The Luna Deception

by Felix R. Savage

  After practice, he hung around, helped to polish the floor.

  The other kendo-ka trickled away. Sensei turned to Mendoza. “Not in a hurry?”

  “Sorry. I know you have to lock up.”

  Sensei zipped his shinai into its bag. He’d already changed into his street clothes. A casual observer might have thought he was still wearing a gi and hakama, but the long black garment was a cassock. Father Thomas Lynch, S.J., was the parish priest of St. Ignatius, as well as being a 3rd-dan black belt in kendo.

  “If you have time for a coffee, I’d be glad of the company,” the Jesuit said.

  They locked the church and walked down the street towards the edge of the dome, where the starry ‘sky’ swept down to meet the ground.

  In larger domes such as Wellsland, the roof was so far away it really did look like a sky. In shitholes like Nightingale Village, the roof was simply a roof. Here, you could see that the ‘sky’ was a patchwork of hexagonal glassbricks. The discolored leading between the bricks enhanced the Victorian atmosphere.

  Glass could be manufactured cheaply on Luna by sintering raw regolith, and it made an excellent radiation shield.

  The Jesuit pushed through the bushes at the end of the street. He pushed a sequence of buttons to open the airlock. Anyone could go outside, though few did. What for?

  The communal EVA suits smelled like the inside of a kendo mask. Made to fit the spaceborn, they wrinkled around both men’s boot-tops.

  Outside, they stepped into the middle of a two-week lunar night. Mendoza’s faceplate stuttered through several filters before settling on one that turned everything pale cerise.

  A ruby maze of infrastructure cluttered the landscape between the domes: waste heat and water recycling plants, solar arrays, garages for maintenance bots, etc., etc. Nearer to hand, construction debris, broken parts, and spent batteries strewed the terrain. The truest sign of Shackleton City’s prosperity: recycling was optional.

  The Jesuit set up a couple of targets made of spare glassbricks. He gave Mendoza a pistol. It was a pulsed laser pistol with a molten salt battery. Same type of weapon as the one that Mendoza hadn’t fired even once on Vesta.

  Training with a sword was all well and good, but the Jesuit would be the first to admit that the fundamentals of self-defense rested on at least a basic ability to shoot.

  They plinked away at the boulders for a while. The Jesuit was a crack shot. Mendoza managed to drill a hole the depth of a finger into one of the targets, which made him absurdly happy.

  “So what did you want to talk to me about?” the Jesuit said at last on the suit-to-suit channel.

  Mendoza tasted iron. He had bitten his lip in his furious concentration on the target. He hesitated.

  The silence out here was the silence of the confessional. Outside, and only outside, they could be confident that no automated surveillance would pick up their voices. It would be technically feasible for the powers that be to eavesdrop on a couple of guys shooting at rocks outside Cherry-Garrard, but highly unlikely that they would. You’d need a satellite pointing in the right direction, listening for the low-power FM signals used in suit-to-suit comms, at exactly the right time. You’d need forewarning, in other words, which the Jesuit had deliberately avoided giving them.

  Yet that wasn’t why Mendoza hesitated.

  Man up, he told himself.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last confession.”

  The time before that, it had been four months.

  The time before that, fifteen years.

  Mendoza had fallen away from the Church when he left home. The calamitous events on 4 Vesta had brought him back to the Faith.

  “I have committed the sins of lust and, uh, self-abuse.” His face felt so red, he had a new reason to be grateful they were outside, faces hidden by tinted rad-proof glass. “But that’s nothing new, right, Father? I don’t know. I just can’t get over her.”

  “The same woman?”

  “Yeah. I just found out she’s taking a job on Mercury.”

  “That’s a long way from here.”

  “It’s almost like she’s trying to get away from me.”

  “Maybe she is.” The Jesuit was not one to sugar-coat things.

  “I guess I have no right to feel betrayed. She’s with someone else. And according to her, she doesn’t even do men. Although that wasn’t the impression I got when … well, never mind.”

  “It seems as though the basis for this relationship is very slender.”

