Under a Killing Moon

UAKM — CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Even in the wee hours of the morning, the New San Francisco Interplanetary Spaceport was a teeming jambalaya of humanity. Swarming mobs of disheveled and nicotine-deprived travelers from hundreds of countries and speaking dozens of languages created smelly, pell-mell pandemonium that would’ve made the aftermath of the Tower of Babel look like a quilting bee. I was reminded anew of how much I loathed spaceports. I also despised going to sporting events, concerts, and grocery superstores, all for the same reason: people. I was convinced that you could turn even the most decent and intelligent person into a complete idiot simply by putting them into a crowd. On second thought, most people were idiots one on one, as well.

I jostled and knifed my way through roaming clusters of imbeciles and eventually reached the bank of courtesy phones. Ching and her matching set of goons were waiting.

As the thugs cleared a path through the crowd, Ching informed me that she’d called in a few favors and gotten arrangements made for our flight. She certainly did work fast. It made me glad we were on the same team.

We made our way through the terminal to the gates. About five miles later, we reached the charter gates and exited the building. The night was clear, but cold, and our breath was steaming as we crossed the tarmac. Eventually, we reached an aircraft hangar and entered. It was chilly and dark inside, except for a rectangle of light spilling from a doorway in the back of the structure. When we reached the door, the goons waited outside while Ching and I entered.

The room beyond turned out to be a small office with one occupant — a rough-looking chap, reclining in a chair with his feet up on a desk. Ching introduced me to Karl Voorman and said that he would be handling the piloting duties on our little excursion.

Voorman shook my hand and nodded, without a hint of pleasantness. Ching began discussing arrangements with him, giving me a chance to scurtinize the pilot.

He wore a full beard, which was jet-black. Together with his dark, sunken eyes, it gave him a distinctly sinister look. His voice was low and sullen, and when he spoke, it was almost begrudgingly. I got the impression that he was a man of action and preferred to avoid talking whenever possible. It was trait I’d always admired and was number three on the list of characteristics I looked for in a woman. Unfortunately, in all my past relationships, I’d rarely gotten past the first two characteristics.

Ching and Voorman bartered briefly, then came to an agreement. Ching insisted that there be no questions asked and offered the pilot a handsome payoff for his silence. Five minutes later, we left the hangar and walked to a midsized shuttle-cruiser, parked just outside. It was the kind of spacecraft used by successful smugglers — very fast and maneuverable. I guessed that Voorman ran a lucrative operation.

The shuttle was no vacation cruise ship, but it was sufficiently equipped for the thirty-hour flight. We strapped in for takeoff and, forty-five minutes later, were officially off-planet. I’d only been on two spaceflights in my life, and the experience was still a novelty to me. Maybe that was why I didn’t feel particularly tired, even though it was almost 5 A.M.

Despite the moderate turbulence associated with breaking free of Earth’s gravitational pull, Ching’s henchmen were nodding off, snug behind their safety harnesses. Ching was awake and seemed somewhat jittery. I yawned and glanced at my new watch. I wondered if Ching might have some idea as to its significance. There was nothing to lose by checking. I removed the watch from my wrist and handed it over. “What do you think about this watch?”

Ching looked it over without a hint of recognition, then gave it back to me. “Looks nice.”

Since it obviously didn’t mean anything to her, I decided to spare her the details. A few moments later, we broke free of the exposure six hundred miles up, and the ride smoothed out. Ching pulled out a large knapsack. Luckily, she’d shown considerably more foresight than I had, bringing along plenty of ready-to-eat foodstuffs. Her knapsack, however, contained an even more valuable treasure: two bottles of Black Bush Irish whiskey. She produced a bottle and held it up. “Got a use for this?”

I smiled warmly. Ching had just advanced from the “Casual Ally” category straight into

“Friends Of Tex.”

“I can think of a couple.”

She opened the bottle, took a long draught, and handed it to me. “I hate these space flights. They always make me sick. All I can do is get drunk and try to sleep.”

I nodded sympathetically. “I understand completely. I have the same reaction to women.” I raised the bottle to my parched lips. “Nothing personal.”

I drank deeply and felt the tingling warmth run down my gullet and into my empty stomach. This wasn’t the official PI breakfast — that, of course, was a cigarette and coffee. This was more like the PI brunch. I took another mouthful, then passed the bottle back. Then I got out my pack of Luckies and offered one to Ching, who declined. As I lit up, I caught sight of a no smoking sticker. The cigarette tasted extra good.

