by Ian McDonald
On level 85 Denny’s familiar sparked back into life. Air, water, data. Money. And a message. Meridian Main Station. From a staunch jackaroo.
‘It’s a trap,’ Agneta said.
‘Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ve taken Bryce Mackenzie before, taken the best he had, his First Blade. Meantime, we take the elevator. Unless you want thigh muscles like that fucking tree in Twé.’
‘You have got a knife,’ Ji-Sung whispered down on the prospekt as the motos and bicycles zipped past.
‘Two knives,’ Denny Mackenzie said. And at the escalators down into the maw of Mackenzie Main Station, another message. Private railcar reception. You won’t come home like an oxygen beggar. From a jackaroo who remembers.
The receptionist’s hand had risen to summon security, then the barriers opened and Denny ushered his comrades through into thick carpets and sensitive mood lighting.
‘Welcome, Mr Mackenzie. Your railcar is at stand five, departure in thirty minutes. Please enjoy our extensive facilities.’
‘Showers, mates!’ Denny shouted.
‘We got showers,’ Thadie said.
‘These are hot.’
Ten minutes to Hadley, Mr Mackenzie, the railcar says.
‘Come and see this.’ Denny beckons his comrades forward. ‘This is one of the sights of the moon.’
The railcar runs through the destroyed lands of the southern Palus; rilles graded flat, craters scraped to wrinkles in the skin of the moon, regolith worked and reworked, sifted and sifted until every atom of value has been sucked from it.
‘There, see?’ Denny points at the dazzling star rising slowly above the close lunar horizon. ‘Hadley. We’ll be coming into the mirror array any moment now. Look!’ He stands up, arms outspread like a showman. Stars blaze up on either side of the track; the railcar drives on a track of shining molten steel through an array of five thousand mirrors, all focusing light on the peak of Hadley’s dark pyramid. ‘Fucking Taiyang thinks it controls the sun. We did it first and we do it best.’
‘Den.’
‘What, Thad?’
‘Those other lights.’ He rushes forward. Above the fixed suns of the mirror array lesser lights are falling, constellations of red and green. Sparkles of blue. Bright burns of white: one second, two seconds, again the nibs of blue flame. Thruster-fire.
‘Moonships,’ Denny whispers. ‘Those are descent burns.’
‘How many?’
‘All of them. All over the fucking Palus.’
‘VTO? Your mother is a Vorontsova,’ Ji-Sung says. And the tip of a blade hovers over his cornea.
‘My mother is Mackenzie. Say her name.’
‘Apollonaire Vorontsova-Mac …’ A squeal of fear.
‘Her name?’
‘Apollonaire Mackenzie.’
‘Thank you.’ The knife is back in its sheath. ‘And if you ever disrespect my mother again, I will cut the spine from your back.’
‘Denny, you should see this.’ Thadie flicks the lead news item from the railcar’s AI to Denny’s familiar.
‘Darius, you little cunt,’ Denny breathes. ‘It’s the Suns.’
It’s felt before heard, a beat conducted through the rails to the body of the railcar: a tremor. Th-th-thumm. Th-th-thumm. Denny steps into the airlock and it becomes sound: a rhythm. Doors seal, pressure equalises. The outlock door opens and the heard becomes the seen. The platform, the ramps, the stairways and overpasses, the underpasses and tunnels are thronged with jackaroos. Jackaroos in sasuits, business suits, skirt suits, sports wear and sleep-wear, high fashion and low grunge; kilts and boots and vat-grown leathers: basic issue hoodies and leggings, shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, the quintessential Mackenzie worker style from the dawn days of leaky habitats, treacherous rovers and untrustworthy surface-activity suits. All beating out a rhythm on the stone skin of Hadley. Th-th-thumm. Th-th-thumm.
Denny steps on to the platform. The pressing bodies make space for him. The rhythm stops: clean, mid-beat. Denny Mackenzie surveys the crowd.
‘So, mates, did ya miss me?’
