Girl on the Moon (30 page)

“What about the rest of the world?”

“This is a...situation unique to the US, Hayley,” Julian said.

Hayley seemed startled. She recovered quickly: “why target the US?”

“I’m not privy to the logic behind it,” Julian said. “Just that there are few if any avatars living outside the US.”

“You need Social Security numbers,” Hayley said. Julian nodded. “School records.” Another nod. Julian could not be provoked into talking in detail about all the presumably forged documentation an avatar would need.

“Are you speaking here today officially for your people?”

“No,” Julian said. “Relatedly, I don’t know if I’ll be in tomorrow.”

Needless to say, Conn and Bowman had been effectively shut out of the rest of the conversation, as Hayley Brigham landed the first interview with a Pelorian whose avatar lived among the US population.

The Pelorian behind the avatar was named Believing. He revealed that avatars had been part of the population for more than ten years, as his race studied ours. But he was maddeningly coy: “That’s a question for the machinists,” he repeated, or “I don’t have detailed knowledge.” What he did say was that his overall impression of human beings was favorable. Most of them, he and his 150,000 comrades, had avatars back home as well—alter egos that were more attractive, healthier, in better shape. So no, it wasn’t a huge sacrifice to come to Earth to do the same thing. It was exciting, and a thrill to learn so much about a different culture.

Had Hayley Brigham been prepared for having such an opportunity dropped in her lap, she would probably have come up with better, more provocative questions. But in a way it didn’t matter: the takeaway was that one’s neighbor, classmate, colleague, or cousin
might be an avatar. The revelation cost the national economy three days’ productivity while everyone obsessed about how many people in their lives were not human.

Some who had tuned in expressly for the debate (within ten minutes of Believing’s appearance, viewership had quintupled) were convinced that Bowman had won. After all, he’d been right. There were avatars among us. And for what benevolent purpose would the Pelorians secretly infiltrate American society?

The Pelorians were quick to deny everything, but obviously without consulting their PR people first. They officially called Julian’s accusations “at best, misleading.” There was enough daylight between “at best, misleading” and a categorical denial that the official statement hurt more than it helped.

People were frightened. Curious. Angry. Bewildered. And so was Conn. The next day, like most employers, she ordered a more comprehensive background check of her key officers. Owing to demand, it was said that it would be weeks before there were any results. Conn bought herself to the front of the line, and all her key people were cleared: they had living direct relatives who were interviewed, or they had left such a trail of evidence throughout their lives—middle school yearbooks, items in church newsletters, employee of the month awards—that it was inconceivable that all of it was phony.

(
NewsAmerica
gravely reported that a thorough investigation into the background of Julian the assistant producer came up with almost none of that kind of minutiae from what should have been his early life. However, they quickly added, he had all the important stuff—everything he would need to get hired and be employed.)

Conn didn’t want to think about the possibility, raised almost gleefully by Bowman supporters, that the Pelorians were body snatchers, “replacing” people. The beings she met on the moon were not capable of such an atrocity. But like most people, she got lost in the middle of wondering who might be an avatar.

When her head was clearer, she was frustrated that the debate had turned out the way it did. Particularly the part where people thought she’d lost. She had to stanch her company’s bleeding from the million cuts Bowman and his followers delivered.

She made a call impetuously, but it was a call she had considered making in the back of her mind for weeks: to NASA Director Nate Petan.

Conn got to the point. “Did you hear the avatar the other night avoiding the question about what’s happening on the moon? The Russians are launching probes in August, yes? Let’s have them find us a landing spot, and let’s go back,” Conn said. She shuddered with a momentary thrill at the idea. “To the far side this time.”

“There are certainly those in Washington who think it would be worth the cost. Until they hear what the cost is.”

“I can’t finance it, but I can get you to the space station on a Dyna-Tech rocket, if you can take it from there.”

“So you want me to pay. And let me guess, you have a crew in mind.”

“Daniels and I should land. We’ve met them before, and we speak the language.”

