Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) (2 page)

~~~

‘Inspector Meridian?’

Fox paused, turning to flash a grin at Pierce. ‘I’m an inspector on Earth, not the Moon, and I’m not on duty. It’s Fox.’

Pierce closed the distance, returning the grin. She was a cute sort of girl, just inside minimum height for Luna City Security Services, something of a button-nosed sort of face with bright blue eyes which tended to ‘sparkling,’ capped off by short, blonde hair. Fox happened to know that she was in the ERU primarily for her technical skills, though all of them had passed advanced competency with firearms as well. ‘Thanks for backing me up there. For, uh, giving me a chance to show I knew what I was doing, I guess.’ Fox did suspect she had some insecurity issues, however.

‘Driscoll needs to learn to listen to his people.’ They started walking together down the corridor between the security complex and the main ‘city’ environment. ‘He needs to learn to take decisions, sure, but he needs to listen. It’s a balancing act. He’ll get it.’

‘We spent all the time before Christmas going over individual and team tactics. I guess the next part is going to be focused on getting us
all
working together.’

‘That’s the idea. I don’t expect to leave on the shuttle with you guys operating as the best unit in the solar system, but I expect you to have a good start.’

‘Well, I studied the Dallas op. I mean, that was amazing. Against all the odds–’

‘You don’t want to use Dallas as an example of a hostage rescue, Pierce,’ Fox told her, her tone flat. ‘Dallas was a total cluster fuck and the only reason I’m a hero because of it is that I get lucky when the odds are against me
way
more than I should.’

‘Oh. It was still kind of… It’s Lenora. We’re off duty, so it’s Lenora.’

Fox flashed her the grin again, but there was an edge of tightness around the eyes now. ‘Okay, Lenora, want a drink?’

~~~

‘So what’s a girl from London doing on the Moon?’ Fox was watching people passing by the café-bar they had selected in the Earthrise Plaza rather than the girl in the ERU uniform sitting across the table from her. The Plaza and its inhabitants were still a small fascination, even after three or so weeks there. ‘Why Luna City? Why the cops?’

Pierce shrugged. ‘I was basically out of work. I’d go out of the city in summer to help with the harvest, but I was trained in computer security and electronics and couldn’t get a job using those skills. Luna was recruiting electronics technicians willing to move long term. And then the job folded after eight months when the start-up died, but Security Services wanted technicians. And by then I’d met a guy… You know how it is.’

‘He’s a cop?’

‘No. He’s management in one of the mining companies. He’s not exactly ecstatic about me going down this ERU route, but it’s a secure job and he doesn’t earn enough to support us both. Can’t stay up here for long without a reason for being here.’

Fox nodded. Luna City, and Shackleton Base which it had grown from, was the more commercial of the lunar habitats. Tranquillity was where the tourists went, and where most of the richer inhabitants of Earth’s largest satellite called home. In Luna City, you worked or you left. ‘Your husband has to be excited at the moment.’

‘The helium-three thing? He’s mostly involved with minerals, but his company is waiting to see whether they can make anything of it. No one knows which areas are going to be opened up and what the bidding process for sites is going to be like. It could be lucrative, but it’s going to be costly. Plus there are people already complaining about the “destruction of the Moon’s environment” because of the large-scale processing they’ll need to do.’

‘Which is why the ERU is being rushed ahead, right?’

‘Well, three months ago the ERU was Hepburn, Wallander, and they had me on call if they needed a technician. Then the helium mining thing started coming up more and more in political circles and the next thing we knew we had a budget and they imported Driscoll from NAPA to head up the unit. Did you know him from down there?’

Fox shook her head. ‘He ran an armed response unit in Detroit–Chicago Metro and I’m based in New York.’

‘But you don’t do antiterrorism there?’

‘I’m available if they want advice. I don’t do that kind of op these days. Dallas… Dallas kind of turned me off special operations work. I’m a detective these days. I investigate things. Mostly homicides, but sometimes I get lucky and catch something that doesn’t involve people dying.’

