“Yup.” He’d seen it on the map before they left the base.

  Jonathan peered down the cliff. The sunlight hit the wall of rock and ice coated with black regolith. He noticed the glitter of freshly-disturbed ice in some lighter areas at a plateau way down the cliff and to their right, and even more lighter-coloured marks further down.

  If he wasn’t mistaken that looked like a path down a rock ledge, zig-zagging down the cliff. You could even see the places where a vehicle had done a few turns to make the next corner.

  He magnified his visor’s screen until the image became blurry. His suspicion was right. They were vehicle tracks.

  Now some of the garbled speech that they had heard in the control centre started to make sense. He guessed people had fallen down this cliff, and the group had lost contact with them. He was guessing those were tracks of the buggy, and that little thing had done remarkably well if it had made it all the way down there. But he also guessed that the charge had run out, and the people in the tents were stuck here, and still hadn’t found their comrades.

  Chapter Nine

  Jonathan and Gaby followed the two people into the flexible air lock where they took off their helmets and left their breathing apparatus and then into the tent.

  The young man Mohammed was one of them, and the other was the young woman Violet.

  They both seemed happy to see Jonathan and Gaby.

  There was also another young man whom they hadn’t met before, with short hair and leaves tattooed on his face.

  "Are you from the military?" he asked. He sounded quite hostile.

  Jonathan said, “You requested help. We’re here to help.”

  His expression was suspicious.

  “He requested help,” he said, glaring at Mohammed.

  “I’m sorry, what is your name?” Jonathan asked.

  “Christopher.”

  “We met Christopher in the base’s dining room.You’re not the same person.”

  “My name is none of your business.”

  Gaby replied. “I’m a researcher and doctor. Jonathan here is a researcher. Believe it or not, but we’re here to help. If you want a sympathetic ear, I can assure you that the military out there is not very happy that you went into their restricted zone, and they’re not keen to help you."

  The fake Christopher said nothing.

  Mohammed looked down. He had reddish-coloured short-cropped hair and his bushy beard was also dark red.

  Then he said, in a low voice, “We lost two of our team members down the cliff. We went down there and looked for them but we can't find them."

  Just like Jonathan had thought.

  “When did this happen?” Jonathan asked.

  “Two days ago. Now we have nowhere to go, because the charge has run out.”

  “I met you in the canteen two days ago,” Jonathan said.

  “Yes. I wasn’t here when it happened. I just helped to look for them.”

  This was one hell of a twisted story.

  “What actually happened? How did they go missing?”

  “They were cutting ice and fell.”

  “Can we see where this happened?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  The fake Christopher said, “We’re cutting ice for making sculptures for the exhibition.”

  “Base command says you’re not meant to be in this area.”

  Mohammed spread his hands. “We’re outside their restricted area. We had to drive through it because there are no other roads. We need this area because it has quality solid ice. We can’t work with the cracked substrate around the base. We’re going to build arches and bridges made from ice.”

  “Did you have permission to be here?”

  Christopher said, “We had permission to do our work. What’s with all the questions? You have to help us find the two members of our group. Then we can worry about what we were doing.”

  "Unfortunately, that is not how it works. There is a reason the base command doesn’t like people here. This area is contaminated with harmful micro-organisms.”

  “They never said anything about that,” Mohammed said. His eyes were wide. “What sort of things? What does it give you?”

  “You weren’t told about this?” Gaby asked.

  “That’s because there is nothing,” Christopher said.

  Jonathan looked at Gaby. This situation was getting stranger by the minute. He, himself, had wondered about the nature of the supposed contamination that Vika had been quite vague about. He was inclined to believe Christopher.

  This was not the time for voicing his doubt, but it was not the first time that Jonathan wondered about the real reason for their visit.

  Gaby said, “That is not the information we’ve been told. We have to assume that if you’ve been in the restricted area, you’re spreading contamination, then you will be responsible if it spreads to the base. So I suggest you start cooperating with us now."

  The woman Violet’s face had gone paler than her purple hair.

  Jonathan turned to her. ”Maybe you would answer the questions. If your friends are out there and they run out of air, that would look a bit messy, wouldn't it?"

  "They're not our friends,” she said. “They were—”

  “They were associates," Christopher cut her off.

  "Let her continue. What are these people? I notice that one of you wasn’t on the visitor register. You have three tents here. That’s a lot. The base visitor register shows only six people in your party. One is supposed to have stayed at the base. The extra tents suggest that you have more. You aren’t registered as a visitor on the base. Who else is here with you? Is Celeste one of the missing people, because we met her. There is someone called Felix that we didn’t meet. You seem to swap out people all the time, and you’re not the Christopher we met in the base. Who are you?“

  "We are from the Extreme Art Society,” Violet said, her chin held high.

  "I know that,” Gaby said. “It says on your entry application, that you’re installing ice sculptures outside the dome. We know. We’ve seen your work in other places.”

