(Photo by Olha Ruskykh)

The day-night cycle in the lunar colony was artificial. With the majority of the colony underground it was uncommon for actual sunlight to be seen, not to mention that a true lunar day was almost three weeks long.

As Chester made his way through the colony he found it odd that there weren’t more people up at night. With so many people needing work, the mines and refineries could easily fill night shifts with the unemployed. The Solar King kept his capitol running at all hours that way. Or, he did when he was alive. Now it was Dawnstar that was in charge of the government. Regardless, it seemed inefficient not to have people working when there were so many that were just sitting around doing nothing.

As if to reinforce the issue, Chester passed by a knot of people huddled together in the mouth of a closed mine. A few people were awake enough to notice him going by but they didn’t do anything besides watch him pass.

The maintenance office sat in the middle of the colony and was the first place Chester found people awake and moving about. The evening shift workers were still straggling in to end their work day so Chester kept to the side while they went about filing reports and updating the manager on any new developments.

While Chester waited and watched, the manager noticed him and waved him over with a puzzled and grumpy look on his face.

“Who’re you?” he demanded.

“I’m new,” Chester said. “Quartermaster Cosa said for me to report here for the night shift.”

“Well you’re early,” again, there was little patience to his tone. “I’ve still gotta sort the evening crew out before I can deal with you.”

“Right,” Chester agreed. “That’s why I was waiting over there, out of the way.”

“Well get back over there and stop wasting my time,” the manager barked.

Chester obeyed, grumbling internally that that was what he had been doing until the manager called him over and that if anyone was at fault it was the manager. If only saying those things out loud could do any good, but Chester knew better. He just had to keep his head down, figure out if the colony has the chemicals and equipment he needs, and then he could see about dealing with people here.

In all, Chester only had to wait a few minutes for the evening shift to clear out. Then the manager waved Chester forward again.

“First things first,” the manager said, “you show up early, you wait outside. I don’t want to see your face until it’s your shift. Got it?”

Chester nodded.

“Right, now what’s your name and why’d Cosa send you here?”

“Did she not send you that information?” Chester asked.

“Would I be asking you if she had?” the manager bit back. “All I got from her was a picture of you and instructions to put you to work.”

It struck Chester as a bit odd that he’d been so cagey about telling people his name. What was the point? Only a dozen or so people could identify him, and all they’d need to do that was to look at his picture. His name was just a small detail, now. However, something in him didn’t want to let go of his anonymity, no matter how superficial it was.

“Treshec,” Chester finally said after the pause between them became too uncomfortable.

It’d been a long while since he’d said that name out loud. It was one he and his mother used to use when traveling through certain territories. That was before the Identification Network and each group had to rely on their own records to track people. To some, Treshec was a forgettable street urchin while to others he was a spy. Neither were exactly true but he had to use what he could to survive back then.

“Okay,” the manager said slowly while noting the name. “And where’re you from?”

“The capitol,” Chester said. “I arrived yesterday.”

There was a significance to that fact that Chester had not meant to emphasize and the manager gave him a long, appraising look.

“Yesterday, huh?” he asked. “From the capitol? And Cosa sent you here to work?”

“That’s right.”

“You know what the maintenance night shift’s job is?”

“No.”

“We handle all the trash, refuse, and other bio waste.” There was additional meaning behind his words but Chester wasn’t quite sure what that was exactly.

“I don’t mind dirty jobs,” Chester assured him.

“Uh huh,” the manager nodded, more to himself than to Chester. “Well, tonight we’ll be collecting and identifying the bodies of those who died in the port.”

The stare he gave Chester was deadly serious but Chester couldn’t tell if it was good or bad. The manager didn’t seem to be on friendly terms with the quartermaster, but was that personal or professional dislike? There were plenty of people Chester had worked with before that he didn’t like but still worked well together. Was this man loyal to the Solar King or was he more closely allied with the fringe?

“Will I be working alone or is there anyone else assigned to the night shift?” Chester asked.

“We’re a small crew at night,” the manager replied slowly. “Everyone else will be meeting us at the port.”

