“Tell him what happened,” Father Tom urged them.
The girl spoke for the group. “Um, who are we talking to?”
“Our astrogator and resident geek,” Father Tom said. “The brother of the guy you’ve already met.”
“Oh. Well, like, Prince Jian Er took us on a tour of these secret labs they’ve got? And it turns out they’re breeding mutants.”
“Human mutants,” said one of the boys.
“Yes, but they hardly even look like people, I mean they look like spaceborn monkeys or I had this book when I was a child about things called goblins and they look like the pictures in that. There are big ones and little ones. The little ones are kind of cute but when they talk it’s just freaky. I mean they’re people. But all they’ve ever seen is the insides of their cages. They’ve been told they’re going to go and colonize the stars or some shit.” The girl’s voice broke. She rubbed her eyes with two of her four hands.
Jun made his projection appear to walk through the door onto the bridge. “It’s true, actually. They are going to colonize the stars, or at least try. Tiangong Erhao isn’t really a space station. It’s a giant colony ship. Scheduled launch date is 2320—about thirty years from now. The mutants are being bred to thrive on board. The journey to Proxima Centauri is expected to take about eighty years. If neither of its planets turns out to be hospitable, they’ll travel onwards.”
“Oh crap,” blurted one of the boys. Jun shrugged with both elbows, a gesture inherited from the spaceborn youth he’d once been.
The girl inhaled hard. “OK. So maybe that part was true, but the point is, it’s sick! They’re people, and they’re being kept like pets—and Prince Jian Er thinks it’s just fine! They all do! They think it’s cutting-edge!”
“But that’s not the worst of it,” said one of the boys. “At the end of the tour, the prince was like, and guess what, you get to contribute your genes to the mission. Our genes! We’d have mutant descendants on a rocky super-Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri—and it’s supposedly an honor!”
“It’s all right for you,” the girl cried. “You guys just have to jerk off. Donating eggs is a surgical operation, and I don’t trust their medibots, and …”
“And we just don’t want to,” said another of the boys. “Can you help? I mean, I guess you have no reason to help us. But someone we talked to said there was a priest in Docking Bay 14 who helps people. So here we are.”
“They’re afraid to refuse this so-called honor,” Father Tom added. “And I don’t think their fears are unfounded.”
“No.” Jun’s consciousness drifted away from the bridge. His No reverberated through the virtual passages of the old St. Francis, taking on extra dimensions of meaning. No. He reflected that he’d got in the habit of saying no to everyone. No to Kiyoshi, no to the boss-man, no to Father Tom, who was only trying to help people. How long had it been since Jun tried to help anyone? No, he’d said to the whole universe when he withdrew into his virtual cloister.
And God had replied: Bzzzt. Wrong answer, sucker.
Goaded by rage, he scrambled at an agonizingly slow pace to reactivate his real-time interaction module. The Chinese AIs laughed in the distance, amused by his struggles.
“Yes, I can help you.” It was like trying to think with a head full of brain-altering chemicals. He knew now how Kiyoshi felt. Was even more mystified by the fact that anyone wanted to feel like this. “You’ll have to have the operation,” he apologized to the girl. “But when they’ve collected your genetic material, I’ll destroy it. I’ll do it before they have a chance to use it in their experiments. No embryos, so it won’t be murder.”
It would be the work of a microsecond for him to slag the experimental lab’s storage system, using the infiltration tools he’d honed during his battle with Gonzo. He’d never bothered to do anything like that before, because it wouldn’t hurt the AIs who were tormenting him. It would only provoke them to greater cruelties. But that was a small price to pay for Brainrape’s dignity.
“Thank you,” they chorused, their faces lighting up with relief.
“It’s nothing,” Jun said, fading.
In the background, his patchbot deleted more fork bombs. Their contents were all the same: a graphic of a human foot stamping on a cross, forever.
xxxiv.
Mendoza was itching all over now. Crotch, armpits, even the soles of his feet. Whoever had last used this sharesuit must have had lice. The Bloomsbury airlock couldn’t cycle fast enough for him. As soon as the air pressure indicator turned green, he pulled the suit off and had a good scratch. Then he tucked in his shirt, straightened his suspenders, and exited the chamber.
