EXILE

Moshe and his crew heard remarkably little. Winters’ last word, “No”, faded quickly with a slight whisper, as the air in his suit rushed out in its vain attempt to equalise the vast vacuum outside. By the time that the blood from Graham’s rupturing lungs and intestines surged, frothing pink, out of his nose, ears and mouth a split second later, there was no longer any air present to conduct the sound to his suit microphone.

Standing where they were, a few metres but an entire lifetime away, the three men did not need any other clues as to what was happening. Although they could not hear the life being sucked out of the suited body, they could certainly see the visor of the helmet become plastered from the inside by a thick, red scum, flecked with small shredded pieces of lung tissue. At the same instant that Graham’s lungs burst, the air throughout his abdomen and intestines expanded explosively. His abdomen didn’t rupture, as it was still confined within the pressure suit. What did give way, though, was his rectum, still injured and weakened by his rape of that morning. Blasting through the weak tissue wall, his body’s gas content erupted out and up through the back of his pressure suit, through the opening that he had torn during his last conscious act. As Moshe, Joe and Tom watched helplessly, a coarse, red mist sprayed out of the suit’s back, dispersing to the emptiness of the lunar space, while Graham’s lifeless body appeared to deflate, empty of its gaseous and unrestricted liquid content.

The death of Graham Winters took an everlasting three seconds, before the end of which the three witnesses were already moving as fast as they were able to in the low lunar gravity. Restricted by their suits and the risk of overly-forceful actions, they crossed the remaining distance in a few eternal seconds. They reached the body before it completed its slow, graceless dance, folding over and still turning slowly from Graham’s last, sideways spasm. As they took hold of Winters’ arms, the last, localised droplets of the bloody spray settled on their suits and visors, colouring their vision a pale, pinkish tinge. Moshe and Tom were the first to reach the body, each man grabbing a limp arm. Joe followed close behind, and quickly checked the open life-support cover flap in the rear of the suit to confirm that Graham had, indeed, torn his own suit open. “Tom, Joe, let’s get him inside,” Moshe said quietly. “I’ll just call ahead.” He released the arm, which was then taken by Joe.

While Tom and Joe began to haul the body over the rough terrain back towards the tunnel mouth, Moshe caught his control unit hanging from his belt. He first deactivated the triangulating radio detection circuit, and then turned the band selector to the universal administration band. This was monitored at all times by the prison guards. Tuned in, he turned it on. “Quadrant Seven, this is Prisoner Ed-Rabbit-tango-Harry, two-one-nine-four. Do you copy?” There was a brief pause, before the guardhouse replied.

“Guardhouse, Q1 here. Go ahead, Arons.”

“Prisoners Billings, Sloan and myself have located missing prisoner Winters. Over.”

“Copy. Where are you now, and confirm status. Over.”

“Approximately one-fifty metres ridge-wards of access adit, spaceport development. Billings, Sloan and myself are operational. Winters voided his suit. Over.” There was again a silence, only longer than the last. After a couple of moments, the speaker in Moshe’s helmet crackled into life. “The warden has been informed, and will wait for your report. Prisoners Arons, Billings and Sloan are to return to the excavation space with Prisoner Winters’ body immediately. Over.”

“Will comply. Over.” Moshe switched his radio back to the suit intercom band. Tom and Joe were already well on the way back to the tunnel. Graham’s lifeless body offered little resistance in the low gravity. Starting off behind them, he spoke to their retreating backs.

“Joe, Tom, we need to move pronto. Warden wants a report.” He got no reply other from an off-handed wave from Tom, whose radio couldn’t send, anyway. Moshe bounced along, perhaps a little less cautious than he would be under normal circumstances. But this was hardly a regular day at the office. He soon caught up with them, shortly before they entered the tunnel. With the sun casting long, stark black shadows in front of them, they began their curved descent back to the excavation. As they walked, their shadows moved and shortened, disappearing altogether as they moved around the curve. At much the same time, they began to feel the vibrations of their crew’s work beneath their feet, shuddering their way up from the excavation through the solid basalt. Moshe paused, looking behind him before the tunnel mouth slipped away from view. Above, straight ahead, was the surreal blue and white globe of the Earth, the home that he would never again walk upon. The erratic shudders from below swiftly reminded him of his task at hand. Sighing inwardly, he turned and again began to follow Tom and Joe towards the air-lock. As he breathed the sigh, he heard from Joe.

