Operation Alice's Restaurant

In another timeline, NASA has a better space station, but at what price?

God bless Skylab Five, I say.

If they hadn’t gone up there to give Skylab a boost, that beautiful thing would’ve reentered and burned up. What a loss that would’ve been. Thank God NASA and Congress scraped up an extra Saturn to pull that off.

I mean, without Skylab, would there even be a space program? They were building the Shuttle, but without a destination would the voters have supported just going in circles? Skylab is the key to everything we’ve built in orbit.

Sure, you get guys wishing they had a brand new space station, built from scratch. As if Congress would pony up for that. And if it would’ve been as good as what we’ve built up from Skylab as a foundation.

Look at it this way. Every pilot who ever joined the astronaut corps did part of his training in some “temporary” building thrown up for World War Two. Some of those temporary buildings lasted over fifty years, and were upgraded more times than anyone using them can count. That’s how the real work gets done.

Skylab was just the same. It started out with the one cylinder, converted from a Saturn Five third stage. Some solar arrays and instruments made it a space station. Nothing like Von Braun’s day dreams, but you could do work on it. And those old guys did.

Once Shuttle was flying, we started upgrading it. More electronics. More arrays. More science gear. A couple of external tanks strapped alongside for additional workspace, or raw materials if we didn’t have enough aluminum for a part.

When we built the truss on it, that’s when it became a real space station. That double-keel set-up was intended to keep the external tanks stable next to the Skylab core, but NASA had the sense to build it twice as long as it needed to be. That gave us room to expand.

New pressurized modules were hooked onto it. They even let the boys at Space Industries Inc. put a can on it. Charged them for it, sure, but it was way cheaper than building a space station of their own.

With the precedent set, more started climbing on board. The Europeans pooled their resources for a couple of cans. India, of all places, got in on the game. Lots more private consortiums set up labs.

You can imagine it was chaotic back then. Dickering over power allocations. Neighbors complaining about somebody ruining experiments with vibration. Every cubic meter claimed by somebody. And NASA wishing they’d never let anyone else on board.

Let’s face it, you don’t climb the ladder at NASA by doing maintenance. You have to develop a hot new system, or fly on it. As much work as they got done with Skylab, they didn’t want the bother of fixing every old system that broke down. And they sure as Hell didn’t want to referee bargaining over power and volume and docking rights.

So Max Faget and his SII boys pulled off one more deal.

They took the idea from the Federal Parks, of all places. See, the Forestry Service suits get ahead by fighting forest fires and conserving old growth. They pay for it by charging people for camping and hiking in the forests, but they don’t like doing the customer service part of the job.

So some businesses set up a deal. “Mr. Government, we don’t want to own your park. But if you lease it to us, on a term long enough for our investments to pay off, we’ll build cabins and boat docks and such, take care of the customers, and pay you more money than you’re getting from the campers now.”

It worked. Forestry Service received more revenue while outsourcing the maintenance.

That’s the deal SII offered NASA. “We’ll lease Skylab from you, do all the maintenance and upgrades, guarantee you lab space, docking rights, and communications relays, pay you for the privilege, and make all our money from the commercial and foreign customers.”

NASA didn’t like it. Give Skylab to contractors? That’s a matter of pride. But pride goeth before cost overruns on the Hypersonic Ascent System. They signed the deal.

In three years, SII doubled the length of the keel and had two external tanks suspended from twenty-klick tethers. Business was good.

That’s where I came in. Bill Cunningham, facility manager. I’m the guy they call when the voltage is low or the vibration is high.

It’s a hell of a fun job, I’ll tell you. Starting out I spent a lot of my time in a suit, tracing wires.

See, in those temporary WWII buildings, anybody wanting to run a wire just drills a hole in the wall and slides it through. They don’t write it down or tell anybody. Skylab was like that too after twenty years of astronauts taking short cuts with their checklists.

There was only one place that I didn’t have to follow a wire into. The trash tank.