He left the suit hanging on the lip of the USED locker.
A river of barely visible motes flowed out of the suit’s neck. They squirted through the airlock’s valve just before it closed behind Mendoza, and dispersed into the air.
★
If Wellsland had been hell, Bloomsbury was a little bubble of paradise. The only visible sign of the crisis was a refugee camp in the public park. Sunrise hues of pink and gold tinted the roof. No one was up yet, except for a few people jogging along the river (it was a loop, powered by underwater turbines; you could swim and fish in it). Clip-clopping hooves broke the silence. The horse-drawn milk float was making its rounds. Sprinklers beaded the verdure in front gardens, slicked the cobbles. Mendoza smiled tightly to himself.
Derek Lorna’s house had always looked somewhat out of place here, both for its ostentatious size, and for the two-meter wall around the property. Now it also stuck out for another reason. Peering through the gate, Mendoza saw that Lorna’s garden had vanished under a tidal wave of QuickGrow™ grass. Like many gengineered species, QuickGrow™ had failed to perform precisely as anticipated: it turned out to be too hardy, and had become the bane of Lunar gardeners.
Mendoza pushed the buzzer.
“It’s eight in the fucking morning,” said a sleepy voice.”Go a … Oh. My dog.” As if to someone else: “Look who’s here.”
Mendoza waited.
After a few minutes, the gate swung open. Mendoza walked through a waist-height sea of grass. His hands swung empty at his sides. Jammed into the back of his waistband, a plasma pistol waited to be drawn and fired into Lorna’s face. He’d practised the whole sequence. Not the firing part, obviously. A part of him still wondered if he would be able to pull the trigger and kill a human being.
Nadia’s father had given him the pistol. The 150-year-old prince had simply assumed Mendoza would know how to use it—and that he would use it. The pistol was huge and clunky, compared to the target-shooting pistols Mendoza was more familiar with. He thought it probably packed more power than regulations permitted. Its grip bore an Arabic motto that Nadia had translated for him as “Do not fuck with the Sons of Allah.”
The front door stayed closed.
The same bad-tempered voice as before yelled, “It’s not locked! Just come in!”
Mendoza’s face burned. He pushed the door open. The hall stretched before him, empty but for that pretentious suit of armor, which was now missing its helmet and sword. A gardening bot lay on the carpet. It looked broken, but Mendoza gave it a wide berth.
“Upstairs!”
Mendoza climbed the stairs. As he stepped onto the landing, movement flashed in the upper corner of his field of vision. He spun, drawing the pistol the way he’d practised.
A small, faceless figure hurtled at him, screaming, “Dieeeee ALIEN SCUM!!!”
Some saving grace stopped Mendoza from depressing the trigger button. He dodged. Not fast enough. As the small figure swung past, it whacked him in the head with the replica sword from the downstairs hall.
Mendoza crumpled against the banisters. Stars of pain exploded in his head.
A dark-haired boy of five or six bobbed in front of him, clinging to a twang cord with a knot at the end. The other end was tied to the upstairs newel post. The suit of armor’s helmet hung from an improvis
ed strap around the little boy’s neck.
“I got you,” he said, with a hint of anxiety.
“Yup. You got me.”
Mendoza bent to retrieve his pistol. The motion sent a fresh throb of agony through his head.
The boy dropped to the landing, seized the pistol—and to Mendoza’s surprise, held it out to him. “Here’s your ALIEN RAY GUN!”
“Thanks.”
“Your head’s bleeding.”
“I know.”
“I WIN! I WIN!“ The little boy leapt downstairs.
Mendoza carried on up the stairs. He had definitely lost the element of surprise now. He shambled along the hall and stopped on the threshhold of Lorna’s bedroom, aiming the pistol at Lorna himself, who sat in the window nook, surrounded by computers, exactly like in the surveillance feed.
Lorna leant back in his rose-shaped ergoform, hands laced behind his head. “Hello, Mendoza. What a pleasant surprise.”
