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“Of course it does,” said Trond. “It needs them to navigate.”

“It sends video back to its controllers,” I said. “Once it goes offline, the controllers will roll back to footage to see what happened. They’ll see me.”

“So cover up any identifying marks on your EVA suit,” Trond said. “No problem.”

“Oh there’s a problem. They’ll call the EVA masters to ask what the hell’s going on, and then the EVA masters will come out to get me. They won’t know who I am, but they can drag my ass back inside and have a Scooby-Doo moment when they pull my helmet off.”

He walked around to my side of the harvester. “I see your point.”

I ran my hands through my hair. I hadn’t showered that morning. I felt like I was a wad of grease that had been dipped in a vat of dirtier grease. “I need to come up with something that has a delayed effect. So it’ll happen after I get back inside.”

“And don’t forget, you’ve got to total the things. If there’s anything left to fix, Sanchez’s repair crews will have them up and running in days.”

“Yeah, I know.” I pinched my chin. “Where’s the battery?”

“In the forward compartment. The box with the Toyota logo on it.”

I found a primary breaker box near the forward compartment. Inside were the main breakers to protect the electronics from power surges or shorts. Worth noting.

I leaned up against a nearby tool cabinet. “When they’re full, they take their stuff to the smelter?”

“Yeah.” He picked up a wrench and threw it into the air. It lofted toward the ceiling.

“Then they… what? Dump their load and go back to Moltke?”

“After they recharge.”

I ran my hand along the sleek, reflective metal of the basin. “How big’s the battery?”

“Two point four megawatt hours.”

“Wow!” I turned to him. “I could arc-weld with that kind of juice.”

He shrugged. “Hauling a hundred tons of rock takes energy.”

I climbed under the harvester. “How does it deal with heat rejection? Wax state-change material?”

“No idea.”

When you’re in a vacuum, getting rid of heat is a problem. There’s no air to carry it away. And when you have electric power, every Joule of energy ultimately becomes heat. It might be from electrical resistance, friction in moving parts, or chemical reactions in the battery that release the energy in the first place. But ultimately it all ends up as heat.

Artemis has a complex coolant system that conveys the heat to thermal panels near the reactor complex. They sit in the shade and slowly radiate the energy away as infrared light. But the harvesters had to be self-contained.

After some searching, I found what I was looking for. The heat-rejection system valve. I recognized the type immediately—Dad and I had attached many of these in the past while repairing rovers.

“Yeah. It’s wax,” I said.

I saw Trond’s feet approach. “What’s that mean?” he asked.

“The battery and motor housings are encased in a solid wax reservoir. Melting the wax takes a lot of energy, so that’s where the heat goes. The wax lines are surrounded by coolant pipes. When the harvester comes home to recharge, they pump cold water into those pipes to re-chill the wax, then pull the newly heated water back out. Then they cool the water off at their leisure while the harvester gets back to work.”

“So can you make the harvesters overheat?” he asked. “Is that your plan?”

“It’s not that simple. There are safeties to prevent overheating. The harvesters would just shut down until they cooled off. Sanchez’s engineers would fix the problem right away. I have a different idea.”

I wriggled out from under the harvester, stood, and stretched my back. Then I climbed the side and dropped into the basin. My voice echoed as I spoke. “Can any of its cameras see in here?”

“Why?” he asked. “Oh! You’re going to ride a harvester to the Moltke Foothills!”

“Trond, can the cameras see in here?”

“No. Their purpose is navigation. They point outward. Hey, how will you get out of the city? You don’t have airlock privileges.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I climbed out of the basin and dropped four meters to the ground. I pulled a chair toward me, spun it around, and straddled it. I rested my chin on my palm and got lost in thought.

Trond sidled over. “So?”

“Thinking,” I said.

“Do women know how sexy they look when they sit like that?”

“Of course.”

“I knew it!”

“Trying to concentrate.”

“Sorry.”

I peered at the harvester for several minutes. Trond wandered aimlessly around the bay and fiddled with tools. He was an entrepreneurial genius, but he had the patience of a ten-year-old.

“Okay,” I finally said. “I have a plan.”

“Yeah?” Trond dropped a socket driver and scurried over. “Do tell.”

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about the details.”

“I like details.”

“A lady’s got to have her secrets.” I stood up. “But I’ll completely destroy their harvesters.”

“That sounds great!”

“All right,” I said. “I’m going home. I need a shower.”

“Yeah,” said Trond. “You really do.”

Once I got back to my coffin, I threw off my clothes faster than a drunk prom date. On with a bathrobe and off to the showers. I even paid the extra 200ğ for a soak in a tub. Felt good.

I spent the day doing deliveries as usual. I didn’t want some perceptive asshole to notice a break in my routine immediately before a huge crime got committed. Just a normal day. No need to look at me whistling innocently. I worked until about four p.m.

I went home, lay down (it’s not like I could stand up), and did some research. I envy one thing about Earthers—they get much faster internet. We have a local network in Artemis that’s handy for slug transactions and email, but when it comes to web searches, all those servers are back on Earth. And that means an absolute minimum of four seconds’ wait for every request. The speed of light just isn’t as fast as I’d like.

I drank so much tea I had to jog to the communal bathroom every twenty minutes. After hours of work, I came to a conclusion: I really wanted my own bathroom.

But by the end of it I had a plan. And like all good plans, it required a crazy Ukrainian guy.

I pulled Trigger up to the ESA Research Center and parked in the narrow hallway.

Space agencies around the world were the first to rent property in Artemis. In the old days, Armstrong Ground was the best real estate in town. Since then, four more bubbles sprang up, and the space agencies remained. Their once cutting-edge design was now two decades out of date.

I hopped off Trigger and went into the labs. The first room, a tiny reception area, was a throwback to the days when real estate was much more limited. Four hallways led off at odd angles. Some of the doors couldn’t be opened if others were open. The ergonomic abortion was the result of seventeen governments designing a laboratory by committee. I went through the center door, down the hallway almost to the end, and into the microelectronics lab.

Martin Svoboda hunched over a microscope and reached absently for his coffee. His hand passed three beakers of deadly acid before he grabbed the mug and took a sip. I swear that idiot’s going to kill himself someday.

He’d been assigned to Artemis by ESA four years ago to study microelectronic manufacturing methods. Apparently, the moon has some unique advantages in that area. The ESA lab is a highly coveted posting, so he must’ve been good at his job.

“Svoboda,” I said.