Dead Man on the Moon (14 page)

Linus touched the doors, and they opened silently inward. The heady smell of frying fish and spicy rice flowed over him. The interior was surprisingly small, with red walls and thick carpet. Lunch rush had ended, leaving the place half deserted. The remaining diners talked in hushed tones, their voices punctuated by the wooden clatter of chopsticks on china. Karen Fang, seated in a back booth, waved her menu at him, and Linus slid in across from her.

"Posh place for a lunch invite," she said. "What's the occasion?"

"I . . . didn't want to eat alone," Linus replied, feeling suddenly embarrassed. "I eat in the cafeterias a lot, but you can only handle so much student food, you know?"

"I do know." Karen ran an expert eye over the selection as a waiter deposited a teapot and small round cups on the table. "Looks like fish is in season. And oh my—the tofu harvest must have been a bumper!"

"No crispy duck?"

"They can't fly this far. And don't torture me." She closed the menu and sighed. "Sometimes I want to shove all this fish through a sphincter and enjoy a good Australian fry for breakfast."

"Isn't that an Irish fry?"

"Don't quibble with the coroner." She poured a cup of tea and said, "You want to go home. To Earth."

The abrupt statement hung in the air for a moment. How long had he known Karen—two years? Three? Did that
much time give her the right to say such things? Suddenly Linus didn't care if it did or not.

"Yeah," he said. "It's rough knowing I'll never get down there again. Not in this lifetime, anyway."

'That's overly pessimistic," Karen replied. "You're on the transplant lists. A compatible heart donor might—"

"Not gonna happen, and we both know it," Linus interrupted with a wave of his hand. "My life isn't in danger up here, which automatically bumps me to the bottom. The transplant registry knows I'm fine as long as I stay away from full gravity." His throat became unexpectedly thick and he took a sip of hot tea to cover his consternation. It was so stupid.
He
was so stupid. Four years ago, only a few months after his arrival on Luna, he'd started feeling a little sick. Nothing major—he just seemed to tire easily. Linus had put it down to overwork. After all, he was taking classes as a masters candidate, working for Security as a deputy, and washing dishes in one of the cafeterias. He had taken an entire day off—and slept through most of it. The end of the next day found him as exhausted as ever.

He should have had the autodoc in the medicine cabinet check him out. He should have gone straight to the medical center. Should have, should have, should have. Instead, he had slogged on for another week.

And then had collapsed.

Linus awoke in the medical center, bleary and confused, with no idea how he had gotten there. Dr. Gertrude Pilt-down, the gray-blond and soft-spoken woman who had preceded Karen Fang as head of the medical center, explained to him in her gentle voice that a virus had infected his heart, with devastating consequences. Dr. Piltdown had managed to repair the damage. Or most of it. The virus had badly weakened his mitral and pulmonary valves.

Dr. Piltdown had tried to grow new heart valves for Linus using his own stem cells. That was when he had gotten the second bit of bad news.

Stem cells, Linus learned, were basic, unformed cells. When they divided, they could become any other type of
cell, from brain to skin to bone. Once a stem cell differentiated into, say, a skin cell, there was no going back. Stem cells could also divide any number of times—as long as they remained stem cells. Differentiated cells could only divide about fifty times before deteriorating. Occasionally, differentiated cells ignored this limitation and divided uncontrollably, causing cancer.

Ninety-six percent of the population could safely receive stem cell treatment to regrow lost or damaged organs. These days, even neural tissue could be replaced.

As a matter of course, Dr. Piltdown had stimulated some of Linus's stem cells into becoming cardiac tissue. And there she ran into a problem. It turned out that Linus was one of the remaining four percent. His stem cells, when stimulated artificially, were overly prone to cancer. And a cancerous heart valve was worse than a weak one.

Cancer, of course, was treatable and could be sent into permanent remission, but not without side effects. The treatments were guaranteed to weaken Linus's valves, sending him right back to his starting point.

Dr. Piltdown also explained that Linus was lucky, in a way. If this had happened on Earth, his valves would have collapsed under the heavier gravity. Here on Luna, the pressure on his valves remained lighter, allowing him to survive. The stress of traveling to and living on Earth, however, would kill him.

Linus had shut down, then fallen into a depression, and then thrown himself into his work. He earned his master's degree in record time and had gone on to work full-time in Security. The high turnover rate on Luna had put him on the promotional fast track—his immediate superiors kept finishing their studies and going back to Earth, leaving him to step into their shoes. Within two years, Chief Inspector Linus Pavlik had full charge of Security.

It was poor compensation for being a castaway.

When Linus put his cup down, Karen put her hand on top of his.

"You have friends up here, love," she said quietly. "People who care about you."

"All transitory," Linus said, suddenly not wanting to be comforted. "Everyone finishes their project and moves on. Except me."

"And me."

Linus blinked. "You?"

"I've decided I like it up here," Karen said. "Back home, the best I can hope for is to be a single researcher or a specialist among dozens on a team, lost in the bureaucracy of a hospital. Up here, I get to do it all. I'm doctor, researcher, lab lady, administrator, and—oh yes—medical examiner, all rolled into one. Fm finding I like it. Fm thinking of applying for full citizenship and staying on permanently."

"Really?" The thought made Linus much happier than he thought it should have, and he found he was grinning. "K, that's wonderful! I mean—look, I'll write a recommendation for you, talk to the Mayor-President. Fm sure she'll want you to stay."

