were only two places to go … one of which was suicide. That left the one they were indeed heading for. Was it also suicide if you were simply outsmarted?

Five minutes later, Beau had them. By now the backwash from the slowly widening crescent on the rim was ten times brighter than before, and while his targets were still grainy blobs even in his top-of-the-line visor, they were clearly there. Closing in on their destination, but too far from it to have any chance of getting there.

He ran/walked/skidded another couple of minutes, as fast as the terrain permitted. That wasn’t all that fast because it was still godawful steep, but it was faster than the prey could go without the boots.

The range was now 600 meters. Close enough. He found a convenient rock, unlimbered his tripod, and set up the rifle.

Briefly, he wished he knew which blob was which. But even through the scope, they were merely blobs. He picked the leader, aimed low in a vague effort to compensate for the ’scope, and squeezed. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

At least one connected.

Whoever he’d hit went down in remarkably slow motion. As long as he lived, he was never going to get used to this place.

He shifted aim to the other, but this one was making it easy. He—she?—ran to the fallen companion. Again, Beau felt the grin. He really hadn’t enjoyed a hunt this much since his early days. Let them stop the leaks. One was now hurt enough to be a burden. The other should run, but wasn’t going to. He switched on his vid recorder. His clients would like this.

He picked up the tripod, not bothering to unbolt the gun, and moved forward again, grab boots on full power. If anything weird happened, he wanted to be able to react fast. But there was nowhere for the prey to hide. If it ran, Beau would shoot. There was all kinds of time to make the kill, and nobody here but the three of them. Beau had long ago checked the work schedule—leaving an active worksite between him and his crawler was not part of his escape plan. Apparently, ramping up and shutting down for each Darkout wasn’t worth the effort: the folks who worked here were gone for a week. Some triumphs were worth savoring. And the cops on the rim were impossibly far behind.

The survivor didn’t run. Rather, it stood up, and, in the increasing light, waved its arms over its head.

“It’s me you want.” The voice came in over the all-band radio. “She’s done nothing to you, never heard of the Katsaros family until I told her. She’s just my boss.”

Beau restrained his laugh only by habit. Not that the noise would have mattered, with his suit telemetrics fastidiously set to “off.”

She was a lot more than boss, from what he could tell. Unconsummated love, left so forever because one of them had foolishly angered the wrong people. His clients really were going to like this.

He kept walking. The lighting was getting better by the second. Now, even from 400 meters, he could tell that the one on the ground was female. He folded the tripod up against the stock of the rifle. Lowered the gun and fired from the hip. A miss. But not by much. He’d seen the dust puff behind the hare. On Earth the man might have flinched, but here, unless he saw the muzzle flash, he might not even have known he’d been shot at.

Beau continued to walk. As long as the guy didn’t run, Beau could be as nonchalant as he wished. And the guy clearly wasn’t going to leave the woman. Stupid because she was dead, no matter what. Maybe Beau would even get to record his face as he blew her brains out.

Two hundred meters away, and suddenly he realized he had a shadow. That wasn’t right. No way was the image enhancement that good. He turned it off and the shadow was still there. How could there be a shadow here in the land of eternal night?

He wheeled back to look at the top of the crater rim behind him. The crescent of sunlight was still there, a bit thicker than before, but not much. But above it was a flare of unbelievable brightness; so bright his suit’s sunshield automatically kicked in to dim it.

He wheeled back toward the prey, but could no longer see them. He fired vaguely in the right direction, but he was now in the center of a spotlight, so bright everything outside was impenetrably dark.

The one good thing was that he could now truly see his footing. He tried to run, but the light followed him, the beam contracting by the second.

It was getting warm. Not just warm, but hot. He dodged right, then left, but the intolerable brightness remained. There were voices yelling at him to do something, but he tuned them out.

Belatedly he realized that the way to go was toward the prey: force the operators of this blinding, searing light to aim it not only at him, but at them. But he was in a land of brightness surrounded by dark and he no longer knew where his targets were. The brightness contracted, the darkness drew closer, and the heat rose and rose until the ground steamed, as ices, trapped for a billion years, felt the light of a thousand suns they’d never seen before and Beau’s suit, black as the night he’d hidden in, absorbed every erg. As did the gun. Stumbling, burning, he dropped it. Zigged. Zagged. Tried to get into the dark.

Then, blessedly the light was fading.

But his suit was still burning, burning, burning, and he needed out, out. Needed a breath of coolness. Just a whiff. Anything but the fabric that still burned his skin, the air that still seared his lungs, even as the light faded to that which he’d remembered from a distant Earth.

He couldn’t think. He was confined in something. A suit. That was it. A hot, horrible suit. All he needed was air. Cool air. Just a breath. He’d stripped off his outer gloves some time ago; he couldn’t remember when. Now he fumbled at the latches for his helmet. Cool. He had to have cool …

Razo hadn’t needed McHaddon’s telescope to watch the assassin die. Once the light got bright enough, there were plenty of perfectly ordinary cams near the volatile mines to use as Lum’s crew put the adaptive optics of the stills’ mirrors through tricks they were never intended to do. Pure, raw sunlight, stolen from an area a hundred meters on a side and focused into a beam of blinding heat. So what if, up on the rim, only a sliver of sun was yet above the horizon?

“Poor bastard,” he said.

Caeli gripped his hand.

