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 others now on Moon Base Freedom, although over the next two years half a dozen more ships would arrive with cargos of supplies and settlers.

Normally, the steel emergency shields over the windows of the observation deck would be up to reveal the black sky and bright stars. No one here was afraid of the sight of space. But Dyson had closed those shields now. Considering what was happening, he needed them closed.

“All right. Let’s get started,” he said.

The hubbub faded. Gazes turned to meet his.

“Where’s Samuels?” the geologist, Mark Howard, called.

“That’s why I wanted this meeting,” Dyson said. He paused, and then: “Samuels is dead.” Now he had everyone’s full attention.

“But I just…” Heather Tate started, and stopped.

“How did it happen?” Ed Carmichael asked in a hushed voice.

Dyson looked around the room. Twenty minutes ago, there’d been a body here. And blood. He and his second in command, Lana Jackson, had cleaned up the mess. There’d been a lot of mess.

He glanced at Lana. She offered him a reassuring smile. He looked back at the others. “Samuels was murdered,” Dyson said. “Lieutenant Jackson and I found the body right here.”

“Oh my God!” Heather blurted. The hubbub returned, twice as loud for having been gone.

“Who did it?” Mark Howard demanded.

Then everyone realized that, since the entire crew except for the murder victim was here, the murderer had to be here too. Pupils dilated. Silence rampaged in. People put distance between themselves and others. Eyes darted left and right, trying to look everywhere at once. Gazes locked, then fled from each other. Terror built.

“You already know it had to be one of us,” Dyson said to answer the question he’d been asked. He glanced again at Lana. Her face was strange and he knew she was remembering the body parts and the low gravity roll of smelly copper-red droplets across the observation deck’s floor. Samuels had not died easy.

“How long had he been dead when you found him?” Howard asked.

“Not long.”

“Then it could have been anyone,” Jessica Rollins murmured. “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 see,” Dyson said.

“Like what?” Howard demanded.

“Lana and I have an idea about that,” Dyson said, glancing at his second in command. She was so beautiful to him, and he’d been sleeping with her since before they left earth. His gaze shifted to her belly, and it almost seemed as if his look could penetrate straight through her NASA-issue coveralls and into her womb. She was pregnant, though no one except he and she knew it yet. He smiled when he thought of how theirs would be the first baby born off earth.

“What kind of idea?” Heather Tate asked. “And what are you doing to protect us from this murderer?”

Dyson looked at her, and sighed.

“Nothing,” he said.

Again, there was silence, and confusion. Dyson pressed the control button that opened the shielding over the windows. The steel covers began to rise. Star shine flooded in through the thick glass. And then came a brighter light. Moon light from all around them. A streaming silver fire that bathed them all in ghostly luminescence.

Dyson looked again at Lana and imagined their baby being born under the glow of this new world. Their new world. Theirs alone.

Lana shuddered, began to change. Dyson felt his own spine starting to curve, felt the coarse hair erupting all over his body. The crew began to scream. Dyson didn’t care. He scarcely heard them over the crackling of bones rearranging themselves inside his flesh. And his thoughts were on other things, on how his race would finally have a home world of their own, and of how a steady supply of live food would be coming on the other ships over the next months.

The window shields clanged all the way open. Dyson and Lana began to howl as into the room poured the savage radiance of the moon, a moon that is always full when you’re living on it.