Pierce grinned. ‘We don’t get too many homicides up here. Not saying we get none, but our murder statistics are pretty good.’

‘Maybe it’s the view,’ Fox suggested, her gaze rising to the ceiling of the domed plaza. ‘Kind of restful.’ The image was not real: Shackleton Base had been constructed on the edge of Shackleton crater on the southern pole of the Moon and the city had been built beneath the base, for the most part, so a clear view of the Earth in all its blue and white glory was not possible, even if they were not a hundred metres under the surface. It was, however unreal, quite a beautiful sight and one Fox never got tired of looking at.

‘I think it’s because if you kill someone here, there’s nowhere to run. If you want to kill someone in Luna City, you need to be damn sure no one is going to figure out it was you.’

Fox turned her attention back to her drinking companion. ‘Lenora, very few people who commit outright murder think they’re going to get caught until
after
that eventuality becomes a possibility.’

‘Not even the impulse killers?’

‘Well, they don’t know they need to worry about it until it’s too late. Rule of thumb: criminals don’t worry over getting locked up, either because they don’t think they will or they know it’s part of the job.’

6
^th
January.

Facilities on the Moon stuck to an Earth calendar because people had evolved to live in a twenty-four hour, cyclic environment. If you allowed the day to be almost seven hundred and ten hours long, given some time to adjust and acclimatise, people tended to go a bit funny. Various definitions of ‘funny’ had been used over the years, but a lot of them involved sleep deprivation and psychosis. So it was the same lunar day when Fox opened her eyes the following morning on Earth time.

Fox viewed that kind of thing as likely to bring on psychosis as well, but that was what virtual assistants were there for, right? Hers almost blocked out the overhead virtual display of Earthlight she had programmed in with various important data elements. She was reminded that it was January sixth, that Christmas decorations should be taken down before midnight, and that her first appointment was at nine. It told her that it was now zero-seven-thirty, that the shower had been turned on and set for twenty-two degrees, and that she had requested breakfast in the hotel restaurant this morning at zero-eight-hundred. The local news panel told her about maintenance operations being carried out in City Quadrant Three for the next seven days.

She pushed all of it aside and cleared out the overhead view as she pulled the sheets back and rolled out of bed. A shower would clear the sleep from her brain and coffee would get it up to speed, and
then
she could deal with all the daily details on her way to the debriefing.

On the other hand, she did call up her notes from the simulation session they had run the previous afternoon while the water soaked into her hair. Then, eyes still closed, she pushed that to one side and pulled an image of the shower stall up to check what the inventory of shower products was like before deciding on a lightly perfumed, frequent-use shampoo and restoring the notes window. No one who really knew Fox would have described her as vain: she could afford not to take excessive care of her appearance given her natural advantages in that area, but many who knew her would have been surprised to discover that she
did
actually put some effort into it. Her orange hair was a case in point: the colour was natural from the orange-red crown to the far paler, near-white tips, not dyed as a few had suggested, but she did like to make sure it was washed right. In microgravity, that was especially important because the thin strands got
everywhere
; at least the Moon had enough gravity to make hair issues less common. Showers, however, were a little odd: the drops tended to be bigger and they fell slower. It was weird what you had to adjust to in lowered gravity, and it was not just the way it threw your walking tempo right off.

