Space Case (13 page)

“But it was an adult, right?”

“Er . . . right.”

“So then, you've been asked to do it. It's not like we'd be snooping around on our own.”

“Well, we'd still be in trouble if we got caught.”

“Let's not get caught, then.” Kira grinned.

“I'm serious,” I told her. “You just got here. You don't want to get off on the wrong foot with Nina.”

“I'll be careful. I can handle this. I've done worse.”

I was about to ask, “Like what?” but before I could, down in the staging area, Nina turned toward me—as though she had sensed I was talking about her. She couldn't see Kira—but the sight of me simply sitting on the catwalk was enough to get her angry. “I told you to wait in my office!” she yelled.

“It's locked!” I called back.

Nina scowled and kept staring at me.

Kira took a step back, making sure she was out of Nina's eye line, then mused, “I wonder if
she
had something to do with Dr. Holtz's death. It's kind of suspicious, ordering everyone
not
to investigate a murder, isn't it?”

I started to deny this, but then thought about it. I put my hand over my mouth, trying to look thoughtful as I covered my lips. “You're right. It is.”

“So let me help, then. I'm pretty good with computers myself.”

“Can you hack?”

“Yeah, a bit. What do you need?”

“The security tapes of Dr. Holtz going out the air lock this morning.”

Kira frowned. “Oh. That's not going to be easy.”

“I know. I'm not sure if even Roddy can do it.”

In the staging area, Nina started heading my way.

“Nina's coming!” I warned. “Better go before she sees you.”

Kira didn't question this. She quickly ducked back into her room. “I'll see what I can get you.” There was a gleam of excitement in her eye as she closed the door.

Nina reached the base of the stairs. If Kira had been a half second slower, Nina would have seen her. Instead Nina only saw me, sitting by myself. She came up the steps to the catwalk. I hopped to my feet to meet her.

“Who were you talking to?” Nina asked.

Apparently, covering my mouth with my hand hadn't fooled her. “Violet,” I lied, pointing down to the rec room. “She was down there. She came out into the hall and wanted to know where our parents were. I told her and she went back in.”

Nina cased both levels of the hallway, trying to determine if I was lying. The halls were empty; there was no one else around for her to presume I'd been talking to.

Nina shifted her attention back to me. “I want you to go into your room and stay there. You're grounded until I say otherwise.”

“What?”
 I asked. “You can't do that! You're not my mom!”

“At this base I have the authority to delegate any punishment I see fit. I gave you a direct order to stay out of the staging area and you disobeyed it.”

“What was I supposed to do? Let the Sjobergs beat me up?”

“Do you know how difficult it was to requisition those eggs?” Nina demanded. “NASA didn't want to send them. I spent hours working every angle I could. They were going to be a treat for everyone up here. A special reward for their hard work. And now that's not going to happen. Every last egg is broken, and after this disaster NASA will never agree to ship any more. Which means it will be three years until I taste a fresh egg again!”

Oh,
I thought,
so that's what all this is about.
For all her posturing that I had disobeyed orders, Nina was really upset that she'd lost her precious eggs. Sure, she was claiming she'd requested them for everyone, but she wouldn't have spent hours on it unless she'd really wanted them herself. I understood where she was coming from, though. We all have our own food obsessions at MBA. You have no idea what you'll
really
miss until you get here. Personally, I'd have thought I would want ice cream more than anything else. But now that I'm on the moon, for some reason I always find myself craving picante sauce. I couldn't imagine what would happen if a jar had been shipped up for me and then ended up broken. I might have been desperate enough to lick everything up off the floor.

And yet I was still ticked off that I was getting punished for this—while the Sjobergs were getting off scot-free because they were rich. “What am I supposed to do in my room all day?” I asked.

“You haven't updated your video log in over a week,” Nina told me. “Start with that.”

“That'll only take five minutes,” I protested.

“No,” Nina said, “I want you to take your time with this. Think about it very carefully. Don't say one word about Dr. Holtz's death being suspicious—”

“You mean, I can't say anything about his death?”

