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Space Monkeys
by Gustavo Bondoni

“. . . and that, my friends, is how the Galileo Inflatable Habitat was driven off its orbit by a spray of pressurized poop,” Jerson said. “At a cost of ten million dollars to correct.”

Everyone laughed except Cyril, who stared glumly out of the porthole.

Jerson took another drink from his bulb of firewater from the solar-powered still and glared at him. “What’s the matter, college boy? You think our humor isn’t right for you? Well, look around.” He gestured at their shared space, a cylindrical chamber fifteen feet long around which were the strap-down bunks of the technical support team. “You’re not in an officer’s cabin. You’re not important enough to sleep in one of the areas of the ship that’s spun for gravity. You’re in here with the rest of the space monkeys.”

“I never said I wasn’t,” Cy replied.

“You don’t need to say anything. We all know.”

Cyril looked around the room. No one would meet his gaze except Jerson, who glared at him, his space-thin frame poised as if to strike.

“Whatever,” Cy said. “I don’t care.” He pushed against the nearest surface with a well-practiced motion, floated out of the circular door at the forward end of the sleeping area, and drifted to the nearest computer console, a touchscreen on a bulkhead.

It took him five minutes to locate his next shift’s assignments—he’d been drinking at the same rate as the rest of the off-duty monkeys, so he wasn’t exactly at peak acuity—and smiled. “At least there’s something good in the offing.”

Then he went for a shower.

One of the best things about the Amundsen was that it never lacked for water. The fusion motor needed hydrogen to function, and water for hyperheated reaction mass . . . and the easiest way to feed it was to anchor the ship to a small ice asteroid harvested by the belt miners. So it was the one place in the Solar System where no one would yell at you for using too much water.

Even so, the water, after being sucked from the spherical bathing unit, was recycled. In space, old habits die hard.

He emerged to find Marina, a big-eyed, dark-haired food technician, waiting her turn, wearing one of the ship’s standard green robes of thin, light material. She studied him for a moment, started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. After he passed and was about to head for his bunk, she spoke abruptly. “If you hate it so much, why do you do it?”

“What?” he asked. The shower had helped clear his head, but not quite that much.

“This ship. Why did you volunteer if you hate being a space monkey that much?”

Cy stopped. He turned back and held her gaze. “Who said I hated it?”

“You’re always depressed. You never want to sit down and talk with the rest of us, and when you do, you always make it really clear we’re not good enough for you. The bitterness . . . it shows through.”

“Wow,” he said. “That’s not it at all . . . I . . .” His voice trailed off. Was that really the way people felt about him? Was that actually the way he caused them to feel? “Damn. That’s not what I mean at all. I . . . I have a lot going through my mind right now.”

She raised an eyebrow. “We all do,” she said. “You’re not the only one stuck three hundred million miles from home.”

“If you think being in space is my problem, you need to re-think it. I fought to get here. Less than one tenth of one percent of humanity has ever been in space. And ninety-nine percent of those are tourists who barely made it to orbit, if that. This is a privilege, not a problem. I never forget that.”

She held his gaze. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

She just turned away, sighed, and opened the sphere. A moment later the water cycle began.

He slept fitfully; even after a shower, alcohol and zero gravity weren’t a great combination. His watch vibrated to let him know he had fifteen minutes before shift. He pulled his bleary eyes open and focused on the task list on the display.

And then he remembered the first task and he was awake and heading for the upper decks. They weren’t really above the space monkey quarters in any accepted sense of the word, and they weren’t decks, but that was what they were called.

“You’re early,” Dr. Minuza said as she opened the door. “Thanks for coming so fast.”

Cy mumbled a reply which he hoped sounded enough like ‘you’re welcome’ that she wouldn’t be offended, and looked around the cabin.

“The panel is on the far wall, beside the air vent.”

He glanced at her as he passed: her fire-red hair was not yet tied into the tight bun she normally wore when on duty, and it framed delicate features whose pale skin was dusted with large freckles. Green eyes followed him. She looked much younger than her thirty-seven years of age.

