Brandir? That might be unfair. Another of the magnates could be behind this. Or it could be quite adifferent sort of conspiracy. But Wahl doubted that. It had the earmarks: a Selenarch ordering justice executed, then standing loyal to the executioner as a Selenarch stood loyal to all his vassals.
Earth people commonly likened the Lunarians to cats. Wahl thought about wolves.
Before he went any further, he had better review the entire case. It had not seemed major. Tangled, nasty, potentially dangerous after emotions began seething up around it, but not worth his close attention. That had changed. He keyed for background.
Constabulary headquarters had organized the file well. He got a swift and incisive narrative.
Rafael Adair was Earthborn, but a twenty-year resident. He went into partnership with the Lunarian female Yrazul. Probably they were lovers, a situation unusual but not unknown though seldom stable. They meant to prospect along the fringes of Mare Australe, broken country where they had found reason to think valuable concentrations of minerals might be; and that was’Tare on Luna. According to acquaintances who were afterward willing to talk, the relationship was going from tempestuous to embittered. Perhaps the couple hoped this joint venture would help them reconcile, perhaps they simply hoped to get rich.
Adair chanced to be in camp, seeing specimens through analysis, while Yrazul was in the field. Her vehicle was a moondodger, fast, nimble, but unshielded. A solar flare was predicted. She planned to get back under shelter before the proton storm hit. Lunarians delighted in skimming the edge of danger.
A meteoroid struck her car, smashed through, disabled engine and communications. Self-seal must have acted fast enough, closing off the drive section where she was, to preserve breathable air long enough for her to don her spacesuit. After that, she was stranded. Her contact with the robots she had been directing was gone, not tjiat they could have done much to help. A satellite recorded the accident and transmitted to Monitor Central; but the transmission was continuous, the program was not set to flag an event so unlikely, and besides, the flare soon had Emergency Services fully occupied.
When she failed to return or to contact him, Adair should have taken their well-shielded van and gone in search. Instead, he waited hours. (Rage, cowardice, greed?) Finally he went. Later he claimed that he assumed she had driven into a cave or beneath an overhang. Else why hadhe not received a call for help? Storm or no, a satellite would have relayed it.
A reasonable, if rather discreditable story. The trouble with it arose from the traces. Inspector Hop-kins studied them too closely.
As he reconstructed the story, Adair came within sight of her vehicle. She left it and ran to meet him and go aboard his. He turned about and drove off.
Then Yrazul knew she would die. Already she had
f taken a radiation dosage that would keep her hospital; ized for months while the nanos rebuilt her cells. Soon
| she would be over the threshold that cannot be
! recrossed. In the Moon dust she scrawled with a finger
what had happened. Thereafter she forced her helmet
up and drank vacuum. It was a death more merciful.
Adair came back after the flare was gone and wiped out the message. Presently he called in to say that, grown worried, he had finally followed her tracks and discovered her, too late. He assumed she had chosen to perish in the open under the stars.
Wahl came doubly erect. It was the astronomer Temerir, that cold brother of Brandir, Fia, and Verdea, who pried the case open. Yrazul had been a granddaughter of their sister Jinann. They hung together, those Beynacs … •. Temerir went over the ground and thereupon summoned Stanley Hopkins.
Would Yrazul really have left her moondodger, where she had some slight protection, unless she saw rescue coming? Why was the dust scuffled around her? Why did Adair’s van approach, retreat, and return? Its tracks showed its course. Left undisturbed, they might endure for a million years.
Hopkins ordered the shell of the van checked for residual radioactivity. He learned that it could not have been out under the flare nearly as long as Adair related.