As I exhaled, Lou snorted and jolted upright. “We there yet?”

Ching spoke like a protective parent. “Not yet, Lou. Go back to sleep.”

Lou nodded wearily and almost immediately began to snore.

Ching passed the whiskey over and turned to look out a window. I studied her for several minutes. I wasn’t quite sure what to think of Ms. Ching. When I’d been tracking down the statuette, I’d gotten the impression that everyone was scared to death of her.

Now that I was sitting across from her, she didn’t seem particularly dangerous. She was just a regular, living, breathing person with an upset stomach. It confirmed my theory that mystique was always more powerful that reality. I cleared my throat to get her attention. “Tell me something, Ms. Ching. Why is everybody so scared of you?”

Ching smiled and motioned for me to pass the Black Bush.

“Because that’s the way I like it. I’ve put a good deal of effort into developing a reputation. I rarely deal face to face with my clients. The less people know about me, the better it is for business.”

“You ever killed anyone?”

The woman laughed. “Of course. Bluffing only takes you so far. There isn’t a lot of integrity in my line of work. If someone crosses you and gets away with it, everyone else will think they can do it, too.”

“You plan on killing me?”

Ching shrugged and took a sip of whiskey. “I haven’t decided yet. We’ll have to see how things go. Right now, I’d say it’s sixty-forty in your favor.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what is it you do, specifically?”

Ching yawned and capped the bottle. “Why do you want to know?”

I dropped my cigarette butt onto the floor and stepped on it. “I’m thinking about getting into another line of work. Yours seems to pay pretty well.”

Ching leaned back into her seat. “I’m sort of a commodities dealer. I use my connections to find rare and valuable items, buy them, then sell them to the highest bidder.”

“How’d you get involved with the statuette?”

Ching smiled drowsily. “The statuette has a long history behind it. No one really knows how old it is, but it’s one of the most ancient artifacts in the world. I’d heard about it years ago, that it had disappeared during the 1940s. Most of those in the know assumed that it had been added to the Nazis’ extensive collection of art and occult objects. Then it suddenly turned up it some Viennese attic. The man who found it donated it to a museum in Vienna. Immediately, a race was on to see who could steal it first. Private collectors began to ante up astronomical offers for it. Naturally, it was something I felt I should get in on.

“Security at the museum was very tight, but an accomplished acquaintance of mine managed to get past it and snatch the statuette. Knowing that he was sitting on a fortune, he contacted me and asked me to make inquiries. I compiled a list of potential buyers and collected bids, the highest of which was in the high nine figures. I was about to carry out the deal when I was contacted by the head of CAPRICORN. How he knew about me and the statuette, I don’t know, but he filled me in on its history and the cult that wanted it.

“It seemed too fantastic for me to believe at first, but then I did some checking around.

Everything I learned seemed to back up what the man from CAPRICORN had told me. I decided to hold onto the statuette and see what happened. As time passed, I began to sense that the cult was getting desperate to find its talisman. Apparently, they were under some sort of time constraint… something to do with one of their prophecies. It seems they had a preset date for when their plan was to be carried out. I never found out the exact date, but I knew it had to be soon.”

Ching rubbed her eyes. I was trying not to feel guilty.

“Do you think the cult would’ve gone through with its plans without the statuette?”

Ching’s eyes were closed. “I don’t know. Probably.”

She began to breathe deeply. I let her sleep, feeling a little less responsible. Then I got out my seat and grabbed the bottle of whiskey. After taking a few sips, I lit another cigarette and looked out into the great vacuum.

This whole scenario reminded me of my religious beliefs, or lack thereof. I’d never really thought much about God, or life after death, but occasionally I’d ask myself, what if? I now found myself wondering the same thing about the cult. It didn’t seem plausible to me that some group would actually have the power to take over the world, but what if they did? And if so, what chance did Ching and I have of stopping them?

Here we were, flying toward the moon with no plan, no idea of what we would find. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. For all I knew, the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of an out-of-work PI, a fence, and two thugs. I drifted into an uneasy sleep.

When I woke, Ching and her henchmen were breaking their fast with some kind of brightly colored snack cake. I opted for the PI brunch. We still had another twenty hours to go. The time passed slowly, but it gave me a chance to find some redemptive qualities in Lou and Felipe. Ching’s henchmen weren’t the brightest guys I’d ever met, but Lou, the one who’d smacked me around, turned out to be a talker and kept me entertained unintentionally with a steady stream of malapropisms, mixed metaphors, and unbelivably creative profanity. Felipe, the more cerebral of the two, actually came up with the occasional four-syllable word, and almost floored me when he whipped out a cribbage board and a deck of cards.

