The Fragger had been brought back to Luna and tuned up. Through October, training flights took off from the new inertial launcher on the Mare Vaporum, near Marius Hills.
The Fragger’s ion propulsion drive could not achieve escape velocity from Luna without burning a wasteful amount of juice, which would draw down its reserves for maneuvers. That was why they had been launched from space to begin with. The inertial launcher—a rail launcher bought from a mining company that had been hit on 9/29—solved the problem in a different way, by catapulting the ship into space from an elliptical maglev track.
Several times a day, Mendoza enviously watched the Fragger whizz into the lunar sky. And then he got back to work.
While he waited his turn, he was still toiling away in the analysis section.
They’d given up on finding the lost batch of Dust. Now they were working on improving tracking for the next drop.
Mendoza wondered why there even needed to be a next drop. They already had a good enough map of Mars for target-finding. But the IT axiom applied: data good, more data better.
In addition to the unused probes that had come back with Frank’s Fragger, trillions more were now pouring out of the new fab in Hopetown. Making them was not difficult for an outfit like Hope Energy, with its expertise in biotechnology and nanoscale manufacturing processes.
Controlling and tracking the probes was difficult.
“Crap on it!” Youssef howled.”I’ve lost my swarm again!”
“They just don’t like you,” Mendoza said. “Seriously, they probably went behind a building.”
Luna’s tenuous surface boundary exosphere was not enough of an atmosphere for the probes. They could only fly where there was air. And that meant inside a dome. The citizens of Marius Hills would have been uneasy if they knew that Hopetown and New Jeddah were now teeming with winged bacteria. But they did not know. Even when millions of probes swarmed together, they looked like nothing more than a sparkle of dust in the air.
The analysts flew them everywhere, in and out of buildings, and spied on their friends. This was not prurience. It was practice.
The Dust, being bacteria, could not be programmed in the traditional sense of the word. However, they could emit and receive signals at 512MHz, utilizing the antennae that they had been gengineered to grow from deposits of metal in their single-celled bodies. The subcarrier oscillator that the team used to communicate with them was modulated with bioinformation that included the wavelength of the light the probes were absorbing. This enabled them to ‘take photographs.’ It also allowed the team to control them like minuscule hang-gliders, by feeding them certain black-box strings which Mendoza did not understand. That part worked OK. But when their feeble signals were blocked, for example by a cathedral … or a crowd of people … they wandered off on their own and got lost. Then someone had to go out and look for them.
“Sigh,” Youssef said, standing up. He grabbed one of the portable transceivers. “Back in a few. Hopefully they haven’t gotten flushed down a toilet, or something.”
“Huh?” Mendoza said.
“What?”
Staring at his own screens, Mendoza shook his head. “Nothing. See you soon.”
His own swarm was inside Notre Dame de la Lune. A graph wobbled downwards, showing an average loss rate. You’d start with a swarm of 2,000,000, say, and only 1,800,000 would come home. That was normal. What was not normal was that his graph had suddenly plunged. It said he had only half his swarm left.
“Can’t be right,” Mendoza muttered.
The swarm drifted over the altar, photographing the (electric) candlesticks. The raw images were blurry, but imaging software rendered them at a resolution high enough for him to see the altar boys’ fingerprints on the candlesticks.
A lens-less camera, too small for the naked eye to see, which could disassemble itself and fly away ... Mendoza preferred not to think about the potential commercial applications.
But there was no danger of Hope Energy commercializing the probes. The control software was just too buggy. The Hope Center for Nanobiotics had handled that side of the development project, and the Hope Center for Nanobiotics was now defunct. Of course, its IP still existed, but all that stuff was now in suspended animation, buried under a bazillion court orders … just like everything else Derek Lorna had ever touched.
So the D.I.E. team were wrestling with a control program none of them understood, running MI diagnostics, trying out messy code patches.
504,809.
This was ridiculous.
“Is someone messing with my swarm?”
