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  She was going too fast! She’d misjudged, and she was going to pass by completely. Carmen stuck out an arm as far as she could, reaching for the edge of the doorway. Her forearm slammed into the metal hard. She bit her lip to stop herself from yelling, and her arm was throbbing. She didn’t think she’d broken it, but it hurt like hell.

  The move had worked, though! She brought herself to a stop just a foot from the panel she needed. The man inside was moving now, pulling himself along the wall toward the doorway. She touched the panel, and another number lock display came up.

  Could it be the same number password? She tried it: one, two, three, four.

  The airlock doors snapped shut, slamming into place before the man could get out. A red light started flashing overhead, and a klaxon sounded an alarm. Shutting the door must have set off some sort of safeguard or alert. All the better, really – Carmen needed help on this. She wasn’t sure what to do with the man now, but there must be something they could do to help him. He was sick – she was a doctor. That made helping him her business, even if he was someplace that he wasn’t supposed to be.

  It took less than a minute for crew to respond to the alarm. Three of them jetted into the cargo hold. One of them was the man who had helped her across the dining area to the galley – Patrick. He pushed off hard from the same door she’d come in through, gliding to her side and pulling himself to a stop by the panel. He checked the panel quickly, shutting off the alarm. Then he turned to glare at her.

  “What did you think you were doing, playing with the airlock?” he barked. “You could have spaced yourself!”

  “I wasn’t playing with it!” she shot back. She was surprised at the sudden hostility. He’d seemed so nice, before. Why was he yelling at her now? “There’s a stowaway.”

  He blinked, and turned to look through the window into the inner airlock. “Damn it!” he said. “He’s infected, isn’t he.” It wasn’t a question. Everyone knew what the symptoms looked like, at this point.

  Carmen nodded anyway. “Yes.”

  Patrick grunted, and went back to the control panel. She watched over his shoulder, wondering what he was doing. She saw a question flash: Safety Override? For a moment she wondered what he was doing. Then the flashing red lights started again – this time, inside the airlock. The man she’d locked inside pounded on the door. She couldn’t make out what he was saying through the thick plating, but she could hear him shouting.

  Patrick pressed another button on the panel. It flashed. A handprint scanner appeared.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “The computer has safeguards,” he replied, his voice hollow. “Only someone with command authorization can open the airlock from outside, if it detects a living person inside the lock.” He reached out to place his hand on the print.

  Carmen caught his hand before he could complete the motion. “Wait – you’re going to open the airlock?” she asked. She couldn’t believe this was happening.

  He turned and looked her in the eyes. “You said it yourself: he has the virus. Do you have a cure?”

  “Well, no. But there must be something we can do!”

  “And risk all of us? You might be willing to risk the lives of everyone on this ship, but I can’t do that,” he said. “This mission is too important.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Carmen said. How could he be so cold? So cruel? You couldn’t just kill a person like that. It wasn’t right. And she’d trapped the man in there! If he just opened the airlock and jettisoned the sick man like so much trash, it would be her fault. She locked the door.

  “I have no choice,” Patrick said.

  “I’ll get the captain,” she said. “He won’t let you do this.”

  Patrick cocked an eyebrow at her. She heard a cough from behind her and looked over her shoulder. The two crewmen who’d come in with Patrick were there, floating right behind her. One of them was the source of the cough.

  “That is the captain, ma’am,” the crewman said.

  She blushed. How was she supposed to have known that? It didn’t make it any better, either. She’d been told the man running this ship was also in command of the moon base, running the entire mission. But he wasn’t the only important person out here. Her father was, too. She bit her lip, on the verge of telling him she’d tell her father on him. But the last thing she wanted to do was use the privilege that came with her father’s name.

  Besides, she realized that her father would undoubtedly be informed anyway. An incident like this – a sick stowaway – indicated a major breach in security somewhere. Reports would be filed. People would be questioned. The people in charge down on Earth would do everything they could to find out how he’d gotten aboard. Her father would be told.

  “Please,” she said at last. “There has to be another way?”

  His eyes softened, and for a moment thought she saw a crack in the ice. Then it was there again. “I wish there was,” he said. Then he pulled his hand free of hers, and placed it on the palm sensor.

  Carmen heard the sound of motors whirring somewhere in the airlock. A klaxon went off again. The sick man hammered on the door, screaming and shouting. Then there was a thunk, and the sound of rushing air. After that she heard nothing at all from inside the airlock. He was gone.

  She closed her eyes, crushed inside by the feeling of utter helplessness. She’d locked him in there. It was partly her fault that he was dead now. But what else could she have done? She couldn’t let him get out into the ship. She hadn’t had any alternatives.

  “You’ve made me party to murder,” she said softly.

  Patrick took her hand in his. She opened her eyes again. He was looking at her strangely. “No,” he said. “You did the right thing. You might have saved us all, by locking him in there.”

  It was small consolation. The man was still dead.

  “Come on,” he said. He sounded tired and empty. “Let me get you back to your seat.”