  "No, you don't know. We perform extreme acts of art to challenge our humanity."

  “I also know that one of the missing people is Felix Estvan who owns technology companies in the asteroid belt,” Gaby said. “He’s not an artist.”

  “He wanted to pay for our art. Is that not allowed?”

  “Except the military already pays you.”

  “They don’t.”

  “They do, and I can prove it.” Gaby grabbed her reader.

  Jonathan asked, “Can someone then just tell us exactly what happened? We need to know before we can even begin to look for them.”

  Mohammed said, “I already told you: they fell down the cliff.”

  “How? What were they doing when they fell? What have you done to—”

  “Jonathan," Gaby said. She showed him the screen on her reader. It displayed a brochure from the Extreme Art Society.

  In bold letters it said,

  Verona Rupes is the tallest cliff in the solar system. If you jump off, it takes 700 seconds to reach the bottom. What can you do in the most important 700 seconds of your life?

  Live the adventure. Take the dive and survive.

  Jonathan looked up. All three people had gone silent, meeting his gaze with guilty eyes.

  He said, “Were you selling this as some sort of crazy adventure? You mean people jumped down the cliff for fun and now you can't find where they fell? You mean, these rich people like Felix paid you to do this so you disguised them as part of your party so that they could do this ridiculous thing?“

  "Look at the next page," Gaby said.

  Jonathan did. It showed a big bubble-like contraption, round, metallic-looking, the size of a small bus. It said it was made of durable plastic that was shock resistant and would cushion the fall of the people inside. It said the metallic layer on the outside would protect the people inside from radiation, while still allowing them to look out.

  A chill went over Jonathan’s back.

  "Hang on. When you drop something from this cliff, without an atmosphere, it will keep falling at a faster and faster speed. It's very likely to hit the bottom at a speed that’s going to make them bounce way out of this area. Did you not consider that?”

  “We were… asked to do this,” Violet said.

  Christopher interrupted, “Violet, you agreed that we wouldn’t—”

  She whirled at him. “That doesn’t matter now, does it? We don’t want anyone to die because of this.”

  Gaby said. “Jonathan, they will have hit the bottom at a speed a significant proportion of the escape velocity of this moon. If the contraption was bouncy, which I’m sure it was. They could be anywhere.”

  All three people stared at her, their eyes wide. Whatever the excuse was, that they were artists not physicists, that someone had told them to do this, all held no water. Someone pulling this stupid “adventure” stunt should have known.

  Jonathan met Gaby’s eyes, realising something else. "You know the object that we almost hit with the shuttle on the way in?"

  Gaby gasped. “But that was... even more than two days ago. Even before we met you in the canteen.”

  Violet looked down.

  “We need to hurry. How long before the air in the bubble runs out?”

  Chapter Ten

  The people in the bubble, Jonathan and Gaby learned, on the way back in the truck, were Felix and a woman named Joanna, who was not on any visitor logs.

  Violet said the woman Celeste had been left on the base. She couldn’t say what happened to the older man Ari who had also been in the canteen, but who was also not an artist.

  Jonathan’s head was reeling, and he was still feeling like someone was trying to pull the wool over their eyes about how many people were in this party. A lot more than six, he assumed.

  Did these “customers” know that what they were doing was illegal and likely to get them into trouble, Jonathan asked.

  They did, but apparently Katie Walker’s cult had not died out when she had been removed from the base, and Katie’s death of one of the cancers associated with space dwelling humans had only increased the popularity.

  “What is this creature that they believe in?” Gaby asked.

  “Haven’t you seen the light?” Violet asked, her voice dreamy.

  “You mean, the phosphorescence under the ice?”

  “It tries to communicate with us. It’s so beautiful.”

  Jonathan said, “Wait, so you’re all members of this group?”

  “Not all of us.”

  “What about all the others? You had three tents. Were they also paying customers?”

  “No, they were just helping us.”

  “But the base says there were only six people.”

  “The military knows nothing.” Christopher’s voice was angry. He sat in the back and from where Jonathan was sitting, he only showed up as a silhouette against the light of the low sun that came in through the rear window.

  “If you want us to help save these two people, maybe it’s time that you told us all the things we don’t know.”

  “They don’t need saving.”

  “I’m getting very confused. We’re the only base on this moon, does this mean you’re happy to let two people die?”

  “We can handle this.”

  “We received a call for help, as far as I can recall.”

  “He called,” Christopher said in an accusatory tone, and this was no doubt directed at Mohammed. “He’s a dumb arsehole.”

  It had been clear from the outset that he had not agreed with the emergency call.

  Gaby was looking at Jonathan from the passenger seat as if she wanted to speak with him in private. They were both still wearing their suit liners with helmet comms attached. The truck made enough noise that probably the people in the back seat wouldn’t be able to hear conversations in soft voices.