He tried to control his breathing and pulled the diagnostics kit from the tool satchel clipped to his waist. Gently prizing the screen away from the wall, he began by checking the connections.

“I think it’s a software thing,” Dr. Minuza said. “It turns on all right, but then I can’t make it do what I want it to. It just goes into a loop at the submenu when I try to access my working files. I checked on the bridge computer and my work is all perfectly fine, so I didn’t lose anything, but it’s annoying not having access from here.”

“You’re probably right,” Cy replied, trying to keep from stammering. “But sometimes shorts in the connectors will cause feedback that blocks correct operation. That’s the easiest fix so I check them first.”

“I guess I should leave you to it,” Minuza replied.

Cy said nothing but hoped she wouldn’t leave. Ever since he’d boarded the ship at L1, he looked forward to the fleeting moments he could spend with the woman in charge of the ice core extraction mission.

Unfortunately, the ship’s strict two-class system meant they almost never occupied the same spaces or mixed socially. Of all the officers—scientific or naval—aboard the ship, Dr. Minuza was the only one who’d ever stopped to talk to any of the monkeys and tried to include them in the activities of higher-deck crewmembers, with little success.

Cy told himself that it was her humanity and not her beauty that he’d fallen for, but he wasn’t quite convinced. Whatever the case, he wanted to get this job done quickly and well.

Fifteen minutes later, he spoke again. “You were right. It was a software thing. Well, drivers really, but that’s kind of the same thing, I guess.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I think it’s done.”

“Already?” Dr Minuza said, walking over. Her cabin was on the exterior of the ship’s rotating wheel. It was one of six cabins with a permanent half-gee of spin gravity. Unlike the monkeys, the higher-ranked officers walked in their quarters.

“It should be. See if it’s still giving you the error.”

He stood aside as she toggled through the menus.

“It’s working now,” she said. She turned to him. “Please don’t tell me it was something really stupid that I should have caught.”

He shook his head. “Oh, no. This was a pretty complicated glitch. The auto-diagnostics couldn’t catch it because they were stuck in an earlier version and the update to the menus hadn’t been entered into their systems. There was a module that hadn’t uploaded right, and the combination of that plus the diagnostics meant . . .” He stopped talking when he saw her amused look. “I guess you don’t want to hear all of that.”

“No, no,” she said. “I’m sorry if I gave you the impression I wasn’t interested. I was just wondering how you found that so fast. I get problems of that kind in my work all the time, and it can take weeks to spot them sometimes.”

He shrugged. “I trained as a computer engineer, which is why they assign me these jobs instead of sending the usual maintenance team. I’ve seen loops like this before, so I can identify it.” He smiled. “When you’re working on a nav system and it hangs up, you want to be able to get it up and running again before it flings you into the sun.”

Her eyes widened. “Have you ever really had to do that?”

He chuckled. “Oh, no. I think I’d panic if it ever came to having to do something like this against the clock.”

She held his gaze. “Somehow, I don’t think you would. Thank you so much for helping me with this. Now I can get back to work.”

Despite the dismissal, Cy left her quarters feeling like the proverbial billion dollars. Perhaps the one thing he loved most about Dr. Minuza was how she somehow knew just what to say to get nervous people to feel comfortable in her presence. It made you forget that a coalition of governments was spending tens of billions on a mission specifically to get the team she led into a position where they could take their samples.

He shook his head and checked his watch for his next assignment.

***

Cy struggled with the cable. He cursed whichever engineer had decided to design wiring that could only be connected if the entire loom was perfectly neat and all the lines were exactly placed. Those conditions, so easy to achieve in a factory, were nearly impossible to duplicate when you had just replaced two yards of faulty wire underneath an MRI machine bolted to the floor.

Drops of perspiration rolled down his face and into his shirt, unsettling him. He’d become used to sweat, in zero gee, staying where it was until it evaporated away or rolled with movement or air currents.

He felt the deck beneath his back vibrate and sensed the ship moving slightly with the unmistakable sensation of acceleration, and frowned. The burn was unscheduled, a large correction in the middle of their mid-journey cruise phase.

