“Oh,” Kiyoshi said. “So it wasn’t a mistranslation.”
Jun started to speak in Chinese, urgently.
“What’s happening?” Father Tom yelled, over the radio from the chapel where he had gone to pray for a successful launch.
“Well,” Kiyoshi shouted back, “It looks like we’re not going to get butt-fragged. That’s the good news, and now for the bad news. We’re going back to Tiangong Erhao. And this time, we’re not customers. We’re prisoners.”
xxvi.
Mendoza went up to Luna on a first-class ticket paid for by Hope Energy. A girl from Hope HR met him at Shackleton spaceport. Her effusive welcome made a stark contrast with his last departure from this spaceport. They flew north in the HR girl’s Grasshopper, a dinky little vehicle that was the Luna equivalent of a car—but much more aspirational: few could afford them.
“It’s a company car,” the HR girl said with a big smile. “But I think you’ll be getting one of your own. The D.I.E. guys generally do.”
Mendoza leaned back and looked out of his porthole. The charcoal plain of the Mare Nubium stretched to the east. Scalloped crater rims lay to the west. The Grasshopper rose to 1000 meters and began to descend again.
“We’ll reach the Marius Hills region in about five hours,” the HR girl said. “The campus is in Hopetown. Exciting, isn’t it?” she added ironically, gesturing at the moonscape. “You can stretch out in back if you like.”
But Mendoza stayed where he was, looking down at Luna, which he had never expected to see again.
“You’re not an expert at anything,” Elfrida had said, when he told her he was taking the job. “What do they want you for?”
“Thanks a bunch,” he’d said, pretending to be insulted.
“You know what I mean! It’s totally suspicious. Hope Energy backed the Mercury rebellion. They helped Derek Lorna, funded his institute. They’re murderers by proxy. And now you’re going to be taking their money.”
“It’s not about the money. You won’t let me come to Rome to be with you. You won’t come to Manila to be with me. I can’t sleep on my mom’s couch forever.”
“Oh, so now it’s all my fault. You know I have to be at the ICJ like, every day, answering their questions about Mercury. Whereas you’re just sitting around!”
“What I said. I need to start working again. And this is a good job.”
But he could not tell her the real reason he had accepted Frank Hope IV’s offer. He didn’t want her to get sucked into what might turn out to be a dangerous enterprise.
They’d given him a job as a data analyst. Same old, same old. But he believed there would turn out to be more to it. And he was right.
★
Frank Hope IV, a.k.a. Fragger1, laid it out at the cocktail party held on Mendoza’s first evening on the Hope Energy campus. This glittering event, thronged with the elite of Marius Hills, was not in honor of Mendoza; it was a weekly thing. “We’re a big driver of the Lunar economy,” Frank Hope IV (“Call me Frank”) said. “With great power comes great responsibility, you know? Hence the CSR stuff, and hence, also, the Department of Intrepid Exploits.”
“Tell me more,” Mendoza said.
“Information acquisition. That’s where any successful campaign starts. You’re already familiar, of course, with the Hope Center for Nanobiotics’s work in the area of Mars surveillance ...”
Mendoza flushed.
“Relax,” Frank said, grinning. “Like I said before, your, ahem, unauthorized release of our survey data was actually helpful. It created interest in our work. We were getting unsolicited expressions of support from all kinds of influencers. So when you left the forums, I created Fragger1 to keep up the good work.”
“Your manifesto-type stuff was really inspiring.”
“I was bored,” Frank said. “Sitting around always makes me angry.”
“Me, too.”
“Well, you won’t be sitting around at D.I.E. You’ll be analyzing the data sent back by the latest batch of Mars probes.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah.” Frank took a swig of his highball. Catching his eyes for a second, Mendoza knew he was in the presence of someone else who shared his passion. His desire for revenge.
“Dust. We call the probes Dust. I ought to warn you, though,” Frank added. “The program’s kind of stalled at the moment. You may have heard about the catastrophic breakup of a space station at the L2 LaGrange point, a few months back. That was our fab and launch facility.”