  Mendoza had to laugh. “Yeah.”

  “So maybe the loss you’re feeling isn’t really about her. Maybe she represents something else to you.”

  “Well, I do sometimes feel like there’s something missing from my life.”

  “Didn’t you tell me that she saved your life on 4 Vesta?”

  “Yes. She did.”

  “That’s wonderful, but Mendoza, that doesn’t mean she owes you anything else.”

  That observation startled Mendoza. “I know it doesn’t, Father,” he said defensively. “I know that if I want any kind of a relationship with her, I’ll have to show her that I really care.”

  “If it’s meant to be, God will show you the way.”

  “I guess so.” Mendoza hurried on. “But that isn’t what I need to confess today.”

  “No?”

  “I’ve committed another sin.”

  Silence. No one did silence like a priest.

  “I’ve been stealing. At least, I think it’s stealing. At work: I’ve been using their research capabilities for unrelated purposes.”

  More silence.

  “I guess I need to start at the beginning. After what happened on 4 Vesta, I got interested in the PLAN.”

  “The PLAN.”

  “Yes, the PLAN.” Mendoza swallowed, the noise loud in his ears. “So a few months back, I started using my work privileges to look at astronomical survey data, astrodata as we call it, related to Mars.”

  “Is there any?”

  “Oh, not much. You know, we can’t put probes closer than fifty thousand klicks before they get zapped. You get a few grainy long-distance pictures, then boom. But people are still trying. Specifically, here on Luna, there’s an outfit called the Hope Center for Nanobiotics. Sounds dull, but they’re on the cutting edge of Mars surveillance. And I have access to their data because, um, well …”

  One sin led to another. They were inextricably intertwined.

  “My job … I’m an astrodata analyst for UNVRP, as you know, Father. The thing about astrodata is that it’s really hard to get hold of. What’s in the public domain is old and unreliable. The private sector does the best surveys, but they don’t like sharing their data. So my section operates in a kind of a gray zone. We infer the existence of asteroids in a given orbit, and then we generally just, um, hack into the databanks of whatever corporations are active in that volume. Once we know what they’ve got, then we go through the front door, ask them to confirm the existence of the rocks we’re interested in, or kick it downstairs to the legal division if they won’t play nice. So, the point is, I have a lot of tools. For going in through the back door.”

  The Jesuit interrupted, “This is allowed?”

  “Allowed, Father?”

  “Your supervisors, your boss. They know that you’re hacking into corporate databanks?”

  “Yes and no. They turn a blind eye. They know we can’t get the astrodata any other way.”

  “And I expect that if you didn’t produce enough data, at any cost, you’d be out of a job.”

  “Yes, exactly, Father.”

  The Jesuit shook his head. “Go on.”

  “Well, so I started, um, hacking into the Hope Center for Nanobiotics. They’ve done some awesome surveys recently. I guess they’re using nanoscale probes to get closer to Mars before the PLAN zaps them. You can see the structures the PLAN has built in the Hellas Basin. They’re up to four kilometers high. During dust storms,
you can see their spires sticking up through the tops of the clouds. Not that that really tells us anything about what the PLAN is, or why it’s trying to kill us. But it has to mean something, you know? And so I thought more people ought to see this stuff. Independent experts. Random individuals who are obsessed with the PLAN and know more about it than anyone outside of Star Force. Hell, Star Force ought to see it. I’m pretty sure some of the commenters on All-We-Know-About-Mars are Star Force officers … So that’s what I’ve been doing. Posting the Hope Center for Nanobiotics’s data on a couple of private forums.”

  “I wonder,” the Jesuit said, “if you also wanted to earn the approval of these independent experts and enthusiasts.”

  Mendoza bowed his head. He knew Fr. Lynch was right. The expectation of kudos gave him a rush every time he logged on.

  “Online communities are dangerous. Spiritually, and of course, practically. If your employers found out about this, you’d be in big trouble.”

  “Yes, I know. But I do believe the survey data should be shared.”

  “But it’s not your job to share it.”