That wasn’t good: it meant that someone had found an error in the nav calculations, and that meant more work for the monkeys. Every screwup meant more work for the monkeys, no matter what it was.

His frown deepened. He’d duplicated the nav calculations for himself—it wasn’t his job, but practice was practice—and they had looked correct to him.

The connector from the cable he’d been wrestling with finally clicked home and Cy began the annoying process of reassembly. The cable coverings clipped back into place with relative ease, but the lightweight aluminum bolts that held the outer casings in place required a specialized wrench that was too long for the space available. He grunted as his knuckles scraped against sharp edges.

The sound of voices in the hall approached and Cy heard the doors burst open.

“Get him onto the bed.” The voice was that of Doc Tune, their medical officer.

The sound of people getting in each other’s way while trying to cooperate reached his ears. Then, through the confusion, another voice: “Can you save him, Doc?” It was Minuza.

“I can try. Chu, get the ICU tube ready.”

The whine of machinery filled the subsequent silence. Cy finished screwing the outer plate onto the MRI and pulled himself out from under the equipment.

“Did they do this?” Chu, the chief engineer, asked.

“There’s no doubt. Shaped charges around the cooling system mainline. If the captain hadn’t noticed the strange bulk in the video feed and gone to investigate, the explosion would have incapacitated the ship.” That was Dr. Minuza’s voice.

“Who is they?” Cy asked.

Everyone turned to look at him.

“We didn’t see you there,” Dr. Minuza said.

“I’m sorry. I was fixing the MRI.”

Minuza and Chu exchanged a look. “How long have you been there?” Chu asked.

Doc Tune didn’t look up from the person on the operating table. “Don’t be ridiculous, you two,” he said, his hands working furiously. He appeared to be inserting a tube into someone’s neck. His hands were covered in blood, and it looked like the person on the table, around which the ICU tube was methodically erecting itself, was also bloody. “Cyrus is here because I told him to move his butt and get that MRI machine fixed, and to drop whatever else he was doing to do it. So if he’s one of the saboteurs, then it’s already too late to do anything about it, since they obviously control my mind.”

“What saboteurs?” Cy insisted.

Chu glared at him, but Minuza just sighed. “He has a right to know. The entire crew has a right to know.”

“It’s still not your decision,” Chu said. “I’m part of the executive board.”

“Which will have to remain in a deadlock since the captain is in no condition to cast the tiebreaker,” Doc Tune chimed in. “So, as the guy keeping him alive, I’ll do it instead. Tell the crew. Minuza is right: they should know.”

“Know what?” Cy said.

Chu looked sour, but when Minuza looked in his direction, he nodded.

“Even before we left L1, there were threats. A group calling itself Pristine System said they were dedicated to stopping us from reaching Europa and contaminating the one life-giving place in the system.”

“Those people are just idiots,” Cy replied. “There were tons of groups who tried to stop us. The courts threw out the ones who went the legal route . . . and the others? How could they even reach us out here?”

“Someone got an operative aboard.”

“That’s impossible. The security screenings—”

“Failed,” Chu said. “We’ve found a bunch of stuff broken that had been specifically checked by maintenance. Stuff that, without destroying the ship or killing anyone would have incapacitated us to the point of not being able to continue the mission if we hadn’t caught it. We managed to fix every attempt we’ve discovered so far.”

“And that was when they tried to kill the captain?” Cy said.

Chu and Minuza exchanged another look. “We don’t think that’s what happened. The explosion was supposed to be a cover up. It wasn’t actually meant to destroy the engine room or anything, just to cover the tracks of whoever had spliced into the main engine control line and put in an unscheduled course-correction burn. The captain was unlucky. He went down there to check. And now he’s probably going to die,” Minuza said.

“No, he isn’t,” Tune said. “I think he’s going to make it. I’ve got him pretty much stabilized. Enough to put him under and let the automated ICU keep him alive going forward. I wouldn’t want to have to wake him on the way, but he isn’t going to die.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Minuza said bitterly. “Without the captain, no one can reprogram the nav computer.”

“Deutz can do it,” Chu said.

