Dead Man on the Moon (4 page)

According to Noah's onboard, the door to his apartment was a bright red circle several yards off the main path. He placed his hand on it, and it rolled smoothly open.

"Hello?" he called. "Anyone home?"

"In here!" replied another male voice, and Noah stepped inside.

The apartment consisted of a single small room furnished with a plain sofa, an easy chair, and brown carpeting. A coffee table made from a packing crate took up most of the floor space. Two windows on either side of the front door gave a view of the main corridor, and a viewscreen on the living room wall pretended to look out on a sun-drenched beach with a blue ocean stretching to the horizon. Dirty dishes and empty beer bottles made an untidy pile on the crate cum coffee table, and Noah smelled fried food. A minuscule kitchenette lined one wall. There was no table. A door led into a tiny bedroom and another into an equally tiny bathroom. On the floor around the crate sat two young men about Noah's age. The first had short blond hair, blue eyes, and a lean swimmer's build. The other had curling black hair and brown eyes. He was only a little taller than Noah. Both young men were white.

"Hi," the dark-haired one said, reaching up to shake Noah's hand. "I'm Jake Jaymes. This is Wade Koenig. Computer said you're the new roommate."

"Yeah. Nice to meet you." Noah set his backpack and duffel on the couch and glanced around the tiny space. "Um ... do you both live here?"

"Yeah," Wade said shortly. "It's a two-person apartment with three people assigned to it. You, JJ, and me."

"Don't call me JJ," Jake said.

Noah sighed. "Shit. That's the second time housing has screwed up on me today."

"Screwed up?" Jake echoed.

Noah gave a brief explanation of what happened with Ilene. "So now I have to go back down to housing and—"

"It's not a mistake," Jake said. "It's overcrowding. Most of these apartments have three people in them. The under-grad dorms are even worse."

"You should have stayed with the chick."

Noah's practiced eye noted that all the beer bottles sat on Wade's side of the crate. Jake had a paper napkin on his lap, but Wade didn't, and the thighs of his jeans bore telltale
streaks of dark grease. Great. He had stumbled into the odd couple.

"I'll just put my stuff in the bedroom, then," he said.

"There's only one dresser," Jake called after him. "And two beds."

Jake was right. The bedroom was barely larger than a closet, with a narrow aisle between two twin beds. One was neatly made, the other was mess. A single built-in dresser was the only other piece of furniture, unless he counted the tiny vid-screen above it. He also found a clothes closet the size of half a coffin. Noah set his bags on the floor in one corner with a grimace and stepped back into the living room.

"How are we going to sleep?" he asked.

"Couple ways to handle it," Wade said off-handedly. "Last semester when Ned—the guy you're replacing— lived here, whoever went to bed last got the couch. Some people do rotations. I like the last-one-in rule."

Noah thought about sharing sheets with guys he barely knew. Five years of finding blood and semen in bedclothes made him shudder at the idea. Maybe he'd get a sleeping bag.

"Sure, we can do that," Noah said. "What about—"

A chime sounded in his ear and text spilled across his monocle.
Incoming call from Linus Pavlik, Chief of Security.
He blinked at the message.

"Got a phone call," he said. "I should probably take it."

Without waiting for a response, he went into the bedroom and shut the door. "Route call to bedroom vid-screen," he said.

A man appeared on the screen. He had fair skin, dark hair salted with a little silver, broad shoulders, and thick hands with square fingernails. His pale gray eyes and serious expression put Noah on quiet alert. Everything about him said, "Boss," and "In charge."

"Noah Skyler?"
the man said.
"I'm Linus Pavlik, Chief of Security here at Luna City. Glad to see you arrived safely."
They
e
xchanged a few pleasantries about Noah's trip while Noah waited for him to get to the point.
"I'm sorry to call you before you've had a chance to settle in, but I've hit an unexpectedly
. . .
unusual situation, and I need another crime scene guy. Meet me down at the Diamond Street airlock in ten minutes. I'll bring a kit for you."

"But—"

The screen went blank.

Linus Pavlik sat impatiently on the bench at the end of the Diamond Street corridor. On the floor at his feet sat a pair of crime scene kits. On a branch over his head slithered a yellow-brown boa constrictor. Linus shot it a quick glance. The animal no doubt made a fine living on escaped pets and experimental animals gone feral—hamsters, mice, even the occasional cat. South American rainforest trees made a pleasant green canopy for plenty of critters, including parrots, insects, and students. Packs of the latter moved up and down the corridor, entering and leaving apartments, finding places outside to study, or just going for a brisk afternoon bound. The Diamond Street corridor was never empty for a moment. Linus sighed. Easier to find oxygen in a vacuum than privacy on Luna City. That worried him more than the dead body lying some distance outside the airlock behind him. Shove five thousand people into space for three, take away some privacy, bake in a vacuum for a few weeks, and ding! You had a perfect recipe for increased violent crime.

Linus checked the back of his hand. The time—2:47
p.m.
— appeared for a moment, then vanished like a temporary tattoo. He wondered what working with the kid would be like. Linus had sat on the committee for the Aidan Cos-grove Memorial Grant, a new award that paid all expenses for and a small stipend to law enforcement officers looking to further their education. The committee had received over a hundred applications, which they had whittled down to five finalists. Linus had lobbied hard for Noah Skyler, and had eventually had his way. He didn't give a damn why the kid wanted to live here; the point was that he was an experienced scene investigator with fine references. Linus had liked him on paper—or on screen, anyway—because, credentials aside, he had the humility to admit he still had a lot to learn.