“You're welcome to talk about it. In fact, I encourage you to. The public knows about the death by now and they're eager to hear what we all have to say. So tell them what a great man Dr. Holtz was. Let them know you're upset he's gone. But do not, under any circumstances, even
hint
that there might have been foul play. I'm going to review your video before you post it, and if I don't like it, I'll have you do it again. So don't take this lightly. No crazy stories about moondragons or finding hoards of green cheese today. Is that clear?”

“Crystal,” I muttered, then headed into my room and slammed the door behind me.

Nina might have been upset about her eggs, but she'd used the incident to manipulate me in a big way. By grounding me, she was shutting down any chance I had to investigate Dr. Holtz's death—or to recruit anyone else to help me. And by demanding that I compose a video log about Dr. Holtz, Nina was forcing me to publicly back her side of the story. If I decided to push the murder angle later, I'd come across as fickle.

I found myself thinking about Kira's suggestion. If Nina truly had been involved in Dr. Holtz's death, she was certainly in a great position to cover her tracks. She was doing everything in her power to muzzle me and derail any investigation.

I sat at the SlimScreen table. Instead of starting my video log, I said, “Computer, get me all information you can on Nina Stack.”

“It vould be my pleasure!” the computer exclaimed. It instantly opened a ComLink and brought up a dozen web pages about Nina. I figured there was no harm in using a ComLink now. It wasn't like Nina could punish me any more than she had already.

Now that the Link was open, I discovered that I had hundreds of messages as well. Virtually everyone I knew on earth had reached out to me after hearing about Dr. Holtz's death. I read a few. They all said basically the same thing:
Heard the news. Thinking about you. Let me know how you are.

Riley Bock had left a dozen messages herself. With all the excitement, I'd forgotten that I'd promised to call her that day. It would have to wait a little longer, though; I had investigating to do.

I scanned through the web pages about Nina, but there was nothing I didn't already know. Either Nina had never done anything wrong in her life, or NASA had completely whitewashed her history. Whatever the case, every biography of Nina was glowing. She was a decorated soldier, a clever scientist, a highly respected employee, and the top choice to command MBA: competent, straitlaced, and honest as could be.

But then all of our official bios read like that. First, NASA truly had sought out extremely well-behaved people to serve at MBA, not wanting any chance of scandal. And then, if we had ever misbehaved, even a bit, NASA had scrubbed any mention of that from our records. For example, at school on earth I'd been sent to the principal's office plenty of times, but according to my bio I'd been a model student. It made me sound like a Boy Scout.

However, someone at MBA obviously wasn't as moral as their bio claimed, because they'd murdered Dr. Holtz. Either they'd hidden their true nature or NASA had hidden it for them. Whatever the case, I probably wasn't going to find any dirt on them online.

“Has anyone at MBA ever done anything wrong?” I sighed.

“Your sister once put chewing gum in ze rehydrator,” the computer replied.

“Right.” I'd forgotten about that. Violet had broken the machine, forcing us all to eat nonhydrated food cubes for two days until Mr. Grisan could fix it. “I meant the adults.”

“Lars Sjoberg is rumored to have done some shady things in his business dealings.”

I straightened up, annoyed at myself for not thinking of the Sjobergs first. “Show me what you've got.”

Hundreds of web pages popped open, so quickly I worried
they might overwhelm the ComLink. I spent the next hour reading through them.

In his business Lars had been accused of everything from ignoring environmental laws to bribing government officials to violating oil embargoes. However, none of the charges had ever stuck. Inevitably, someone below Lars at his company ended up taking the fall, while Lars himself came out unscathed. He was known to say, “When you're on the top of the heap, lots of people will try to drag you down to their level”—and yet it was hard to believe that a fundamentally good person would have been accused of so many bad things. Instead Lars came across as someone who'd behaved badly time and time again, but who had the wealth and power to avoid getting in trouble.