When NASA launched Skylab they weren’t expecting to have twenty years of use out of it. (We’re planning fifty, but we’ll see.) They planned to do a few missions and then replace it with something shiny and new.

That’s an attitude that leads to quick and dirty short cuts. One of them was trash storage.

The oxygen tank for the third stage was still part of the Skylab structure, even though they didn’t need it for launch. Ripping it out would’ve weakened the structure. So they left it in place.

Then they realized they had to find a place for the trash the astronauts generated. They slapped an airlock on the tank and shoved all the trash in there. Just like having a deep hole under your outhouse.

That worked fine for the original Skylab missions. They even had room for some trash from the Shuttle missions. But eventually, NASA’s kinda vague about when, the tank was packed full. So they welded it shut and forgot about it.

Well, didn’t completely forget about it. There were jokes about what was stuffed into there: food wrappers, poop, worn-out jumpsuits, and, according to veterans drinking with gullible newbies, the bones of an astronaut who’d pissed off his crew mates.

But they didn’t do anything with it. Just went around it when they needed to.

When I showed up I found myself going around that trash tank . . . and around it . . . and around it . . . because the power lines, data lines, air lines, and propellant lines all had to go out of their way to avoid that damn trash tank.

By the time I finished tracing all the lines I swear we’d wasted a kilometer of cable detouring around that damn tank. Made me want to get rid of it just to straighten out the lines.

The moment I suggested removing the trash tank everyone’s eyes lit up. That’s over seventy cubic meters of volume, right at the heart of the space station. Do you have any idea what we charge for prime volume like that? No, of course not, that’s proprietary. We don’t tell anybody.

Trust me. It’s real money.

So removing the trash tank went onto the upgrade and maintenance schedule. Part of the deal is briefing NASA on our plans for the next year.

Oh my God, the howls from NASA! Okay, I shouldn’t have named it Operation Alice’s Restaurant. Suits don’t like hippie music.

But they hated the thought of taking out the tank. Couldn’t say why. They gave reasons, but none of them made any sense.

“Endangering the structural stability of the station.” The keel and tethers had everything stable.

“Destroying a historical artifact.” The original Skylab hull had so many holes in it by now it was closer to a cheese grater than swiss cheese.

“Physically inaccessible location.” Shifting all the stuff around the tank was why we wanted to remove it.

And on and on. Some of those suits didn’t even know why they were objecting. They’d just picked up that NASA didn’t want this and they were going to stick to the party line.

I didn’t get hired to piss off our landlord, so we backed off.

If NASA wants the tank to stay put, the tank can stay put.

Of course, we didn’t talk about the contents.

When word got out that the trash tank was going to be removed, all the biologists doing research on the station and a few elsewhere lined up to put dibs on the contents. Seems there was some curiosity about what twenty plus years of radiation might have done to various organic material, and especially any encapsulated bacteria that might be surviving in there.

Honestly, I didn’t intend to make money from the trash. I only said I’d charge them for it to filter out the ones less interested. There was still so much interest I divided the volume into a dozen wedges and auctioned them off.

How much? Can’t say. Proprietary. Non-disclosure agreements.

But the bonus I received for it is letting me take my wife on a nice lunar vacation when I’m done with this tour.

The biologists didn’t just want to get the stuff in a bag. They wanted to know where each bit had been in the tank, how long it’d been there, and how much other stuff was shielding it from radiation while it was there. That was way beyond the competency of anybody on my crew. We specialized in speed and efficiency.

I wound up hiring some archaeologists from a big name university. They had all the skills the biologists wanted for precisely extracting everything. There weren’t any space qualified archaeologists out there, of course. Had to send them through basic space dog training. Suits, survival, zero gee maneuvering, all the stuff.

Biologists paid for it all.

It’s funny how technical jargon will stick. When they came up to Skylab, the archaeologists called the tank ‘the dig.’ Because for the archaeologists, everything they work on is a dig. But in a week they had us calling it the Dig too.

