Moonsteed

by Manda Benson

  “No! I need to avenge him. Vladimir, your connection to the ANT might still work. Can you use it to find Farron?”

  “Let’s just try to get out of here with our lives, right? Verity, if we can get back to the lander, he won’t be able to come after us.”

  “You go back to the lander then, but tell me where he is first.” Verity gripped the handle of her katana. “And if you don’t, I’ll stay here and look until I find him.”

  Vladimir’s shoulders collapsed into a sigh. “Okay,” he said. “The ANT says he’s in his lab. But I’m not going back to the lander alone. I’m coming with you. Let’s finish this and get out of here.”

  Verity nodded, and turned to the corridor that led that way.

  “You don’t need to hold my hand anymore,” said Verity as they set off. “I think the drug has worn off and I’m all right now.”

  Vladimir loosened his grip and dropped his arm to his side, and it occurred to Verity that she preferred it as it was. “Actually...” She closed her hand around the wrist of his glove.

  He glanced at her and smiled awkwardly. “All right, then.”

  Verity stuck the manual override switch into the lock.

  Farron crashed into the corridor in front of them. He breathed fast and stridently, and there was a gun in his hand. “You think I’m going to let you off at level two?” He broke into a brief spate of coughing, and added, “Ex nihilo nihil fit.”

  Verity let go of Vladimir and immediately shot her hand to the hilt of her katana, but her elbow froze rigid. Farron’s stare cut into her.

  “Kill him!” Anthony screamed in the back of her mind.

  But she couldn’t draw the sword. Her muscles wouldn’t respond.

  Vladimir shouted, and he staggered forward with the fire extinguisher. He swung it up, slamming the base into Farron’s diaphragm. He tripped backward, arms folding around the heavy cylinder as he crashed to the floor, eyes wide and mouth groping soundlessly for words he didn’t seem able to speak.

  Verity tried again to draw her sword, pulling a few inches of steel out from the sheath before her arm locked again and refused to obey her. She tried to tell Vladimir to take her wakizashi and kill him, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Vladimir grabbed Verity’s arm and pulled her away, up the corridor that led to the stable block.

  A sudden fear came upon Verity that Farron might be mortally injured, and she turned back to look, dragging on Vladimir’s arm.

  “What you worried about him for?” Vladimir said, hurrying on so she stumbled and was forced to look ahead of them once more.

  “I... I don’t know. Why didn’t you kill him?”

  “I don’t kill people! How d’you expect me to do things like that?”

  “That’s what he does,” thought Anthony Cornelian’s ghost. “Don’t think what he wants you to think!”

  “Let’s just get out of here before he does anything else,” Verity said. “There might be horses we can take to get back to the lander.”

  They reached the stable door and flung it open. No horse sounds greeted them, no background broadcasts of idle socializing. All the stalls stood empty, the tack missing from the racks opposite.

  “They must have evacuated them,” Verity realized. “We’re going to have to walk it.” Walking would take more than an hour. Without horses, they’d be easy to catch, but there was no other option.

  “Okay, out the stable door.”

  Outside, the light of a dawn not yet broken hung upon Callisto’s icy horizon. Verity jammed on her helmet to protect her from the razor-sharp chill in the air. They ran for the main gates in great leaping strides in the low gravity. The scarp seemed so far away as they passed through. It would take too long to run all that way. They didn’t stand a chance.

  “Halt in the name of the Meritocracy!”

  Verity froze. She sensed the tremor of many hoof beats on the ice through the soles of her boots, and when she turned, the whole cavalry rounded the side of the perimeter fence to intercept them both. Sergeant Black came at the front, on the alpha mare, and beside and a little behind her rode one of the newcomers whom Verity didn’t recognize. Obviously he thought himself important and knew little about horses, because he was riding the stallion, of all things.

  The other riders came about in a coordinated arc to cut them off from the base to surround them. As they closed their ranks and pressed in toward her and Vladimir, Verity unsheathed her katana. If she was to die today, she was going to take some of them with her, and she was going to make damn well sure they had to kill her properly, with guns, because she did not intend to be a decapitated head on Farron’s bench.

