But this wasn’t the UN, as everyone kept reminding him.
The droid led them into a red-and-gold stateroom where flamboyantly dressed people slumped on the air. Only about half were Chinese, and the others seemed familiar in that way that meant you’d probably seen them on the gossip feeds. They had whimsical augments—pointed ears, bionic biceps, a 30-cm penis which its proud owner flaunted in a transparent codpiece—and vacant eyes.
The Imperial Prince Xi Jian Er lay wrong way up to Kiyoshi in a hammock, a humanoid bot massaging his bare shoulders.
Kiyoshi grinned at the prince. He had done a few more cc’s of cijiwu during their wait, so he was unfazed by the Imperial Presence. The members of Brainrape tried to turn themselves the right way up to the prince, and bumped into people.
Jian Er pushed his masseuse away. He sat ‘up’ in his hammock, reached for a cuddly toy squirrel, and perched it on his shoulder. “So, about these accusations.” The squirrel spoke in English, while Jian Er spoke in Mandarin. Kiyoshi had to concentrate to pick the comprehensible words out of their duet. “Ship theft! That’s pretty serious. What have you got to say for yourself?”
“I didn’t do it?” Kiyoshi offered.
The prince shook his head sadly. So did the squirrel on his shoulder.
“No? OK, I did it, but I needed the ship. It was mine to begin with, you know.”
Goddamn Jun and his goddamn flawed predictive modelling.
“If you were a Chinese subject, you’d get the death penalty,” the prince said. “But you’re not, are you? You’re that dwarf everyone keeps talking about.”
The Brainrape drummer giggled.
“That was a great show, by the way! I’m sorry you didn’t get to finish your set.”
Brainrape sycophantically babbled their thanks.
“Well, I can’t adjudicate the ship theft thing. It didn’t happen here, and we do have to be careful about jurisdiction issues. But I can and will punish you for spoiling the festival.” Jian Er pointed at Kiyoshi. His fingernails were ten centimeters long, twisted like screwdrivers. “What penalty does he deserve?” he enquired of the room at large.
“Space him,” said several people.
“Maybe just make him give us the ship back?” said Charles nervously.
“This isn’t about your ship.” The prince leaned back on the air, interlacing his long fingernails over his bare stomach. “They sent me up here as a precaution,” the squirrel said. “The National Security Committee and [untranslatable] thought that the PLAN might attack Earth. And if they did, they would target us. After all, they’re our own [untranslatable].”
Kiyoshi nodded. Everyone knew about this. The PLAN had started out as an expeditionary force of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, on a mission to reconquer Mars. They had never come back. What came back had been the PLAN—Chinese ships captured, reverse-engineered, stealthed, and now crewed by AIs.
In the meantime, revolution had engulfed the People’s Republic of China, leading to the restoration of imperial rule, or the fiction thereof. So the Imperial Republic of China wasn’t even the same country that had sent that doomed fleet to Mars. But evidently, they still considered the PLAN in some untranslatable way their own.
“So,” Prince Jian Er and his squirrel continued, “it was thought wise to move some of the Imperial Succession out of the country, in case they bombed us. One of my sisters was sent to climb Mount Everest, which she’d always wanted to do, anyway. One of my brothers was [untranslatable], and I was sent up here.”
“The truth,” said a young man with transparent skin, whose organs could be seen pulsing within his torso, “is that they were hoping the PLAN would get you, Jian Er.”
“Very funny. The thing is, I like it here. No one telling me what to do. And the labs! Have you seen what they’re doing up here?” Jian Er’s eyes opened wide. “It’s amazing. Real cutting-edge science. It’s the future.” He clapped his hands, an oddly delicate gesture, sparing his fingernails. “I know! Charles, Anna, Dave, and Jim, as a reward for your excellent performance, you can have a tour of the labs.”
Brainrape gushed sycophantically again.
Jian Er acknowledged their thanks. Then he turned to Kiyoshi. His lips trembled, betraying some powerful emotion. The prince was as changeable as—well, as a person who did a lot of drugs.