Minuza shook her head. “No, he can’t. You know as well as I do that no ship is permitted to make any flight without double human verification plus one computer validation. The only permitted flights in this situation are back to emergency recovery points. The Solar System Treaty is clear.”

“I can get Earth to validate the calculations and—”

“Minuza’s right, Chu. You know it. There’s no way around that. And besides, no one is touching the nav controls, not even to return to Earth, until we find the person responsible for this.”

“Not your call, Doc,” Chu said.

Tune shrugged. “I know that. I just thought you two would probably agree that having an unknown saboteur on board might not be the ideal situation as we head back to the populated parts of the Solar System. I mean how hard would it be to plow this barge into a lunar colony or one of the orbiting inflatable hotels?”

“Dammit,” Minuza said.

“I know,” Tune replied. “Now get out of here and let me tend to my patient.”

***

The other monkeys stared at him.

“It couldn’t have been a monkey,” Marina said.

“Why not?” Jerson retorted.

Tears glittered in Marina’s eyes. “Because we don’t do that kind of thing. We’re here because we love being in space. We live and breathe this. Any one of us would get a huge raise to go down to the surface and run the show in an oil platform or a diamond mine where, if we wanted to go home, we’d be just a plane ride away and we wouldn’t have to learn to walk again. Hell, with the back pay for being up here, we could just buy a big house somewhere and retire. But no one ever does. We just sign up for the next exciting exploration mission. And there’s always one to sign up for.”

“Besides,” Cy added, “the odds of someone getting a random saboteur through the process we went through to get selected is nearly impossible. There were ten thousand candidates for my position.”

“Same here,” Marina said. Everyone in the room nodded in agreement.

“Yeah. That’s why my money is on Cy,” Jerson said with a smirk.

“What?”

“Think about it. You’re the one that’s too good for us, too good to be a monkey. If you’d gone to MIT or the BlueX college, you’d be an engineer on a shuttle service somewhere, working your way up the ladder. In a few years you’d have your own shot at a mission like this one. Of course, that doesn’t happen to guys who went to Nav school in Guyana. Jobs for guys like you will open when the civilian sector needs discount-priced engineers to run the sewage systems for all those planned orbital hotels. That’s going to be a few years.”

Before Cy could continue, Jerson held up a hand. “But when the competition is for space monkey jobs . . . that makes things easier. You probably sailed through the selection process, finishing first in your peer group.” He looked around the room. “So did the rest of us, of course, but I finished first tied with twenty other people. You beat the competition into submission with your five years as a monkey and your fancy training—which everyone knows you’ve been re-certifying every year.” He paused, letting his gaze meet every other monkey’s eyes. “All of us are here because we were drawn out of a lottery of eminently qualified candidates. The only person who was always going to be here is you. That’s what I would want if I was selecting a saboteur to infiltrate a mission: a sure bet.”

“Also,” one of the other monkeys said. “It’s a pretty big coincidence that you just happened to be in the infirmary when the captain was brought in. Almost like you knew that was where the action would be.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cy said. “I was scheduled by someone else. I had to be there the same way you guys have to do your jobs in the assigned slots.”

“You might not be acting alone.”

Cy felt his mouth hanging open. He forced it closed. “Are you seriously accusing me of trying to destroy the dream I’ve sacrificed so much for?”

Jerson’s eyes blazed, then he paused. “No. Not yet. I’m just saying that you would be as good a candidate as any other. Do you think the officers on board worked any less than we did? What do they have to gain from something like this?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” Cy said. He glared around the room. “But I’m going to try to find out.”

***

“I don’t think you did it,” Marina said as they pulled their way along the maintenance shaft towards the water purification room at the rear of the ship. Even though there was a shipwide manhunt ongoing to try to identify the saboteur, the monkeys had been largely ignored in that effort except when one of them came under suspicion. They’d essentially been told that the officers would find the person responsible and to keep doing their jobs.

Which was what they were doing now.

“Of course I didn’t do it,” Cy replied testily. “It was stupid of Jerson to imply that, and he knows it as well as I do.”