Another glance at the time told Linus two more minutes had passed. Maybe the kid had gotten lost. Linus grinned. Kid. Noah Skyler was twenty-seven, barely thirteen years Linus's junior. He suspected Noah wouldn't much like being called "kid," and Linus resolved not to let himself think of the ki—of Noah that way.

But when Noah finally strode into view, Linus wasn't so sure he could keep his resolution, out of petty revenge, if for no other reason. Life wasn't fair but did it have to be so
blatantly
unfair? The brief glimpse Linus had gotten on the viewscreen hadn't done Noah justice—the kid was movie-star handsome. No two ways about it.

Linus had a private theory about the way men noticed the looks of other men. Women could notice and comment on the beauty of another woman and no one thought twice about it. If a man, however, commented on the looks of another man, people thought there must be a sexual attraction. So men acted as if they had no idea if another guy was handsome or not. It was all bullshit. Men, Linus knew, were just as adept as women at spotting good looks in their own sex—they just viewed them in competitive terms.

Noah easily fell into Onus's better-looking category, and he was handsome enough to make Linus nervous. Handsome men tended to spark jealousy among their lovers, which meant potential violent crime, and the guys themselves often had egos the size of their—

Noah tripped and fell. The kid hadn't adjusted to the low gravity yet, and he overcompensated when he tried to regain his balance. His arms flew forward to catch himself, but he had only fallen half a meter, so instead of hitting the floor, his hands hit empty air. The momentum of his outflung hands and arms pulled him forward a little faster, bringing him even further off balance. A nearby frat boy easily dodged out of the way and turned, grinning, to watch the fun. He had plenty of time. Noah fell and fell, and finally landed in a tangle of arms and legs. He lay still for a moment, face flushed with embarrassment. Then he made the mistake of trying to get back to his feet without moderating his strength. When he pushed off, his entire body leaped into the air like a startled salmon. The look on his face— wide eyes, open mouth—made Linus laugh, even though he remembered going through the same involuntary slapstick routine when he first arrived on Luna five years ago.

By now a small crowd had gathered. Noah drifted down to the floor to land on hands and knees amid enthusiastic applause. Linus supposed he'd have to have a word with the kid about getting his Luna legs quickly. It was hard to command the respect of suspects and witnesses when they remembered seeing you stumble like Charlie Chaplin on crank-ups.

The crowd was drifting away as Linus rose from the bench to greet Noah and offer him a hand up. The kid's face reddened even further when he realized the person standing over him was his boss, but there wasn't anything Linus could do about that. Noah took Linus's hand, and the chief pulled with exactly the right amount of force. It wasn't much. The kid couldn't have weighed more than one-fifty back on Earth. Linus suppressed another surge of jealousy.

Even after swearing off fried food and exercising like a fiend five days a week, he wasn't able to rid himself of a small roll of fat around his midsection.

"Nice to meet you in person, Noah," he said, pronouncing the name carefully. "Chief Inspector Linus Pavlik. Call me Linus, unless I'm pissed at you. Then you should call me 'Right away, sir!'"

"Hi," Noah said. "Uh . . . great way to impress the boss, hey?"

"You'll get used to the gravity," Linus said. "Some people wear weights and gradually taper them off, you know."

Noah shook his head. "I want to adjust as fast as I can. I'll stumble, but no one ever died of embarrassment."

"Then let me give you a piece of advice I wish someone had given me," Linus said, and paused. Noah leaned in closer to listen. "Until you're fully adjusted," Linus whispered solemnly, "sit down when you go the bathroom."

Noah blinked at him. "Sit down?"

"Low-gravity urinals take practice. Not for the faint of heart."

"Ah. I'll take your word for it." Noah looked around. Overhead, the artificial sun shone like warm, liquid gold through jungle leaves. The boa had moved on. "So where's the crime scene?"

Linus cocked a thumb at the heavy metal door behind him. "Out there."

"Outside?" Noah's voice rose a little. "You mean—in vacuum?"

"You're certified for outdoor activity, aren't you?"

Noah nodded. Although many Luna City residents never set foot outside an airlock, familiarity with a vacuum suit was a requirement of residence.

"Then let's go."

Near the entrance to the airlock was a series of orange lockers. Linus set his palm against one, and it clicked open, revealing a pair of silver vacuum suits. He handed one to Noah, who took it wordlessly.

"I almost forgot," Linus said. "By the authority granted me by the Luna City government, I hereby deputize Noah Skyler into the Division of Security."

"Acknowledged," said Linus's onboard, with Noah's echoing a split-second later.

They donned the self-adjusting suits and double-checked each other's seals. Once Linus's helmet was in place, his onboard automatically connected with it and projected a three-sixty view on the sides and back of the helmet's interior. The projection fuzzed a little if Linus moved quickly, but he preferred that over having to turn his entire body to look left or right. This way he could just turn his head. Linus set his gloved palm against the airlock door, and it rolled aside. The square chamber beyond could accept perhaps a dozen people comfortably. The two men entered, and the door shut behind them. Air hissed out of the airlock, and a red flag appeared in Linus's display, warning him that he was standing in vacuum and it would be foolish to remove his helmet. His suit puffed up a little, and it felt like he was covered in marshmallows. Still, these suits were much sleeker than the burly, clunky ones worn by the first inhabitants of Luna City. The air in his suit was dry and smelled metallic. Linus could already feel his lips and eyes drying out.

The outer door rolled open, revealing Luna's dirty-beach landscape. In the distance, domes rose like clear blisters against the absolute black sky and hard, unwinking stars. Near the airlock sat a vehicle the size of a giant go-cart with fat, dune buggy wheels—a police rover summoned by remote control. Linus headed for the driver's side, his boots crunching on the gritty lunar sand.