“As for you, dwarf! I’ve got something else in mind.”
★
That evening, Kiyoshi sat in the cargo module, astride the glowstrip-coated spine of the Monster. Jun’s abandoned garden curved around him, a scabby brown and grey mosaic.
If he could get Jun to come out and talk anywhere, he figured it would be here.
“I didn’t do anything. Those meatheads started hollering about ship theft, when they should’ve just shut up and played their music. So I’m the one who gets punished. That’s what passes for logic around here. It’s kind of like what’s happening to you.”
What IS happening to you?
He regretted turning the lights on. It was too depressing for words. Clots of dirt drifted past his face. Jun’s soil substitute was drying up and flaking off the walls. The few sprigs he’d got around to planting were dead.
I should have come in here and watered them from time to time.
“So this prince. He was wasted, off his face. But it turns out he was engaged to a Saudi princess. She broke it off for whatever reason, but he wants her back. He was talking about how worried he was when the PLAN attacked Luna. She’s fine, she was in one of the underground cities up north, but apparently the whole episode made him realize that he can’t live without her. So, guess what?”
A slab of soil substitute came off the wall overhead and broke up.
“He’s sending me to kidnap her. That’s my punishment.” Kiyoshi chuckled aloud. “I get to take the Superlifter. As soon as I’m out of fragging range, I’ll call the boss. I’ll call the ISA. I’ll—I don’t know, but someone has to have the power to make them let you go!”
Silence.
“Jun! I’m taking the Wakizashi, that means I’m taking the mini-Ghost. I need a repo to operate it.”
Silence.
Suddenly, fear overpowered Kiyoshi. He had not dared to log into the St. Francis sim in weeks. Now he made himself do it.
Bodies floated in the air.
The closest one, dressed in a monk’s habit like all the others, was the plump and cheerful sub-personality Peter Akagi. His mouth hung open in a frozen gape. He was drifting towards Kiyoshi. Instinctively, Kiyoshi stuck out an arm to push him away. But without his headset and gloves, he could not interact with the sim, could not even see his own hand. It was like he was a ghost himself.
He flattened himself on the ship’s spine. Akagi drifted over him, one foot scraping through his back.
Jun’s voice spoke. “They died under interrogation.”
“You’re sacrificing them.”
“The CTDF knows I’m hiding something. I have to keep them from finding out what.”
“The Ghost. Let them have it, Jun! It’s not worth this!”
“No.”
“If I take the Superlifter, that’ll be one Ghost they don’t have. We’ll be evens. Would that be such a disaster?”
“Yes,” Jun’s voice said. “World War III, remember? Gonzo’s vision. The Chinese against everyone else. If they get the Ghost, it might give them the confidence to take on the UN. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I were the one to make Gonzo’s dream come true?”
“It won’t come to that. It can’t.”
“No, it won’t,” Jun’s voice agreed. “They know that if they try to search the ship, I’ll self-destruct.”
“Suicide is a sin.”
“What about suicide by butt-fragging?”
“Talk to Father Tom. Please.”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
Tears bulged, distorting Kiyoshi’s vision. He wiped his face with an invisible hand. Spoke through his grief. “All right, but I’m stil
l gonna need a repo for the Superlifter.”
He thought: It’ll be him. A lite version. Like he was before he got too smart. I can start over, if worse comes to worst. Get it right this time. Keep him safe.
Don’t let him play with guns.
“You can have Studd,” Jun said.
One of the floating corpses sat up and sneezed. “No! I’m not telling you anything!” he squeaked, and then: “Oh.” Blink. “Luna? Again? Will there be any shooting?”
“The way this is going, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Kiyoshi said.
xxxi.
Mendoza had planned to sneak back into Shackleton City without attracting anyone’s attention.
He had not planned on having a winged princess in tow.
Inevitably, stares followed a two-meter beauty with pycnofiber wings. Nadia’s abaya made her even more of a curiosity: there were not many observant Muslims in Shackleton City.
