Luna

by Ian McDonald

  Rotating red lights. The lock is depressurised, Hetty says. She and every familiar wink out and re-visualise as the name of the squaddies, hovering green over each head. Green for all systems normal. Yellow for alert: air supply, water, batteries, environmental warning. Red for danger. Flashing red: extreme danger, immediate risk of death. White for death.

  ‘Coms check,’ Carlinhos says. Marina says her name and the little tongue-twister of the day to check that she is not touched with oxygen narcosis. ‘Copy,’ she adds hastily. So much to remember. ‘Outlock is opening,’ Carlinhos says. His sasuit is a patchwork of stickers and logos and icons but in the middle of his back is Ogun, São Jorge, his personal orixa. On the wall beside the outlock is an icon of Lady Luna. The skull side of her face has been worn away by thousands of gloved fingers. Touch for luck. Touch to foil death. ‘This is Lady Moon. She is drier than the driest desert, hotter than the hottest jungle, colder than a thousand kilometres of Antarctic ice. She is every hell world anyone ever dreamed. She knows a thousand ways to kill you. Disrespect her and she will. Without thought. Without mercy.’

  One by one the Jo Moonbeams line up to touch Lady Luna. Deserts, jungles, Antarctica: those aren’t words Carlinhos has ever experienced, Marina thinks. They sound like a old mantra. The duster’s prayer. Marina brushes fingers across the icon of Lady Moon.

  Through the soles of her boots Marina feels the outlock door grind up. A slot of grey between grey door and grey floor opens on to ugly machinery: laagers of surface rovers, service robots, coms towers, the upcurved horns of the BALTRAN. Dumped machinery, wrecked machinery, machinery under maintenance. An extractor, too tall for even this huge lock, roped off with chains of yellow service flashers: a Christmas tree of lights and beacons. Ranges of solar panels, slowly tracking the sun. Far distant hills. The surface of the moon is a scrapheap.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Carlinhos Corta says and leads his squad up the ramp. Marina steps out on to the surface. There is no transition, no crossing from indoor to great outdoors, not even a particular sense of bare surface and naked sky. The close horizon is visibly curved. Carlinhos leads the squad around a kilometre loop marked out by rope-lights. Hundreds of Jo Moonbeams have walked this way, bootprints overlay bootprints overlay bootprints. Bootprints everywhere, wheel tracks, the delicate toe-tips of stalking and climbing robots. The regolith is a palimpsest of every journey made across it. It is very ugly. Like every kid with access to binoculars, Marina had turned the magnification on King Dong; a giant spunking cock a hundred kilometres tall, boot-printed and tyre-tracked into the Mare Imbrium by infrastructure workers with too much time on their hands. Fifteen years back it was already blurred and scarred by criss-crossing tracks of subsequent missions. She doubts anything now remains of its gleeful frat-boy esprit.

  Marina looks up. And stops leaving footprints.

  A half Earth stands over the Sea of Fecundity. Marina has never see a thing bluer, truer. The Atlantic dominates the hemisphere. She makes out the western limb of Africa, the horn of Brazil. She can track the swirl of ocean storms, drawn in to the bowl of the Caribbean where they are stirred into beasts and monsters, sent spiralling out along the curve of the Gulf Stream towards unseen Europe. A hurricane blankets the eastern terminator. Marina can easily read its spiral structure, the dot of its eye. Blue and white. No trace of green but Marina has never seen anything look more alive. On the VTO cycler she had looked down at the Earth from the observation blister and wondered at the splendour unreeling before her. The streaming clouds, the turning planet, the line of sunrise along the edge of the world. For the first half of the orbit out she had watched Earth dwindle, for the second half she had watched the moon wax. Marina has never seen the Earth from the moon. It squats in the sky, Planet Earth; so much bigger than Marina had imagined, so terribly far away. Bright and brooding and forbidding, beyond reach and touch. Marina’s messages take one and a quarter seconds to fly down to her family. This is home and you are a long way from it, is the message of the full Earth.

  ‘You staying out here all day?’ Carlinhos’s voice crackles on Marina’s private channel and she realises, startled and embarrassed, that everyone is back at the outlock and she is standing like a fool, gazing up at the Earth.

  That is another difference. From the cycler she had looked down on the Earth. On the moon, the Earth is always up.