Hadley’s stone corridors and shafts take the shout and, like the tubing of a vast wind instrument, turn it into roaring thunder. Hands slap his back, play punch him, tousle his hair, try to grab hold of him; voices cheer and whistle and good-on-ya! and proper bogan, mate, proper bogan, and you little ripper or just make incoherent roaring noises. Denny’s comrades from Meridian are absorbed by the voices as they close behind the homecoming golden boy. Walk breaks into run; the rhythm picks up again: th-th-thumm. Th-th-thumm. Denny Mackenzie runs, grinning, between two endless lines of cheering, clapping people. Now he bursts into Hadley’s central atrium; a pyramid inside the great pyramid. The floor is a flood of faces, reading his intention, parting before him. The escalator is not fast enough for him; he takes it five steps at a time and stands up on the balustrade of the level one deck.
Hadley falls silent. Faces crane up, peer down from the higher levels. Denny takes them in.
‘My dad is dead,’ he shouts. ‘Bryce Mackenzie claims Mackenzie Metals. What do we say to him?’
Fuck him! a thousand jackaroos shout.
‘Darius Sun is dropping combat bots and wushis all over the mirror array. What do we say to him?’
Fuck him too! Hadley roars.
Denny Mackenzie holds up his maimed hand, calling silence.
‘What’s this place called?’
The city thunders back its name. Denny shakes his head. The answer comes back redoubled.
‘Hadley was my brother. First Blade of Mackenzie Metals. He should be standing here. He died in the Court of Clavius. He fought for this family. After him, I was First Blade. I fought for this family. Fought for what this family stands for. Honour and pride, mates. Honour and pride. I did things that some thought were against the company. Yes, but never against the name. Never against what it means to be a Mackenzie. You know that too. You welcomed me like a hero. Let me tell you who I am. My name is Denny Mackenzie, I am the last and youngest son of Duncan Mackenzie and his one true heir. I claim Mackenzie Metals, I claim this city and I claim your loyalty. Are you with me?’
The answer drowns out the eternal rumble of the smelters, rings from the steel girders of the atrium.
‘Are you with me?’ Denny says again and again Hadley answers stronger. ‘But, mates, mates. Our enemies are out there. They are strong, they are hard, they outnumber us and they will take everything we hold dear away from us. What are we going to do?’
Fuck ’em!
Denny milks the moment, cupping his ear, working the crowd, mouthing What? What?
‘Fuck ’em!’
Balanced on the balustrade, Denny Mackenzie drinks down the adulation, arms spread wide, beseeching. Come on. A figure moving through the press of people on the balcony catches his eye. Apollonaire, his mother, in mourning white. He jumps from the balustrade.
‘Mom!’
The open arms embrace her hard. Apollonaire smiles and bends to her son’s ear.
‘Welcome back, Dennis,’ she whispers.
‘Thanks for sending the railcar, Mom,’ Denny whispers back. Apollonaire stiffens.
‘What? I didn’t … Good to have you back.’
‘Mackenzie way or fucking what?’ Over her shoulder he sees another woman in white emerge from the crowd: Anastasia, Duncan’s keji-oko. More women in white step from the press: his sister Katarina, her granddaughter Kimmie-Leigh, Mykayla and Ngoc, Selma and Princesa. Cousins and out-cousins.
‘Lead them right, Dennis,’ Apollonaire says. ‘First we have to tell you how the Mackenzie way works from now on.’
The Eagle of the Moon hands the martini glass to his Iron Hand.
‘I shouldn’t,’ says Alexia. Lucas opens the windows on to the terrace garden.
‘And you don’t like gin,’ Lucas says, stepping on t
o the terrace. ‘But this isn’t gin, and I want you to.’
Alexia follows him over the warm stones of the path, through the elegantly mutilated bergamot trees to the small domed pavilion perched on the precipice. It is built for two, intimate and vertiginous. Alexia sips and is ambushed by the smoke and salt of cachaca.
‘What do you think?’
‘Good. For the moon.’
‘I try, I fail, I try again and fail better. Jorge wasn’t impressed either. I thought I’d improved the recipe.’ Evening descends on the hub, not a lengthening of shadows but a crimsoning of the world. In the Antares Quadra it is dawn, purple turns to blue. In Orion, it is high noon. It is beautiful and quite quite alien to Alexia. ‘I find I have developed some terrible habits. This one I call “down the garden”. Meetings are over, reading is finished, briefings are absorbed, I take a glass and I wander through the bergamots down the garden. The only ones who see me are my escoltas and spies.’