“In twenty years, I’ve never had to kill anyone. Never thought I’d have to.”

Caeli didn’t say anything, which was probably best. He squeezed back. Then it was time for business.

“Sarah?” he said on the all-suits channel. “Drew? You still with us?”

“Yeah.” Drew’s voice seemed surprisingly close. “Though we could use some help. What the hell was that?”

“Home-made heat ray.” Suddenly he felt unbearably tired. “Ask Lum.”

Ask your future father-in-law, he’d almost said. Some tea leaves were easy to read. Even with Caeli still holding his hand, Raz felt old.

He shut off the com. “He went back for her. He could have run, but he went back.”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t.”

It took her a moment to get it. “It’s not the same, Artie. Nobody was pointing a gun at her and your situation was absolutely no-win.”

“He didn’t leave her.”

“Yeah, and look how it worked out. He’d have been dead if he had, shot before he took two steps. Would you concede, for just a minute, that had you gone back to Earth you might have died? Not the same way, but in some other?

“Or how about this. If you had, Drew and Sarah would be dead. Give yourself a break, Artie. Sometimes good things come out of bad. And new starts don’t have to be instantaneous.”

XIII

“How’s Damien?”

By now, Drew knew Sarah well enough not to be surprised that these were her first coherent words once she’d recovered from surgery. The bullet had shattered her femur, narrowly missing the femoral artery, and it had taken eight hours and a hardware store’s worth of titanium to put it back together. Still, the docs had assured Drew she’d not only walk again, but someday challenge him at running the plates. Bones knitted well under low gee.

But of course Sarah hadn’t asked about that. Oh, she would eventually. Descending into the crater with her, Drew had been amazed by how gracefully she moved, how easily she maintained the effort. On Earth, she’d have had a sport. Gymnastics, perhaps. Or maybe tennis. Something that demanded poise and strength.

Or maybe he was just biased.

Meanwhile, the issue was Damien.

“It looks like he’s going to make it. The docs gave him a seventy-five percent chance, last I heard. They’re really stunned he even got back to the tunnels alive.”

The meds made her voice groggy. “We’re a good team.”

Drew grinned. “Never doubted it.” Though it wasn’t just them. When the assassin had blocked his and Sarah’s run for help, the rest of the PEL crew had done everything else as close to perfectly as humanly possible. A lot of hands had worked to save Damien, a lot of folks who’d never before met him. Hell, Drew had never met him. He was just a guy who’d accidentally taken a bullet—three bullets, actually—for him, and been saved by a clan of folks he’d never known before.

Drew finally knew why he’d come to the Moon. It wasn’t just a new start. It was a new family. The real thing. Bound by … well, he wasn’t sure what. But something thicker than blood.

Meanwhile he had other news.

“I’m dead.”

Sarah was recovering quickly from the meds. “You don’t look it.”

“Good.” He laughed. “I wasn’t meaning it literally. But while you were under…” Briefly, he choked up. Even though the docs had been optimistic, there’d always been a chance she’d never wake up again … “While you were under, Razo—he’s a good guy, you know—he told me that as long as the guy trying to kill us was dead, he was putting out the word that there were two casualties, Drew Zeigler being the other. The official story is that I got killed before Razo and Lum got him.”

Unexpectedly, he felt smothered in a confusing mix of emotions. Gratitude. Relief. The dregs of leftover fear. Saving him would have been the pinnacle of Razo’s career: the stuff of tabloids from here to Ceres. Instead, he’d given it up to truly save him.

Razo, Lum, the folks who’d worked to save Damien. Blood wasn’t thicker than water, whatever that meant. Blood was simply genetics. This—this had been choice.

“Anyway,” he said, “he’s going to need some help keeping the secret.”

“No problem. Nobody’s going to have any trouble with that.”

“And I’m going to need a new name. Something Loonie would be good.”

Sarah’s smile was tired and he knew that sleep beckoned. But not yet. “Janes?”

XIV

“When you go back to visit, I want to meet her too,” Caeli said.

She and Raz had wound up in his quarters, still too wired to make more than the most chaste moves toward that which they’d joke/flirted about so often.

“Who?” Raz was still thinking about fresh starts, good-coming-from-bad.

“You know. Your daughter. She’s got to be in college now, right?”

“Yeah. She’s a sophomore at Macquarie, majoring in Renaissance literature.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “What makes you think she’ll even talk to me?”

Caeli’s eyes were far away. “Oh, she will.” She hesitated. “You’re not the only one to hit space with secrets.”

“Don’t say anything you don’t want to. It’s the real you that matters.” He tapped his chest. “The one that lives in here.”

“Yeah. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. But this is part of what made me who I am. And probably brought me to space.” She paused. “You would have brought Jenn and Lily back here if you could. My daddy … well, let’s just say I’d give my right arm to have him show up from wherever he went.” Her eyes were moist. “I might beat him black and blue with it, but I’d give it up. But I’d not give up space. Not for all the daddies in the world.”

Her mood brightened. “I’ve got a better idea. Don’t go visit her. You didn’t want to train for the gravity, anyway. Invite her here. How could she resist?”

“And who, pray tell, would fly her up?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, I bet you could find someone.”

He stared at the com. It would take a while to work up the courage. But family—true family anyway—was more than the accident of birth. It was about choices. Maybe sometimes you could choose both.