“I don’t think he believes you did,” she replied. “I think he only said it so the rest of the monkeys would tell the officers you were a suspect. Of course, they could check your movements any time, but the sheer force of people telling them you were the one would cause you a hell of a whole lot of inconvenience.” When he didn’t respond, she went on. “It would also be a good way of keeping suspicion away from him. I wonder if he did it.”

Jerson’s features, the face of a grizzled space veteran despite only being thirty-four, came unbidden to Cy’s mind. He shook his head. “No. Jerson is a bastard, but he’s not the one. He would do anything to protect this ship and the people on it, especially the monkeys. But if he suspects one of the monkeys was responsible for all of this, he might throw the thing on me—the only one he doesn’t care about—to protect whoever might be the real culprit long enough for Jerson to catch him first. Then, there’ll be an accident.”

“You mean . . .”

“Yeah, I think so. The safety of the ship means that much to Jerson.”

They went the rest of the way in silence. Only after they arrived in the pump room and exchanged a few technical comments did Marina return to the subject. “What I don’t understand is why they just can’t go back through the video of the places where the incidents occurred and see who’d been tampering with things.”

Cy nodded. He’d been thinking much the same thing, and then he’d accidentally come upon some video. Video he didn’t want to discuss with Marina.

***

“Why did you come to me and not to your Technical Liaison Officer?” Dr. Minuza said after hearing him through.

Cy shrugged and wondered if his stammering explanation had made any sense at all or whether the woman before him thought he was a complete imbecile. “You’re the only officer on board that I’d trust with my life,” he replied.

“Why?”

He paused. Saying he’d been in love with her since she first walked into his life when the officers inspected the monkeys at the L1 Heavy Build Facility crew staging area—that enormous spinning wheel that housed those astronauts based at the Lagrange point—would likely get him summarily dismissed. Instead, he went with a different version of the truth: “I’ve researched your project. There were biographical details along with the technical ones. I saw how much you sacrificed to be here.”

A tenured professorship. A promising career. Likely many other things that didn’t appear on that dry, professional background story. All of that immediately jettisoned when the opportunity to lead the science mission on the Amundsen came up. He wondered if there was also a husband, a boyfriend, or even just a beloved pet. None of that was listed on the official bio.

Dr. Minuza nodded. “You’re convinced that none of the technical staff who appear on the videos are behind this?”

“Almost completely certain,” he said. “Partly because it would take a huge amount of time for a space monkey to become senior enough to be considered for a mission like this, and even then there is no guarantee that they’d be selected. But more than that, it’s not the way monkeys think. Monkeys feel about the ships under their care the way you’d feel about a kid brother or a favorite pet. You take care of it. And you know it will take care of you.”

“The video . . .”

Cy sighed. “Look, Doctor—”

“Will you please call me Una?”

In spite of himself, he grinned. “I’m not sure I can do that, Doctor. Monkey habits die hard. One thing a monkey learns early and often is not to call attention to himself, and one sure way of doing that is to get chummy with the people abovedecks.”

“Well, after what you just showed me, I would say you called attention to yourself.”

“Yeah. So the video shows two of the monkeys—”

“Why do you call them monkeys? Are the electricians called that?” Una asked.

“No. We all are. Everyone who isn’t officer class. The kind of people who make the ship go when the captain says go. The ones who come with the ship, and who generally stay on when the mission-specific crew moves on. We’re space monkeys. And proud of it.”

She looked dubious. “All right. Go on.”

“I agree the video makes it look bad for the electricians on that team. They are right where the captain was nearly blown up, and they’re obviously doing something technical. It could easily be a cover for placing a bomb. Hell, if only one of them was guilty, that one could probably hide what he was doing from the other two.”

They watched in silence as the electricians worked. The two men and one woman in the image were surrounded by cables that emerged from the floor as several large pumps whirred around them. Occasionally one of the electricians would stop their work and look into a screen on one of the machines. Then they’d get back to work.

Finally, the three replaced the cables, packed up their tools and left, checking their watches for the next assignment.

“So which one of them did it?” Una asked. “I’m pretty sure Chu and the rest of the investigative team have already seen this, by the way. If they haven’t gone after the electricians, there must be a reason.”