So I didn’t bat an eye when a message asked me to come out to the Dig.

I’d been there a few times before. There were some problems they just couldn’t imagine before actually getting their hands into the dig. New tools, extra lights, nets around the working area, more storage bags. Whatever they needed, I found it for them, half the time before they knew they needed it.

I expected to be hit with a rant about the latest trouble as soon as I was in line of sight. Instead all four archaeologists were floating around the opening in the tank, waiting.

“Mr. Cunningham, thank you for coming,” said Professor Yakov. “Could you please take a look here?”

He shone a light into the opening in the tank. We’d taken off a four square meter piece of the tank, enough to give them room to work while still being able to restore it to NASA’s historical standards.

I grabbed the edge and looked at the trash. They’d started taking out one of the wedges from the outside and working their way in. It was mostly what I’d seen before—poop bags and food wrappers.

Embedded in the wall of trash was a human skull.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

It wasn’t a bare skull, like a Halloween decoration. It was a dead body, dried out from I don’t know how long in vacuum. There was a film of skin clinging to the bones, a bit of hair on top, and dried up . . . stuff . . . in the eye sockets.

Some of the neck was visible, but the rest of the body was all buried in the trash.

After doing some more cursing, I turned back to Professor Yakov. “Have you told anyone?”

“You’re the first. We have standard procedures for this, but they don’t apply up here, so I called you. We did take some x-rays first.”

“Yeah. Right. Okay, let me call Roy. He’ll have to make the decision.”

Roy Tsugawa was my boss, the station director. You wouldn’t think a skinny little guy like him could push people around, but when Roy wanted something, he got his way. He resolved all the arguments among our many tenants, and made sure NASA received everything they wanted.

He told us to meet him in the big room. We reached there first, since we were already next to it. Skylab’s main room was the community center for the station, used for big events. I chased everyone out. It was just me and Roy and the four archaeologists.

“We found something in the trash tank,” I said.

Yakov put a picture of the skull on a display screen.

Roy burst into laughter. Nobody else laughed. He trailed off. “Are you serious?”

“Boss, there is seriously a dead body in the trash tank.”

He looked to the archaeologists for confirmation. Yakov nodded.

None of them looked upset about it. I suppose finding a corpse is a normal day’s work for them.

It ain’t for me.

“Does anyone else know about this?” asked Roy.

“Just us in this room.”

He thought for a moment. “Okay, we’ll keep it that way for now. Professor Yakov, can you handle doing an examination of the body?”

“Yes. Dr. Medard has experience in police forensics.”

The female member of the team pushed herself forward. “The deceased is a Caucasian male, age between twenty and thirty.”

Roy’s eyebrows rose. “You can tell that from just the skull?”

She nodded. “From x-raying the bone structure, yes.”

“Hell. That rules out just about everyone. We hardly ever get someone below thirty up here.”

Medard asked, “There’s no one missing?”

“I’ve never heard of one. Bill, you know about anyone missing?”

I shook my head. “Nope. I know somebody who’d dug into it. He’d heard some of those ghost stories at a Houston beer blast and decided to look up if anyone was missing. Told me everyone who’d ever gone up was recorded going down.”

“Then who the hell is this guy?” demanded Roy.

I shrugged. Yakov shrugged. Medard said, “I can take DNA samples, but there’s no guarantee any of it has survived well enough to identify the corpse.”

“Crap. Can you tell if it was murder or natural causes?”

That brought a tiny smile from Medard, the first expression I’d seen on her cool face. “Death of natural causes happens far from other humans, or has a funeral with the body carefully laid out. Stuffing it into a hiding place implies murder. I will check the body for signs of trauma.”

“Right. Right. Shit. If this was a murder . . . it’s been covered up.” Roy looked worried.

I felt worried. “Boss, NASA threw a fit about us removing the tank. Some of them must know about the body. If they find out we know . . . somebody who committed one murder would do another one.”