Could Lars Sjoberg have killed Dr. Holtz? It wasn't hard to imagine him committing murder. He was basically the worst person I'd ever met. Plus he had a volcanic temper and was prone to fits of rage that shook the entire base.

And now that I thought about it, Patton and Lily Sjoberg were also volatile and violent. I wondered if either one of them was capable of murder too.

I rubbed my eyes, which were bleary from reading. “Computer, can you bring up the news?” I asked.

“Of course,
mein Herr
.” The web page for the
New York Times
appeared. (When my parents were kids, there were lots
of newspapers, one for almost every city. Now in America only the
Times
is left.) As I'd suspected, Dr. Holtz's death was the lead story. I tapped on the headline, which instantly linked to a video report.

Footage of Dr. Holtz training for his mission to MBA appeared, while a reporter began, “Dr. Ronald Holtz, a lunarnaut on Moon Base Alpha and a highly respected professor, died this morning during a routine moonwalk at the base.”

“Routine?” I repeated, surprised. Obviously NASA was covering up the real details of the death. Or maybe Nina had hidden the details from NASA.

A telephone's ring interrupted the news report. Then a message flashed:
INCOMING CALL. RILEY BOCK.

After so much time focusing on the Sjobergs, I was ready for a friendly face. I accepted the call.

The news story automatically muted and shifted to the background while Riley's face popped up in a central window. Her sister, Eliza, who is two years younger than us, was right next to her. They were speaking to me on Riley's smartwatch while their car automatically drove them someplace—probably the beach, knowing the Bocks. (Ever since cars started driving themselves, parents have been letting them chaperone kids.) It was gorgeously sunny, as usual; the girls were wearing bikini tops, board shorts, and sunglasses.

The phone service on the moon isn't bad. In fact I can get a better connection from MBA than I could from a lot of places in Hawaii. However, the signal has to travel 238,900 miles between earth and the moon, so it takes a few seconds between the time you speak and the time the other person hears it. Then there are another few seconds after they speak until you hear them. Originally this was difficult to deal with; we ended up talking over each other all the time. But after a while we got used to it. Since I speak to Riley every few days, she knows the routine.

“Hey,” she said. “Is everything all right? I left you a ton of messages.”

“Sorry. I didn't get them until an hour ago. They wanted us off the ComLink.”

“Oh. Guess it's been an exciting day up there.”

“Yeah, for once.” NASA usually has censors eavesdrop on our personal calls, but I've learned I can get away with insulting the base if I make it sound like sarcasm.

“I'm serious,” Riley said. “Are you doing okay? Did you know the guy?”

“There are only twenty-two people here. Of course I knew him.”

“You know what she means!” Eliza said. “Did you hang out with him or was he just some old coot who never paid attention to you?”

My eyes flicked to the news footage of Dr. Holtz. It was now showing him boarding the rocket for the launch to the moon. He looked as happy as anyone could be, beaming in his space suit, waving cheerfully to the cameras.

“Somewhere in between,” I admitted. “Since he was a lot older, he hung out more with the other adults than any of us kids. But he was always really nice to me. Everyone really liked him.”

“Oh,” Riley said. “Well, I'm sorry he's gone. Are you guys gonna have a funeral for him?”

“To be honest, I have no idea. I don't know if anyone's even thought about that yet.”

“Are you gonna bury him there?” Eliza asked. “Is he gonna be, like, the first dead guy laid to rest on the moon?”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“So what are you gonna do?” Eliza demanded. “Shoot him into space?”

“I doubt it. Though I think Dr. Holtz might have liked that idea.”

“Well, it's all over the news down here,” Riley reported. “Like being the first human to die on the moon makes you a hero somehow. So we figured we'd check in.”

“Thanks,” I said. “What are you up to? Surfing?”

“You know it. Kohala. Looks like an epic break today. Check it.” Riley turned her smartwatch so I could see they
were arriving at the beach. On cue a perfect wave came in, a beautiful blue curl.