  Jonathan pointed at the microphone, and Gaby held the little loudspeaker that normally sat in a recess inside the helmet to her ear.

  “What are we going to do when we get back?” Gaby asked. Her voice sounded tinny, and slightly delayed from when he could see their lips move.

  “They should be put in separate rooms,”Jonathan said. “This guy Christopher in one, Violet and Mohammed in the other. They’re not on the same team. We need to send people to investigate the other tents and figure out who was using them.”

  Gaby added, “And why.”

  “That, too. But first we need to worry about the people in that balloon thing. I really can’t believe that they would have just jumped off that cliff without thinking about what they’d do when they got to the bottom. There has got to be others involved. Some tourist scheme. How ridiculous is that?”

  “Quite funny, when you think about it. Here you have this secretive military base and their main concern is batting away tourists who want to come on spiritual trips.”

  Yes, this was exactly what this looked like. Competition for resources, the same reasons why the military had been driven out of most of their planet-based operations. Contamination issues were only secondary, and probably the vehicle for the likes of Bernard Vika to try to control an influx of people to the base.

  He let out a sigh. “I hate it when people use us for their political aims.”

  “You know there is no such thing as a project that is not political?”

  She was grinning at him. That sentence came directly out of one of their training manuals.

  “Whoever they are, I think they were using the artists.”

  “Just as much as Bernard Vika is using us.”

  Also true.

  “What I don’t understand is how did they even get here?”

  “Would they be the commercials that everyone we’ve spoken to has been complaining about?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “Who knows?

  Then she said, “You know, I’m actually a bit concerned for these people. We’ve seen the level of disdain that people on the base have regarding these intruders as they call them. Sure, they might have broken rules, but we need to make sure they are not endangered. People in stressful environments can lose their sense of humanity. To be human is to help others.”

  That was her experience with space madness talking.

  Chapter Eleven

  "I need a shuttle," Jonathan said into the comm.

  "We don't have any scheduled flights until tomorrow morning," the woman in the traffic control room said. Her voice sounded muffled through the loudspeaker, while the truck rumbled back to the base.

  "No, you don't understand. I want a shuttle to be prepared to rescue someone. It's an emergency."

  “I’ll have to check that with Boone.”

  “Do that. Make sure it’s ready as soon as possible.”

  Jonathan was driving just a bit too fast to be safe. The three artists sat in the back, all of them with pale faces.

  After a few questions, Mohammed had explained that Felix had given them the balloon with some payment if they could drop him and his partner off the side of the cliff. They had told the group that it was an experimental form of art.

  It was clear from everything that Christopher did not agree with giving out this information. His attempts to shut Mohammed up told Jonathan that Mohammed was likely to speak the truth, and this also meant the artists were innocent pawns in this scheme.

  But what was the scheme?

  Christopher clammed up and would answer no more questions.

  Violet said that she thought people were coming to see Katie Walker’s shrine.

  “What exactly is this thing?” Gaby asked.

  Violet could only describe it as “the expression of the ice angel” but Jonathan doubted she had seen this fabled thing herself. Or even whether she believed in its existence at all. She was an artist and liked such stories.

  They weren’t getting anywhere with that line of discussion.

  Trying a different angle, Jonathan explained that there was significant tension between the military base and commercial interests—represented by Felix—in this area, that Felix should never have been here, that he was likely to be viewed a spy.

  Mohammed said, his tone angry, “We didn’t want to do it, but Felix said everything would be fine, that it was just a thrill for them to be able to say that they’d fallen off the tallest cliff in the solar system, and that all someone needed to do was pick them up at the bottom.”

  Ah, now Jonathan understood. “That was what the people in the other tents were for?”

  Gaby spread her hands. “Were they really so stupid that they didn’t realise that they might bounce a serious distance away? Was there any survival gear in the balloon?”

  Violet said, “There were some air tanks. Some other supplies, I don’t know what. I didn’t want to pry and asked no questions.”

  “There were no other people in those tents,” Mohammed said.

  “Then what were they for?”

  “I think they were going to be a base for other paying customers. We had to help set up the tents and put beds in them.”

  “How would those people get to those tents?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’d come to look at our exhibition?”

  Jonathan felt sorry for him. He sounded distressed.

  They were coming closer to the base. By the glow from one of the exterior lights, Jonathan spotted Christopher in the back seat, his arms crossed over his chest, his face set in a scowl.

  Violet sounded close to tears. “Is someone going to be able to rescue them? They were nice people. I don’t think they had any idea. They said they liked doing unusual things in the name of art.”

  “I will try my very best,” Jonathan said. “But the base command has the final say. If there is no shuttle available to search for them, or we can’t find them, or the bubble has burst, then I don’t hold out much hope. That’s on top of the fact that the base command has serious issues with trespassers from commercial companies. They’re going to blow a fuse.”

  Not to mention a bunch of surface-to-orbit rockets.

 

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