“Shouldn’t we be involving the police?” asked Dr. Medard.

Roy grimaced. “I’m the sheriff here, technically. There hasn’t been much need for law enforcement on Skylab.”

“What? Not even drunken brawls?”

I explained, “We don’t have those here. Everyone’s an experienced professional. We hardly ever see someone under thirty, it takes too long to get the credentials to earn a slot on board. The crew are all PhD’s or experienced military officers. Not the types who punch each other for fun.”

“I see. But the kind who might make a rival disappear to ensure a success?” Medard looked peaceful, with a sweet round face under the braid wrapped around her head. But she clearly had seen the worst of humanity before she decided to switch from newly dead people to long-dead ones.

Roy hesitated before answering her. “I’d hope not. But . . . there’s the body.”

The archaeologists went back to extracting the body. It took them three days, but they took it out in one piece. It was dressed in an ordinary flight suit, lacking nametags or corporate logos or any useful information at all.

There was a care instruction tag with the name of the outfit that made the jumpsuit. They’d gone out of business in 1992, about the same time SII installed our first can.

Whenever this guy died, there’d been only NASA astronauts around.

I arrived at the Dig to find Dr. Medard x-raying various parts of the corpse.

“Hello, Mr. Cunningham.” I’d asked them to call me Bill, but I guess PhD’s like being on a last name basis.

Medard continued, “There’s no signs of trauma. We’ve done more damaging handling the body than it had on it originally.”

“Oh. So natural causes then?”

“Eh.” She shifted the x-ray set-up to the other leg. “The easiest way to kill someone here is to take their oxygen away. That would not leave traces I can detect, though perhaps a detailed analysis of the lung tissue could tell if it went into vacuum pre- or post-mortem.”

“Ugh. They shoved him into the tank alive?”

“Possibly. Not conscious though. There’s no damage on the hands to indicate a struggle or beating on a door.” Medard’s tone was clinical, as if seeing such damage was a routine thing. Maybe it had been before she switched to archaeology.

“Which wedge was the body in?” I asked. Some lucky biology team was going to get a much more interesting sample to analyze than they expected.

She glanced at Professor Yakov, handing the conversational ball to him. I sensed I wasn’t going to like the answer.

“You divided the tank into twelve wedges, all radiating out from the center axis,” said the professor. “This was a fair way to ensure each recipient would have a range of samples from the oldest at the edge to the newest ones in the center.”

Yakov took a deep breath. “The corpse seems to have been almost the last item placed in the tank. A few bags were placed atop it, likely to hide it from view if the airlock was opened. The center axis of the tank went through the body, so every wedge has at least some part of it.”

I stared at the corpse in dismay. How was I going to handle that?

Medard answered helpfully, “We recorded the exact position of every body part as it was exposed, so we can define which were where.”

Dividing it up that way would be ugly.

Not as ugly as some NASA veteran killing us to cover up a twenty year old murder, though. That helped keep things in perspective. We were keeping this secret, so the biologists couldn’t complain.

Once the Dig was complete, all the biologists would demand the delivery of their samples. That would make enough news that NASA would realize we’d emptied the tank. A deadline, just what I needed.

I urged Yakov and company to be safe and meticulous while clearing out the rest of the tank. I reminded them of the crew rest regulations for operating in EVA. I even mentioned how they were being paid by the hour, which drew a sniff of professional indignation from Yakov.

Then it was back to trying to figure out how to figure out who our corpse belonged to.

Roy and I went over a list of Skylab astronauts. There’d been scores, from the original handful in the Seventies to the ones who’d visited on Shuttle missions and then the full time occupation crews. NASA only let two astronauts stay on board between Shuttle missions, not wanting to risk more lives without an emergency escape vehicle.

Sounding out some of the NASA procedures people about trash disposal checklists narrowed the potential window to the late 1980s. In the 1990s all the trash went back on the Shuttle, or some of the other vehicles that were starting operation. But the procedures guys said trash had been coming back before they documented it. A bit out of character for NASA as a whole, but astronauts could do stuff and the rest would just clean up the paperwork later.