“I see,” Chester said and began wishing he’d thought to wear the long coat with the rifle hidden inside. This would be a perfect opportunity to kill Chester, with him separated from the rest of his group. All they’d have to do would be to wait for him to walk into any one of the kill boxes to begin removing bodies and then switch it on. That is, if the kill boxes were still functional after the fire.

“Is there any protective gear I can wear?” Chester asked without too much hope.

“Gloves and a mask,” the manager nodded. “Though I don’t think either will help you much. Just load the bodies into the haulers and bio-reclamation will do the rest.”

“Alright, then,” Chester said, managing to keep his anxiety under control for now. “I’ll head over there now.”

“Oh, I’ll be coming with you,” the manager said.

“Excellent,” Chester said without meaning it.

Already he was waking up his drones and asking them which ones were most confident that they could sneak their way to the port to help him in case this was a trap.

“Not a good idea,” Lyon told him almost at once. “There’s security cameras watching almost every inch of this colony and there’s definitely eyes on our hab block. Anyone trying to slip out would be noticed at once.”

“Anything you can do, Lyon?” Chester asked.

“Unfortunately, both Doreb and I are neck deep in filing everyone else’s daily reports. You’ll have to handle this one on your own if you want us to to keep our low profile.”

Chester let the drones all go back to sleep, or in Lyon and Doreb’s case, back to work.

“Let’s get to work, then,” Chester said as both he and the manager began making their way out of the office. As they walked, he asked “How many people are on the night crew?”

“Only six of us,” he replied. “Seven, if we count you.”

“Seems like you could use a few more workers,” Chester nodded to where a few more people slept in a corner, piles of trash on either side of them. “Clean up the, uh, streets a bit more easily.”

“Nah,” the manager said with a shake of his head and it only now struck Chester that he hadn’t asked the man his name. He wasn’t sure he wanted to now. “It’s not my decision to make, how many people are on each shift. Besides, we’re only allowed a certain productivity. We do too much, produce too much, then we’ve got issues.”

Chester had never heard of this sort of restriction on the lunar colony before. It made some sense for certain fringe colonies, but why the moon?

“Ah, I see you’re really not up to date on lunar economics,” the manager went on after seeing Chester’s confused expression. “See, the Solar King needs this outpost here, but maintaining it is an expensive hassle. So, he lets us do a bit of mining, a bit of refining, and all that. So we turn a little profit, cut down on the overall cost of having a port on the moon, and everyone’s happy. But if we get going too big and too fast on our mining and everything, then are we a port colony supported by mining or a mining colony with a port? See, it changes our focus and the Solar King won’t want that. He wants us focused on being a port. And besides, the mines aren’t that rich so if we work them too quickly we’ll run them dry and then we won’t be able to offset the Solar King’s expenses for keeping the port here.”

“What do you even mine here on the moon?” Chester asked as he found a way to get the conversation closer to an area that might be more useful to him.

“Metals, mostly,” the manager said with a shrug. “I’m not exactly sure on the specifics.”

“And you refine them all here too?”

Chester knew a lot of the chemicals used in metal refining were also used in manufacturing neural gel and the idea that there might be large quantities of them nearby was inspiring.

“Yeah, I think so. Though some things do get shipped unrefined. Not sure what. Again, not my job.”

Chester let the topic go for now. He didn’t want to seem too interested in it since he still assumed everything he said was being reported back to the quartermaster but he would make sure to return to it when the opportunity arose. Of course, it wouldn’t matter if he died tonight.

When they arrived at the passageway leading into the port they were met by the other five members of the night shift. No introductions were given since the manager waved them all to silence the moment they arrived and he punched in the release code for the fire doors. As soon as the doors swung open, the smells from the fire hit them all; burnt plastics and flesh were the most notable.

“This’ll be a treat to clean,” the manager sneered. “Here,” he added and began handing out respirators and gloves. He put on his own as well. “Guess the fire got farther along than I thought.”

The walls were clean, at first, but the farther they went down the passageway the darker the walls became with soot stains, running from the ceiling towards the floor until eventually even the floor was covered in a thin, oily film of soot.

“How many people were in here when the doors sealed?” one of the crew asked the question that had been pounding in Chester’s head.