  “Drop your weapons, Sergeant Verity. You’re surrounded,” said Black.

  The man on the stallion raised an electroshock gun and aimed it at Verity’s head.

  And the first sun ray of a new day on Callisto glimmered on the horizon, sparkling on the frosted coats of the horses and the icy plain.

  Chapter 15

  The sight of the sunrise stirred strange emotions in Verity. Would she live to see that same sun come up over Torrmede once more? Or would her eyes be blind, her mind converted to a vessel of poison to be used against her people to buy Farron time? Would she look upon the sunrise and it mean nothing to the person she had once been? Would her eyes be no more than the cameras that informed a robot?

  Nearly seventeen Earth days. Four hundred hours. A drop of molten light, brimming on the horizon.

  “Put it down, Verity.”

  The first rays of a new dawn spilled out over the icy plain, sending long fingers of shadow reaching toward the people gathered before the base. The sunlight had a thin, watery quality, light that had travelled nearly five hundred million miles to reach this cold place. The sunrise lent the landscape an eerie, cheerless quality.

  “Verity, put it down!”

  Verity looked away from the sun to take in the man looking down at her from the shoulders of the stallion, and the gun in his hand. These horses, whom she’d trusted with her life time and time again, these noble beasts she knew better than anyone, now being used against her by those with no such understanding.

  She let the blade of her katana drop until it met the fingers of her left hand. Balancing the sword on upturned palms and without averting her gaze from the eyes of the man, she lowered it as though to put it down carefully, angling it as she did so the bright grain of the steel caught the sunlight, sending a dazzling reflection racing up the blade and into the face of the stallion standing in front of her.

  His eyes wheeled to the whites, his head went up and he took a faltering step back, ignoring a barrage of surprised shouts and kicks from his rider. He shied and turned, crashing into one of the other horses as he tried to escape the scary shiny thing, and cantered to the safety of the building. The horse he’d gone into was the alpha mare, and Verity sensed the sharp broadcast of her anger. The hormones of early pregnancy were in her blood, and these were her horses for her to protect, and she would not have him, a mere stallion, bringing disorder here!Her ears went back, and she ran after the retreating stallion, lunging at his rump with her teeth as Sergeant Black yelled and pulled the reins, face rigid in concentration as she assailed the horse with thought-prompts. The stallion broadcast panic and sped to a gallop, unseating his rider. The other horses began to mill about as they tried to follow their leader.

  Verity sprang upright, re-sheathing her katana, and seized the nearest horse by its bridle. She turned its head to her as its rider fumbled for his gun. She got the faceplate undone, synced herself to the horse, and immediately gave the thought-prompt to rear. The next moment, the rider was on the ice on his back, and Verity vaulted into the saddle. “Get a horse!” she shouted to Vladimir.

  He had one by the bridle. Verity jammed on her helmet and gathered the reins as she moved her own horse alongside, grabbing its rider’s arm and moving away so he unbalanced and fell to the ground. “Come on!” As soon as Vladimir had mounted, she led
his horse by its bridle as she gave hers the command to move away, trying to get them both clear of the commotion. She released it once he was into its stride and they were clear of the others.

  “Keep close to me and make for the scarp!” she called to him as the horse rose to a gallop.

  “Not bad, for someone the Magnolia Order reckoned wasn’t up to this mission,” thought Anthony from inside the bag.

  “You can tell them that yourself when we get back.”

  “There’s someone following us!” Vladimir shouted.

  Verity used the horse’s vision to look. It was Farron. He wore his furry-collared coat and no helmet, and she was certain that was the alpha mare he was riding. “What’s he doing?” she yelled back to Vladimir. “He can’t control two people and their horses at once, and he’ll die of hypothermia dressed like that out here!”