That still left a lot of astronauts on the suspect list. A few were dead—motorcycle and car accidents more than cancer—many had retired, and most of those still working were still with NASA, so we’d have to go through bureaucratic channels to talk to any of them.

We wanted to avoid that. If there was a murderer out there, he had to be plugged into the NASA grapevine. Their resistance to removing the tank proved that.

Roy spotted our best target. Edward “Duck” Hardison. The current recordholder for hours on Skylab. He’d been one of the two poor bastards stranded up here after the Shuttle Challenger exploded. Two and a half years of surviving on deliveries from unmanned capsules. Once he was relieved he spent a few years downside, then came up for another tour as station commander.

He still visited. He was piloting one of Gary Hudson’s weird-ass rockets. When he made a delivery here he’d come aboard and rack up a few more hours, just to make all the record book nerds update their pages.

We made plans for the interview. It would be just me and Roy and one other guy.

Not as an interrogator. Cat Brown was one of our maintenance staff. He was also a three time winner of the annual free fall wrestling tournament. Wrestling up here didn’t look much like wrestling downside. More like soccer. Except you tried to stuff each other into the goals.

Roy figured if Duck Hardison turned out to be a murderer, or part of a conspiracy to cover up a murder, Cat Brown would keep things under control.

Professor Yakov and company drew out the dig long enough for Hardison’s next visit. His Roton was dropping off a load of reagents for the laboratories. Roy and I met him as he came through the airlock.

“Duck, welcome back aboard. Or should that be welcome home?” said Roy.

“Glad to be back. Home is on Earth now, and I’m happy to keep it that way.” Duck shook hands with us firmly. He would’ve fit nicely into the original Mercury Seven. Still wore his hair in a military crew cut. His steely eyes penetrated through those without the Right Stuff.

After sorting out the business of his docking, Roy asked, “Have you heard about Boyle’s Distillery?”

Duck laughed. “Are they really making whiskey up here?”

“Vacuum distilled spirits. Don’t know if they’ll make a profit, but they are making booze.”

“I’ll wish them luck.”

“The lease agreement entitles us to a cut of their production. I have some of their first batch back in my office, if you’d like to try it.” Roy tried to keep the invitation casual—just a favor for an old hand.

“You won’t catch me turning down a drink.”

I trailed behind as we navigated the tubes to Roy’s office. Cat Brown was waiting there, playing bartender. He served us each a tiny squeeze bottle filled from the cask sent over from the distillery.

We each swallowed our shot. I kept mine down despite the burning. Living in space had ruined my tolerance for hard liquor.

Duck took it down easier than I did, but he felt it. “Whew. Gentlemen, I appreciate the gift, but I have to be honest with you. That’s the worst rotgut I’ve had in my life. And you wouldn’t believe some of the piss I drank on active duty.”

“Well, it’s the first batch. Hopefully they’ll improve with some practice.” Roy turned one of his display screens to face Duck and turned it on.

The corpse appeared. Just the mummified skull, surrounded by trash, like I’d first seen it.

Duck started. The squeeze bottle bounced off two walls before Cat caught it. “Son of a bitch. You found him.”

The astronaut didn’t say any more.

Roy prodded him. “Who is he, Duck?”

“I don’t know.”

That just brought a raised eyebrow.

“I don’t, I swear. Never did. Not that I tried to find out. If I’d asked any—well, I couldn’t.”

“Why did you kill him?” Roy’s tone was flat, the same way he’d ask how a pipe had been blocked by FOD.

“We didn’t kill him! He was dead when we opened the hatch.” Duck was offended by the accusation. Sounded sincere to me, but I’m a maintenance guy, not a cop or priest.

“You’d best tell us the whole story.”

The compartment was silent. Duck was looking stiff, almost Right Stuff facing death stubborn. He was older than all of us, but I wouldn’t want things to get ugly.