‘And the entire hub.’
‘Oh, they find me very boring,’ Lucas says. ‘Compared to my predecessor and his husband.’
‘Bryce is refusing to back down,’ Alexia says. She sets down the cachaca on the small stone table. It is shit.
‘Darius will cut Bryce to pieces.’
‘With any luck.’ Lucas allows himself a tight, wry smile. ‘Denny Mackenzie will be a different matter.’
‘So how does Denny Mackenzie turn up in Hadley with half of Bairro Alto and the guns of a thousand jackaroos?’
‘He was tipped off,’ Lucas says. ‘And bankrolled.’
‘Mackenzie Metals? His mother?’
‘None of those,’ Lucas says. ‘It was me.’ He takes a sip of his down-the-garden gin. He tried cachaca once and will not make that mistake again. Pure and pristine gin of his own design, now and always. ‘Don’t look so surprised. You shouldn’t be so expressive. They have machines reading your face, calculating your emotions. I slipped him enough money to get back to Hadley and chartered the railcar. All very discreet: untraceable.’
‘Denny Mackenzie.’
‘Yes.’
‘In charge of Mackenzie Metals?’
‘Well, that remains to be seen. Darius Sun is building a formidable force out there. Maybe he will prevail. Taiyang’s pockets are bottomless. But I believe it is always good to introduce a third force into a simple binary. It sows instability and chaos. I like chaos. And the terrestrials are nervous enough about the sun-belt without Taiyang staging a hostile takeover of Mackenzie Metals. No, let Denny swagger and posture. Let him claim Hadley. I will know where he is. You always know where you are with the Mackenzies.’ Lucas looks out at the deepening sunset, dropping into indigo. ‘I have another bad habit, alas. I call it “back up the garden”. Care to accompany me?’
They leave their glasses on the table. Subtle lighting has turned the Eyrie into a cascade of lights, pools of blue, rippling whites: a lightfall.
‘One condition,’ Alexia says. ‘I want the gin.’
EIGHTEEN
Jesus and Mary, they’re fast. Half-glimpsed flickers between the mirror pylons, using the array for cover. This is a hideous place to fight. His jackaroos are strewn across the mirror field; names, tags overlaying the visual and infra-red maps. Radar throws up five thousand false contacts. He’s fighting blind. The common channel crackles.
They’re too fast, the fuckers …
Rachel, where are you? Where are you?
I’m pulling back, I’m pulling back.
I can’t see …
A name tag turns white.
‘Fall back!’ Finn Warne orders. White-outs all over his HUD and his tactical displays are blind. The enemy is radar-soft and masking its thermal signature in the heat-glow of the mirrors. Finn has helium miners, processing engineers, field surveyors, maintenance workers against sleek, fanatic Taiyang killing machines and trained wushis. Finn Warne flicks the rendezvous co-ordinates to his fighters. Jackaroos, dusters, down-on-their luck mercs. Get them under the cover of the rover-mounted chain-guns. Figures bound past him, three-metre leaps, dust pluming. Sasuits, shell-suits, a miscellany of surface-survival engineering. Workers against soldiers.
‘Get the rovers closer!’ Finn Warne orders, throwing out evacuation points to the AIs. ‘We’re being cut to pieces out here.’
A prickle on the top of his scalp: a warning from the suit haptics. He looks up to see the black sparkle with sharp blue stars, falling slowly. Thrusters.
‘The fucking things are trying to cut us off!’ Finn shouts on the common channel. Bots drop to the regolith, rebound on their shock absorbers. There lies their weakness. A Sun fighting drone lands in front of him. Finn Warne twists and snaps the spear into two halves. The axe-head whips out on its cable and takes two of the machine’s legs out at the knee joints. Finn leaps, reverses the weapon and drives the spear-point hard through the sensory core. The thing goes down in a flail of limbs and blades. Still the bot kicks a circle of moondust around the axis of the impaling spear. Finn Warne opens the tangs and wrenches the blade from the machine’s carapace in a mess of capillaries and processors. The bot is still at last.
‘Where are my fucking rovers?’