Cribbage, of course, was the greatest two-played game ever invented. My mom had taught me to play right after teaching me how to go pee-pee by myself. Since Ching didn’t play and had no desire to, and Lou had yet to master Go Fish, Felipe was as happy to find a fellow player as I was.

Voorman didn’t join us once throughout the flight. Instead, he sat in the cockpit and read. Ching spent most of the time staring out a window, interrupting her meditations intermittently to clean one of the many firearms she’d brought along. I didn’t ask how she’d gotten them through the spaceport security. Lou kept himself amused with a Robet E. Howard paperback and a bag of pork rinds. Every few seconds, he’d silently sound out a word, then shake his head. At one point, I timed the length between page turns.

Eight minutes.

Felipe and I, meanwhile, played a couple games of cribbage, feeling each other out tentatively, he like a mediocre boxer, me like a python with a cornered gerbil. Felipe cut a few lucky cards and eked out a victory in the second game, after which he suggested that we play for money. I casually suggested a dime a point — a quarter past the skunk line — and my unsuspecting opponent agreed. Calculating the length of the flight and the number of games we could get in, I figured I could pocket about four hundred bucks.

I owed Felipe a little more than two hundred dollars when Voorman emerged from the cockpit. He took a seat by Ching and removed a cigar from his mouth. “We’re about an hour out. I figured we should discuss what you want to do when we arrive.”

Ching filled Vorrman in briefly on what we knew about GRS and asked if he had any idea what they would be doing on the moon. Voorman thought it over for a moment.

“I’ve heard that there’s some kind of research facility up here. I don’t know where it is, but you can probably find the way there through the operation center. I’ll get you in, but what you do after that is your problem. I just agreed to get you there.”

Ching nodded. “Once we get in, how many people will we have to get past?”

Voorman shrugged. “The complex is pretty much fully automated. There aren’t more than a dozen people running the whole place.”

Voorman pulled out a piece of paper and unfolded it. I moved to get a better look and saw what appeared to be a diagrammed layout of the complex. From what I could tell, it was comprised of six or seven domed biospheres, all connected by some type of subway system. Voorman pointed to one of the domes. “This is the op-center. We’ll land here.

I’ve made deliveries before and shouldn’t have any trouble getting in. After we land, I’m staying in the shuttle, and you’ll have eight hours. I need to leave after that. If you’re not back by then, I’ll leave you behind. We clear on that?”

Ching said she understood, and Voorman returned to the cockpit, leaving the diagram for us to examine. We crowded around while Ching formulated a strategy. We would all be armed to the teeth and would hopefully catch the people in the op-center by surprise.

After subduing any resistance, we would split up and search the complex. Ching had brought along communication devices and rebreathers, which would allow us to leave the biospheres if it became necessary. Then she passed out the equipment, and we waited anxiously to land.

Looking out the window, I could see the moon getting larger by the minute. A short while later, I heard Voorman’s voice through the partially open cockpit door. He was repeatedly asking for permission to land, but there seemed to be no response. After several minutes, he poked his head through the door. “For some reason, they’re not answering. Looks like I’ll have to set the shuttle down outside the op-center.”

Ching looked at me, a concerned expression on her face. “I’m not sure if this is good news or not.”

Twenty minutes later, the shuttle came to rest and powered down. Ordinarily, Ching informed me, we would have landed in an air lock. But since no one was responding in the op-center, we had to touch down on the moon’s surface and would have to walk.

Through the window, I saw a massive structure that resembled a metal bowl turned upside down. To the right, I could see two others in the distance. We bundled ourselves into space suits, strapped on our rebreathers, and checked to make sure they were working correctly. Voorman came in and opened the hatch for us. We climbed single-file out of the shuttle and down the ladder.

For the first time, I stepped onto the dusty surface of the moon. Immediately, I felt the effects of minimal gravity. I turned and bounced along after Ching in the direction of the op-center. We reached the dome and began to move clockwise around the perimeter. A minute later, we came to a sealed door built into the curved surface. Ching tried the door, but it didn’t open. She motioned for us to stand back, then leveled a large gun at it, and pulled the trigger.

The blast left a hole the size of a basketball where the door handle had been. Lou stepped up and reached inside. With a mighty tug, the door swung open, and we followed the big man into the dome.