Duck let out a sigh. “Can I have some more of that rotgut first?”

Roy nodded. Cat tossed Duck a new squeeze bottle, looking relieved to be bartending instead of wrestling.

We had to wait for the whiskey to settle in his throat before he talked.

“It was during the downtime after Challenger. We were getting our food from the Pelican pods Rockwell threw together to cover the gap. Didn’t have a fancy automated docking system like the Soviets had, and we weren’t going to ask the Sovs for favors under Reagan. John and I had to take turns going out and hauling them in with the arm, then secure each one on the truss so it wouldn’t drift into a collision orbit.”

Duck held out his hand. Cat tossed him another.

“Cables fraying, water recycling left everything smelling like piss, not knowing if we’d get a ride before something failed completely. It was hell. Every time we went out the airlock we wondered if the suit was going to blow a seam. So we asked for a replacement suit as a spare.”

He took a sip off the bottle. “It came on Pelican 7. It was late, the booster dropped it in a below nominal orbit and it did a slow rendezvous to conserve fuel. I did the EVA, mated it up to the airlock. John waited for me to come in before opening it up. We opened the hatch. There was the new suit we’d asked for. Right on top. The sun visor was closed.”

Duck’s eyes were focused far away, past the wall of the office. “We knew something was wrong when we pulled it out. Too much mass. We took off the helmet. There was this dead kid in it. Suffocated. We checked all the settings, he’d had the oxygen running, the tank just ran out.”

“Because his weight was more than the booster was programmed for,” said Roy.

“Exactly. He thought he’d show up and say, ‘Hi, I did the numbers, I’m your new crewmate.’ Instead he ran out of air while the Pelican drifted toward us.”

“You just shoved him in the trash?” I demanded.

“Well, what the hell else were we going to do with him?” said Duck. “Pelicans couldn’t reenter. Rockwell shaved too many corners to get us a minimum system. If we tossed him out the airlock we’d have him floating out there forever. We didn’t have any booster packs to deorbit him. And the place smelled bad enough already without a rotting body.”

I had to admit the man had a point.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” asked Roy.

Duck stared at him in disbelief. “This was 1987. Challenger just traumatized every elementary school kid in the country by blowing up before their eyes. Reagan wanted the budget spent on satellites to shoot down Soviet missiles. Congress was balking at paying for a replacement Shuttle. We couldn’t risk any bad news getting out. The tabloids would love more ‘death in space’ headlines. We didn’t have encrypted comms. Anything we said, we said to the world.”

“And after you came down?”

“We’d welded the tank shut. We told everyone it was full, don’t open it. There were a few trusted people we shared it with. Under the table. So word spread, but only among those who could be trusted.”

“That’s why they gave me so much shit about removing the tank,” I said.

“Sure. Nobody wants dirty laundry dug up. Guess you did anyway. Why’d you open it?”

“The biologists wanted to know what twenty years of cosmic rays does to astronaut poop.”

That surprised a laugh out of Duck. “They would. Guess they’ll get a bigger surprise now. You going to tell them all of this?”

I looked to Roy. He said, “Maybe not all. But we need to know who he was. Tell his family. See if they’ll give their permission to let the biologists have his body.”

“All right. Just . . . I don’t want to be the villain in this, okay?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Roy.

Pelican 7 was a huge clue. It locked down the timeframe to just a couple of weeks, and the suspects to people working the launch. If he was just living off the oxygen in the suit, he must have gone in just as it was sealed up.

Did Rockwell still have the records of who worked that shift, fifteen years later? They might. Checking the corporate history led to a happy discovery. That piece of Rockwell and SII were part of the same corporate umbrella now. I could contact them directly. One of SII’s upgrades was tying the Skylab radios into the ground videophone system.

“Diana, Human Resources, how may I help you?”

“Hi, Diana. I’m Bill Cunningham, facilities manager for Skylab. I was hoping you could help me verify a background check on somebody up here.”