  “No. I know. It’s just the secretiveness of these people, Father ...”

  “Way of the world,” the Jesuit said brusquely. “We have more information at our fingertips than any other generation in history. For that exact reason, information is an asset, only as long as you have it and other people do not. So don’t blame the Hopes for sitting on their proprietary survey data, or your private-sector supermajors for refusing to share their starmaps with everyone in the solar system. If they behaved any differently, they’d be out of business. And I think that we can trust a publically funded research institute like the Hope Center for Nanobiotics—yes, I’ve heard of it—to share their data with the right people, in the right way.”

  “Which is not on a secret forum. I know, I know,” Mendoza sighed. “I’ll stop.” Uttering the promise felt like pulling a scab off a wound. “I just hope it’s not too late. My last post really took off.”

  “Oh, I expect that if you haven’t been caught yet, you’ll be OK. I assume you hid your tracks, like any clever-clogs professional hacker would.”

  “Yes.” That, too, now felt like a shameful admission.

  “Then say an act of contrition, and I’ll absolve you of your sins.”

  Mendoza called the act of contrition up on his retinal implants. He still had the Tagalog version by heart, but he was rusty on the English. “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you …”

  The Jesuit spoke the words of absolution and made the sign of the cross over Mendoza’s helmet. “For your penance, say the Creed, the long version. On your knees, no half-assery. You don’t have to do it now. Any time before you next receive Communion is fine.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “Now, how about that coffee? I think the Jolly Green Bean across from the station is still open.”

  So they had coffee, and talked about music. The Jesuit admitted to being a polyphonic metal fan, and Mendoza told him that if he liked that stuff, he had to get into classical. They even traded a few music files. The Jesuit didn’t have a BCI; he used a wristwatch.

  “I thought about getting my BCI removed, too,” Mendoza said. “After 4 Vesta. That was how the PLAN killed everyone. It tricked them into downloading its neuroware into their BCIs.”

  “But you kept yours?”

  “I just never got around to having it taken out. And it really is convenient.”

  “Convenience kills,” the Jesuit intoned. He had a big, bony face, haloed by an Afro. His naturally grim expression made his deadpan humor easy to miss, but Mendoza was getting used to it. He laughed, and the Jesuit winked.

  “On a not quite unrelated note,” Fr. Lynch added. “You mentioned a certain private forum.”

  Mendoza tensed.

  “You told me you won’t be posting there anymore, and I hope you’ll keep to that. But, if it’s no trouble, I wonder if you could invite me?”

  “Father!”

  “There’s neither crime nor sin in looking. And to tell you the truth, I’ve always been interested in Mars, too.”

  ★

  Straphanging on his way home, Mendoza sent Fr. Lynch an invitation to join All-We-Know-About-Mars. He got a notification a few minutes later that the invitation had been accepted. He smiled to himself.

  Maybe, just maybe, he’d found not just a kendo sensei, not just a confessor, but … a friend.

  Which made him remember the thing he wasn’t telling Fr. Lynch.

  (Yes, of course there was something.)

  And that made him feel guilty all over again.

  But it didn’t matter. Surely it didn’t matter. Anyway, there was no way the Jesuit could find out …

  The next day, Nate Sindikuwabo called Mendoza over and told him he was being transferred.

  “What have I done?” Mendoza said in terror.

  “Huh? Nothing.”

  Sindikuwabo snapped his fingers. Privacy baffles rose up around them and spliced themselves into the ceiling.

  “Big news!” Sindikuwabo said, once the baffles were in place. “UNVRP is twilighting the asteroid capture program. Ramping up operations on Mercury. Basically, we’re launching Phase Five. Venus, here we come! We’re gonna get that baby terraformed ahead of schedule.”

  “All right …. that’s big. Is it happening because Pope shuffled off this mortal coil?”

  “Nah. It was already in the works. Pope greenlighted it himself. I know everyone acted like the sky was falling when he passed away, but he wasn’t a monarch. Just a bureaucrat. We aren’t expecting his successor to change any of his policies.”