“Oh shit,” said Mendoza. He had had too many highballs in an effort to feel less nervous. “Wasn’t that where they caught Derek Lorna?”
Lorna’s name fell into the arched, pillared room like a stone crashing through a window. The chit-chat around them faltered. Someone dropped a plate. It bounced, scattering canapés on the artificial diamond floor.
“Still a bit of a touchy subject,” Frank said in a low voice, as conversation resumed. “He’s out on bail. Hiding at home in Shackleton City. Guess he can’t face seeing anyone. No one wants to see him.”
“He ought to be in jail.”
Frank pushed the heel of his free hand against his knife-blade nose. “Yeah. Shrug. He’ll wind up in jail for sure. Even my father would welcome it at this point, so we can put the whole Mercury fiasco behind us.”
“Why did he do it?” Mendoza said. He needed to know more about the hazy connection between Derek Lorna and Hope Energy. The Hopes had denied the existence of any connection, of course. But Frank had just admitted there was one. “Did he have … orders?”
“From us? Is that what you’re implying?” Frank’s eyes glinted.
“I guess I am,” Mendoza said.
“Of course he fucking didn’t. Of course we didn’t fucking connive at the murder of four thousand, three hundred and twelve people.”
That was the final death toll from the Mercury rebellion. That Frank knew the exact number spoke well of him.
“I had to ask,” Mendoza said.
“I understand. It’s just … shit. The guy deceived us as much as anyone else. And why he did it, who knows, but in my opinion, it was pure arrogance. You know he developed that super-advanced telepresence platform, the stross-class phavatar? And then it got cancelled for being too smart? Well, Lorna never got over that. He insisted the stross-class was safe, and everyone had overreacted. He kept working on it in secret, which we had no idea about. Then they captured the Heidegger program on 4 Vesta, and it was light-years beyond what he was working on. A supercomputer, and his stuff was a pocket calculator. Can you imagine what that must have felt like?”
“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” Mendoza guessed.
“Pretty much. As far as we’ve reconstructed it, he made a copy of the Heidegger program, grafted on the safety controls he’d developed for the stross-class … and boom, version 2.0. Which, to repeat, we had no idea about.”
“I just need you to tell me that D.I.E. isn’t about murdering people.”
Frank laughed. Holding Mendoza’s gaze, he said, “Cheesy acronym notwithstanding, D.I.E. is not about murdering people.”
“OK.”
“It’s about hitting the PLAN, and hitting them hard.”
Mendoza ate the maraschino cherry out of his drink. “I always thought we should just haul some asteroids out of the Belt and throw them at Mars.”
“I can tell you used to work for UNVRP.”
“Ha ha; but seriously.”
“Well, it would be kind of nice to get Mars back afterwards, you know? As opposed to a ring of rubble around the sun.”
Later, as the cocktail party was breaking up, Mendoza stood by a window, admiring the view of Hopetown. As the name suggested, this was a company town. But Hope philanthropy had endowed it with lots of open spaces and lovely architecture. The steeple of Notre Dame de la Lune speared towards the invisible roof of the dome, illuminated by floodlights. A cluster of office buildings in the Victorian style of Shackleton City hid the
bulk of the cathedral. Nearer at hand, partygoers bobbled homewards across the lawns of the Hope Energy campus. Dishdashas and niqabs this way, tuxedoes and evening gowns that way. Many Arabs lived in Luna’s northern hemisphere, and they had their own dress code, analogous to Shackleton City Victoriana. However, enforcement was less strict up here. The HR girl had told Mendoza it would be fine to come to work in jeans.
Still a bit drunk, he took off his bow tie (other people were doing it) and tossed it to a parlormaid.
Frank appeared beside him. He had a dropdead sexy blonde in tow. As if continuing their earlier conversation, he said, “You know, I always thought the whole reason they came up with UNVRP was because we lost Mars. We were going to terraform Mars. It was going to be humanity’s second home. But the PLAN stole it. So, OK, fine, if we can’t have that one, we’ll have this one! Terraforming Venus is not impossible! Because we say so!”
Mendoza cocked his head. “Well, yeah. Of course.”