Petan was silent for long moments. “You get everybody to the space station. I’ll pay for you to build another lander. I don’t have the vehicles, and Europe doesn’t care if there are a bunch of avatars in America. I’ll get approval for the rest.”

“You’re a doll, Nate,” Conn said, and when she hung up, she was smiling for the first time in a long time.

Jody loved his new job, working with a bright, energetic team to find ways to exploit pressure field tech in new ways. It wasn’t long before he decided he wanted to come out to California to be with his coworkers in person. That almost exactly coincided with Conn heading to Houston and Brownsville for the next five months, but they got to eat a couple meals together.

“Do you think Pritam is one?” Conn asked him over lunch, about a week and a half after her appearance on Hayley Brigham’s feed.

“No.”

“Who do you think is?”

“Honestly? I don’t get what the big fat deal is. It’s not like anybody married an avatar—and no, I don’t think the Pelorians would have done that, and anybody who says they did marry one is trying to sell a story. So some tangential people in my life might have been aliens. I hope they learned what they wanted to learn. Buh-bye.”

“I guess it’s more that the country has had one put over on it.”

“Not the first time,” Jody mumbled.

The US government seemed unsure whether to reassure people that, yes, they knew all about this, everything’s under control, or act like they’d found out at the same time as the rest of the country. Since they couldn’t decide, they did a little of both. Conn was skeptical that anyone in the government had known about the avatars; it would have come out, even as a discreditable conspiracy theory.

Conn had to testify before the US Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space to explain what she was going to do with all the money they were ready to throw at her. The committee made it clear that she was making this trip not as a private citizen, but as a duly appointed agent of the United States. Conn gravely accepted her responsibilities.

They would use the same command module as Conn’s previous mission, and once again, Jake would be the pilot. Five months to build a new lander was pushing it, but her people would get it done, at NASA’s expense.

In August, Russian probes went to the moon. They beamed back some interesting pictures from orbit. They located a good spot for Conn and Daniels to land. A relatively flat area not far from the forty-by-forty kilometer fortress the aliens were building.

August, 2035

The Pelorians were walling in a kilometer-tall mountain along the rim of the enormous crater Hertzsprung. Inside the perimeter, they looked to be burrowing under the mountain, though there were plenty of vehicles and equipment visible inside the compound. There were also what looked like enormous antiaircraft guns rimming the barrier. Conn shuddered when she imagined them aimed at their lander on its way down.

There was debate over whether to land inside or outside the walled perimeter. Conn’s preference, to land outside, prevailed. It was true that for the trip to be worth the cost, she and Daniels would have to get inside the fence. Conn’s plan was to ask nicely. She stuck to the belief the Pelorians had some benevolent purpose. Daniels was vocally skeptical, but was grudgingly won over by Conn’s logic. It would be easier to go from trusting to not trusting than to burn bridges right away and only then discover the Pelorians had been on their side. Conn knew well from her experience in the Arctic Circle that a single incident could turn the aliens against them.

The photos of the lunar reconnaissance were classified; it had taken a great deal of delicate maneuvering to get the Russians to share them at all. But that didn’t stop them from getting out.

As sky-high as the Pelorians’ popularity had been just a year before, it hit bottom now. The photos clearly showed a huge fortified area defended by some kind of weapons. The usual suspects stoked the belief that this must be meant as an act of war against Earth: Glenn Bowman was as smug as if he had actually been saying all along that the Pelorians were building a militarized fortress on the far side of the moon. But Conn had studied Bowman and learned his mannerisms, and she thought he seemed bewildered underneath the warlike rhetoric. She had the sense that he would have been happy for the Pelorian threat to remain something left to the imagination. He was a little out of his element now that the aliens might have turned genuinely aggressive.

Conn didn’t want to think about the implications if the Pelorians really were preparing to attack Earth. If so, she and Daniels might not make it out of the command module, or might not reach the surface at all. But blowing them out of the lunar sky didn’t seem like something the Pelorians she knew would do. Had they changed that much? Or fooled her that completely?