“Omigosh, I’ve never talked to an astronaut before! Sure, I’d be glad to help.”

Technically I wasn’t an astronaut. It was in the contract. I was ‘space qualified personnel.’ NASA people were astronauts.

“I can’t give you the name, but could you check for me if anyone supporting the Pelican 7 launch was discharged for cause or otherwise flagged as an issue?”

“Hmmm. Let me check.” I entertained her with some small talk as she trawled the database for anything that might fit my request.

“Ah, this must be your guy. Failed to complete a mission-critical sign-off for launch, then didn’t report for management meeting. Never showed up again, actually. He was fired in absentia. Marked do not rehire.”

“That fits the rumor I’m tracking down. Can you send me his file?”

“Okay, but don’t let it go outside the company. There’s personal information it.”

“Thank you, Diana! I will be careful with it.”

Once the email arrived, I promptly broke my promise to Diana by sharing the security badge picture and profile with Dr. Medard.

She studied the picture for a moment. “Yes, that could be him. Hmmm. The height matches exactly. And the weight is in the range we estimated. This is sufficient to take to next of kin.”

Next of kin. Right. That was a conversation I was looking forward to even less than interrogating Duck.

A pair of biologists cornered me outside the head, demanding I confirm or deny a rumor of a body found in the dig. I told them to buzz off, I had work to do, which they took as confirmation and demanded the right to analyze the remains. I had to push one aside to get away.

The parents listed in the employment record were dead, but I tracked down a sister, Tanya Beauchamp. I considered asking one of SII’s downside workers to visit her in person, but I was afraid of word getting out if I took too long. I didn’t want her to hear the news from some reporter shoving a microphone in her face.

I made the call.

“Hello?” She had the look of a middle aged working mom. I hated having to ruin her day.

“Hello, ma’am. I’m Bill Cunningham, the facilities manager on Skylab. Are you the next of kin for Freddie Zimmers?”

Her eyes widened. “You found him?”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am.”

The mouth tightened. “He’s dead, then.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

“Well, we figured he had to be dead after so long. It’s not a surprise.” She was tearing up anyway. “What happened to him?”

“Freddie snuck aboard a cargo pod to Skylab. He wound up trapped in a storage tank. We just found him doing some maintenance work this week.”

That was technically true, but I still felt guilty about misleading her. If she pressed me I’d admit Duck’s role, whether it made him a villain or not.

“I see. I’d wondered if it was something like that. He was always obsessed with space. Applied to be an astronaut, but didn’t have the credentials they wanted.”

She wiped tears from her eyes. “So can you send him back to us? Um, I know shipping from space is expensive, I’ll have to see if we can afford it. Oh, damn, he committed a crime, didn’t he? Are there any fines? I’d like to bury him with our folks if we can afford it.”

“Yes, we can send the body to Earth. We wouldn’t charge you for it.” I took a breath to brace myself. “Before we get into the details of that, I’ve been asked to make a request of you.”

“What?” she asked warily.

“Your brother’s body has been exposed to more vacuum and radiation than any other organism in the history of spaceflight. We have several scientists who think they could learn a lot from analyzing his remains. Would you be willing to give permission for them to examine him?”

“Oh.” The tears were flowing freely now. “Yes, he’d like that. He always wanted to do everything he could for the space program. Yes, I give permission.”

“Thank you, ma’am. That’s a great gift for science. When they’re finished we will bring him back to you.”

I’ll be making sure the biologists pay for that, and the funeral. Won’t make it an auction unless that’s the only way to keep them under control, but I’ll make sure Freddie received the respect he deserved.

---

For more space adventures, read Storm Between the Stars, Book 1 in the Fall of the Censor space opera series:

Niko Landry and his crew thought a routine hyperspace survey would be easy money. But when the barrier separating their homeworld from the rest of the human race opens, they seize the chance to go exploring . . . finding an empire more dangerous than they imagined.