We found ourselves in a short tunnel, with a door at the other end. Ching pushed past Lou, walked up to the control panel on the wall beside the door, and pushed a button.

With a hydraulic hiss, the door slid open, and we rushed through, weapons ready to fire.

The room was empty. The four of us looked at each other, partly relieved, partly confused. Ching turned and closed the door behind us, then loosened her rebreather and signaled that it was safe to remove the apparatus. Slowly, we relaxed and began to look around. The space was large and circular, like the dome over it. Computer consoles lined the perimeter, and several computer stations dotted the center of the room.

We fanned out, and I walked to the nearest console. Most of the equipment was running, with monitors displaying everything from camera views to data readouts. The first section I checked was labeled Maximum Security Zone 10. Several dozen cameras were trained on an area that resembled a prison camp. None of them showed any movement whatsoever. Wherever this maximum security area was, it appeared to be completely abandoned.

I circled around, pausing every few feet to inspect computer screens. There were inventory displays, prisoner records, and a good deal of indecipherable data. One bit of information caught my eye. It was a listing of zone populations and seemed to show that, as of November 22, there were four hundred and eighteen occupants in Maximum Security Zone 10. What happened to the prisoners?

As I continued my examination, I saw several other banks of camera monitors, all of which showed deserted areas like the one I’d already seen. From what I could gather, the entire complex was abandoned. My investigation was interrupted by Ching, who called me over to where she was standing.

She found a computer display of the complex’s layout. Most of the areas were color-coded, and we were able to identify sections of minimum, medium, and maximum security. The op-center was also clearly marked, but there were three sections without a description. Ching and I agreed that we should explore those areas first. According to the layout, there four transport tubes, one at each primary compass point. We looked around the room and saw four corresponding exits. Ching would explore one area, I’d take another, and Lou and Felipe would go cover the other two.

I walked to one of the doors and examined the control panel beside it, which was not unlike and elavator panel. One of the buttons looked especially important, so I pressed it. A yellow light flashed on and began to blink. Thirty seconds later, the light changed to a solid green, and the door slid open. Beyond was a small compartment with two rows of facing seats and windows all around. I buckled myself into one of the seats near the door, then pressed a button to the left of the door. It slid shut, and the compartment began to move.

Through the windows, I saw the moon’s landscape flying by. I looked in the direction I was moving and saw a long, clear tunnel. The compartment seemed to be moving along a monorail. A few moments later, it began to slow down, then came to a rest against a door identical to the one back at the op-center. I pressed the button by the door, and it slid open.

Suddenly, all the oxygen seemed to leave my lungs, and I groped for my rebreather.

Apparently, this section had been shut down. Once my rebreather was in place and I’d regained my composure, I stood up and entered a narrow hallway that looked like it ran all the way around the dome’s perimeter. A door directly in front of me proved to be locked, so I turned right and started walking.

Doors were built into the inside walls every twenty feet or so, but they were all locked.

It wasn’t until I’d gone at least halfway around that I found one left ajar. I pushed on it, but it didn’t want to move. Then I lowered my shoulder and pushed hard. The door moved inward, and I heard the sound of something sliding on the floor. When the opening was wide enough to pass through, I squeezed in and took a look at what had been blocking the door.

It was a body. A heavy set, middle-aged man stared up at me with unseen eyes. He had a massive wound in his chest, and his white shirt was stained dark brown with dried blood. I pried my eyes away from the corpse and saw eight others, all within twenty feet of each other. Every one of them had been shot. It looked like a mass execution.

Immediately, I thought of the missing prisoners. But these people didn’t look like convicts. I bent down and went through the pockets of a dead woman. Keys, a pen, a pack of chewing gum… and an ID card. It read, “Janice Bergman — Genetic Research Systems.”

So this is where they’d ended up. Now, the question was, what had they been doing?

And why had these people been murdered? Was there a mutiny of some kind? I stood up and looked around. The room was semicircular. Along the left side, the wall was rounded, and the ceiling rose up at quite a steep angle. To my right was a long, straight, high wall of Plexiglass. Up against the Plexiglass was a series of workstations and chairs. It looked like the engineering booth in a large recording studio.

I walked toward the clear glass wall. On the other side was what appeared to be the interior of a biosphere. There were trees, grass, flowers, and plants of all types. I estimated the size of the garden-like area to be at least the square footage of a football field. It would have been a beautiful site, except for one thing. The floor was covered with dead bodies.