They did that. Pranks. Since they all had access to the secure wireless keys, you just had to de-authenticate a swarm from its assigned controller and re-authenticate it to yourself. Then send it to lurk in the toilets or something. Har, har.
“Naw, dude.”
“You losing probes?”
“Bunch of mine are gone, too.”
“Maybe it’s a protest. Someone bought bug spray, is killing them by the million.”
“Har, har.”
“Bug spray wouldn’t kill them,” Jasmine Ah said humorlessly. “They’re tough. You guys need to figure out those black-box code strings. That’s where the problem is.”
Mendoza thought, Frank should know about this. Frank was the guardian angel of D.I.E., always in their corner, shielding them from blowback.
Mendoza clicked over to the personnel map, which showed where everyone was. He searched for Frank’s name. OUT OF AREA. Dammit. Now he remembered, Frank had taken the Fragger up today.
ID bubbles clustered so thickly on campus that they obliterated the 3D buildings. Text and mugshots ruffled up, tracking his gaze.
Wait. Go back.
The frowning face of a young Arab. Name: Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud.
Where have I heard that name before?
Mendoza was getting used to functioning without his BCI. His powers of recall had recovered. In a second he placed the name.
Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud had been one of the Fragger pilots lost on the final, failed Dust drop.
So, he never got taken off the personnel roster. That’s understandable. It would be like admitting he’s dead.
Mendoza zoomed in on Abdul’s ID bubble. The young man had prominent teeth, a unibrow. Hawk-like eyes. The map gave him a location on the campus. R&D building … 3rd floor …Analysis Section.
Jesus!
Mendoza jumped as if he’d been stung.
Abdul’s ID bubble floated in the corner of this very office.
He’s in HERE!
Mendoza rose from his ergoform. Stood on it to look over the tops of the fish tanks.
Everyone was in their place, bouncing up and down, shambling on a treadmill, or slumped immobile, according to personal preference.
No unibrowed Arab pilot to be seen.
Mendoza rubbed his arms. All the little hairs were standing on end.
He hesitated to speak up. Everyone was busy. Youssef wasn’t here. Jasmine already thought Mendoza was a typical Earthling …
He stepped down from his ergoform, took his jacket, and moved towards the door.
The PA emitted the two-tone chime that preceded an important announcement.
“Everyone, be informed that there has been an accident. The Fragger has crashed.” It was a real person making the announcement, not an MI. Her voice broke. “Frank was piloting. We don’t know what happened. The good news is he’s expected to survive …”
Mendoza didn’t wait to hear the rest. He kept moving, out of the building. He did not know where he’d been going to go. But he knew where he was going now.
Frank.
An accident?
There are no accidents, his mother often said, with the certainty of a lifetime immersed in Catholic eschatology.
Standing in the sunlight, Mendoza summoned his Grasshopper via his contacts. It drove up from the underground garage. He got in and instructed the autodrive to take him to t
he ‘roadlock,’ as Hopetowners called the airlock assigned to vehicles. You were not allowed to drive your own car inside the dome. Once outside, he disabled the autodrive and zoomed upwards.
The Grasshopper’s hydrogen fuel cell powered a cold-gas propulsion system that could provide rearwards and vertical thrust. It travelled, like its namesake, in hops. Up he went, through the stripe of sunlight that sheared through the PLAN’s hole in the roof. He could see the patch on the roof of Hopetown, like a knob of keloid tissue on a face. Down, down, down to the jagged floor.
The dead were out here. Despite the best efforts of the search teams, not all the people sucked out of the breach on 9/29 had been found. Mendoza kept the headlights on maximum strength, half-expecting to see a frozen, irradiated body on the floor every time he landed.
The lava tube kinked. He flew into daylight, and out.
Earth partnered the sun, low in the sky. Using the GPS, he navigated through the lumpy terrain of the Marius Hills, down to the Mare Vaporum.
The solar panels of the new launch facility glittered in the distance. They must have seen him coming klicks away, as the Grasshopper kicked up a fountain of moondust each time it touched down. He was met with, “You can’t see Frank. He’s in intensive care.”