It was amid these troubling thoughts that, almost exactly one year after her first moon landing, she sat with Jake and Daniels on an Strummer I-IV rocket, ready to do it all again all alone on the far side of the moon. Nobody would be able to talk to them there. Nobody would be able to help them.

No aborts this time. The Strummer I-IV rocket launched without incident. The four- to five-G press was more tolerable for Conn this time. With all the rocketing to the space station she’d done, her body knew it was temporary, and didn’t send as many panic signals to her brain. The crew’s SSIV docked at the space station, and the three of them clambered out and into command module
Rocinante
. The lander was called
Dapple
.

As anxious as they were to get underway, the three of them went through the preflight inspection checklist item by item. Their concession to the hurry they were in was that they went through the checklist only among themselves, off-radio. For obvious reasons, Conn found herself keenly interested in the starter for the lander’s ascent engines. It was in good shape, as was the rest of the lander and command module.

As they completed their checklists, Conn saw someone at a window inside the space station, waving frantically to get their attention. She pointed him out to Jake. Jake tuned back in to the space station’s frequency, then blinked and gawped at what he heard.

Turning back to the moon frequency, he told Conn and Daniels, “There’s what they’re calling a
swarm
of Pelorian spacecraft inbound. Heading this way.” Daniels and Conn looked at one another. Daniels chuckled nervously.

“Doesn’t have anything to do with us. It can’t,” he said. But the spacecraft had gotten the astronauts’ attention. Jake told the workers to hurry it up.

Since they were in zero-G, Conn was able to pull herself up to the command module’s navigation telescope and look in the general direction of the moon. She saw nothing. Daniels took her place and shook his head.

Jake got back on the radio to the station. “Where’s this
swarm
coming from? We don’t see it.”

“Your four o’clock,” was the response.

Jake took a look. “Shit on a shingle,” he said. “At least a dozen. I don’t know how big they are, so I can’t tell how far out.”

Conn shouldered him aside. She’d seen plenty of Pelorian shuttles. She gasped. “I don’t think those are shuttles. I don’t know how far away they are, either, but it’s not far enough,” she said. “Are those guys done out there yet?”

“They’re going over their checklist.”

“Can we afford to wait?” Daniels asked. A NASA veteran, Daniels would normally be the most rigid of the three of them when it came to checklists.

“They can’t be coming because of us,” Jake said. “Why would they be? How would they even know?”

“The feeds would have told them we were going to the moon,” Conn said. “But not when. Not now.” The world knew a team would go to the moon to reconnoiter the Pelorian fortress, but details were classified.

Jake radioed the contractors to clear away. They objected. Conn switched to their frequency. “This is Conn Garrow. The person who pays you. Unhook us now and get out of the way.”

Jake barely waited for confirmation they were untethered before he goosed a maneuvering jet. Conn hit the wall. Daniels hit her.

“Sorry,” Jake growled. “Strap in.”

They no longer needed a telescope to see the inbound craft. The ships winked in the sunlight, in roughly a rectangle formation, three rows of four. The astronauts heard Gasoline Alley operations trying to warn the inbound craft to slow down, as well as protesting to Jake that it was unsafe to proceed out.

“I’ve never seen this kind of spacecraft before,” Conn said. They had aggressive, harsh angles, noses shaped like bee stingers, and intimidating protuberances Conn imagined were weapons. It was as though someone had ordered a squadron of spacecraft that were exactly the opposite of the Pelorians’ friendly-looking “rocketships.”

“So they could be OK,” Daniels said. “We really don’t know what they are.”

“We’re not going to find out,” Jake said, clearing the docking bay and dropping below the plane of the space station’s orbit. “Hang on.” He fired an attitude jet, and
Rocinante
shuddered.

The Pelorian spacecraft each flared and fired jets propelling them in the direction of
Rocinante
. Some spacecraft broke formation and dipped down, seemingly to intercept the command module.