The scene was nightmarish. There were literally hundreds of men, women, and children.

It looked like old pictures I’d seen of the Holocaust. I pressed my face against the glass and stared at the corpses nearest to me. These people were probably the missing prisoners. As I looked over the carnage, I was especially horrified at the presence of children. For a moment I wondered why children were here, but then I remembered hearing that minimum-security prisoners weren’t automatically sterilized and that male and female prisoners were allowed to mingle. Sometimes, even marriages were allowed.

So, it wasn’t just incarcerated scum that had been slaughtered here, but entire families.

Why had the prisoners been murdered? And how? Unlike people on my side of the wall, the victims in the biosphere hadn’t been shot. In fact, there was no visible cause of death.

I decided to take a closer look. There were doors at either end of the Plexiglass wall. I walked to one of them and was about to open it when I noticed a row of decontamination suits hanging on the wall. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to enter the biosphere.

I turned away and began searching through the workstations for details on what had happened to the prisoners. There was no power for the consoles, so the contents of the computers were off-limits. I opened drawers and looked in wastebaskets for some time.

Eventually, I found a printout that provided some information.

I read the message several times. If it meant what I thought it did, the cult was planning on fumigating Earth with some kind of virus. And if the biosphere full of corpses was any indication, the billions down below wouldn’t stand a chance of surviving. I didn’t know anything about chemistry, and most of the other things I found were too technical for me to understand. As far as I could determine, the GRS scientists had spent the past few years developing the virus referred to in the message. How it worked was beyond me, but it was quick and lethal.

That left only one question. If the virus was to be released from dispenser satellites, from where would the satellites originate? Not from the moon, seeing how the complex was abandoned. There was only one logical answer: The cult would attack from the Moon Child. But when? Maybe it had happened already. Ching and I might have escaped just in time. Or maybe there was still time.

I turned on my communication device and paged Ching. After a moment, her voiced piped through my speaker. “Find anything?”

“Yeah. GRS was definitely here.”

Ching’s voice was excited. “Stay where you are. I’ll meet you there.”

“Don’t bother. There’s not much here to see except a bunch of dead bodies. The GRS scientists were working on some kind of virus. It looks like they came up here to use the prisoners as test subjects. Since the place is abandoned, I’m willing to bet they’re all finished and, from what I can piece together, they’re planning on dumping the virus into Earth’s atmosphere. Unless I’m way off, they’re going to do it from the Moon Child.”

Ching didn’t respond immediately. “I guess we need to get to the Moon Child.”

There was another pause. “All right. Let’s all meet back at the op-center and get out of here.”

I was about to leave when I took another look at the nine bodies by the door where I’d come in. For the first time, the thought occurred to me that the CAPRICORN mole might be among the victims. I crossed the room and began searching the bodies. If the mole was one of these people, maybe he was carrying a message, or something that would help us. It was disgusting, horrible work, but I was desperate. After ten minutes, I decided there was nothing to find.

Hopefully, the mole was alive and well. Maybe he’d gotten onto the Moon Child and would find some way to stop the cult. There wasn’t much else to hope for. I decided to return to the transport tunnel.

Inside the compartment, I pressed the button by the door and began moving back toward the op-center. Suddenly, my communication device crackled to life, and I heard Ching’s voice.

“If I go down, one of you is going with me!”

An unfamiliar male voice spoke up. “Just put down your weapon, and no one’ll get hurt.”

Ching wasn’t buying it. “I don’t think so. You put yours down first.”

Ching had turned on her communication device to warn me. I reached up and hit a button to stop the compartment, and then hit another one to reverse course, moving away from the op-center. Ching continued to argue with several male voices. They seemed to be in a Mexican standoff. I tried not to panic. Over the communication device, I could hear Ching obviously trying to buy time. Then there was silence.

The compartment stopped, and I exited back into the GRS dome. I didn’t want to be discovered, but it would be just as bad to be marooned. I decided to look for another exit from the dome and try to get back to Voorman’s shuttle. At best, Ching would end up captured. At least one of us had to get out.

I hadn’t seen an exit door the first time around, so this time I turned left and sprinted down the hallway, still cradling the gun Ching had given me. I’d gone maybe a hundred yards when I reached a door marked Emergency Exit Only — Alarm Will Sound. With the power cut off, I hoped that there would be no alarm, but I didn’t have any choice. I pushed with my shoulder against the door and stepped outside.