He wanted guns. Gauss rifles. You need guns to take Hadley. Bryce had vetoed them: they would take too long to equip; the mirror array would be smashed to a maelstrom of flying glass.
Fuck you, Bryce, always valuing the materiel more than the meat.
Another tingle at the back of his head: he spins. Charging down on him, a blade on each wrist, is a combat shell-suit in the matt black and silver of Taiyang. Finn cracks the spear shaft, the cable whips again and drives the axe-blade through the face plate in an explosion of shivered glass and blood. He kicks the spasming body away, rips the axe free and snaps both halves of the pole-arm together again.
Nice little weapon. Some smart fucker at Huygens came up with it: easy to print, easy to use. An Information Age society that fights its wars with Bronze Age weaponry.
The rovers finally load up.
‘Rachel, Quoc, with me!’ Finn commands. His rearguard falls in at his side, weapons hefted, but the Taiyang bots and wushis have halted on the edge of the mirror field. They have won. They have humiliated Mackenzie Helium. There is no profit in prolonging the slaughter.
Eighty jackaroos went in. Forty-six came out.
The bots and wushis melt away into the shadow and dazzle of the mirrors, save one, which raises an armoured hand, rotates it, extends a single finger. Darius? Could be. The suit is small. Finn has only met him on rare formal visits to Crucible, spoken no more than the niceties due the son of Robert Mackenzie and Jade Sun, but he came away with the sense of a RALF. Right Arrogant Little Fucker. Darius Sun would do something like that.
Finn Warne’s haptics let him appreciate the solidity and weight of the spear-axe in his hands.
Nice piece.
‘Rachel, Quoc, go.’
The rovers have loaded up the survivors and fire up their traction motors.
Finn lifts the spear, finds the balance in its irregular form. He feeds power into the suit servos. He hurls it with all his amplified strength at the Sun suit’s chestplate.
Weren’t expecting that, were you, you little fuck?
The figure sidesteps, drops to a crouch. The hand moves faster than anything Finn Warne has ever seen and snatches the spear in mid-flight. Spins it, aims it. Finn Warne is sure he can see a smile behind that dark face plate.
‘Bryce!’
No answer.
‘Bryce!’
Finn Warne summons another display – the ragged wedge of rovers fleeing the bloody debacle of Palus Putridinis. There is Bryce’s rover, ahead of the pack.
‘No you fucking don’t,’ Finn swears. The combat suit calculates reserves. He has enough power for ten minutes at full speed. Enough to catch up with Bryce’
s executive rover, though he will be down to milliwatts and gasps.
Enough to outrun a spear aimed at his back?
He turns and kicks the suit into power run. He cries out at the agony in his joints, would fall and roll if the suit were not in control. Ten minutes. He can’t take it. He has to take it.
There is the dust-line of the retreat. He sprints between the scattered rovers and their defeated cargoes: shell-suits clamped into acceleration frames, sasuited dusters clinging to struts and strapping, webbed in, lashed down, jolting to every rock and divot. Bootprints among the tyre-tracks. One set of tracks and a single dust plume now.
Power eight per cent.
He catches up with the racing rover, locks a glove around an inspection ladder. Mid-swing he slams into the ladder with an impact he can feel even through shell and pressure skin. Has he broken anything? He dangles from the back of the rover, each swing a down-tick on the power meter; then gets a boot against a bulkhead, pushes and manages to get his other hand on the ladder. From that it is a simple, agonising process to haul himself up the ladder and over the pressure hull to the life-support section.
Power two per cent.
Finn Warne uncoils the power conduit, flips up the dustcap and plugs himself in. It’s like sex. Better. Air now. Fresh and sweet and so so cool. What you smell most in a shell-suit is your own mouth. He lies on his back on the top of the rover, bathing in clean, sweet air. Last, communications. He patches into the rover’s common channel.
‘Bryce. What you did there, running off, I didn’t appreciate that.’
There is no response for a long time but Finn will not concede the weakness of having to repeat himself.
‘Finn. Glad you made it.’
‘No thanks to you, Bryce.’
‘Finn, Finn. This was a business decision.’
‘First Blades being just another fungible asset.’
No reply from inside the comfortable, air-conditioned cabin.
‘I see you’re taking us back to East Insularum.’
‘I must get to Kingscourt.’