  ‘How long was I standing there?’ she asks Carlinhos as the lock repressurises.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Carlinhos says. Airblades blast dust from the sasuits. ‘When I first went up I did exactly the same thing. Stood staring until São Jorge gave me a low oxygen warning. I’d never seen anything like it. Heitor Pereira was with me: the first words I said were, “Who put that there?” ’

  Carlinhos unlocks his helmet. In the few seconds when conversations can still be private, Marina asks,

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we have a drink.’

  ‘Did he touch you?’

  The little rover bowls flat out across Oceanus Procellarum. It hits every bump and rock at full speed, bounds into the air, lands in soft detonations of dust. Speeds on, throwing great plumes of dust behind its wheels. Its two passengers are banged and bruised, jolted hard, snapped back and forth, to and fro in their safety harnesses. Rachel Mackenzie pushes the rover to the very limits of its operational envelope.

  Mackenzie Metals is hunting her.

  ‘Did he do anything to you?’ Rachel Mackenzie asks again over the whine of the engines and the creak and thump of suspension. Robson shakes his head.

  ‘No. He was real nice. He made me dinner and we talked about his family. Then he taught me card tricks. I can show you. They’re real good.’ Robson reaches into a patch pocket of his sasuit.

  ‘When we get there,’ Rachel says.

  She thought she would have longer. She had been so careful with her decoys and deceptions. It was a skill of Mackenzie women. Cameny had booked a railcar to Meridian. Rachel had even hacked the lock to create the illusion of two people exiting. Robert Mackenzie had stopped the railcar on remote within twenty kilometres. At the same time, two rovers had set out from Crucible in opposite directions. The first rover took the obvious route, north-east to the Taiyang server-farm at Rimae Maestlin. A logical road to escape; the Suns were doggedly non-aligned in lunar family politics. The wrath of Robert Mackenzie held no fear for House Sun.

  Rachel has taken the illogical road. Her course seems headed south-east to the old polar freight line. Power stations and supply caches are strung all along the track. By ancient tradition – ancient by lunar standards – the Vorontsovs must stop a train for anyone who flashes it down from the trackside. Everything after that is negotiable, but the tradition of support and rescue endures. Duncan Mackenzie will have contracted private security to meet trains at all the main stations – Meridian, Queen, Hadley. But those aren’t Rachel Mackenzie’s destination. Not even the rail line.

  The rover is windowless, airless, unpressurised, little more than a transmission and power system. Automatic return and overrides have been disabled on this and the decoy, sent in the opposite direction. Rachel has always been a good coder. The family has never valued the talent; any of her talents. Her true destination is the isolated BALTRAN relay at Flamsteed. She has a series of jumps laid in. But Mackenzie Metals rovers are closing in from the extraction plants to the south and east. Cameny is shut down to a whisper: Rachel doesn’t want to advertise her location through the network. She hopes the hunters will be trying to cut her off at the rail line. Journey times can be calculated with high precision. The equations are sharp and cold. If they guess the relay, they will catch her. If they guess the mainline, she will escape. But she has to go on to the network, which will advertise her position to the whole moon.

  ‘We’ll be there soon,’ Rachel Mackenzie says to her son. Look at him, strapped in in his sasuit across the narrow belly of the rover, his knees touching hers: look at him. The
helmet visor masks his hair, the shape of his face and draws all attention to the eyes, his eyes, his great green eyes. There is no world finer – not this grey world, not the big blue world up there – than those eyes. ‘I have to talk to someone. I’m making Cameny active but don’t switch on Joker. Not yet.’

  The sense of opening as Cameny connects to the network is physical; like breathing from the bottom of the lungs.

  Ariel Corta’s familiar curates the call. Hold please. Then Ariel Corta herself appears in Rachel’s lens.

  ‘Rachel. What is happening?’

  Ariel’s dress, hair, skin, make-up are immaculate. Rachel has thought her sister-in-law snobbish, aloof, careerist. She possesses enough honesty to recognise envy – those Brazilians have all the gifts and graces. Ariel has defeated her family many times in court, but she needs her now.

  Rachel summarises the escape. Cameny flicks over the nikah.

  ‘One moment please.’ Ariel is briefly replaced by Beijaflor, then back. ‘It’s a standard-form marriage contract committing my nephew to a ten-year marriage to Hoang Lam Hung. It’s tight.’