“Oh, come on,” was all Mendoza could think of to say, standing beside his car, which had been de-dusted in the vehicle airlock and now sparkled clean. The garage smelled of mint. This launch facility was so new that dust, dirt, and fungal growths hadn’t had time to lodge in the crannies.
“Trey’s on his way,” said the elderly field engineer confronting Mendoza. “I guess you can go in for a couple of minutes, until he gets here.”
“I told those assholes to let you in as soon as you arrived.” Frank said, when Mendoza was admitted to the launch facility’s sickbay. To be precise, he did not say the words. They appeared on a screen above the privacy baffles that hid all of Frank except for one bare foot. The baffles bulged and trembled: medibots at work behind them. “I’ve got comms in here, feeds. I saw you coming.”
“Are you OK?” Dumb question.
“I’m fine. But listen, Mendoza. They’re going to say I’m crazy or some shit. Dad thinks he’s always right about everything. So I need you to listen to me. Believe me.”
“I’m listening.”
“Vicky’s alive.”
“Frank …”
“She’s alive! I saw her! That’s why I crashed. Lost control for a moment, I guess. It was a shock.”
“Where … was she?”
“That’s the weird part. She was …” The words appeared one by one on the screen. “In the cockpit with me.”
Dumbfounded, Mendoza blurted, “How was there room? The Fragger’s cockpit is scarcely big enough for one.”
“She was sitting on my lap.”
Mendoza moved closer to the privacy baffles. He laid his hand on Frank’s foot. It was icy cold, and did not move.
“They say the Fragger’s totaled,” Frank went on. “I’m not buying it. Shit, I’m OK, so how can the ship not be?”
Fear overtook Mendoza. He stepped around to the foot of the bed.
The baffles were open here, so that the medibots could move in and out. He saw another privacy screen, which hid Frank’s head and shoulders. On this side of the screen was a red, glistening mess. A medibot hunted and pecked, suturing the purple snakes of Frank’s intestines. A suction hose gulped up blood and fluids. Frank’s entire body had been crushed. His pelvis and ribs rose from the gore, macabrely intact. But even nanotically reinforced bones were not unbreakable: something had sheared through both of Frank’s legs above the knee. The foot Mendoza held was not attached to anything. It lay in a tray.
“Hey,” the screen blinked in his peripheral vision. “Can you tell me what they’re doing down there? Damn bots aren’t very talkative.”
“They’re fixing you up,” Mendoza muttered.
“I sure hope so. It better not take too long. I have to get back up there and find Vicky.”
Mendoza stumbled away. Heading for the door, he threw up at the feet of Trey Hope, who had just entered the room with an entourage of state-of-the-art surgeons.
★
Driving, he parsed Frank’s bizarre statements. Tried to work out how Frank could have been telling the truth.
Say Vicky really was out there. She made it back, but her ship was damaged, she couldn’t land, couldn’t communicate. Frank spots her and tries to rescue her … but it goes wrong, and he crashes. But he can’t admit that he deliberately risked the last Fragger, so he comes up with this other story.
It was possible, Mendoza guessed. In a universe where people acted dumb when those they loved were near.
Which, actually, described this one.
The other alternative was that Frank was crazy. But if he was, Mendoza was, too.
He went home. Couldn’t face going back to the office. Everyone would ask him how Frank was.
Even his Copts asked. They, too, had heard the news. “He’s expected to survive,” Mendoza told them.
Eliana, little Gerges, patriarch Binyamin, and all the others shook their heads solemnly. There seemed to be even more of them today, rustling and shivering in their heavy Shackleton City clothing. Mendoza grabbed his hat and went back out. Abraam, who was hanging around near the door, flattened himself against the wall so that he would not get in Mendoza’s way. They tried so hard to be good guests.
Back in his Grasshopper, Mendoza cued up a Bartok violin sonata on the sound system. He drove down the tube to New Riyadh.