“Is it really you this time?”
Lorna pressed his fingers to his head and made a show of trying to pull the top of his skull off. “Yep. Nothing in here except gray matter.”
“Your gray matter is more dangerous than any number of phavatars with electrolasers in their heads.”
“Why, thank you. Have you come to flatter me or to kill me?”
Mendoza sighed. Blood trickled into his left eye. He blotted it with his sleeve.
“What happened?” Lorna asked.
“A five-year-old who’s simmed too much Knights of the Milky Way. Is he yours?”
“Thank fuck, no. Have a seat.”
Mendoza hesitated. Then he sat in the ergoform opposite Lorna, the Saudi pistol on his lap. He hadn’t been in this room last time he came here. A probably-authentic Monet hung on one wall. The carpet sported a Persian design in rich reds and blues. The bed looked like a piece of industrial machinery. Otherwise, the room bore signs of continuous occupation by the man who sat across from him, surrounded by computers, snack food wrappers, and empty coffee pouches.
Mendoza smiled to himself. With the glamor of his job stripped away from him, Derek Lorna was just an IT guy, after all.
“I came here to kill you,” he admitted.
“Funny,” Lorna said. “There must be no limit to the number of people who want to kill me. But you’re the only one who’s actually tried it. Oh, there was that assassin from Wrightstuff, Inc, but the police nabbed him at the spaceport. Anyway; congratulations for having the balls to come all this way, even if you could’ve been more professional about it.”
“I’m not a professional killer,” Mendoza acknowledged. “That’s you.”
“Oh, come on. You can’t hold me responsible for Mercury.”
“You’re as guilty as fuck. But that’s for the Interplanetary Court of Justice to decide.”
“And they will. They will. They won’t discover the truth. They’ll just decide on it. The truth will be whatever the political climate demands.”
“Forget Mercury. What about Marius Hills?”
“What about Marius Hills?”
“Frank Hope crashed his spaceship.”
“How is that my fault?”
“And there are reports of something strange happening in Hopetown and New Jeddah.” Reports was an exaggeration. Mendoza was trying to hold onto his conviction of Lorna’s guilt. The man seemed so beaten-down. His flippancy was a transparent veneer. The garden, which he had taken such pride in, looked even worse from the second storey. “What happened to your gardening bot?” Mendoza asked.
“We broke it.”
“Too bad.”
“Don’t take Trey Hope’s word as gospel. I’ve learned the hard way not to believe a word I hear out of Marius Hills,” Lorna said. “Trey is a chronic over-promiser. We were supposed to have won by now. Here’s a piece of free advice: never let a bunch of engineers run your war for you. They never give up—they just keep chewing through your budget, looking for that next increment of efficiency. The whole thing should have been cancelled after the Mercury operation went to shit. And yet Trey is still out there promising investors that the PLAN can be beaten. It is to laugh.”
“We will beat the PLAN,” Mendoza said, instinctively defending D.I.E. “The only issue is the Dust control software.”
“I wrote that. Never got paid for it, either. Cash flow issues, according to Trey. That shifty son-of-a-bitch. You only have to look at his eyes to know he’s descended from a used-car salesman.”
“Is that why you’re sabotaging D.I.E.?”
“What? Me? Of course not.”
“Someone’s messing with the Dust.”
“Well, it isn’t me.”
“You didn’t make a deal with the UN to sabotage D.I.E. in exchange for the charges against you being dropped?”
“I might have, if they’d made the offer. They didn’t. They want to ship me to Pallas pour encourager les autres. What’s the problem, specifically?”
“Swarm crashes. More and more of them. And even when a whole swarm doesn’t crash, we’ve been seeing inexplicably high loss rates.”
“Well, I agree with you, that does sound like sabotage. And it can’t be someone hacking into the system from outside. The control software is based on LiRI’s telepresence technology, which is unhackable. So it sounds like someone with legitimate access is stealing the Dust for their own use. That would not be good news. When did this start?”
“Right after 9/29.”
Lorna leaned into his screens. “Let me have a look.”