“Wait,” Cy said. He pressed the fast forward button and they watched the empty room flash by until the captain arrived.

“So, no one else went there,” Una said.

“That’s what they want us to think. I want to show you something.” Cy rewound the video and pointed at the timestamp. “This is four hours after the electricians finished,” he said. He let the video play on. “There, did you see that?”

“No. What am I looking at?”

Cy rewound again. He let it play in real time. “There!?”

“What?”

“The screen. Did you see it?”

“No. What did it do?”

Cy played the sequence once again.

“The screen went off?” Una asked.

“Exactly. The screen went off just before the captain walked in. Those screens are set to wait two minutes after someone uses them, then they power down until someone touches them again. Saves energy but, more importantly, it also saves the screens. If they were on all the time, they’d fail more often and we’d have to bring more spares.”

“So that one malfunctioned.”

“Well, that’s certainly one explanation,” Cy replied. “That the screen malfunctioned for several hours and just happened to go off again just before the captain walked in. But there’s another possibility: that someone overwrote the image of the empty room over the real surveillance video and matched the timestamp so no one would realize. That would cover the presence of anyone who entered the room: they simply wouldn’t appear in the video. And the merge with reality happens just before the captain walked in. Since everyone knew the captain had been in there, it would have looked suspicious if he hadn’t appeared in the video.” He pointed. “But the screen, of course, went off. It was the last screen the electricians used. If the person who did this had just waited another minute, it would have been off in the fake footage. But they didn’t. Which is why I noticed.”

“But can that even be done? I mean . . . the security system?” Una asked.

“It can. But it would take mad technical skills . . . and serious access levels. I could probably program it if I wanted to, but I could never get past the security around the ship’s surveillance system. None of the monkeys could.”

“Which means?”

“One of the officers. And there are only two who might have the skills. Well, three if you count the captain, but I think we can rule him out. He might have planted the bomb and blown himself up . . . but there’s no way he doctored the tape after he was placed in a medical coma in the ICU tube. So that leaves Chu and the navigation officer. I suspect Deutz . . . this is a heavy lift on the programming side.”

“But . . . how do we prove it if there’s no video?” Una asked.

“Easy. All we need to do is track both of them during the time we saw. The saboteur will likely have switched the video there as well, so all we need to do is to check if what is happening around him—for example if he runs into one of the monkeys in a video, we can just find that monkey in a different video to check that he was actually there. As soon as we find a discrepancy, we’ll know who is guilty.”

“So how do we do that?”

“We can program the system to follow one person. It’s got reasonable face recognition.” Cy punched in the commands and the video began to play, the blond features of the navigator appeared, walking down the hall.

And the screen went black.

“What?” Cy pressed commands. The screen restarted, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t activate the security feed. “Dammit. He’s on to us.”

Dr. Una Minuza stood, face grim. “I’m going to get him.”

“Not alone, you aren’t. And not just the two of us, either. He’ll be expecting us. Come with me.”

They left her cabin and he led Una aft, towards the monkey’s bunk room. Jerson was at a table in his underwear, drinking hooch from a bulb. His eyes widened when he saw Dr. Minuza. So did that of his three drinking companions.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, as the bulb drifted out of his hand towards the exit. “We weren’t expecting an official visit.” Then he glared at Cy, his look promising dire retribution for bringing an officer into the private world of the monkeys.

“This isn’t a visit,” Una replied. “I need help.” She quickly outlined the situation and asked for volunteers to arrest Nav. He’s probably expecting us. He might have found some kind of weapon.” All four monkeys immediately raised their hands. “I knew I could count on you.”

#

The six of them barreled down the zero-gee corridors until they reached the bridge. It was empty. Then they went up the central spoke towards the cabins.

Deutz’s cabin was on the opposite side of the wheel from Una’s.

They reached it, and Jerson, in the lead, jammed his maintenance override card into the reader. The door swished open and they poured into the cramped room.

Marina looked up at them from under the sheets of the bed. “What the hell?” she asked. “Guys, this had better not be some stupid hazing ritual.”