This 6-km long dome, pimpled with satellite dishes and air exchangers, was the private residence of the Saudi royal family. The House of Saud provided fodder for an entire subcategory of gossip feeds, proving both the timeless appeal of royalty, and the allure of the incompletely known. You couldn’t even get in here … unless, for example, you worked for one of the King’s best friends, such as Trey Hope.
Mendoza had never been inside before. He expected to be overwhelmed by bling.
Instead, he stepped into a desert.
“Wow,” he said, genuinely overwhelmed.
Low dunes stretched to the horizon. On Luna, the horizon was only ever a couple of kilometers away, so it looked like the sand went on forever, until it met the cobalt sky. Heat mirages rippled. Silence filled Mendoza’s ears, making him realize how accustomed he’d grown to living with the background noise of a dome.
“Come on,” said the security guard who had met him at the airlock. He tramped into the dunes. Mendoza followed.
Dry, oven-like heat pressed on their skin. Off to their left, date palms shaded a pond as flat as a mirror.
“Sorry we have to walk,” the security guard said. “All the camels are out today.”
“The camels … are out?”
“You were expecting decadence? Swimming pools and things?” The security guard was about seventeen years old, earnest and informative. “New Riyadh isn’t modelled on old Riyadh. It’s basically a wildlife preserve. That’s why you had to go through a full decontamination protocol before you could enter the dome. We have hyraxes, gerbils, desert foxes, leaf-nosed bats, and even leopards. And camels, of course.”
“Wow. I think I actually read something about that.”
“The deserts of the Middle East were greened in the late twenty-first century. We’re told it was necessary to combat climate change,” the young security guard said darkly. “But we know it destroyed the ecology of the region. So the House of Saud made a commitment to preserve the natural beauty of the Arabian peninsula.”
Ahead, a sand-colored mountain rose out of the heat haze. There’s nothing natural about a desert inside a dome on the moon, Mendoza thought. Hot and tired, he said, “Can we skip the guided tour? I want to see the King.”
A black shape separated from the distant mountain, soaring. The security guard yelped and fell flat on his face.
“Is it dangerous?” Mendoza yelled, but got no answer.
The enormous bird swooped down, folding its wings, and landed in front of them. Sand spurted up from its jewelled sandals. Yes, sandals. It was not a bird. It was a woman in an abaya, with wings spanning four full meters. Green eyes sparked in the slit of her niqab.
“Frank’s friend,” she said in English.
“Yes.”
“How dare you make him walk?” she scolded the security guard. “Look, he’s red in the face, he’s sunburned!”
The security guard, still face-down, babbled in Arabic.
The woman snapped something in the same language. She held out her hands to Mendoza. “Come, I can carry you. I’m very strong.”
Doubtfully, Mendoza stepped forward. She pulled him into her arms and leapt into the air. As the desert fell away beneath them, Mendoza wrapped his legs around her bottom so as not to be dangling vertically. Face to bosom, groin to groin. This was awkward.
“I’m Nadia,” the woman panted. Mendoza twitched. He knew that name from the news. He was being carried through the air by Princess Nadia, who’d recently broken off her engagement to Prince Jian Er of China. “Do you like my wings? I’m getting fed up of them, actually. It’s annoying to have to sleep on your stomach, and you can’t sit in ordinary chairs, either.”
“They’re lovely,” Mendoza mumbled into her breasts. He had assumed the wings were a fancy, feathered version of the wingsets that you could rent in the touristy areas of Shackleton City. Now that he knew they were augments, he could feel her enhanced shoulder muscles flexing under his hands. “I like the … feathers.”
“Not feathers! Pycnofibers.”
“Like the coats of dinosaurs.”
“Yes! Exactly like that!” She giggled, which made her breasts heave. “I am a dinosaur. We’re all dinosaurs here.”
“Laugh,” Mendoza said weakly.
Something terrible was happening. He knew she had to be able to feel it. No. No. Think of Elfrida. Think of … think of … death by decompression, Horowitz at Carnegie Hall …
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 123