"You have enormous eyes, Linus," she replied. "Has anyone told you that?"

The remark caught him off-balance. "Once or twice," he said. "Why?"

"They're even bigger right now," she said. "They make you look like a little boy. Or a puppy."

He noticed her hand was still warm on top of his, and Linus felt uncertain again. Was the gesture meant to be more than friendship? He didn't know how to respond. Karen often did that to him—threw off his equilibrium. Oddly, he found it endearing. She could always surprise him, but unlike the surprises brought to him by police work, Karen's little jolts weren't disturbing.

Though they
could
be unsettling.

The waiter saved him from further comment by arriving and asking for their orders. The Moon Dragon still depended on human waiters and physical menus. The place was priced accordingly, but Linus had already decided he
needed a treat. Karen pulled her hand away as she ordered unicorn mandarin fish while Linus chose fresh scallops and fried fish balls, with an admonishment to Karen that she didn't need to make any obvious comments. She sniffed in disdain at such an easy target.

They passed a convivial, delicious meal, after which Karen insisted on picking up the tab. "I make more than you do, love," she said with a light grin, and slapped her thumbprint on the check before Linus could react.

As they were exiting the restaurant, Linus received a call from Hector Valdez.

"We're done with the murder victim's onboard,"
he said.
"Are you free to come down and have a look?"

"I recognize that expression," Karen said. "Security business. I'll catch you later." She pecked him on the cheek and vanished into the tourists crowding the avenue. Linus watched her walk away for a long moment, then told Hector he was on his way.

Hector's office was empty except for a single graduate student who Hector introduced as Wesley Yard. Wesley, a tall, thin young man, pushed one hand through dark brown hair and nodded at Linus. For a moment Linus considered telling Hector that Julia Espinoza sent fond greetings. Karen must be rubbing off on him. He set the thought aside.

"The obie was severely damaged," Hector said, "which surprised me. I was expecting to lose the organic components, but I wasn't expecting destruction quite this severe. I brought in Wesley here to help me. No one knows computer destruction better than he does."

Wesley gave Linus a weak smile and a shake of the head. "I'm not bad."

"Not bad." Hector clapped Wesley on the shoulder with thunderous force. "Such modesty."

"So did you find anything?" Linus asked, feeling impatient and trying not to show it.

"Nothing helpful," Wesley said. "Nothing worth—"

"Don't be ridiculous!" Hector said. "We found a few file fragments. Music and graphics files. The information itself was scrambled beyond recognition, but we found a time stamp. It was dated December sixteenth, last year—almost exactly six months ago."

Linus grew excited. "So our victim was alive six months ago."

"So it would seem," Hector said. "But there's more, and it's the reason I called Wesley in here."

"Go on."

"As I said, vacuum shouldn't have destroyed the obie so thoroughly. Most of it should have been readable even by an amateur like you."

"Right," Linus said dryly. "So?"

"So someone deliberately destroyed the obie," Hector said. "This isn't easy to do. They're built to take quite a lot of punishment. I had a suspicion and I called in Wesley to confirm it. Wes, why don't you tell him what you found?"

Wesley had pressed himself against the wall as if he were hoping it would eat him. He was looking at the floor. Cop jitters, Linus wondered, or just shy?

"I. . . Dr. Valdez said .. ."

"I said nothing," Valdez said with a hint of steel. "I wanted to see if you would come independently to the same conclusion. And it was . . . ?"

"That someone used an EMP on the obie," Wesley said.

"Okay," Linus said. "Why is that such a major revelation?"

"An electromagnetic pulse is hard to control," Hector said. He stroked the end-curls of his mustache. "We techies use them in emergencies, to disable a robot miner, for example, or shut down a system in an emergency. The problem is that the pulse usually takes out not only the target, but every other computer within a certain radius. If the killer used an EMP to wipe out the victim's onboard, he would have taken out every other computer in the immediate area, and someone would definitely have noticed. I
checked—there have been no unexplained computer outages since last December."

"Meaning what?" Linus asked.

"Wes?" Hector prompted.

Wesley Yard looked shyly at the floor. "It means the killer used an imp gun."

"An imp gun," Linus repeated.

"It's a specialized tool that squirts a focused electromagnetic pulse in a small cone," Hector said gleefully. "It only works at close range and it takes a fair amount of skill to use one. They're also very expensive and rarely found in a layman's hands."

"Who uses imp guns, then?" Linus asked, though he had a feeling he knew the answer.

Hector thumped himself on the chest. "People like me. Most IT departments keep several on hand."

"I don't suppose," Linus said, "that you would happen to know who on Luna would be qualified to use an imp gun like this?"

"Every student in the information tech department is trained on them," Wesley said quietly. "And of course the professors know how to use them. It amounts to about two hundred people."

"I can get you a complete list, if you like." Hector rubbed his hands together with glee. "Does that mean I'm a suspect?"

"I'll let you know," Linus said sourly.

On his way back to Security, notice of yet another incoming call trilled in his ear like an annoying little bird. He sighed. During quiet times, he could go days without a notification. Now it seemed like half of Luna City was trying to get hold of him. He accepted the call, and Gary New-burg's voice popped into his ear.

"Chief,"
Gary said,
"we have a big problem"