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course, must be participating remotely, via a phavatar of his own.
    I haven’t left Luna in twenty years …
    And why was that, anyway? What had made this brilliant man such a homebody?
    Mendoza did some more digging. At the bottom of a memory hole so deep he needed decryption tools to reach the bottom, he found something interesting.
    ★
    “I didn’t know you had a relationship with Angelica Lin?” he said when they met on Thursday evening.
    Lorna’s reaction was startling. He flushed darkly. “I don’t.” Recovering: “Or rather, our relationship is one-sided. I admire her; she uses me to get what she wants. Sigh. One is a slave to beauty.”
    They were eating supper in a trattoria in Wellsland, not far from the UNVRP building. Lorna was conservatively dressed today, so they looked like two colleagues grabbing a plate of pasta after work. But Lorna wore glasses with a fractal pattern on the lenses, the type that pulsed near-infrared signals to confuse facial recognition software.
    Mendoza spread his hands. “I was just interested, that’s all … I stumbled on some stuff about Callisto. There was that incident in 2265, right? That crazy personhood activist group, CyberDestiny, took over the UNSA base. Ended up killing pretty much everyone. And you were there, working at the base; I didn’t know that. And so was Angelica Lin.”
    Lorna pointed at him, a rueful smirk on his lips. “You did not stumble on that.”
    Mendoza smiled and shrugged. “I just thought it was interesting.”
    “Well, it’s not a secret, but it isn’t relevant, either,” Lorna said after a moment. “We worked together. Kind of. I was on the software side. Angie was one of the Marines who, er, didn’t protect us very well. But nothing ever happened.”
    “Nothing?”
    “I was desperately in love with her, but she never looked twice at me. So it goes.”
    “Aha,” Mendoza said. All was now clear. He was working his ass off to help Lorna impress his crush.
    “And in case you’re wondering, I’m not just trying to impress her here,” Lorna said, which convinced Mendoza that that was exactly what Lorna was doing.
    He knew the feeling.
    As if reading his thoughts, Lorna said, “You ever been in love, fellow?”
    Mendoza twirled some fettucine around his fork. The food in Wellsland restaurants was always good. Real, fresh ingredients. “Once, I guess.”
    “I’m going to hazard a guess that it didn’t end in wedding bells.”
    Mendoza laughed. “She prefers women.”
    “Yow,” Lorna said. “You have my condolences. How’d that happen?”
    “Well, some people say it’s genetic, but my opinion is it’s more of an environmental thing …”
    “You know what I mean. How’d you get together?”
    “It was on 4 Vesta, actually. She was there for the Space Corps, and I was doing astrodata analysis for UNVRP. This was before they axed the asteroid capture program. Anyway, to make a long story short, we were out in the field together when the Heidegger program got loose.” He spoke stoically. “Elfrida saved my life.”
    Lorna shook his head. “Mendoza, you and I are, like, living each other’s lives here.”
    Mendoza laughed, thinking: Except that you’re a famous scientist, and I’m just the schmuck you arm-twisted into doing some work for you.
    He finished his fettucine. “So,” he said. “Was the stuff I sent you OK?”
    Lorna shifted gears smoothly. “OK? It was better than OK, it was great. Just as I thought, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter is the one we need to watch.”
    “Seriously? I thought Dr. Ulysses Seth was the one to beat. Or Pyls O. Mani.”
    “No, no. Hasselblatter’s the dangerous one. He’s no populist, but look at his connections. He’s the President’s man.”
    “He’s also Elfrida’s boss, as it happens.” Mendoza reflected that Elfrida couldn’t be happy that her boss had decided to run for the UNVRP director’s job. She had gone to Mercury to get away … not to get caught up in an