Space Case: Chapters 16–21

Well, as you know, there are hundreds of robots at work here, especially at night. They run all sorts of maintenance tasks while we’re asleep: calibrating the evaporators, checking the seals on the exterior of the base for oxygen leaks, cleaning the solar arrays, and so on.

Children are prohibited from venturing outside MBA unless an emergency has compromised the safety of the base.

Nowadays the suit itself is perfectly insulated, which means the person inside is much less constricted.

Several well-trod paths snaked through the moon dust from the air lock. The one we wanted veered right, then branched into two others.

One of these went directly to the large white dome of the moon-rover garage, while ours continued straight, threading the gap between MBA and the garage, then banked left to circumvent the science pod.

The panel toppled and shattered, strewing glass all over the lunar surface.

Instead of simply trying to squash me flat, the hand suddenly extended its fingers and swooped in sideways. It was like being slapped by King Kong. One of the huge metal digits caught me flush in the chest and I went flying.

I skidded across the surface, leaving a deep trough through the moon dust, until I slammed helmet-first into a large rock, which stopped me dead.

A tiny web of fractures had appeared where I’d impacted the rock, looking like the divot a stone leaves in a windshield. But the cracks were spreading.

A small crack extended from the impact point, spreading across the glass like the fissure of a miniature earthquake.

On earth the detour would have taken only a few seconds, if that. But it was much harder to change direction on the moon. I skidded in the dust once as I tried to stop my forward momentum, and again as I tried to grab the phone, squandering precious seconds each time.

The fingertips scraped the base hard enough to furrow the wall as they swept past.

The arm had slammed into the garage so hard the wall had collapsed, and the arm was now tangled in the wreckage. It was jerking about, trying to wrest itself free.

“You think that's funny? Well it's not! This is a serious violation of protocol!”

In the unlikely event of an emergency, it is imperative to respect the chain of command.

The base commander has had far more training in emergency procedures than anyone else, has studied all possible crisis scenarios, and will be the primary liaison with Mission Control in the event of trouble.

Therefore, in a state of emergency, any orders issued by the base commander must be followed immediately. Failure to do so will be considered mutinous behavior and will be punishable upon return to earth.

My parents hugged me tightly and fawned over me, at once relieved to see that I was alive, annoyed that I’d done something so risky, and angry at Nina for how she was treating me.

“We all know you’re afraid of a scandal here, but there is now irrefutable evidence that there is a killer on the loose at this base! So stop pretending that Dr. Holtz’s death might have been an accident and face the facts!”

“I’m ordering you,” Nina growled. “As is my right as base commander, per the bylaws of Moon Base Alpha, section seventy-eight, subheading A. Anyone who sees fit to violate that order will be locked in the medical bay with Dr. Holtz's corpse and held there until I see fit. Is that understood?”

Given our time constraints, with there possibly being a killer on the loose and all, I only focused on the most recent items stored, figuring those would be the most relevant.

“Well, the audio’s garbage too,” Nina muttered.
She was right. What we could hear pitched back and forth between garbled speech and a loud static buzz that sounded like a nest of giant hornets.

“You might have fooled everyone else,” Dr. Holtz said on the video, “but not me. I figured out what you were really here for shortly after we all got to the moon.”
“And what might that be?” the other person asked coyly.

Another wave of elation rippled through the control room.

The only person who didn’t seem excited was the other person on the video. Their voice barely modulated, as though Dr. Holtz had just told them something routine, such as “I like bagels.”

“Well, it’s not your decision,” Dr. Holtz said defiantly. “It’s mine. I’m revealing that I’ve made contact today—and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

I have a lot of people at my disposal down on earth. And at this very moment a team of them is positioned outside your daughter’s home.

Computers could make mistakes. Despite all the amazing things they were capable of, they were still fallible. The base computer misunderstood and misinterpreted things all the time.

“Who?” they demanded.
“Well,” I hedged, “I’m not one hundred percent sure—”

He no longer looked like the reserved, meek man we knew. That had all been an act.

“That’s not possible,” Nina said.
“It is now,” Mr. Grisan told her. “I overrode the safety protocols. Although I won’t do anything unless you force me to.”

Any life from another planet is most likely hostile—and any contact they make with us, no matter how friendly it seems, is most likely a ruse to learn our weaknesses.

Dr. Holtz was just like you: a naive optimist, thinking his alien contact couldn’t possibly be dangerous.

“You’re the one who’s threatening our lives! You’re the one responsible for Dr. Holtz’s death! And you have the gall to accuse the aliens of being monsters? They couldn’t possibly be any worse than you!”

Dad and Nina were pinning Mr. Grisan down while he writhed angrily and told us what fools we all were.

The brochures for MBA had displayed artists’ renderings of a greenhouse so thick with plant growth it was practically a rain forest. In real life, the greenhouse looked more like the Great Plains after a drought.

All around me straggly bits of greenery struggled to survive.

There were a thousand questions in my head, all vying to be asked at once.

“Yes. It was a serious breach of protocol, but I feared there was no other way to find out. I wanted to know the truth, but no one else here seemed willing to investigate the death—except you. Though I figured you might need a little push.”

“I never trusted that guy. He always seemed shiftier than a Neptunian Blorkbeast.”