  ‘Get him out of it.’

  ‘The contract is legal and binding. The obligations are clear. I can’t release Robson from it under any of the clauses. I can get the contract voided.’

  ‘Do it. He’s eleven years old. They made me sign it.’

  ‘Legally, there is no minimum age of wedlock or consent. Duress is not necessarily a defence in our law. I would have to demonstrate that by failing to consult Robson regarding his preferences before signing the sexual activity clause, you violated your parenting contract with him. That would nullify the nikah. I wouldn’t be acting for you, I would be acting for Robson against you. I would be trying to prove that you are a bad mother. Lucretia Borgia degrees of bad mother. However, in taking out this action, by escaping with Robson, you are acting like a good mother. It’s a Catch-22. There are ways around it.’

  ‘I don’t care how bad you make me look.’

  Does she see Ariel Corta, perfect Ariel Corta, loose the smallest smile?

  ‘There would be a lot of dirt.’

  ‘Mackenzies built their fortune from dirt.’

  ‘So did I. Robson would need to retain me and agree a contract. Yet again, only a good parent would advise him to hire me. I must advise you off the record that taking this to court means clear and open conflict between our families. It’s a declaration of war.’

  ‘It’s a declaration of war if Rafa finds out that I let Robson go without a fight. He would tear Crucible apart with his bare hands to get him back.’

  Ariel Corta nods.

  ‘I can’t think of a more intractable situation. It’s almost as if your grandfather deliberately chose the most provocative act possible.’

  The rover lurches. Rachel’s safety harness snaps against the sudden acceleration. And again. Something is crashing against the rover, again and again. She feels not hears the vibrations of cutters, drills. A sudden deceleration: the rover is slowing.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Ariel Corta asks. Concern on her perfect mask.

  ‘Cameny, show me!’ Rachel shouts.

  ‘I’m alerting Rafa,’ Ariel says, then Cameny flashes the exterior cameras up on Rachel’s lens. The maintenance drone clings to the rover like a little toothed nightmare. Manipulators and cutters hack at cabling and power conduits. Again the rover slows as the drone severs another battery. How can this machine be here? Where did it come from? Cameny pans the cameras: there are the upraised horns of the BALTRAN relay among the thicket of solar panels, not two hundred metres away. That’s the answer: her family has retasked the relay’s maintenance drone.

  But they’ve forgotten the rover is a depressurised model. Two hundred metres of vacuum is a stroll in sasuits.

  Rachel touches Robson on the knee. He starts; his eyes are wide with fear.

  ‘When I say go, follow me. We’re going to have to finish this on foot.’

  The rover drops with a jarring crash to one side. Rachel is thrown hard against her restraints. The rover is immobile, capsized at a crazy angle. The drone has cut away a wheel. Then it takes out the final camera.

  ‘Robson, my love: go.’

  The hatch blows. Dust and hills and the flat black heaven. Rachel grabs the side of the hatch and propels herself out. She hits the regolith, runs. Glances over her shoulder to see Robson land light as a hummingbird and run. The drone is crouched over the wreckage of the rover. Rachel thinks of Bryce Mackenzie, of cancer, if cancer could walk and hunt.

  Now the bot raises itself on its manipulators from the wreckage of the rover. Unfolds cutters and long sharp plastic fingers. Climbs down on to the surface, picks its way towards her. It’s not fast, but it is inexorable. And there are operations Rachel needs to perform before she and Robson can catapult to safety.

  ‘Robson!’

  Step by step, the bot gains on the boy. He is slew-footed on the regolith. He doesn’t know how to move in vacuum, how to avoid kicking up blinding sheets of dust. His father kept him too long in the coddled womb of Boa Vista. Should have taken him up to see the Earth at age five, the Mackenzie way. Should have could have would have.

  The hatch is ready, Cameny says. The personnel lock will only take one person at a time. Out on the Mares, the BALTRAN system is rough and ready, prioritised for bulk transport.

  ‘Get in!’ Rachel shouts. Robson scrabbles at the lock. He is so clumsy.

  ‘I’m in!’

  Cameny closes the hatch. Now Rachel must rotate in the capsule. Slow. Why is it so slow? Where is the bot? She doesn’t have time for even a glance behind. Breath hisses through teeth in supreme concentration as Cameny powers up the launch sequence.