  Too many questions, and not enough answers. Patrick pulled himself forward into the ship’s cockpit after dropping the woman off. She seemed more than a little stunned by the experience, and he really couldn’t blame her. It was a nasty business. The place on his wrist where she’d grabbed him still felt warm. He remembered her pleading for the stowaway’s life. The look in her eyes, that intensity! If there was anything he could have done to give her what she wanted, he would have.

  Hell, he didn’t want to kill that man. That never should have happened in the first place. Nobody could get on board his ship without some outside help. Security was damned tight even during good times – which these were certainly not! So how had he gotten here? And what was he trying to accomplish?

  Amy was in her seat when he arrived. “Heard there was some trouble out back?” she asked.

  “Stowaway.”

  “Shit. Sick?”

  “Yup.”

  She reached for her buckles in reflex, getting ready to unbuckle and go – somewhere. He didn’t know where she was thinking to go. He waved her back into her seat. Everyone was so damned hair-trigger when it came to this virus. Even Amy, and she was level-headed as you could get. That’s why he had her as his second in command out here.

  “It’s dealt with,” he said.

  She stopped moving. Inhaled. Exhaled again. “OK,” she said.

  “A passenger spotted him, locked him in the airlock.” He slid into his seat and buckled himself down. His eyes scanned the computer screens displaying the ship’s status. Everything looked good.

  “What’re we going to do with him, Pat? We don’t have a place to quarantine sick people,” Amy said. She still looked worried. And it made sense to be. There were damned few really safe places left right now, and the moon happened to be one of them. He could understand not wanting to lose that sense of security.

  “He’s not going to be a problem, Amy,” Patrick replied. “I opened the outer airlock. He’s gone.”

  She gaped at him for a moment, then snappe
d her mouth closed before answering. “Jesus, Pat. You spaced him?”

  He turned back to his displays. The last thing he needed was more of this crap from someone else. He was still burning from having had to kill the man in the first place, and the verbal thrashing he got from the passenger only made it worse. “I don’t need this from you, Amy.”

  “No, of course not. Sorry,” she said. “Nothing else you could have done, Pat. Just…Jesus. I’m sorry.”

  It was the least crappy call of a few crappy calls. He pushed buttons on his console, trying to find something to occupy his mind. He was going to have a lot of spare time for the rest of the trip out to the base to consider what he’d done, and if it had really been the only good choice. Too much damned time. He found himself checking out the passenger manifest, wondering who that woman was. Finally he found her photo.

  “Was that who found the guy?” Amy asked, peeking over his shoulder at his screen.

  “Yeah,” he replied. And it could be trouble. Carmen Rosa. Rosa! Damn it, that was the doctor’s daughter. Not only was she supposed to be Doctor Rosa’s primary assistant, she was also the guy’s kid. Their one biggest VIP on this entire mission was that doc, and he’d already allowed his daughter to be in jeopardy. And pissed her off, too.

  In theory, he was going to remain in charge of the moon base. He knew the place. He knew the domes, knew the dangers, knew how to make things happen out there. But in practice, Doctor Rosa had been given pretty much unlimited budget and unlimited access to resources and personnel. So he knew damned well that if he pissed the good doctor off, his ass was going to be back on Earth faster than he could blink.

  And Earth didn’t even seem like a nice place to visit just now, let alone get permanently grounded on. He had sudden visions of being transferred to someplace in Texas, or some other major hot zone for the disease.

  “I think I ought to go back and fill Doctor Rosa in on what went down,” he said.

  “Yeah, sounds good,” Amy said. “I’ll hold down the fort till you get back.”

  The computer said that Rosa’s room was upper deck, first door on the starboard side. Patrick unbuckled and pushed his way back out of the cockpit. The cockpit door snapped open as he approached, and he floated out into an open space. There were small flights of stairs here, to use while in gravity. But out here in space? He could fly, here. He pushed off and glided effortlessly across to the hatch into the upper deck. That never got tiresome. Compared to walking, gliding around in space was like a dream. The only nightmare was the idea of being trapped back on Earth again. He’d stay out here forever, if he could. If they’d let him.

  But for health reasons, a year was the most they’d usually allow anyone to spend on the moon, and his time was already up a month ago. The powers-that-be in the US government ordered him to stay put until this crisis was over, but once they solved the virus issue he was due to be grounded. It might be years before he got another serious space mission again. There were lots of people trying for not a lot of spots.

  He reached Rosa’s door and knocked.

  “Enter,” said a muffled voice from inside.

  He opened the door. There was only one man inside the room – of everyone on this ship, only this one man merited a room to himself. The extra bunk was full of crates, carefully lashed to the wall so they wouldn’t budge. Supplies, Patrick guessed.

  The doctor himself was a slender man, wiry even. He wore glasses, had a mustache and tufts of hair near his ears, but was mostly bald on top. His skin had the same light brown tinge his daughter’s did. He was seat-belted into a chair, working on a computer on the room’s only desk when Patrick came in. Instead of being upset at the disturbance, he looked up with a smile that brightened his face in a way that Patrick couldn’t help but find appealing.

  “Yes? Can I help you?” Rosa asked.