“Yes,” a man’s voice answered from beside her. Deutz’s head came into view. “I really hope there’s a good explanation for this. If not, I’ll see to it that none of you ever leave the gravity well again.”

Cy ignored him. He turned to Marina. “How long have you been here?”

“Like you care,” she said.

“This is important,” he replied. “And it isn’t some kind of joke.”

“She’s been here for four hours,” Deutz said.

“We need her to tell us,” Dr. Minuza said. She’d finally been able to push past the monkeys jamming the door.

“Una? You’re a part of this?” Deutz said.

“Yes, and I promise you I’ll explain in a bit. But I need to know the answer to Cyrus’ question. And I need her to answer it.”

Marina appeared bewildered. She swallowed and said: “I got here just after seven, ship’s time.”

“Do you trust her?” Una asked Cy.

“Absolutely.”

Una turned back to Deutz. “I promise I’ll make this up to you. And I’m sorry.” She turned to the pack of men and women with her. “Deutz couldn’t have hacked the surveillance system,” she said. “We need to find Chu.”

“Chu?” Jerson said.

“Uh-oh,” one of the monkeys replied. He was looking down at his watch. “I just authorized a suit release for him. He’s EVA.”

A long silence followed until Jerson broke it. “Get my suit ready, too. And Anderson and Gully. All three of the heavy power suits.”

“We can’t use all three at once. It’s against every safety regulation in the books,” the monkey in charge of EVA suits said.

“I’ll authorize it,” Una said.

“I need two officers,” the man replied. He didn’t look happy about it.

Una turned to Nav. “I need you to authorize all three heavy suits out of the ship at once.”

He looked as bewildered as a naked guy who’d been awoken by an armed posse should look. “I am going to need the story. And you’re buying the drinks,” he said to Una. “Authorized.”

Jerson shot from the room, shouting into his comm.

Cy watched them disappear. “Do we have any more suits?” he asked the monkey in charge of the EVA equipment.

The guy shook his head. “Don’t. If Jerson and the others can’t get to him in time with the powered suits, then you’re not going to be of any help clambering over stuff in a regular one. And if I remember correctly you’re only baby rated on the suits. You’d probably be more of a danger to yourself than to Chu if you do go out.”

“Then what can I do to help?”

“Watch and cheer,” the guy replied.

“Screw that. I’m going to get the bastard.” Cy started towards the door, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him. He turned to see Una looking at him with a puzzled expression. “I thought you were a stammering guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly, too shy to even talk to people. You don’t seem that way.”

“I’m not normally like that,” Cy replied. He felt the color going to his face.

“Ah,” Una said, and he could almost see the understanding flowing into her mind.

Cy sighed. “Do we have a security feed?” he asked another of the tech team.

“Not yet. Someone well and truly borked the video system on the security end of things.”

“Well, at least we can listen in on the suit radios to see where he’s going,” Cy said.

“I already know where he’s going,” Dr. Minuza replied.

“Where?”

“He’s going for the coupling on the reserve ice block.”

“What? Why?” Cy asked.

“Because that way he can force us to turn back no matter what. That’s our reserve water base. The primary water supply is fine to get to Europa—including deceleration and landing burns—and back. But we’d arrive with almost nothing left. If we have any unforeseen circumstances, such as this detour, for example, we might not make it. He cuts that loose, there’s no longer any question: the mission is dead.”

“I thought the mission was already dead,” one of the monkeys said.

“Not officially. We called to ask for permission to run the mission with just one single Nav-rated officer on board. It was Chu’s idea. They haven’t turned us down yet.”

“Why would Chu . . .”

“To cover his tracks, of course,” Una replied.

“Wait,” another monkey said. “Isn’t there more than enough ice on Europa to basically keep us running forever?”

“There would be if we could lift it off . . . but the lander isn’t set up for that. I mean, we could try to jury rig something if it was a question of life or death, and maybe we could make it work. But there’s no way Earth will authorize anything crazy. That ice goes, this is over.”

A monkey came in with a suit helmet tuned to the radio band. Deutz and Marina joined them in the hall, now fully dressed.