Shutting off the water with a thought, she stepped back and engaged the air dryers, and contemplated Driscoll’s performance. The simulator software was good, one of the best training sims MarTech Services produced, and it came with an array of useful tools for the teacher. She could, for example, see where Driscoll’s attention had been focused throughout the exercise, and she could see, right there, a bad habit he was going to have to get over.

~~~

‘Back on Earth you were frontline, Lieutenant? You were one of the guys breaking in the door?’ Fox was smiling as she said it and Driscoll knew he was being set up for a dressing down, but somehow the smile made it seem like it was not
too
bad.

‘Yes, sir. I ran a twelve-man unit, but we always operated as three teams of four, and we didn’t have manpower to w– to spare on someone sitting back and coordinating.’

‘Didn’t have this military-class TacNet software either.’ She grinned at him. ‘I know I miss it. Used to rely on it in the Army and the UNTPP had something similar. NAPA could really do with getting up to speed.’

‘It seems… Yeah, it could be really useful.’

‘Uh-huh, but you need to use it. Now, this goes for all of you, but it goes double for your CO.
All
of you need to get used to this tactical software, find out what it can do for you, and what it
can’t
do for you. You, Lieutenant, need to learn to love it and stop sweating the detail you
think
you need and can only get by watching the cameras.’

‘But I can’t get a real overview of what the teams are doing without…’

Driscoll trailed off as Fox turned and a virtual display appeared behind her on the wall. It showed the TacNet graphics from the previous day with all eight camera feeds, miniaturised, on the sides. ‘This is what I’d suggest,’ she said, ‘but you can play around with it and see what suits you best. The tactical system gives you all the overview you can want and having the team views off at the sides lets you get a picture of what they’re
all
seeing without paying too much attention to
exactly
what they’re seeing. You can always enlarge an individual view if you need extra detail momentarily.’

‘And if I’d had something like that in-view, I could have seen Cutter getting attacked and
maybe
done something about it in time.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but Cutter shouldn’t have been where he was anyway. You were letting your enthusiasm get in the way of procedure. In a situation like that, unless you have absolute identification of anyone you find, they should be considered hostile and cuffed. Securing them should have taken priority over the security system.’

‘I don’t get the setup though,’ Belthorpe said. ‘I mean, they didn’t know when we were coming in, so were they just supposed to be sitting there waiting for us?’

Fox smiled. ‘What makes you think you had surprise?’

‘Well… All the cameras were down…’ He watched her shaking her head and frowned. ‘The cameras weren’t down?’

‘The interior cameras were down. You checked the feeds from those and got nothing so you assumed the internal security system was out. They could still access the
external
cameras. So while the lieutenant was watching you all stacking up, so was I, playing terrorist leader. They knew exactly when you were coming in and that it was happening on two fronts.’

‘Well, shit,’ Belthorpe grumbled.

Fox was still smiling. ‘This was your first exercise as a unit under realistic conditions and I
did not
make it easy for you. You screwed up, but you’re learning and there’s plenty you did right. And, frankly, it’s way better that you get it all horribly wrong now, and learn from it, and get better, than doing this for real and ending up in body bags.’

‘Amen to that,’ Driscoll muttered.

‘Too damn right. Now, we’re going to go through this step by tedious step and work out how we could have done it better, even if it was done right the first time, so I hope you all had plenty of coffee this morning.’

Tranquillity Base, 11
^th
January.

It was the last Sunday of Fox’s stay on the Moon and she was indulging herself. They had worked through until the late evening the night before to make best use of their time, but regulations demanded one day off in a week, at least, and she had never been to the Armstrong Lunar History Facility in Mare Tranquillitatis. In the half-dozen times she had been up there, not once had she had the spare time to go to what many considered to be the most important museum in the solar system. Pierce had suggested that this fact was verging on the criminal.

Fox was not quite so sure, but it was something to do. A short hop via local, sub-orbital shuttle and she was at Tranquillity Base in Sinus Amoris. The UN had declared much of the Sea of Tranquillity to be an international treasure; all the original Apollo landing sites were managed, secured, and monitored by a UNTPP unit which ensured that no one disturbed them. There had been some talk of allowing helium-3 mining in the area, but no one was expecting that to pass. So you could not actually get near the landing sites except via telepresence tours, and the museum itself had a lot of replicas in it rather than real objects. You could look at a carefully built replica of the Eagle lander. You could compare surface activity suits down through the decades from the bulky A7L suits of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which had brought Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface, through the later EMU suits used on the Space Shuttle, to the Z-series suits with their progression to more and more advanced material usage which made them thinner and more usable. There was a very, very large exhibit on spaceship bathroom technology through the ages.