Mendoza reached out and twisted one of Lorna’s screens around. He saw the same operator interface that he saw every day at work. “Hey, how’d you get into the …”
“I built it, idiot. If you want to hold that up as proof that I’m the saboteur, go ahead and abandon all semblance of logical thought.”
Lorna went into the back-end of the system and clicked around in the access log. Nervous, Mendoza glanced at the area of the ceiling where the surveillance camera had to be.
Lorna smiled crookedly. “Don’t worry, we’re not being watched.”
“Actually, we are. I watched you sitting here a few hours ago.”
“A vid loop.”
“Clever.”
“I’ve just fucking had it with pretending not to know that they’re watching, while they pretend not to notice that I’m evading their surveillance ... Holy crap!”
“What?!?”
“You’ve been running the Dust inside Hopetown? And New Jeddah?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Are you completely crazy? That’s …” Lorna caught back his next words. He shook his head. “Too late now. Look. I just compared the access log with the swarm crash reports. This guy’s our doer.”
“Abdul,” Mendoza breathed.
“You know him?”
“He’s dead.”
★
“OK,” Lorna said. “So we’re looking at a case of identity theft. Rare in this day and age, but it happens.”
“There’s something else,” Mendoza said. “Victoria McFate came back, too. She was sitting on Frank’s lap.”
“The dead don’t come back,” Lorna said.
“I don’t believe in ghosts, either,” Mendoza said.
They sat for a moment without speaking. Then Lorna called up a comms map of Hopetown. ID bubbles crowded the dome, concentrated in the residential blocks. Marius Hills was an hour behind Shackleton City, so most people were still at home in bed. But there were also a lot of people on the Hope Energy campus. They’d either come into work early, or pulled all-nighters.
Lorna highlighted one of the individuals in the R&D building. Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud. Then another. Victoria McFate. And a third. Erik Sigurdsen.
“All three of them,” Mendoza whispered.
“That’s not what I’m looking at.”
“What else?”
“All these other IDs? None of them are doing anything.”
★
Kiy
oshi bounced through the wreckage in the Haworth crater. Squadrons of salvage bots burrowed in bomb sites. Kiyoshi flew over a row of mangled corpses the bots had recovered. It reminded him of the destruction of 11073 Galapagos. He hadn’t seen that, had been on the other side of the solar system at the time. Now he felt like he had been there, had a better understanding of what Jun had gone through.
He breasted the lip of the crater. Urban sprawl clogged the sunlit plateau between Shackleton Crater and the Malapert ridge. After what he’d just seen, it surprised him to see so many domes lit up and functioning.
“I met a girl last time I was here,” he mused aloud. “She offered me a job at her father’s company. The kind of thing, you know, you collect a paycheck, get married, buy property, raise a bunch of spaceborn kids with fragile bones and weak hearts. Sometimes I want that. I want what the PLAN took from me.”
“What was her name?” Studd asked.
“Who?”
“The girl you met.”
“Oh. I forget. She’s probably dead now, anyway.” Kiyoshi sat down on a rock. He tipped his head back and looked up at Earth.
“So what are we going to do?” Studd asked.
We. This warped little sub-personality wanted in on the action any way he could. “What do you mean?”
“Are we going to look for Princess Nadia? Or Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter?”
“Neither.”
“What?”
“Fuck Prince Jian Er. Fuck the boss. Fuck that manipulative asshole.”
“So … are we just going to leave Jun … on Tiangong Erhao?”
Studd sounded almost hopeful.
“We are not,” Kiyoshi said.
“Then … what?”
“We’re going to kidnap Derek Lorna. He’s a criminal genius. And he knows everything about the UN’s robotics programs. I’m betting the CDTF will be willing to trade him for Jun.”
Kiyoshi blinked up his suit’s drugstore, and injected a premixed cocktail of cijiwu and cocaine into his cubital port. The drugs immediately put him into a more cheerful frame of mind. It struck him that he might as well have some fun with this.
Using his suit radio to patch into the local network, he placed a voice call, no vid.
The Luna Deception Page 34