“You said something, Boss?”

“Nah, Joe. Just thinking.”

“Yeah? `Bout what?”

“Oh, you know. There’s Earth up there, and we’re stuck here. Y’know, Joe, not so long ago people longed to get up here. Now, we’re longing to get back down.”

“Yeah, Boss?” Joe and Tom had stopped, having reached the outer door of the airlock. “Personally, I stopped caring about that long ago. This is my home now.”

“I know, Joe. We have to work together to make this place work. Shame about Graham, though. He was a nice guy.”

“Nice guys don’t end up here, Moshe.”

“You’ll be surprised. Take a look at the men around you. The bad ones end up orbital.” Joe stopped and looked at Moshe, who stepped forward, and clapping a gloved hand on Joe’s shoulder, moved past them to the airlock control panel. The panel was less complex than its counterpart inside the hab-space, as the main threat of opening both doors at once came from inside the colony, not from the outer surface. Even then, it would require a clever computer over-ride to hold both open together.

With Tom and Joe supporting Graham’s body, Moshe hit the first button, to depressurise the airlock interior, backwards to the hab-space. The equalisation with the outside took a couple of minutes, as the large pumps set into the rock sucked the artificial air out of the small space. Complete, the other large button on the panel flashed green. Pushing it, Moshe caused the door to slide open. The depressurisation was never total, and the three men felt the merest brush of a gentle puff against their bodies as the last remaining air rushed out to the vacuum around them. They entered the airlock, the door silently closing behind them. Moshe started the repressurisation sequence, and slowly the men began to hear sounds from outside their suits. As the air rushed in, the vents became visible as water in the air condensed out in the cold of the vents’ cavitated vortices, small puffed jets of vapour distributed around the walls.

Moshe looked down at his suit’s pressure gauge - ninety percent of ambient. Safe enough. Pulling up his control unit, he deactivated the life-support system, and unlocked his visor’s vent. Sliding the visor up and back into the top of his helmet, he blinked and took a couple of deep breaths. Turning, he saw Tom and Joe doing the same, each with his free hand. No matter which way eco-scientists tried to rationalise it, the bottled air always tasted bottled, unlike the hab-space air that they routinely breathed in the habitats. Satisfied that they were alright, Moshe opened the inside airlock door, and stepped out back into the transition area that was crossed by the ring tunnel.

Waiting for them was a pair of guards with a wheeled stretcher. Seeing them, Tom and Joe carefully lowered Graham’s ruptured body onto the stretcher, and strapped it on. One of the guards then took the stretcher, pushing it effortlessly down the corridor towards the shuttle terminal. He would later arrive with the corpse at the infirmary, where a brief autopsy would be performed so as to clear the prison staff of any implication. The other guard stepped forward to Moshe. “Warden is waiting for you, Arons. Billings and Sloan are to return to the shift.” Tom and Joe nodded, and walked back to the interior of the new excavation, taking their places on the rubble-removal equipment. Moshe turned away, and accompanied by the guard, walked back down the corridor towards the shuttle terminal.

There were a few carriages there on a siding. One had already gone, taking the guarded corpse to the infirmary. When Moshe and his escort arrived, the lights of the shuttle were still visible ahead, down the tunnel, and remained in view for the length of their journey around the ring shuttle that linked the quadrants, and inwards to the central Quadrant Seven complex. When the two shuttles approached the Q7 ring, their ways parted, with the first shuttle turning to circle the quadrant downwards to the lower levels.

Moshe’s carriage stopped at this point, pulling onto a siding outside the main axial tunnel for the upper level. He knew the way to the warden’s office well - as the recognised leader of his shift crew, he was their representative and spokesman when the warden was involved. The two men walked roughly half-way down the wide, cavernous tunnel, and turned to their right into an elevator bay. There were three elevators, but only one went up to the surface level apartments of the warden and his family. Entering the middle elevator, the two men were quickly carried to the next level above.

