Girl on the Moon (34 page)

“I’ll explain everything, I promise. Just please don’t move.” He withdrew.

As Conn spun around to question him again, something ripped through the bun of hair on top of her head. Simultaneously, a woman screeched as Brett Lipton staggered forward and fell on his face, his dark hair wet and slick.

Conn dropped to a crouch and waddled quickly to what she hoped was safety. Asher Janus was on her in a second. Conn shook him off, calling for help. Wyatt, her other bodyguard, was there in an instant, and Conn pulled herself behind him.

Wyatt and Asher faced one another. “Whose side are you on?” Wyatt asked. Asher sneered at him, then recovered himself.

“I thought Conn was in danger,” he said, palms forward. “I put her where I felt she was safe.”

“You put me where they had a clean shot at me!” Conn shrieked.

“I was trying to help!”

Wyatt, unconvinced, got between Asher and Conn, and eyed Asher with a sneer of his own.

Conn let the police deal with Asher. She didn’t know whether to trust Wyatt, but she got enough sense that he and Asher were at odds over the attack that she warily allowed him to remain with her the rest of the night as the police took statements, and then to take her home.

Brett Lipton was dead on arrival at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Shot in the head.

February–March, 2036

There was a target on Conn’s back. She fired the company that provided her bodyguards, and brought in a new agency that operated on the east coast and not in California—one that wouldn’t have been compromised already. It cost a great deal extra, but it was worth it.

At the same time, she was under pressure from her lawyers to rein in expenses while Laura contested Peo’s will. But Gasoline Alley paid for itself, and the revenue from pressure fields was nothing short of astonishing (if unsustainable, once other companies perfected their development), so the company wasn’t bleeding money like it had been in the run-up to the Saturn and moon missions. And there was little question that Conn needed protection.

Far from silencing her, the assassination of Brett Lipton and her own close call made Conn more active in politics, and in pro-Pelorian activities. She authorized a marketing blitz for the pressure fields Dyna-Tech had developed. Advertisement wasn’t a necessary expense as yet; everyone who could use a pressure field knew where to get them. But Conn’s aim was to demonstrate the good that had already come of a cooperative relationship with the Pelorians.

A sixty-second spot during the broadcast of Super Bowl LXX in late February demonstrated the technology, branded by Dyna-Tech as SafeTfields, or T-fields. One segment showed a man with a camera (inside the pressure field) walking through a white-hot, controlled chemical fire. One showed a woman swimming a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, in nothing but a wetsuit and breathing apparatus. One showed men and women working outside at Gasoline Alley. That was all possible now thanks to Pelorian technology. As for the future: one segment looked forward to when aircraft would be fitted with the tech; one portrayed an open-vehicle orbital tour of the moon; and one showed a hale, street-clothed man at the summit of a mountain.

Luan Yongpo was fascinated by his work with Dyna-Tech and eager to be part of the solution to the fifth-dimensional travel problem, but Conn could also see that he was lonely and suffering from culture shock. She began taking him out for dinner and to hockey games and movies. She enjoyed their time together, and he wasn’t too freaked out by the bodyguard that always accompanied them.

Conn believed him when he said that he didn’t strike the deal for nitrogen power. The Pelorians only asked him questions about China’s government, how it saw its place in the world, who it considered allies and potential enemies—Yongpo was nervous that he’d given them classified information, as flustered and distraught as he had been. “We know all about the United States,” they told him. “Not your nation.” He had no idea what China was giving the Pelorians in exchange for the nitrogen power technology. He was out of the loop even before he defected.

Nor did he take off from the moon and abandon Conn of his own volition. He hadn’t even been looking for her—he didn’t know she was in trouble. He lifted off when ordered, even though the timing was wrong and he had to wait an hour and a half for a rendezvous with his command module.

Conn asked whether Cai Fang might have sabotaged her lander before he died, and Yongpo looked stricken. He genuinely didn’t believe Cai had anything to do with Conn’s almost being marooned on the moon.

