Moon Mafia

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Turns out there is more than one way to scream. My name is Carmine D’Amato. In my family, the phrase used to be “sleep with the fishes.” Sounds like a simple idea. You got a rat problem. You fix the problem. You put weights on said rat’s feet and you toss them into the river, lake or ocean never to be heard from again. No problem.

My great uncle Vinnie would describe the process of fitting a rat with cement shoes. A rat, of course, being some galoot that was making life difficult for the family. If you didn’t plan it out, then it was more difficult than you might imagine. You gotta mix the concrete. Pour it; hopefully with the rat’s feet embedded in the mix. Wait for it to dry. Doing any part of this on a boat often ended up in real mess. One time, they set the concrete and let it dry in a dock warehouse but couldn’t find a dolly and needed four men to carry him to the boat. But I digress.

This is the story of how I managed to mess up our whole lunar protection racket. You might think “sleep with the stars” would be easier but my first, and very possibly my only time trying to dispose of a rat this way, failed miserably. My rat, Tony, runs a lunar logistics and distribution company handling our protection racket in the lunar colony New Portland. Come to find out, Tony has been under reporting shipments for years. Something that cannot, under any circumstances be tolerated.

So we took him out on his mining transport to see if we could get more information. I could not have messed that up any more if I tried. We were threatening to throw him out the airlock to get him to talk and that’s where I made my first mistake. I didn’t give Tony hope. I told him if he talked we would end it quickly. Otherwise, out the airlock and into the void.

Note to self. When someone believes they are going to die no matter what they do, they become desperate. Tony freaked out. I guess I can’t really blame him. I had just told him I was going to throw him out of the airlock.

Let me fast forward the holovid from the transport so you can see what happened for yourself.

That person facing away from you is me standing just outside the airlock door. The guy In the airlock on the right looking for a way out of an inescapable situation is Tony. The other guy giving me the “let’s hurry it up” look is Rico, my enforcer.

Watch what happens next.

“Tony, you know there is no way I can let this go? I can give you the option to end it quickly if you just tell us who was involved other than yourself.”

For a brief moment, it seems as if the holovid playback had been paused. Everything seems frozen. Rico is watching Tony while holding him in place by the arm. Tony is staring at me with a look of disbelief on his face. I’m waiting for an answer to what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question.

That is when everything went sideways. Tony lunged for the wall. At first, it wasn’t obvious why but when he broke the glass on the emergency airlock release it became clear what he was doing. He was opening the airlock. This is an emergency feature that has almost no good reason to exist. It’s sort of like the safety release you can use if you accidentally lock yourself in the trunk of your car. Except in space, there are very few places you can escape from your spaceship if you need to get out.

The first thing that happened is the inner airlock door slammed shut separating me from Tony and Rico. An alarm started with the corresponding flashing lights. Rico stopped trying to grab Tony and ran to the door pleading for me to do something. Tony grabbed one of the lightweight space walk suits and started trying to put it on. The countdown was at five seconds.

5...4...

I watched in horror as this all unfolded in front of me. Yes, I know I was just about to do the same thing to him. Part of it was the fact that Rico was trapped in the airlock with Tony. The thing that bothered me more was that Tony did this to himself. Did he really think he could get the suit on before the airlock purged?

3...2..1…AIRLOCK OPENING.

The airlock opened. The trapped air took advantage of the opportunity to escape into space carrying anything not bolted down with it. Including Tony and Rico. Tony had one leg in the suit and started flailing as he was whooshed out the door. Rico was sucked out right after still facing me with his eyes begging for me to do the impossible. Since they both left the airlock with the same direction and velocity they were very close to each other. Tony embraced Rico with his arms and legs when Rico collided with him outside of the airlock.

I watched all this happen in front of me, unable to move. Rico briefly fought Tony’s hug trying to break free. Their struggle slowed and they slowly stopped fighting as they succumbed to the temperature drop and the lack of oxygen. They stopped moving altogether floating slowly away from the transport.

Then the unthinkable happened. A mine labor transport shuttle slowly appeared in the frame just beyond the floating Tony and Rico. With the reflective space walk suit still attached to Tony’s leg, he might have been a signaling mirror. From the silhouettes that filled the portals on the side of the shuttle, it was clear that Tony’s post-mortem SOS had been received.

My mind racing, I started mentally tracing my steps. I was in Tony’s transport and the transponder was still enabled. Ship identification would be immediate. Rico and I had not taken precautions when visiting Tony so we were on various cameras along with all of the ingress and egress logs in the mining bubble. Finally, Rico was a well known associate of mine.

Yeah. I was well and truly screwed. There was no way I was going to get out of this one. It turns out you can scream in space.