The warden’s apartment was a sturdy structure made from lunacrete to resemble an oversized, grey stone igloo with windows. The elevator shaft came up in the centre of the concentric dome, and opened into a central area that several other rooms opened off from. For simplicity, the warden’s day office was directly ahead of the elevator. Stepping out from the lift, they paused in front of the security door, and the guard pushed the intercom button. “Corporal Stanton with Prisoner Arons, sir.” There was no reply, but the door slid open. Moshe and the guard walked through the door, entering the office. Directly ahead of them was a large panorama window made of double-glazed, two-centimetre thick plexiglass with an ultra-violet screening compound sprayed onto the inner surfaces. The office was built on a minor rise in the landscape, and the windows gave a view over the spaceport a few hundred metres away to the right, while on the left could just be seen the clear area that had been surveyed for the new quadrant port - the same area that Graham Winter had chosen in which to evacuate his body to the moon’s nothingness outside.

As the door opened, Moshe heard some voices talking, and he recognised both of them. Warden Pilsener was one the voices - every person in the colony knew his voice. As they walked into the office, Moshe mentally confirmed the other speaker - Henry Rawlinson. He was still wearing the fatigues that he had changed into at the transition point, and had a very tired, hungry look to him. From the brief time that had elapsed since the shift change-over, Henry would have just arrived at their quadrant when he was summoned by the warden. In addition to his immediate hunger, Henry’s short, muscular frame was very tense, and Moshe could see that he was only with some effort restraining his notably violent temper. Although the two men held identical tacit positions in the colony hierarchy, both essentially being the joint leaders of the Quadrant Six prisoners, their personalities and convictions were very different. Whereas Moshe had been effectively exiled as a political expedient against a culturally-based popular uprising in what had been Israel, Henry had been transported in response to his cold-blooded murder of three Union soldiers nine years earlier. Not that anyone had to be terribly hot-blooded to want to kill Union soldiers. What compounded Henry’s fate was that his little stunt, as he referred to it, had been a part of his initiation to a now defunct street-gang. The gang had actually demanded only one soldier, but Henry, being Henry, liked it, and shot a second. By that time, another squad arrived, and during his reluctant arrest he had managed to dispatch a third.

At the time, the Global Union had been going through a bad patch in terms of popularity, and did not particularly need any such anti-heroes as Henry becoming role-models for wannabe revolutionaries, as it considered Moshe to be, a few months later. So, with very little fuss, Henry was tried, convicted and in orbit within days of his capture. As it happened, the Union ended up doing Henry a favour of immense personal proportions. Like so many other people, Henry was disillusioned with what Earth had to offer. The gang had become the only family and friends that he had, and it was an illegal family. The air stank, and the sun would rather burn to a cancerous crisp than encourage any form of life. The food was becoming increasingly synthetic, as naturally-grown foods were rapidly becoming a footnote in biochemical history. Algal-based vegetables were grown indoors under artificial light, and were processed to look like any number of extinct vegetables, all of which seemed to taste like algae. As the months passed after Henry’s arrival on the moon, other members of the gang began to appear until, as Henry correctly assumed, those who weren’t on the moon were dead. So, in the end, he was in a clean, hygienic environment, surrounded by friends, in a position that held the responsibility and respect that he would never have ever dreamed about in his past life on Earth.

Henry took pride in his work, and delighted in the unofficial competition with Moshe’s shift. He knew that it was an equal competition, but could not understand how Moshe’s crew operated as a unified team, while Henry was his crew’s boss - his word was law, and he co-ordinated his crew to their best advantage, making the best use of his crew members’ strengths and abilities. He would measure up what needed to be done, and send out the commands that would get it done. To Henry’s mind, he was the brain and his crew the body, whereas Moshe’s team was like an amoeba, shaping itself to the task at hand. Neither he nor Moshe liked each other very much, most likely due to their vastly different backgrounds and personalities. Nevertheless, they acknowledged each other with mutual respect as the leaders of their co-operative crews.

More than that, both men were loath to openly admit that they each needed each other to accomplish what they themselves could not. Henry had the network of his friends throughout the colony that could be depended upon for rapid, accurate communication of news and ideas through the quadrants. A gangster jungle telegraph, one could say. On the other hand, Moshe was a master co-ordinator and motivator, able to get the best out of men without force or coercion, relying instead on his articulate, persuasive explanations and discussions - quite the opposite of Henry. Each was able to do a part of any large-scale, colony-wide project, but they needed each other to succeed.

