‘Consider it a farewell gift.’
‘I’ve got enough baggage, thanks.’
‘You need my help.’
‘We’ve never needed your help.’
He motioned to the case. ‘Link in. You might change your mind.’
She cast her eyes over the black case.
‘Please,’ he said.
Sky hesitated. Eventually, curiosity got the better of her.
Connect.
The case opened.
There was nothing inside. Was this a joke? She knelt to inspect it. She ran a finger along its miniature scales. There was something familiar…
Then came a strange sensation, as if she had just discovered an extra limb. She was in two places; her body and that case. The case felt numb at first, but as neural connections settled in place, she sensed the cold floor beneath it. The luggage began to lose its shape, like a melting clock in a Salvador Dali painting.
Yes, Sky thought, it was exactly what she needed.
The mass spread and stretched until it was no longer a case but a swaying sheet of armor. It rippled in gentle waves.
‘You’re giving me a swarm?’ she asked, almost in shock.
‘Loaning.’
‘You have authority to do this?’
He paused. ‘This swarm is an older model, used mainly for training. It does not have some the features of the swarms our agents currently use in the field.’
‘Old or not, I couldn’t get a high-beam flashlight as a citizen, and you’re offering a rent-a-swarm? What’s the catch?’
‘Stay alive.’
His offer jarred her like an out-of-tune key on a piano. As an employee of the Department of Justice, she knew how things worked; there would be protocols within protocols, checks and balances, and more checks and balances. Handing over this sort of equipment to unqualified third parties would be governed by some policy or other.
Why was he doing this? Was it guilt? Or did he truly care?
‘What I really need is information,’ she said, deciding she might as well milk the opportunity. She imagined the swarm flat, and its mass crumpled in response.
‘Any more news on the brainbender?’ Sky asked.
‘You’ll accept the swarm?’
‘I’m not asking you to divulge classified information. Just tell me what you can.’ She spread the swarm out like pancake batter. There were kinks in it, and it was not as circular as she had intended.
She imagined the swarm as a sphere, and its miniature interlocking robots worked as harmoniously as they could with their novice operator. The resulting object looked like a child’s attempt at a clay ball.
‘You already know as much as I do, more or less,’ he said, watching her manipulate the weapon.
The swarm swirled around her like a Chinese dragon.
I need this, she thought. ‘You don’t think this might stand out on the Moon, just a little? I may as well be wearing an NIA badge.’
‘Some of the wealthier insurance enforcers and militias carry swarms. But I do suggest you use it with discretion.’
She led the swarm over her. It rippled like a gymnast’s ribbon. She did not have to move her body to manipulate it, but she felt more connected to it if she did. Her palms guided the swarm in fluid waves, around her, beneath her. A sudden dart of a knife-hand sharpened the swarm into a point which stabbed at an imagined assailant. A clockwise rotation of her forearm gathered the swarm into a shield.
Tester smiled. ‘I remember your first martial arts class. You made me stay and watch because you were afraid of the instructor.’
‘It’s like it knows what I plan to do before I even think it,’ she said, trying to hide her excitement.
Her feet searched the air for a step and the swarm created one. She traipsed through the air, hopping from one swarm-stone to another. When she slipped and fell, it caught her.
‘If I go alone, as a daughter who wants to cure her mother—no politics—then I’ve got a chance. But if I go up there with even a scent of the NIA, I’ll end up dead. ’
‘If you cannot defend yourself, you’ll be dead anyway.’
Take it, take it.
She brought the swarm close to her face to study it. The thing appeared to be made of miniscule grains of black sand, but she struggled to focus on an individual grain because the swarm was in constant motion.
< It uses kinetic energy tech, ma’am. It needs to keep moving to generate power, > Uncle Jesse explained.
Like a great white shark needs to keep swimming, she thought.
She turned to Tester. ‘If you’re not detaining me, I want to be on the next elevator to the Moon.’
‘And the swarm?’
‘I won’t be needing it.’
Tester’s ordinarily controlled features took on a look of disbelief. ‘Be reasonable, Sky. You are heading to a lawless colony. You will be surrounded by people who are completely unmonitored, who could be thinking anything. You need protection.’
Sky shrugged.
Tester shook his head. ‘You’re mad at me, is that it?’
There was a long silence.
‘I am doing everything I can to save Winona…’ he swallowed, ‘… your mother. And to keep you safe.’
Truth be told, Sky was unsure how she felt. There were too many competing emotions swirling around her heart. Perhaps she was angry, but was that a good enough reason to reject a weapon such as this?
‘Your mother would want you to take it.’
He was right, again. Yet, something inside her could not bear to give him the pleasure. If she accepted his help, she would be in his debt. It was as if the mere act of acceptance invited him into her mind, into her life, as if accepting his gift would be to accept him. The thought made her ill.
‘Take it,’ he said.
Down on Earth, there was a swirl of white over the Pacific Ocean, like cotton candy, but the accompanying data told her it was a hurricane.
Behind her, the shifting swarm fell to the floor.