Conn didn’t anymore, either. She believed she had dated and slept with the person who had tried to kill her. It made her sick. The damage she, and only she, could do to the US propaganda machine by accurately translating their snippets of Pelorian language into English (and by being the most famous woman in the world) made her a unique threat. They wanted her to stop, in the very worst way. Marooning her on the moon hadn’t worked, so now they were taking a more conventional approach to killing her.

In March, the Pelorians on the moon shot down an unmanned reconnaissance probe, one of several launched over the months by the US government.

Perhaps the Pelorians thought it was there to bomb them; perhaps they were just sick of all the probes flying by. Either way, the government accepted the gift, and Congress declared war.

Conn was ordered by the US District Court for the Northern District of California to cease all activities which might give aid and comfort to the Pelorians. She had her lawyers appeal the order to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where a three-judge tribunal ruled two to one that the overbroad order violated Conn’s rights of free speech and conscience. An emergency
en banc
hearing was held, and the court as a whole upheld the decision.

Congress then passed a law stripping the Ninth Circuit Court of its appellate jurisdiction over orders of the lower court respecting Pelorians. The court order against Conn was reinstated.

Conn tiptoed around the order for ten days, doing nothing that could reasonably, or even unreasonably, be perceived as pro-Pelorian. On the eleventh day, she gave an interview limited to the subject of SafeTfield technology. Conn and the interviewer were both careful, and the interview went smoothly.

The government, having waited more than a week for Conn to do something contrary to the order, sprung. Conn was arrested for violating the order by marketing and promoting Pelorian technology. She was remanded to the Federal Correctional Institution at Dublin, California. The government initiated an audit of all her assets. After two weeks, which set a land speed record for audits, the US District Court ordered those assets frozen, Dyna-Tech prominently among them. There was no money to pay salaries or overhead. It was all tied up by the court.

Even in a federal women’s prison, Conn was mostly treated with reverence. There were inmates—and guards—who enjoyed the
schadenfreude
of the world-famous girl wonder behind bars, but enough inmates thought she was badass that she was able to pass her time without any incidents. In fact, her life was intolerably monotonous. She read, she wrote letters, did puzzles. At first, she did not want to be any part of exercise time outside with other inmates, but it wasn’t long before she started running just to keep her muscles working.

With time to do a lot of thinking, she formulated a theory that stuck with her: there hadn’t been an infiltration of American society by Pelorian avatars at all. Julian the assistant
NewsAmerica
producer had been paid by the US government to drop his bombshell, in order to establish a pretense for war. Conn knew better than most that the government was capable of just about anything.

Jody visited her on two occasions, and told her to hang in there. Skylar Reece, Hunter Valence, and other Dyna-Tech officers came once as a group. Otherwise, her visits were mostly from her lawyer. The lawyer, a severe, competent woman named Hannah Ryan, claimed to be doing everything she could to get the freeze of assets lifted enough for Dyna-Tech to at least meet payroll; that result never materialized.

Yongpo came to see her. They were both warned against conversing in Basalese, but Yongpo had developed enough English proficiency to make simple conversation possible.

“You are well?”

“I am. Thank you.”

“We keep working on fifth-dimensional problem.”

“I can’t pay you right now.”

“One or two people do not keep working, but we most do.”

“How are you going to pay for things? Your rent?”

“George Tyrell, he said when necessary I come live with him.”

Conn started to say something, but it caught in her throat. Finally, she asked, “What about the spacecraft?”

“Almost done. Two more weeks. Contractors not working, but not much left to do. I wanted to ask you something.”

“Please do.”

“May we call the spacecraft the
Cai Fang
?”

At that, Conn broke down and cried.

March–April, 2036

The president suspended the writ of
habeas corpus
under her supposed wartime powers, and Conn was not publicly charged, arraigned, or brought to the surface at all. She was thankful for the ability to see her lawyer and receive visitors.

The need to meet Dyna-Tech payroll was becoming more urgent as the
Bebop
got closer to Saturn. Hannah Ryan worked with NASA to make sure the Saturn mission got the support it needed from the agency instead of Dyna-Tech. Ryan then moved to request yet another hearing on unfreezing Conn’s assets to the extent necessary to meet payroll, support the Saturn mission, and provide maintenance, repair, and support services in space. Her motion, as always, was denied. And in an off-the-record meeting, the federal prosecutor assigned to Conn’s case, Assistant District Attorney William Drury, told Ryan the government was perfectly happy to have Conn in jail and her assets frozen for the foreseeable future.