  “Oh, he has his reasons,” Anthony explained. “He rather foolishly just told you what he was doing before he was interrupted. You now have intelligence he intended to overwrite with something else, and he doesn’t want that information to escape. If he can’t stop you, it’s in his interests to kill you.”

  Anthony was right. Verity urged the horse faster, pushing ahead of Vladimir to take the lead on the path around the side of the scarp. The crystal palisades of the ice protrusions rushed past amid the snorting of the horse and the clouds of vapor it threw over its shoulders with each breath.

  “When I jump, jump after me!” she shouted. “I don’t care if it looks dangerous. I don’t want you to think about it, just do it!”

  They rounded the edge of the scarp, and Verity had to duck over the horse’s neck to avoid a large ice spike that had come down from the ridge and fallen over the path. They must be nearing the edge of the crater now. There was the place Anthony’s body had fallen over the edge. This horse wasn’t like the stallion. She wouldn’t be afraid, so Verity didn’t have to worry about controlling her. She just had to know exactly where the right place to jump was.

  “Here! Follow me.”

  The crystalline edges of the path caught the sunrise and sparkled as she turned the horse and gave the thought-prompt to jump. The ravine sailed past below. Verity spotted the yacht’s lander, lying at the bottom a hundred yards or so away. The black ice of the plain below came up to meet them. She kicked her feet free of the stirrups as soon as she recovered from the jolt of the landing, and slid off with the horse still moving.

  “Don’t dismount yet,” said Vladimir. “We’ve still got a way to go.”

  “I don’t want the horses hurt by the fusion engine when we take off,” Verity argued. “Now get down and come!”

  They bounded across the plain, back toward the scarp and the ravine where the lander was hidden. Verity glanced up at the ridge once before she leapt into the ravine, but saw no horse there.

  “Hurry,” Anthony urged. She landed heavily and stumbled down on her knees, before getting up and running to the lander. She gave the thought-prompt to unlock before she’d even reached it, then Vladimir was up on the roof turning the wheel that would open the airlock.

  She vaulted onto the lander’s roof. She was still synced, and in the horse’s peripheral vision she could see Farron and the alpha mare up on the ridge, his hair and eyebrows rimed with frost from his breath, fury on his face as he raised his arm and squinted down the barrel of a gun.

  “Get in!”

  Vladimir slithered through the hatch and into the lander. As Verity dropped her feet through and took up her weight on her arms to lower herself after him, a blow to the back hurled her forward against the rim. She fell into the pod across the headrest of the pilot’s seat with her head in the foot well. Her vision blacked out. He’d shot her in the back, the bastard. A dead mass filled her chest, and when she tried to draw breath her lungs would not respond. Certain that death was imminent, she could not even muster the voice to speak to Vladimir.

  “Goodbye, Anthony.”

  “Anthony?”

  Verity opened her eyes. The lander’s interior drifted into focus. She found herself able to inhale against the pain in her chest. She’d winded herself when she’d fallen on the hatch.

  “Verity!”

  Against the ringing in her ears, the voice seemed to come from inside her head.

  “Verity!” It wasn’t Anthony’s voice, it was Vladimir’s. He reached over the back of the pilot’s seat and pulled her upright by the shoulder straps of her Sky Forces backpack. A stink of scorched electricals burnt her nostrils. “Verity, are you all right?”

  “Uh,” she said.

  “We need to take off. Now!”

  Verity twisted around so her weight fell properly into the seat and pulled the straps over her shoulders. When she glanced up, the green light was already up on the airlock door. Vladimir must have closed it.

  “Anthony?”

  She took off her gloves and fumbled numbly for the controls. “Anthony, I can’t remember the takeoff sequence.”

  “Verity, we need to go!”

  Gyromag first, she recalled. The noise of the magnet rotating came into hearing. Now plasma thrust. Her hand found the control for it. The little craft gave a lurch as the gyromag levitator came online. Now the main fusion engine. This felt awkward, like something she’d never had any experience with. The force of the acceleration threw her back against the seat, and she gripped the steering bar, holding the lander’s course straight as it chased up from the ravine and the horizon grew curved and blue before her eyes, although her arms trembled and a deep feeling of shock paralyzed her inside. “Anthony, I can’t do this without you!”