“We’re looking for all fifty port security officers,” the manager said, “as well as another fifty from lunar security. Then there’s all five of the port engineers, the port manager and a runner.”

“Man, that’s a lot,” sighed another member of the crew.

“That’s not even half of them,” the manager stated, not even trying to conceal his disgust. “There were close to two hundred passengers waiting to be processed in the holding rooms.”

The crew devolved into exclamations that ranged from shock to grief to frustration at having to clean up such a big mess.

“We got bio-reclamation sending over their large haulers so all we gotta do is run an I.D. check and then toss ’em into the bin.”

“You think we’ll be able to get an I.D. off anyone in here?”

“All you gotta do is run the scan,” the manager said to calm the crew down. “If it works it works. If not, well, we got a list of everyone who was in here. It’ll all get sorted out eventually, but by somebody other than us so just do what you can and leave it at that.”

They came out of the passageway into the port and the destruction was incredible. Everything metal seemed to have weathered the fire alright but the ceramic floors and sections of wall were cracked and broken. The explosion had knocked over the ship Chester had arrived in, which in turn had fallen against another ship. The refueling tanks on the far wall were ruptured and in fragments. Up above, the port doors were closed but the soot coating made it impossible to tell what sort of condition they were in. Being at the highest point and directly above the blaze, they would have endured some of the hottest temperatures.

“You think they’ll still be able to open?” someone asked.

“Should’a opened them when the fire was still burning.”

“We would have lost too much atmosphere. At least this way we got to keep it. Just have to filter out all the gunk.”

The crew chatted, moving around in a group as they all searched through the wreckage for the dead. There was a detachment to the way they worked that reminded Chester of the times he and his mother would search dead soldiers after a battle. It was the only way to avoid the worst of the nightmares.

By the time they found the first group of port security officers, the hauler from bio-reclamation had arrived. It was a wide and long autonomous vehicle with multiple, large, compartments segmented by flexible ribbing that allowed it move around like a snake through the rubble.

“Most of this is just bone,” one of the crew remarked, almost relieved. “Makes this a lot easier.”

It wasn’t clear to Chester if they meant it was physically or mentally easier on them, but in either case Chester agreed. Not all of the bodies were so burnt, but those were the minority. Once the obvious bodies were found, the crew began to spread out in their search for the rest of the security officers.

“Hey, over here!” a voice shouted from the other side of the port from Chester. “This one’s still alive!”

That was impossible. The air was starved of oxygen by the fire and the heat had been so intense that just inhaling air that hot would have burned your lungs to a crisp. Yet as they all converged on the spot they indeed found a survivor. Burns covered their body but they were breathing and moving ever so slightly.

“Scan them,” the manager ordered after a moment of shocked silence.

The one with the scanner complied and after a moment they spoke.

“H’lay,” they said, reading off the scanner, “Registered as the Solar King’s head of nanotechnology.”

Chester’s shock was only missed by the others because they were all so surprised that anyone had survived, let alone such a high ranking member of the Solar King’s science department. For Chester, however, he was trying to connect to H’lay over the neural connection but without success. It was possible that she was brain dead. It was also possible that she, like the fringe saboteurs and the Solar King, had ways to negate his neural gel. It was an issue that he was becoming more and more frustrated by.

“Must have been some high tech nano stuff that kept her alive,” the crew member with the scanner said.

They began debating how she could have survived, while also wondering how best to move her or if they should just call medical to come and collect her. All the while, Chester was worrying about this new development and what he would do if H’lay woke up and was herself again.

That was when the manager took a step forward, his face serious, and leveled a handgun at H’lay’s head.

“I’m sorry everyone,” he said, “but I’ve got orders straight from the capitol. There’s no survivors. You can walk away and go work on another spot if you don’t want to see this, but the Solar King was clear.”

There wasn’t time for Chester to wonder at the Solar King giving new orders. Perhaps these people didn’t hear the broadcast. Perhaps this was a reference to Dawnstar as the new Solar King. It didn’t matter. Chester walked away with a few of the others as he had no desire to watch. The air hummed and the handgun fired before another thump heralded H’lay’s body being added to the hauler.