“Divestiture,” Ryan said to Conn. “You have to get rid of the company. If you weren’t the owner anymore, I guarantee Drury would unfreeze. He’s clearly under orders to make sure you can’t ever use it. He even told me off the record that he could let you go. The government just doesn’t want you to have the money to make yourself heard whenever you want to.”

“Then sell it,” Conn said. “But I want to know it’s going somewhere where it won’t be broken up and sold off in pieces. Make sure whoever gets it wants it to keep working.” Conn felt like a failure, surrendering Peo’s legacy to get herself out of jail. But she could at least make sure the company kept going, for some length of time anyway.

But the process of finding a buyer, even at a lower-than-market price, was long and slow. And it wasn’t happening fast enough. At an update meeting with Ryan, Conn reached back into her paralegal training and pulled out a rabbit: “if I withdraw my defense to Laura’s lawsuit, does she win summary judgment? Giving her everything?”

“That would be the effect, yes. Let me confirm with Drury that that will satisfy him. But Conn—you’ll have nothing.”

“I’ll have what I had before Peo died.”
Except Peo
. “About eight thousand dollars in an IRA, a degree in aerospace engineering, and experience landing on the moon. I’ll be fine.”

Drury agreed to have the assets unfrozen if Conn didn’t own and didn’t use them. Conn dropped her defense and Laura won her challenge to the will.

Then, she learned that Drury’s authorization to release her from prison had been overruled.

Conn’s people would get paid, full back pay if they had shown up for work during the asset freeze. Crews could swap out at Gasoline Alley, where some Dyna-Tech contractors had been effectively stranded. And the Saturn mission would get operational control on the ground. A big win for everybody, all in all.

Except for the person who gave it all away.

Conn was still a guest of the federal government on April 10 when the
Bebop
achieved orbit around Saturn. The crew had been seeing the ringed planet, bigger and bigger each day, for weeks as they approached, but Conn’s first sight of it was in a common room where well-behaved inmates were allowed to watch the feeds.

She had to remember to breathe. The planet was magnificent—would have been magnificent without the rings. But the rings...

The planet itself was a series of pastel oranges, yellows, golds, pinks, creamy whites, in stripes around its lower half. From the angle the
Bebop
approached, the northern hemisphere was in shadow, but glowing purple aurorae made a soft accent mark along the northernmost edge. Conn realized belatedly that they might not be looking at Saturn in such a way that north was “up.” But the dark hemisphere looked northern to her.

The rings were the color of the planet, only in muted sepia. From the angle of approach, they seemed to grow out of the planet’s southern hemisphere and surround the planet boisterously—an exaggerated, cartoon effect. This close to the sunlight reflecting off the planet, there were no stars visible. Saturn’s shadow on the rings was the same deep shade as sky, as if the rings had a chunk taken out of them.

One of the astronauts superimposed a picture of Earth over the view, then shrunk it roughly to scale—and Conn could barely see it on the prison monitor. Saturn was truly massive, its rings jutting out the distance of several Earths.

What Conn was seeing and hearing had happened an hour and a half earlier, Saturn being some eighty-one light minutes from Earth, and Dyna-Tech previewing the feed before sending it out to the public. The astronauts were narrating the experience, and their words were captioned on the screen. Though Conn couldn’t hear well, it was clear from the transcription that the astronauts were enjoying themselves. Conn felt happy for them, and a pang of longing to be part of it, any part.

The camera panned right, and lit upon a smoky, surreal moon, little more than a thumbprint’s smudge. It had a pea soup-green pallor, and Conn guessed it was Titan
moments before “Titan” appeared on the feed screen. The camera panned left until Saturn once more filled its view, then zoomed in on a fleck of light that appeared to be underneath the rings. By the time it was done, the rings dominated the top half of the screen with a tiny sphere of ice beneath: “Tethys,” Conn said aloud, as “Tethys” appeared on the screen. They would look for evidence of life on Tethys, although humankind already knew all too well that they were not alone in the universe.