Hunter's Moon
Leroy Dyson stood against the wall of the observation deck and studied the men and women of his seven person crew. Six person crew, he corrected himself. There were only six other crewmembers now on Moon Base Freedom, although over the next few years many more ships were scheduled to arrive with their cargos of settlers and supplies.
Artificial light always made the observation deck feel sterile to Dyson, and normally the emergency asteroid shields covering the windows here would be lowered out of the way to reveal the black sky and bright stars. No one at Freedom base was afraid of the sight of space. But Dyson had closed the shields now. Considering what was happening and why he'd called this meeting, he needed them closed. "All right. Let's get started," he said.
The hubbub of voices and the random milling about of confused people subsided. Gazes began to turn to meet Dyson's. An absence was noted. "Where's Samuels?" a crewman named Mark Howard called.
"That's why I wanted this meeting," Dyson said. He paused, cleared his throat, and: "Samuels is dead."
Now he had everyone's full attention.
"But I just..." Heather Tate started, bit her lip, and stopped.
"How did it happen?" Ed Carmichael asked in a hushed voice.
Dyson looked around the room. Half an hour ago there had been a body here. And blood. He and his second-in-command, Lana Jackson, had cleaned up the mess. There had been a lot of mess. Dyson glanced at Jackson. She'd changed out of her stained clothes. As had he. Now, she offered him a reassuring smile. He gave a slight nod before looking back at the others. "Samuels was murdered," Dyson said finally. "I discovered the body a little while ago right here on the observation deck."
The general hubbub returned, twice as loud for having been gone. Some voices were even louder. "Oh my God!" Heather Tate blurted.
"Who?" Mark Howard demanded. "Who did it?"
Then everyone realized that, since the entire crew except for the murder victim was here, the murderer had to be here too. Silence came rampaging in. Pupils dilated. Eyes darted left and right, trying to look everywhere at once. Gazes locked, then fled from each other. People put distance between themselves and the next person over. Fear had taken hold. Terror began to build.
"You already know it had to be one of us," Dyson said, his voice firm enough to cut through the incipient hysteria. For a brief moment, a kind of calm returned.
Dyson glanced again at Lana. Her face was strange and he knew she was remembering the body parts and the tattered viscera, and the low gravity roll of smelly copper-red droplets across the observation deck's floor. Samuels had not died easily.
"How long had he been dead when you found him?" Mark Howard asked.
"Not long at all."
"It could have been any one of us," Jessica Rollins cried. "None of us were together. The base is so big. So many places to hide. So—"
"A big question is why?" Howard interrupted. "Why was Samuels killed?"
"I suspect he surprised someone doing something they didn't want anyone else to know about," Dyson said.
"Like what?" Howard demanded.
"Lana and I have an idea about that," Dyson said, glancing yet again at his second-in-command. She was looking toward the sealed windows; her brunette curls fell across her face. But he could see the swell of her lower lip and the faint, pure glisten of the whites of her eyes.
She was so beautiful to him, and he'd been secretly sleeping with her ever since they'd left earth. His gaze shifted to her belly, and it almost seemed as if his vision could penetrate straight through her NASA-issue coveralls and into her womb. She was four months pregnant, with more than one fetus, though no one except he and she knew it yet. He could not help but smile to himself when he thought of how their babies would be the first earth children to be born off planet.
"What kind of idea?" Heather Tate whined. "And what are you going to do to protect us from this murderer?"
Dyson blinked, brought his thoughts back to the problem at hand. His gaze found Heather. And the others. He sighed. "Nothing," he said.
For a long moment there was silence, and confusion. Dyson took an instant to press the switch that opened the shielding over the windows. The steel covers began to sink toward the floor. Starshine flooded in through the thick glass. Then came a brighter light. Moonlight. A streaming silver fire poured in to bathe them all in ghostly luminescence.
Dyson moved toward Lana, imagining their offspring being born under the glow of this new world. Their new world. Theirs alone.
Lana's form shuddered; she began to change. She'd always been able to control it, until the hormone surges induced by her pregnancy.
The crew began to scream. Dyson didn't care. His thoughts were on other things. A steady supply of live food would be coming for Lana and the children on other ships over the next months. And by the time earth wised up and new food and supplies stopped arriving, Dyson would have the water synthesis program operational and the hydroponics gardens fully established. There would be enough small animals of several species to provide breeding populations, and the gardens would be able to feed a carefully selected and maintained herd of larger animals for use as...meat.
Dyson's mouth cracked wide in a smile. He let himself go. His spine began to curve. Coarse hair erupted all over his body. The crew's screaming grew louder but he scarcely heard it over the tearing of his flesh and the crackling of bones rearranging themselves beneath his skin. It was time their race had a world of its own, he thought.
The window shields clanged all the way open. Dyson and Lana began to howl in unison. And from Lana's womb came answering howls. One. Two. Three. More. The pack was in full voice tonight, as into the room poured the savage radiance of the moon, a moon that is always full when you're living upon it.
-END-