After a pause, Frank said ruefully, “And I thought that was a pretty deep insight.”
The blonde laughed.
“But it was never going to work,” Mendoza said. It was easier to believe this, than to accept that an achievable dream had been killed by bureaucracy and bad luck. “The technical challenges were just too big.”
Frank nodded. “But this will work.”
“Tell me more about it.”
★
Hopetown lay bubbled within a glassbrick dome, like the domes of Shackleton City. But when you stepped out into the vacuum and looked up, you did not see the black lunar sky. You saw another, higher roof, decorated with whimsical constellations of LEDs that got reprogrammed regularly.
The city lay inside a lava tube, one of many that snaked beneath Luna’s surface. Formed by primordial volcanism, some of these lava tubes had collapsed into sinuous rilles, but others remained intact, their naturally arched roofs holding up 20-50 meter-thick slabs of regolith. Marius Hills was one of the biggest lava tubes. It measured four kilometers wide, two high at its apex, and thirty kilometers long—a sublunarean void big enough to swallow the city of Manila. The domes of Hopetown and its sister cities looked minute in this abyss, like glowing puddles on the floor.
Mendoza commuted daily, in his new Grasshopper, from his company apartment in the New Jeddah dome to Hopetown, a distance of three kilometers. The D.I.E. offices were hidden away on the Hope Energy campus, on the third floor of the R&D center, which resembled a giant oyster on the half-shell.
Mendoza sat at a tri-screen workstation in the analysis section, searching the universe for traces of Dust.
“Here’s the problem,” Frank told him. “Our last batch of Dust has gone missing.”
“Did the PLAN blow it up?”
“We don’t think so.” Frank’s normally sparkling eyes were flat. “On our first launches, we used unmanned shuttles. That didn’t work so well. So then we used phavatars to pilot the ships. That worked better. But we—they—still got blown up.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. That’s when we knew, this is never going to work with a signal delay. We need to be flying these shuttles in real time. So on this last launch, that’s what we did.”
“… Oh.”
“Three shuttles successfully launched from the Hope Center for Nanobiotics on June 18th. For various reasons, the launch was a bit rushed. But they all got off OK.”
“And then?”
“We lost contact with all three pilots as they were making their final approach to Mars. One of them, a friend of mine, Victoria McFate, she reported that she was looking at the northern polar cap. She could see the PLAN’s water mines, she could see these scarab-shaped bots climbing around in there.”
“Holy crap!”
“Yep. She got closer to Mars than any human being has in a hundred years. And then she went off the air.” Frank paused. “So, your job is to find the Dust,” he said, and walked away.
No, Mendoza thought. My job is to find her, isn’t it, Frank? Dead or alive.
The D.I.E. office had real plants everywhere, tanks full of fish instead of cubicle dividers, and ergonomic walls, for bouncing off—or banging your head on, if it was that kind of day.
Mendoza’s cubicle-mate, a guy named Youssef, volunteered more details about the final, failed Dust drop.
“It was in these auto-dispersal containers that would scatter it into the Martian atmosphere. 1,000 kilometers up, which was Victoria McFate’s last known altitude, at least some of her Dust should have made it to the ground. But …” Youssef shook his large, spiky-haired head. “Most people around here think all the shuttles got fragged before they could deliver their payloads.”
“So we don’t actually have any data to analyze.” This was at odds with what Frank had told him.
“Vicky McFate was Frank’s fiancée.”
“I figured something like that.”
“He hasn’t accepted that she’s gone. So, that’s wishful thinking. We’ll be analyzing the data from the probes … when we find them.”
They sorted through the data from various radio receivers pointed at Mars, searching for anything that might be a signal from a lost nanoprobe. There were exabytes of data to analyze, from hundreds of instruments in Luna, Earth, and L2 Earth-Sun LaGrange point orbits, owned by the UN, the Chinese, and various private companies and consortia. Some of these the D.I.E. team had access to. Some they did not, yet, and this was where Mendoza’s experience came in handy.
After a while, he almost felt like he was back at UNVRP, in the days when he’d loved his work.