However, no one interfered with Mendoza and Nadia. They were all too busy trying to stay alive.
Verneland was gone. A kinetic missile had reduced the city’s largest dome to a dadaist collage of wreckage. Mendoza parked the Moonhawk in a flat area that might formerly have been part of the park around the dome’s circumference. When he and Nadia got out, their EVA suits screeched radiation warnings. The PLAN’s enhanced warheads had left higher-than-normal levels of residual radiation behind, as well as throwing off massive amounts of neutron and gamma radiation when they hit. A frozen layer of debris covered the regolith, so pulverized you could not even tell what it used to be.
They hurried on foot to Wellsland.
The Wellsland dome had been breached, but repaired in time to save the lives of most people inside. However, survival could be a fate crueller than vaporization, when everyone had been riddled with charged neutrons.
Wellsland was now a giant hospital.
Medical supplies were arriving from Earth, and evacuations were still ongoing. But the majority of Shackleton City’s population had been born on Luna. For them, evacuation to Earth would mean death. The only option was to treat them right here.
In Wellsland, they queued around blocks closed to pedestrian traffic, waiting to receive stem cell transfusions and cancer-fighting drugs. Some streets had been turned into open-air intensive care wards, so that a limited number of medibots could efficiently treat what seemed like an unlimited number of casualties.
Human volunteers were working with the bots. Mendoza spotted Dr. Miller, the doctor he’d met at Farm Eighty-One. Then, she’d been put-together, self-righteous. Now, her hair was falling out of its bun, her face dirty. Blood and puke stained her dress, as if she hadn’t changed it for days.
Mendoza greeted her as she collapsed against a wall for a cigarette break. The mess, the cries, and the stink had upended his priorities. He offered to help.
“Help? No one can help. Oh, hello. Feet all right now?”
“Yes, fine.”
Dr. Miller plucked wearily at the bodice of her dress. “We tried so hard. We dressed up as fucking Victorians to try and pretend we were all the same. It was supposed to hide our differences. Pureblood, mixed-race, no one can tell when you’re trussed up in a corset, or suspenders and a cravat. Right? But it didn’t work. Who were we kidding? They came for the purebloods anyway.”
“They didn’t come for the purebloods,” Mendoza said. “Not this time.”
“Oh yes, they did. I know people are saying it was different this time. Because science. Or something. But if that’s true, how do you explain the fact that the purebloods are dying, and everyone else is recovering?”
“They are?”
“Oh, yes. Look at me, I’m fine. Most of these people will be fine. They’ll feel like shit for a while, then the stem cells will kick in and they’ll recover. But the purebloods? They’ll just slink away and die. They get their first treatment, or their second, or whatever, and then they just don’t come back.”
“That’s impossible,” Nadia said. “A neutron bomb can’t be genetically targeted.”
“Who the fuck knows what the PLAN can do? All I know is I’m losing patients.” Dr. Miller looked properly at Nadia for the first time. “You’ve got wings.”
“They don’t get in my way. I can help. I know about nursing. I’ve nursed my father my whole life. I can program Aesculapius-class medibots, and even Hippocrates-class ones.”
“We’ve already got enough clueless volunteers getting underfoot … what? You can program medibots? All righty, let’s see about getting you a volunteer pass.” Dr. Miller hesitated. “I’m afraid those wings will get in your way.”
“Then I’ll cut them off,” Nadia said, staring proudly at the doctor. “I was getting tired of them, anyway.”
Mendoza said, “Nadia, wait. You can’t just …”
“You can’t program medibots, can you?” Dr. Miller said.
The reek of urine and vomit coated Mendoza’s tonsils. “No. But I’m good with data. I might be able to track down some of your missing patients.”
“Oh, that would be great. We haven’t got the manpower to chase after them, as you see.”
“Just give me a list of IDs and a network connection.”
