He waved his Gizmo over the reader and the fireproof door slid open. Rudy’s Gizmo was like a magic wand. It could open literally any door in Artemis. “Follow me.”
Rudy and I entered the industrial facility. Technicians operated equipment while engineers monitored the huge status board along one wall.
With the exception of me and Rudy, everyone in the room was Vietnamese. That’s kind of how things shake out in Artemis. A few people who know one another emigrate, they set up a service of some kind, then they hire their friends. And of course, they hire people they know. Tale as old as time, really.
The workers ignored us as we wound between machinery and a maze of high-pressure pipes. Mr. ?oàn watched from his chair in the center of the status wall. He made eye contact with Rudy and nodded slowly.
Rudy stopped just behind a man cleaning an air tank. He tapped the man on his shoulder. “Pham Binh?”
Binh turned around and grunted. His weathered face wore a permanent scowl.
“Mr. Binh. Your wife, Tam, was at Doc Roussel’s this morning.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s clumsy.”
Rudy turned his Gizmo around. The screen showed a woman with bruises on her face. “According to the doc, she has a black eye, a hematoma on her check, two bruised ribs, and a concussion.”
“She’s clumsy.”
Rudy handed me the Gizmo and punched Binh squarely in the face.
In my delinquent youth I’d had a few run-ins with Rudy. I can tell you he’s a strong son of a bitch. He never punched me or anything. But one time he restrained me with one hand while typing on his Gizmo with the other. I was trying really hard to get away too. His grip was like an iron vise. I still think about that sometimes late at night.
Binh crumpled to the ground. He tried to get to his hands and knees but couldn’t. When you can’t get off the ground in the moon’s gravity, you are seriously out of it.
Rudy knelt down and pulled Binh’s head off the ground by the hair. “Let’s see…yes that cheek is swelling up nicely. Now for the black eye…” He rabbit-punched the barely conscious man in the eye then let his head fall to the ground.
Binh, now in a fetal position, moaned, “Stop…”
Rudy stood and took his Gizmo back from me. He held it so we could both see. “Two bruised ribs, right? The fourth and fifth on the left side?”
“Looks like it,” I agreed.
He kicked the prone man in the side. Binh tried to cry out but had no breath to scream with.
“I’ll just assume he has a concussion from one of those head punches,” Rudy said. “Wouldn’t want to take things too far.”
The other techs had stopped to watch the spectacle. Several of them were smiling. ?oàn, still in his chair, had the slightest hint of approval on his face.
“This is how it’s going to go, Binh,” Rudy said. “Whatever happens to her happens to you from now on. Got that?”
Binh wheezed on the floor.
“Got that?!” Rudy asked, louder this time.
Binh nodded fervently.
“Good.” He smiled. He turned to me. “There’s your package, Jazz. Approximately one hundred kilograms to be delivered to Doc Roussel. Charge it to the Security Services account.”
“Got it,” I said.
That’s how justice works around here. We don’t have jails or fines. If you commit a serious crime, we exile you to Earth. For everything else, there’s Rudy.
—
After that “special delivery” I did a few more mundane pickups and drop-offs. Mostly items from the port to home addresses. But I did nab a contract to move a bunch of boxes from a residence back to the port. I love helping people move. They usually tip well. That day’s move was pretty modest—a young couple relocating back to Earth.
The woman was pregnant. You can’t gestate a baby in lunar gravity—it leads to birth defects. And you can’t raise a baby here, anyway. It’s terrible for bone and muscle development. When I moved here I was six years old—that was the minimum age for residency back then. Since then they’ve bumped it up to twelve. Should I be worried?
I was just moving on to the next pickup when my Gizmo screeched at me. Not the ring of a phone call, not the bleep of a message, but the scream of an alarm. I fumbled it out of my pocket.
FIRE: CU12-3270—LOCKDOWN ENACTED. ALL NEARBY VOLUNTEER PERSONNEL TO RESPOND.
“Shit,” I said.
I threw Trigger into reverse and backed up until I found a patch of hallway wide enough for a U-turn. Now facing the right way, I sped to the ramps.
“Jazz Bashara responding,” I said to my Gizmo. “Current location Conrad Up Four.”
The central safety computer noted my report and popped up a map of Conrad. I was one of many dots on that map, all converging on CU12-3270.
Artemis doesn’t have a fire department. We have volunteers. But smoke and fire are so deadly here the volunteers have to know how to breathe with air tanks. So all EVA masters and EVA trainees are automatically volunteers. Yes, there’s an irony there.
The fire was on Conrad Up 12—eight floors above me.
I screeched along the ramps up and up to CU12, then sped along the corridors toward the third ring. From there, I had to find the lot that was approximately 270 degrees from true north. It didn’t take long—a crowd of EVA masters had already converged.
A red light flashed over the thick door to the address. The sign above read QUEENSLAND GLASS FACTORY.
Bob was on-scene. As the ranking guild member present, the fire was his responsibility. He gave me a quick nod to acknowledge my presence.
“Okay, listen up!” he said. “We’ve had a full-fledged fire inside the glass factory, which has burned off all the available oxygen in the room. There are fourteen people inside—all of them made it to the air shelter in time. There are no injuries, and the shelter is working properly.”
He stood in front of the door. “We can’t just wait for the room to cool like we normally would. This factory creates glass by reacting silicon with oxygen, so they have large tanks of compressed oxygen in there. If those tanks burst, the room will contain the explosion, but the people inside will have no chance. And if we let fresh oxygen in the whole thing will blow.”
He shooed us away from the doorway to make an empty area. “We need a tent right here, sealed to the wall around the doorway. We need an inflatable accordion tunnel inside the tent. And we need four rescue workers.”
The fire brigade, well trained, got on it immediately. They built a cube skeleton out of hollow pipes. Then they taped plastic to the wall around the fireproof door, draped it over the skeleton, and taped the edges together. They left the rear flap open.
They hoisted an accordion tunnel into the tent. This was no small task—unlike the makeshift tent, inflatable tunnels were made to hold pressure. They’re thick and heavy, designed to rescue people from air shelters when there’s a complete vacuum outside. A bit of an overkill in this scenario, but it’s the equipment we had.
The tent wasn’t very large, and the tunnel occupied most of the space inside. So Bob pointed to the four smallest responders. “Sarah, Jazz, Arun, and Marcy. Get in.”
The four of us stepped forward. The others put air tanks on our backs, breather masks on our faces, and goggles over our eyes. One by one we tested our gear and gave a thumbs-up.
We crowded into the tent. It was a tight fit. Bob stood a metal cylinder just inside. “The air shelter is along the west wall. A total of fourteen people inside.”
“Copy. Fourteen,” said Sarah. A fully licensed EVA master with the most tenure out of the four of us, she was the insertion team’s leader. The other fire brigade volunteers taped the tent flap closed, except for one corner, which they left slightly open.
Sarah cranked the valve on the cylinder and it sprayed a fog of carbon dioxide into the tent. It’s a sloppy process, displacing oxygen, but we didn’t need to expel every last atom. We just needed to get the percentage as low as possible. After a minute, she cranked the valve shut again and the people outside sealed that last corner of the tent.