  The readouts and course schematics on the screens in front of her finally started to register, and the memory of how to operate the craft began to return to her and form sense. The autopilot would take over in a minute. She just needed to hold the craft still a little longer.

  As soon as the autopilot came online, she tried to twist round to reach the bag, but the acceleration force and her seatbelt made it impossible. “Anthony!” Her mind was empty of all but her own thoughts. “There’s something wrong.”

  “We’re nearly there. See, there’s the yacht.”

  Verity looked where he pointed, to a bright star in the fore window. Nearly there. Nearly.

  Vladimir had his seatbelt off and was standing in his seat before the craft had even finished docking. Immediately when the light came on the airlock door, he turned the wheel and threw it open. “Come on!” he said, maneuvering up and putting down a hand to pull Verity out into the yacht’s central bay.

  She held on to the rail as she wriggled the bag off her shoulders. When she reached inside and pulled out the computer, a dark indentation had burned a ragged shape in the plastic close to one corner, falling into a hole that revealed warped metal surfaces within.

  “We need to get into the centrifuge and find a screwdriver.”

  “What are you talking about? We’ve got to radio Torrmede and tell them what’s happened. And you need to gimme that sample so I can put it in the freezer.”

  Verity wasn’t listening to him. She pulled herself through the doorway to the centrifuge. She found a box of tools in one of the rooms inside, and she sandwiched the computer between her knee and elbow and the table as she took out the screws holding the casing together. Inside, where Farron’s shot had hit it, was a deformed rectangular object with its interior metal surfaces all melted. “We have to fix this.”

  “That’s the hard drive,” said Vladimir quietly from behind her. “It can’t be fixed.”

  Verity stared at the broken computer, and it blurred before her eyes. “Anthony’s dead,” she said, and it came out in a sob.

  “What’s the matter? I thought you already killed him twice.”

  “We were going to do stuff together. I was going to make it up to him for killing him.”

  Vladimir put his arms around her, rather awkwardly without gravity to support them both. Verity put her head against his chest as her shoulders
shook and her breathing broke into shuddering gulps.

  “Look,” he said gently. “I’ll go and radio Torrmede for you, if you like. Would that be better?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then. What do you want me to tell them?”

  Verity swallowed and took a deep breath. “Tell the Magnolia Order we’ve got a sample and we’ve destroyed the illegal research, but we’ve failed to kill Lloyd Farron. And tell them we’re turning the yacht around. We’re going back to Torrmede.”

  Chapter 16

  The blade of the shovel bit into the hard-packed earth and Verity had to step on the back edge and use her weight to cut the ground. The sun was warm, and after a few shovelfuls of earth she was already sweating. She grit her teeth and persevered with the digging until she’d made a hole a foot or so deep.

  Verity straightened and arched her back. She dragged her sleeve across her forehead, and looked back in the direction of Torrmede House, the sun in the sky and the bright flowers of the rhododendrons that covered the grounds. A rectangle of lawn separated the house from the magnolia garden, where the trees surrounded the statues at the center. Normally, the general public wasn’t allowed in here, but an exception had been made in this case by the request of the Magnolia Order.

  The statues stood on their plinths with their backs to each other, Pilgrennon with a noble expression and his right hand folded on his chest, Blake poised with her hand on the hilt of her katana and a keen intelligence on her face.

  “Ready?” Vladimir said.

  Verity nodded.

  He held out the bag to her, and she slid her hands inside and took out the computer that had been the last resting place of the ghost of Anthony Cornelian, spy for the Magnolia Order. She turned the computer so its undamaged screen faced upward, and placed it in the hole she had dug.

  “Goodbye, Anthony Cornelian.” She scattered earth over the dead computer. “No one will remember your name, and no one knew it, but you did as much for the Meritocracy as anyone ever did. You deserve to be buried here with its heroes.”