As far as I could tell, nothing went off. I glanced around, trying to get my bearings. It seemed to me that the fastest way to the shuttle would be around the right side of the op-center dome, and I set off in that direction. I covered ground quickly, bounding ten feet or more with every stride.

As I came around the side of the dome where Ching was trapped, I saw a transport tunnel straight ahead. Unless I went all the way around another dome, I’d have to go over the top of the tunnel. I gathered all my strength and ran straight toward the tunnel, then leaped. The tunnel had a rounded roof. I hit it about two-thirds of the way up, somersaulted over the top, and then landed in a soft heap on the other side. The collision had made me drop my gun — on the other side. At least I was uninjured. I stood up and made sure my rebreather was OK, then continued on toward the waiting shuttle.

There was no one in sight as I approached the escape vehicle. I opened the hatch and crawled inside. I checked the cockpit, but Voorman wasn’t there — a bad sign. If he’d been caught as well, I was as good as dead. At that moment, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, through one of the windows. Four men were emerging from the door of the op-center. One of them was Karl Voorman. There was no sign of Ching, Lou, or Felipe. It appeared that we’d been set up.

I rifled through the storage bins, hoping that Ching had left a weapon on board, but I couldn’t find one. I glanced quickly around the interior of the shuttle. There was no place to hide, except for the lavatory. I hurried inside and locked the door, trying not to breathe too loudly.

A minute later, I heard the hatch open, and the men climbed in. One voice spoke up. “I say we go find the fourth one.”

A second voice responded. “Don’t worry about it. What’s he gonna do?”

A third voice joined in. It was Voorman. “We haven’t got time to look for him. We’re supposed to be on the Moon Child in a few hours.”

The first man gave in. “All right. Are we gonna take both vehicles?”

Voorman spoke again. “No, let’s all go in this one. It’s faster.”

“Fine by me. Let’s get going.”

I hunkered down and hoped fervently that none of the men had a weak bladder. Maybe there was a chance I’d get to the Moon Child without being discovered. Through the door, I could hear them moving around. One of them found Ching’s second bottle of whiskey and chortled. “Look what the bitch left us. I guess we can drink it, seeing as how she’s not going to.”

One of the other men laughed. Suddenly, the lavatory door moved slightly. A voice yelled from no more that three feet away. “Hey, Karl? What’s with the bathroom door?

It’s all locked up!”

I heard Voorman’s faint voice from the other end of the shuttle. The door rattled again.

“I’m telling ya, it’s locked!”

Everything went silent. A few moments passed, and then I heard the sound of something metallic tapping against the other side of the door.

“Open the door. Or I’ll blow it open.”

I considered my options briefly, then unlocked the door and pushed it open. In front of me was a large blond man with a buzz cut and a large firearm pointed at my face. I raised my hands meekly. The man with the gun smiled. “C’mon out. Nice and slow.”

As I stood up, the shuttle lurched. The blond man staggered and lowered the gun. Seeing an opportunity, I stumbled forward and grabbed the rifle barrel. Again the shuttle pitched, and I slammed against the wall across from the lavatory, losing my hold on the end of the gun. As the shuttle stabilized, the blond man regained his balance and aimed at my chest. “Don’t try that again.”

He motioned for me to step into the passenger area and sit down. The brute stood in front of me, the gun still pointed at my chest. “You should’ve stayed in the complex.

Could’ve stayed alive a little longer.”

He raised the gun. Suddenly, I heard Voorman. “@#%$ it, Brody! Don’t shoot him in here! You think I want this place messed up? Not to mention maybe putting a hole in the wall! Use your head, man! If you’re gonna kill him, strangle him!”

Brody paused and looked at me over the top of the gun, then lowered it. “I wanna shoot him!”

Voorman stepped in from the cockpit. “Fine! Just wait until we get to the Moon Child.

All right?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Voorman approaching, a length of cord in his hand. “I’ll tie him up, and you do what you want with him later.”

Brody stepped back grudgingly and set his rifle down. As Voorman had me stand up, I noticed him checking out my watch. For a moment, I thought he might take it from me, but he seemed to decide against it. He tied my hands behind my back, then pushed me back down into my seat. I looked up at the man who’d set me and Ching up. “You son of a bitch.”

Voorman looked down at me apathetically, then headed back toward the cockpit. Brody moved, and I turned to see the butt of his rifle flashing toward my head. I flinched, then felt the white hot pain, and everything went black.