But day after day, their search came up empty. Frank hung around the office, challenging people to tic-tac-toe and arm wrestling matches. He got in the way, but no one minded, because it was Frank. Mendoza learnt from Youssef that Frank had actually been going to pilot one of the delivery shuttles himself, but something had gone wrong, and he’d got left behind.
The revelation took Mendoza’s breath away. Trey Hope, the CEO of Hope Energy, had committed his only son to almost certain death. He must really believe in what they were doing.
Another of the shuttle pilots had been Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud, a nephew of Faisal ibn Abdul al-Saud II, whom everyone simply called the King. The House of Saud had gotten kicked out of the Arabian peninsula (and off Earth) 150 years ago, but the Saudi ex-royals continued to enjoy monarchical status on Luna. The King had poured millions into D.I.E. And now, having lost a nephew to it, he stood ready to contribute millions more.
If they could find the damn Dust.
“Oh no, we’re not under any pressure,” Youssef sighed.
Mendoza branched out into examining data from optical telescopes, reasoning that he might be able to see some debris from the shuttles in Mars orbit, if they had been fragged high enough up that it didn’t all fall down to the surface straight away.
What he found was shocking enough that he brought it straight to Jasmine Ah, the leader of the D.I.E. analysis section.
“These are ships!”
Jasmine took one look, nodded. “Yeah, we know about those.”
“We do?”
“The PLAN’s mustering a fleet in orbit.”
“No one told me.”
“Those that know have kept it in their heads. We don’t want another panic.”
Mendoza stared at this thin-armed spaceborn woman, whose charm bracelets rattled as she bounced up and down on her trampoline chair. He shook his head slowly. “I hope Star Force knows about this.”
“Sure they do. They’re keeping a close eye on the situation. Stay cool, Mendoza. We’ve got the PORMSnet, the Luna Defense Brigade—OK, so it’s just Frank and his buddies, but they’re quite good shots—and if all that fails, we’ve got thirty meters of rock above our heads.”
Jasmine assumed that he was concerned about their safety, here on Luna. But Mendoza had been thinking about Earth.
He returned to his workstation and searched for more information on the PLAN’s fleet
. Now that he knew what he was looking for, the picture filled in rapidly.
The volume around Mars always teemed with the PLAN’s defenses, a thousands-strong swarm of orbital fortresses. But now, the number of objects in orbit around Mars was climbing daily, and all the new blips shared a familiar configuration. Cylindrical, belted with guns. They were the PLAN’s fighters, known as toilet rolls.
Mendoza also discovered that Jasmine hadn’t been kidding when she said the authorities were monitoring the situation. The Chinese had sent up a CTDF fleet to protect Tiangong Erhao. Star Force was recalling ships from Mercury.
Mendoza phoned Elfrida. “You know, this would be a great time of year for a holiday in the country,” he said. “How about you take a trip to northern Canada? Or the Urals.”
“Are you vaping something? The Urals are horrible at this time of year. Mosquitoes everywhere.”
Mendoza was thinking that if the PLAN attacked Earth, they would be quite likely to target Rome, for the same reasons that the forces of barbarism and darkness had targeted the Eternal City through the ages.
“Maybe North Dakota, then,” he said. “Or Wisconsin. One of those little countries.” Where there’s nothing worth nuking.
“How about New York? We were going to go to New York together. But then you got your new job, working for the helium-3 cartel.”
“Actually, a not-for-profit organization jointly funded by Hope Energy, the Korolev Foundation, and the House of Saud,” Mendoza said bad-temperedly.
“Same difference.”
As they talked, Elfrida was walking through a street market in Rome, with her phone floating on its lanyard in front of her face. She stopped at a cheesemonger’s stall and ladled a mozzarella ball out of a vat of brine. Pushing her straw hat back on her head, she waited for her purchase to be weighed. Sparrows and pigeons flew over the stalls. September heat shimmered around people’s sandals.
“Ellie. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but a lot of smart people are worried. The PLAN is mustering a fleet. This isn’t just a nine-pack, it’s like a nine-hundred-pack. They might be targeting Earth.”
The Luna Deception Page 27