  The pain in her right calf is so sharp and clean Rachel cannot even cry out. Her leg won’t hold her. Something has been severed. Helmet displays flash red; she gasps as the sasuit fabric tightens above the breach, sealing the suit, compressing the wound.

  Your right hamstring tendon has been severed behind the knee, Cameny announces. Suit integrity is compromised. You are bleeding. The bot is here.

  ‘Get me in,’ Rachel hisses and then the pain comes, more pain than she imagined could exist in the universe and she screams; terrible, bellowing agonised screams. Screams that sound impossible from a human throat. A movement, a dart, a second clean slash, and she’s down. The bot is over her, a shadow against the black sky. Her suit lights glint from three drills, descending on her helmet visor.

  ‘Launch it, Cameny! Get him out of here!’

  Launch sequence initiated, Cameny says. The probability of your survival is zero. Goodbye Rachel Mackenzie.

  Drill bits shriek on toughened visor. And at the end Rachel Mackenzie finds only rage: rage that she must die, that it must be here in the cold and dirt of lonely Flamsteed, rage that it is always family fucks you. Her visor shatters. As the air explodes from her helmet she feels the ground shake, sees the flicker of the BALTRAN capsule from the mouth of the launch tube.

  Gone.

  Rafa Corta is ire and thunder, striding at the head of his security detail. João de Deus is his town; his face is familiar among the Corta Hélio workers and ancillary staff, but not like this: an icon of rage and joy. He is Xango the Just, São Jeronimo, judge and defender. His people glance away from his eyes and make way for him.

  The boy has already exited the lock. He stands alone in the arrivals, still in sasuit and helmet, smeared with dust, his familar hovering over his left shoulder.

  ‘He taught me a trick,’ Robson says. Joker relays his words to the world beyond the helmet. ‘It’s a real good trick.’ Gloved hands take a deck of playing cards from a thigh pocket. Robson fans them out. His voice is dead, flat, alien. Joker catches every tone. ‘Pick one.’

  The cards fall from his fingers. His knees collapse, he pitches forwards. Rafa is there to take him.

  ‘Your mother.’ Rafa shakes the trembling boy. ‘Where is your mother?’

  FIVE
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br />   Duncan Mackenzie storms through Crucible. Humans make way for him, machines accommodate him. The CEO of Mackenzie Metals is not to be kept waiting for trivial safety regimes. Not in his pale wrath. Duncan Mackenzie’s anger is grey, like his suit, his hair, the surface of the moon. Esperance has hardened to a ball of dull pewter.

  Jade Sun-Mackenzie meets him at the lock to Robert Mackenzie’s private car.

  ‘Your father is undergoing a routine blood-scrub,’ she says. ‘You’ll appreciate the process can’t be disturbed.’

  ‘I want to see him.’ Duncan Mackenzie’s voice is cold as the metal above his head is hot.

  ‘My husband is undergoing a delicate and important medical treatment,’ Jade Sun restates. Duncan Mackenzie’s grip is at her throat. He slams her head back against the lock. A fat drip of blood runs slowly down the white lock. You have a scalp contusion and possible impact trauma, her familiar Tong Ren says.

  ‘Take me to him!’

  I have images, Esperance says. The familiar overlays Duncan Mackenzie’s lens with a high-angle view of the old horror in a diagnostic cot. Nurses, human and machine, surround him. Tubes and lines pulse red.

  ‘That’s not real. You could have fed that to Esperance. You fuckers are clever like that.’

  ‘You. Fuckers?’ Jade Sun whispers. Duncan Mackenzie releases his grip.

  ‘My daughter is dead,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. ‘My daughter is dead, do you hear?’

  ‘Duncan, I’m so sorry. A terrible thing. Terrible. A software error.’

  ‘The recovery team found precise cuts in her sasuit. That bot hamstrung her.’ Duncan Mackenzie covers his mouth with his hands to hold in the horror. After a moment he says, ‘They found drill marks on her helmet. That’s a very precise software error.’

  ‘Radiation regularly causes soft fails in chips. As you know, it’s an endemic problem.’

  ‘Do not fucking insult me!’ Duncan Mackenzie roars. ‘Endemic. Endemic! What kind of word is that? My daughter was killed. Did my father order this?’