The sky was bruise-purple. The diurnal cycle had broken down, leaving the artificial sky stuck on twilight. Scattered blocks of hexagons lit up noon-bright for a few seconds, giving an effect like pixelated lightning. The moans of the sick mingled with the chirping of birds, which had somehow survived.
★
Mendoza settled into a saggy ergoform in the basement of the Bob Q. Hope Convention Center, where Shackleton City’s municipal services had migrated after Verneland was flattened. He popped a pouch of coffee with his teeth, never taking his eyes off the sheaf of screens propped in front of him.
He’d been given access to the back-end of Shackleton City’s legendary surveillance network. Data bubbled up in real time from a million cameras, eavesdropping devices, robotic bats, and the camera-enabled retinal implants of human informers. He’d never known about those. There was always something new to learn in Shackleton City.
He ran location searches on the list of 548 pureblood victims Dr. Miller had given him. They came up blank, suggesting that the poor souls were dead. Next, he tried facial recognition searches. But the results were garbage. So many cameras down or damaged. So many people injured beyond recognition. When the MI analyst had done its best, Mendoza was left with batches of possible hits that he’d have to go through manually.
He stretched his legs. All around him, people chattered, laughed, snacked. The basement was cluttered with exhibits for upcoming trade shows. People were using booths as desks. They were joking around while they surveilled the dead and the dying. Mendoza had only been back in Shackleton City for a few hours, and already he was losing faith in humanity again.
He spread one of his screens flat and opened a new search window.
FIND: Derek Lorna.
He chewed the nipple of his now-empty coffee pouch.
SUBJECT LOCATED.
There was a surveillance camera in Lorna’s bedroom. Evidently, the Bloomsbury dome had not been damaged in the PLAN attack. Lorna sat in a high-end ergoform shaped like an overblown rose, working on a computer—what else?
Holding his breath, Mendoza watched Lorna mouth at the screen. There was no audio feed, but Mendoza imagined that Lorna was talking to his controllers back on Earth, discussing how they could finish D.I.E. off once and for all.
Man watching screen on screen watched by man. And Mendoza himself was probably being watched by someone—man, woman, or bot.
He reached out to wipe the surveillance feed away. Just before it vanished, someone else walked into Lorna’s bedroom. Springy salt-and-pepper hair, broad-shouldered Earthborn physique. Bare-ass naked. The man had his back to the camera, so Mendoza couldn’t see his face.
The feed vanished.
So Lorna wasn’t alone. That would make Mendoza’s job more difficult. But he hadn’t
expected it to be easy.
He went back to combing through pictures that might be of Dr. Miller’s missing patients. Done at last, he checked the time. Midnight! He napped for a few hours in his ergoform, knowing he’d be good for nothing if he didn’t get some rest.
When he awoke, the morning shift had begun. An automated breakfast buffet wound its way through the basement. Mendoza grabbed some kedgeree and toast. Amid shortages, the municipal workforce were still doing themselves proud.
While he ate, he reviewed his work. He had forty-odd matches that looked good. He ran another search on those, which gave him their last known locations. He selected the closest: Mockingbird Village.
“Nadia?”
“Oh, hello.”
It sounded like she’d forgotten all about him. He felt guilty at the thought that she’d spent the night caring for people with severe radiation poisoning, while he’d been dicking around on the computer.
“I’ve probably found some of Dr. Miller’s missing patients. I just have to confirm their locations.” Guilt pinched. “Uh, are you OK where you are?”
“Yes. I’m about to have my wings removed. First I was a nurse, now I’m a patient.”
“That’s the way life goes.”
“May Allah go with you, Mendoza.”
“And with you,” Mendoza responded.
As he trudged back to the Moonhawk, he reflected on the many names of God. YHWH of the Israelites, Abba, Father … and, yes, Allah, from the Aramaic Alaha that Jesus Himself had spoken. In Tagalog, Diyos. One God, almighty. Scuffling through the debris of Verneland, he wondered if the day of judgement was upon humanity now.
The Luna Deception Page 32