“Cut him off by the dish,” Jerson’s voice, scratchy and distorted, came over the radio. “Dammit. Don’t let him reach the cable. Wait. What’s he doing?”

A long silence ensued before Jerson’s voice came onto the helmet radio again. “If anyone on the Amundsen is listening to this, I just wanted to let you know we got him. He gave himself up. He seems pretty happy about something.”

Twenty minutes later, three monkeys frog-marched Chu into the main mess, where the rest of the crew—everyone who wasn’t actively running the ship, at least—had congregated to see what happened.

Doc Tune, Nav, and Dr. Minuza sat behind the officers table. “You look pretty pleased with yourself,” Tune said when Chu came in.

“I should,” Chu replied. “This travesty of a mission, this monument to human arrogance and entitlement, is over.”

“We can still make it to Europa,” Una said. “You weren’t able to drop our ice.”

“It doesn’t matter. I got my reply from Earth. Negative on moving forward with just one navigator-rated officer on board.”

Tune half-stood, fists balled. “I’m going to enjoy watching you rot in jail for what you did to the captain.”

Chu shrugged. “He’s going to live. And he should make a full recovery. You said so yourself. I’m glad about that. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. But even if he’d been killed and I had been sentenced for manslaughter, it would have been worth it to keep Europa from falling into humanity’s greedy grasp. We’ve already ruined enough of the solar system. This failure will ground the exploration drive for a while, which will give us time to get the legislation we need passed.” He grinned. “This is a success.”

Tune growled. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to give anyone any ideas, but I wouldn’t be too interested in any investigation if you happened to accidentally fall out of an airlock.” He said it loud enough that no one in the room could have missed it.

Una stood. “I will, though. Chu is confined and can’t leave the brig, but he will return to Earth safely. Do I make myself clear?”

No one met her eye.

“Do I make myself clear?” she repeated.

Mumbled assent.

Una nodded. She seemed to realize she would have to be satisfied with that, because she wasn’t getting anything better.

“This isn’t over.”

Everyone turned to see Jerson standing, a furious expression on his face.

“I don’t want you to hurt the prisoner,” Una said.

“We’re going to Europa,” Jerson insisted. “That’s why everyone came.”

“Is this a mutiny?”

“What?” Jerson seemed shocked. “Of course not. I am a space monkey. Space monkeys don’t mutiny.”

“Then what?” Una asked.

“We have another navigator on board.”

“The captain won’t be in any condition to navigate,” Doc Tune said. “I’m not pulling him out of that ICU unit until I have him back in L1 base where they have the sensor units to make sure I’m not missing anything internal that might kill him.”

“I’m not talking about the captain,” Jerson said. “I’m talking about Cyrus.”

“What?”

“He’s a trained navigator. Top of his class at the old Guyana Ariane Uni. And he’s kept his credentials up. I checked.”

Every eye turned to Cy. It was the navigator who spoke. “Is this true? Will it check out if I ask the commission?”

Cy tried to talk. His tongue seemed way too large for his mouth. Talking was out of the question. He nodded.

“How good are these qualifications, exactly? What did you hit on the standardized?”

Cy swallowed. “Three ninety-seven. And I’m still kicking myself for those three points I lost.”

“Really?”

Cy nodded again.

“That’s fifteen points better than I managed. No one hits three ninety-seven.”

Anger made Cy brave. “I know of two others. One of those was a perfect four oh-oh. She didn’t get offered a place as nav. Wrong school. Guyana is in the wrong school now that the Ariane days are fifty years in the past. She’s an instructor at NASA now, but has never been in space. I got a chance as a monkey, and I jumped at it.”

“Excuse me.” The Amundsen’s navigator left the room in a hurry, presumably to check on Cy’s claim.

Una caught his eye, one eyebrow raised. Cy nodded.

She smiled.

He blushed.

The excitement over, people started to file out.

As Jerson went past, he bumped Cy slightly with his shoulder, then gave him a mock scowl. “Do us monkeys proud, college boy.”

Then he was gone, and so was everyone else, leaving Cy sitting alone wondering whether his life had just changed forever.

Gustavo Bondoni is the 2025 winner of the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award.

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