When Moshe and the guard entered the office, the warden and Henry saw them, and stopped talking. Moshe remained silent, nodding shortly towards Henry. In the warden’s office, no-one spoke without Pilsener’s invitation or approval. If he wanted you there to be a silent witness, you received no invitation at all. Thankfully for Moshe, this was not one of those times. The warden was seated behind his desk, a slice of lunar basalt that had been polished to mirror-perfection, and supported by four lightweight steel legs, which under Earth’s gravity would have buckled and collapsed under the load. The desktop was bare, except for a thin, square LCD computer monitor and the standard photographs of the Pilsener family, resident on Earth but occasionally shuttled for vacation to the lunar apartments. Warden Pilsener looked over at Moshe with a face that was part concern, part inconvenience. “Prisoner Arons, come in and sit down.” Moshe looked for a vacant seat - there was only one, a straight-backed, armless stacking chair that was identical to the one that Henry was sitting in. Without a word, he walked over and sat down. The warden continued.

“I don’t need to explain why you’re both here. To confirm or deny any rumours that you may have heard, the four prisoners who this morning assaulted Prisoner Winters have been confined to orbital solitary for a few months. First of all, I would like Arons’ account of Winters’ death.’

“Prisoner Graham Winters returned to the crew from the infirmary while we were completing our suiting-up procedure. During the changeover between shifts he left the evacuation through the surface tunnel airlock. His absence was not noted for a few minutes, when the crew distribution took place in the work area. He had not returned through the tunnels towards the colony, so the airlock was the only exit port available. Taking Prisoners Billings and Sloan with me, we informed the guards. With the mandatory return time approved by the watch-sergeant, we exited the space through the airlock, and made our way to the surface. Once there, we used the radio-trig location circuits to find Winters. His assault must have disturbed him greatly, as he tore out his own life-support system from the back of his suit when we were still some distance from him. It was then that I reported back to Q7.”

Pilsener sat back, thinking about Moshe’s account. He could easily verify it himself, but he trusted Moshe to be truthful. Moshe had acted according to prison regulations, which stated, amongst other things, that surface searches must be performed by prisoners only, so as to avoid putting prison staff at risk. Hell, it wasn’t as if any could escape while they were out there, and if they wanted to live, they had to return to the airlocks, anyway. If they died, it was just one prisoner less, one more space to be filled by the Earth’s justice departments.

“Prisoner Arons, your crew this morning has lost five men, almost a quarter of the crew. We don’t yet have any suitable men that can be transferred in from other quadrants. What I am going to do is to transfer two men from the alternative crew to yours. Prisoner Rawlinson, I appreciate the work record of your crew. For that reason I am transferring the two new men who arrived last week, Prisoners McKay and Johnson. Is this rest shift a recreation or sleep shift, Rawlinson?”

“Recreation, Sir.”

“Good. Have them join Arons’ shift at the excavation in four hours time, for the rest of the shift. The transfer will be temporary, the remaining five spaces will be filled with new prisoners from Earth, once other quadrant requirements are met with. That will be all.” As he finished speaking, the warden started to work at his computer, from then on ignoring his visitors. Moshe and Henry stood, and quietly left the office to where the guards were waiting, just outside the door. Neither man spoke to the other until they were in the lift. And then, it was not Moshe, but Henry, who spoke first.

“He has a good measure of the men here.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. McKay and Johnson don’t seem to be working out, in my view. They think too much, listen too little. You’re welcome to them.”

“Thanks, Hank.” The elevator stopped, and the doors opened. They walked out, and started back down the wide hall towards the shuttle station.

“What did you have them doing?”

“Not much of any use. Hell, if it hadn’t happened to Winters, it would have been one of those two.”

“What, the deep and thoughtful type?”

“Yeah, a pair of wimps.” Henry sniffed. “Still, you’ll probably turn them to more use than what I’ve managed to do.”

“Don’t really have much choice, do I? Anyway, I’ve got a hole to dig. Catch you later.” Moshe and his guard climbed back onto their shuttle, to return to the space. Henry just shrugged in reply, and climbed onto another waiting shuttle. The two guards were the drivers, and within seconds they had edged their respective shuttles out of the sidings and were heading back towards the edge of the colony. Half-way along, Henry’s shuttle veered off to head for Quadrant Six.