  “I’m Patrick Wynn,” he replied. “We met, back on the ground, sir.”

  “Yes of course – our mission commander,” Rosa said. “I’m sorry, I’d stand, but I don’t really have my space legs. Or my space anything else, really.” He shrugged in a self-deprecating way.

  “No need, sir. I just wanted to pass you a report on an incident a short while ago. We had a stowaway, sir. Sick. He had hidden away behind a bulkhead panel in the main cargo airlock.”

  Now Rosa did look alarmed. “Where is he? If he interacts with anyone at all…!”

  Patrick shook his head and made a calming gesture with his hands. “He never came close enough to anyone to pass on the infection, and we’ll have the area sterilized once we land. He was contained inside the airlock by one of the passengers, and I…” Patrick steeled himself, gritted his teeth before rushing on. “I activated the outer door and cycled him into space.”

  Doctor Rosa looked grim. But he nodded to himself, not really looking at Patrick or anyone else. “Yes, probably right,” he said, not really to anyone in particular. Then he looked straight back at Patrick again. “Nothing else you could have done. No facilities to house the sick on Luna, are there? No quarantine facility.”

  “No, there isn’t.” Although perhaps they could have worked out something. Put up an emergency dome as temporary housing, something to keep the man alive… Damn, but he was overthinking this. The man was dead anyway, would have died within days. Keeping him alive would have put them all at risk. Which would have been insane.

  “Doctor Rosa, there’s one other thing you should know,” Patrick added. “The passenger who found him was your daughter. She isolated him before he could get out and infect the ship.”

  “She is all right?” Rosa asked. “You’re sure he never came close enough to infect her?”

  “I reviewed the video feeds myself,” Patrick said. “Never came within twenty feet.”

  Rosa heaved out a sigh and relaxed. “She did well, then. Maybe bringing her along was even a better thing than I had believed.” He looked up at Patrick, cocked and eyebrow and half a smile. “Do you think it was nepotism, my bringing my daughter with me out here to the one truly safe place humanity has left?”

  Patrick recalled Carmen’s hand on his wrist, her hot words, the tenacity she demonstrated – and the smarts she’d shown, in figuring out the right thing to do and taking immediate action. He found himself recalling her face, too. Actually he couldn’t forget it even if he tried. Her cheekbones had sharp angles, her long dark hair pulled back into a braid… He felt himself flush a little, and he thought carefully about how to answer. “I think she’s a remarkably capable woman,” he said.

  Rosa looked amused. “A cautious answer. I like you, Patrick. I think we will work well together. And we must. Too much is counting on us to fail.”

  “I agree completely, sir. You let me know what you need, and I’ll do whatever I can to help,” Patrick said.

  “Good. For now, I need to continue my study of all this research – everything that has been done to look at the virus, to attack it, and to try to defend against it,” he waved at his computer. “All in there.”

  Patrick whistled. How many men and women had been working on this, back on Earth, and this man was trying to organize all their studies, all their results, all the data they’d gathered, and collate it into something useful. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Rosa said. “And thank you for your update – and your candor.”

  Patrick left the doctor to his work. It was still a long way to the moon, and he had far too much time on his hands between now and then. He headed back to the cockpit to file his report with Earth. Nobody was going to be happy to hear about the stowaway. Some heads were sure to roll over that one.

  Chapter 3

  CARMEN BOUNDED down the corridor, carrying a big box of machinery for the new lab. She’d never have been able to lift this, back on Earth, let alone bounce around with it. Walking about on Luna might not be as much fun as the gliding around in space had been – she really felt like she was getting the hang of it, just before they a
rrived at the lunar base. But it was still pretty awesome.

  Luna exerted less than a fifth the gravity Earth did. She weighed about one hundred and thirty pounds on Earth – here, she was less than twenty five! It was like the best crash diet plan ever. She felt light as a feather.

  Which was a good thing, seeing as how the ship was parked almost a quarter mile from her father’s lab, and they had to hand-carry most of the equipment. There were a few lifting machines to pick up larger loads and carry them, but they were moving those big crates one at a time. It was slow going, and her father wanted everything set up as soon as possible.

  So he had everyone on the new medical team hauling stuff to the lab dome by hand.

  The lunar base was pretty small. It was made up of a bunch of dome shaped habitat modules – each manufactured on Earth and imported to the moon by ship at huge expense. There was a ring of six domes all connected by tube-like hallways, with one central dome in the middle. And sticking off one side like some sort of strange growth was the new lab dome. It had been set up while they were still en route on the ship, and it wasn’t really finished yet. But it would be soon, if her father had anything to say about it.

  She set her load down carefully and bounded back down the hall for another load. That meant going around the ring to the far side of the base, then out the tube they’d extended from the base to the ship. It was a bit of a hike, and she’d made it three times already. It would be nice to see some new scenery!

  As she was leaving, she heard her father grumbling while he stood over one of his machines. She bounced her way over to his side.

  “What’s wrong, dad?”

  “Hmm? Oh, electricity,” he said.

  “What?” she asked. Sometimes he could be a little distracted, and it made conversations interesting.