  “Any news on that?”

  They were referring to the upcoming election of Charles K. Pope’s successor. Uniquely among UN agencies, UNVRP had an elected director, for reasons having to do with the ambiguous political status of Mercury, where UNVRP was headquartered. Mendoza wondered if Elfrida would get involved in the election. Judging from the news feeds, it was shaping up to be an exciting contest.

  But Sindikuwabo said, “Ignore the media. Pope’s deputy, Dr. Ulysses Seth, is running; he’ll get the job. People want continuity, not upheaval.”

  “So why’s the asteroid capture program being axed?”

  A trace of compassion softened Sindikuwabo’s voice. “Come on, Mendoza. We got 4 Vesta. After the PLAN’s malware destroyed the colonies there, we made a deal with the Chinese to move 4 Vesta across Earth’s orbit and throw it at Venus. That rock contains five percent of the mass in the entire frigging asteroid belt. We don’t need any more little 1015 kg pebbles.”

  “I see.”

  “Cheer up. You aren’t out of a job. We’re all being reassigned, and you’re going first, by special request from the Mercury Resource Management Support Group.”

  “The what?”

  “I know, right? Never heard of them. Well, they’re on the twelfth floor at the moment, but they’re moving to the sixteenth floor. Getting all of it,” Sindikuwabo said enviously. In Shackleton City, the more room you had to spread out, the more important you were.

  “The Mercury Resource Management Support Group,” Mendoza pondered. “That sounds like something to do with mining. I don’t really understand how my skill set would be relevant.”

  “Your skills are universally relevant,” Sindikuwabo said with a big smile. “Anyway, it should be an interesting change of pace.”

  “If we’re all being reassigned, where will you be going, if I can ask?”

  “Back to Earth,” Sindikuwabo said. “Thank fuck. I will never, ever wear a cravat again.”

  iii.

  Mendoza didn’t go to kendo practice that week. He was busy wiping every trace of his activities off the computer systems at work. So were all his colleagues. Mendoza just had more to wipe.

  In his spare moments, he researched the Mercury Resource Management Support Group (MeReMSG). There wasn’t much to find out. The group collated hardware demand
from UNVRP’s field operations, projected raw material requirements based on that data, and nagged the mining crew on Mercury to improve their productivity. Presumably, their role in the Phase 5 ramp would be more of the same, on a bigger scale.

  Mendoza showed up early for his first day of work, a Sunday. There were no weekends in Shackleton City—a departure from the Victorian template; it made more sense to stagger everyone’s holidays to smooth out infrastructure demand peaks. It also meant that Mendoza couldn’t fulfill his Sunday Mass obligation. Clad in a frock coat and top hat, to make the best possible impression, he entered the office on the sixteenth floor of Doyle Tower.

  Empty. His new boss clearly did not believe in making everyone show up at the crack of dawn. That was a relief.

  The new office, like his old one, was barren to the naked eye. Fake wood panels lined the walls. A ladder and plasterer’s tools in the middle of the room showed where two offices had been knocked into one to accommodate MeReMSG’s anticipated expansion. Rows of standing desks accentuated the period atmosphere. These were standard issue in Shackleton City. As well as looking Dickensian, they retarded muscle and bone loss from inactivity. However, Mendoza spotted several high stools, fabbed on home printers and smuggled into the office to foil the health police. He had brought his own stool from downstairs.

  He hung his topper on the hat tree by the door and logged into the MeReMSG search space.

  A virtual overlay leapt into existence around him, projected on his retinal implants. The office was still there, but it was far messier. Filing cabinets towered in such profusion that, had they been real, you could hardly walk between the desks. The desks themselves were heaped with workloads, represented as stacks of files, swarms of icons, or in one case, a basket full of realistically meowing kittens. Mendoza foresaw that that was going to get annoying. He moved through the virtual maze, reflexively turning sideways to edge between the unreal filing cabinets, looking for a vacant desk to set his stool at.

  “Screw this crappy-ass filing system,” someone muttered. “It’s got to be here somewhere!”