5:3
Sky sat alone by the window as her ship approached the tetherport. She had enjoyed the silence of the return trip.
When the ship docked, her stomach lurched. She began to fidget again, but found that doing so through gloves was not as satisfying.
She summoned a maya with footage of her mother; she was no longer on a stretcher in the corridor, but in a hospital bed in one of the wards. Winona seemed at peace. A flower stood in a vase beside her bed, a Jasmine flower, pale and soft like a marshmallow. It was her mother’s favorite. Sky had Uncle Jesse rewind the footage to identify the person who had placed the flower. It turned out be Tester.
What a strange man he was, Mr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The training room slowed its spin and the gravity dropped to zero. When the circular door began to slide open, Sky dismissed the maya of her mother.
Tester waited at the open door. Sky moved to the exit using the wall rails. She followed him into the adjoining corridor that led to the tetherport lounge. The lounge was still empty, save for her maroon luggage and the garish black tape that held down a part of the lining.
The half-moon shone in full view, austere and imposing. Sliced in two by its asteroid ring, which was itself dotted with lights.
The Moon. The first of the colonies. She had watched it as a child, shining down on her like an angel in a stained-glass window. Pure innocence. It even had its own halo, albeit an artificial one.
Tester floated beside her. ‘Everything has a price up there. Everything,’ he said. ‘Be careful who you bargain with, and what you bargain for. We have been trying to infiltrate their hacker networks since ’36. We have sent agents all over the colonies, but they come back with nothing, or they don’t come back at all. Our lunar embassy found one agent with his memories reformatted clean; he could neither speak nor walk. They had dumped him in the street outside, in a diaper. A joke.’
The bridge to the lunar elevator opened. Sky grabbed the handle of her l
uggage.
‘It’s the last one,’ said Tester.
‘Last what?’
‘The Security Council has decided to suspend all private travel to and from the Moon as a precautionary measure, in case of further attacks.’
‘How will that prevent a hack? Hackers don’t need to be on Earth.’
‘No, they don’t, but this is politics. It’s the interplanetary version of the silent treatment.’
Sky looked back at Earth. ‘How long?’
‘Indefinite. But what that means in reality, I don’t know.’
The Earth shone and Sky lost herself in its colors. She felt connected to the planet by an invisible tether of her own. Her mother was down there.
She grabbed hold of the zip-line with her free hand, but Tester held her arm. ‘Shackleton City is the best place to start. It’s the closest thing they have to a capital. Just avoid the lower levels. And do me a favor—purchase a weapon when you land?’
She nodded and he let go. The zip-line carried her to the waiting elevator.
‘Take care of yourself, Sky,’ he said. ‘Never be too proud to come home.’
She paused at the elevator entrance. She wasn’t sure why. Fear? No, something else, like a loose thread on a dress dangling for all to see.
She looked back to find her father staring into space.
‘I didn’t leave,’ he said, a glint of lunar light on his features. ‘I just…’ he caught his reflection in the window. He touched his face with one hand, as if to confirm that it was in fact his own flesh. ‘Sometimes you’re away for so long…’
He seemed lost, unlike himself, or at least what little she knew of him. Almost human. She felt something for him then, other than anger. Pity?
She thordered the zip-line onward and it guided her into the waiting elevator.
‘Never underestimate a brainbender,’ he said before the doors closed. ‘They can turn your world upside down. Watch your thoughts; make sure they are your own.’
PART II
Apollo
Chapter 6
Baggage
6:1
The umbilical cord between Earth and Moon detached. Sky’s elevator had crossed onto the lunar side of the equation; the bands that held the two stalks together unwound, and the rails separated, floating free.
Sky was cut off from Earth, for now.
The elevator was empty. Sky was its only passenger.
She recalled the vision she had while linked with the brainbender, and she hoped dearly that it was real—that Dante and Geppetto were real. It dawned on her that she had left Earth in such a hurry she had neither researched her destination nor developed a plan to locate the underground colony in her vision.
With eight hours left of her journey, she began her study.
Four hours later, she was barely wiser. The VOL had no public tracing systems such as cameras and thought-scanning. Hackers, especially the telepathic variety, were wary of outsiders.
She looked outside. The artificial ring of asteroids orbited the Moon from pole to pole. The ring was askew by a few degrees, leaning to the right of the North Pole (when viewed from Earth’s northern hemisphere) and to the left of the South Pole, so that it appeared like a lopsided crown of thorns.
Most of the asteroids had been dragged from their home in the Mars-Jupiter belt. Some were grand cavernous husks, their resources sucked dry, while others were covered in the lights of mining machines and their crews.
The lunar tetherport was something else. It was a few hundred kilometers from the asteroid belt, orbiting at the Moon’s equator. It was wedged into a hollow asteroid filled with hangars, hotels, and entertainment venues. It was far more impressive than the sea-bound Galapogos Elevator Port.
As the elevator approached, an obligatory welcome maya appeared with a slim, grinning actor.
‘Sammati and welcome to Apollo, signatories of the Voluntary Organization League,’ she said in an accent that sounded like a cross between a Louisiana drawl and letter-clipping Singlish. ‘The only law is the law of Consent as laid out in the Constitutions: there shall be no compulsion, except in matters of self-defense, and in the application of this law. Welcome to the Voluntary Organization League. One law, no authority but your own, freedom is yours. Sammati.’
The elevator did not stop at the tetherport, but continued on, down to the lunar surface.
Sky logged into the local news channels. Only a few were covering Earth’s Tellinii infection: Earth’s security council was to meet with representatives from the VOL, the first such meeting since the War of Independence (or the War of Secession, as it was known on Earth). The news segments were filled with advertisements from lunar neurosecurity firms who spruiked their anti-virus programs and the like.
As the elevator descended, Sky was unnerved by the lack of clouds. There was no semblance of an atmosphere here, just black space to gray space with no natural in-between.
‘Individual,’ the captain announced, ‘Welcome to Apollo; no nations, no borders, no taxes, no worries. We will shortly be arriving at Port Mare Vaporum.’
*
The lunar elevator docked with a thud. A zip-line led Sky out of the elevator and into the train station. Maya signs pointed to the tourist trains, many of which were heading to heritage areas such as the Apollo 11 landing site and museum.
Sky’s zip-line took her to the train for Shackleton City, the location her father had suggested she begin her search. The process was mercifully quick and required little human contact; Sky had only to flick her maya ticket at the train steward and she was allowed on board. She struggled to walk in the lower gravity and fell over twice before she found her seat.
The train soon departed. It sped through the rail tube across the lunar surface. Outside, the Moon was stark. Gray upon gray upon gray and no air. It was all so surreal. She could hardly believe she had made it this far. Ever since her mom’s infection, her life had moved at breakneck speed and she was struggling to catch up with it.
Uncle Jesse said he could put her to sleep until…
‘Shackleton City, final stop,’ announced the driver over the comms. Uncle Jesse woke her just in time.
Sky had to take a few moments to orient herself. She was indeed on the Moon. She hadn’t imagined it. Her maya provided a summary of the approaching locale: Shackleton City, lunar South Pole. It was the Moon’s largest single human habitat. The second largest was Pythagoras at the northern pole.
On Earth, humans huddled around rivers for access to water. On the Moon, it was the poles and their ice.
The area was known as Shackleton Crater, but there was no crater to be seen. Instead, it looked as if someone had tossed a rainbow of paint onto the Moon’s surface. The portion of the city that extended into the sunless side of the pole glistened with multicolored night-lights.
There were domes within domes. It would have made more sense to have a single dome, but Shackleton City had grown in fits and spurts; new colonists attached new domes onto old ones. Some of these radiation-proof domes were actually squared, others pyramids, others an amalgam of shapes. Contours and hues blended and clashed like a preschooler’s artwork.
The highlight of the city was the naked statue of the god Apollo. His torso rose out of the central mish-mash of domes, making it appear as if he were standing in the middle of a bubble bath. It was awe-inspiring, to say the least. Sky had experienced such surreal wonderment only once before in her life; the moment she laid eyes on Earth from space.
Sky’s train entered a dome airlock. On the way through, she spotted humans in lunesuitson the dome’s exterior, sucking up something from the roof.
< Cleaning, ma’am. They’ve got a dust problem here. >
‘Looks like dangerous work. Don’t they have bots for that?’
< It’s cheaper to hire humans. >
‘Bots are always cheaper.’
< Not here. >
A cleaner, in a faded red suit, stopped to watch the train enter the airlock. On
ce the train had passed, he returned to his work.
Inside the airlock, the train was hit with bursts of water and air. Uncle Jesse explained that it was being sucked and washed and fried clean of that pernicious destroyer of machinery; lunar regolith, the dust that coated the Moon—as fine as flour and as abrasive as glass shards, it clung to practically everything.
When the train entered Shackleton City, the architecture hit Sky like a hack; order had taken a back seat to chaos, straight lines connected to curves, buildings—or what looked like buildings—leaned and hung at angles impossible in Earth gravity. The less extravagant buildings rose from the levels below, the same as they would on Earth. Others, in the higher levels, hung unnaturally from dome ceilings like stalactites. Upside-down buildings with right-side-up living.
Palaces glittered in moats of slums like the India of the Before, metal and spice. Shackleton’s town planners must have been either drunks or surrealists. There was no theme or constant, just randomness, as if the city had been built on the roll of a die. A perpetual architectural anxiety.
The Earth loomed large on the horizon, but it was so low that it threatened to disappear altogether. It was also upside down; North Africa was at its base and Antarctica at its peak.
Though Sky had eaten little on the voyage over, she still struggled to keep it down. She barely made out the captain’s words over the pounding in her ears. ‘Individual, welcome to Shackleton City.’
6:2
Despite rinsing several times, Sky could still taste the stomach acid. Earth gravity would have kept it down, she thought. She had locked herself in a private bathroom in the train station for the last two hours. It had cost her twenty lunes, enough to buy a week’s worth of printed meals back home. The idea of food made her hurl again.
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