The Luna Deception

by Felix R. Savage

  “Hello? Dr. Hasselblatter? Yeah, you don’t know me, but I’m one of your biggest fans … No, no, not the Space Corps. That vid, man. Sexbotgate? That was freaking hilarious …”

  ★

  A man burst into Lorna’s bedroom. He had clothes on now, but Mendoza recognized him from the surveillance vid loop. Actually, he recognized him, period.

  “I just got a call from some pleb who says he’s a fan,” Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter exclaimed.

  “So what?” Lorna said. “Get over the fame thing, Abdullah. You’ll be happier if you forget you were ever rich and powerful.”

  Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter—ex-director of the Space Corps, former candidate for the directorship of UNVRP, and now system-wide object of ridicule—stared at Mendoza. “Who are you?”

  “I work for D.I.E.” Mendoza paced the bedroom, slapping the Saudi pistol against his leg. He could not stop thinking about those 19,248 inactive ID bubbles. “We need to find out what’s really happening in Hopetown.” He circled back to Lorna’s makeshift desk. “Can I use one of your screens?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “Where’s my kid?” Dr. Hasselblatter said.

  “If it was your kid who tried to cut my head off, he’s somewhere around,” Mendoza answered distractedly.

  “That’s my boy,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “He’s got it figured out: playing by the rules doesn’t pay off in this solar system. Does it, Derek? Just cut their heads off and call it good. What are you doing?”

  “We’re trying to find out whether everyone in the Hopetown dome is dead, or just resting,” Lorna said.

  “They’re not picking up,” Mendoza said. “I just pinged Youssef, Jasmine, Abraam, Eliana … everyone. Nothing.” He glanced up at Lorna, feeling a bit hysterical. “Maybe they’re pining for the fjords.”

  “Sounds to me like they’ve rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible,” Lorna said.

  “Pushing up the daisies?” Dr. Hasselblatter said.

  They all chuckled. Then they gathered around the screens while Lorna hacked into the optical surveillance feeds from Hopetown.

  The feeds showed nothing unusual. In the fake sunlight, people trickled towards their offices, as you would expect at 7:45 a.m. The early Mass crowd surged out of the cathedral. Queues stretched out the doors of cafés. It was the same in New Jeddah.

  And yet none of those 42,018 people (the combined populations of Hopetown and New Jeddah) were talking on the phone, or surfing the news, or playing games, or sending emails, or doing anything that involved electronic data transfers to and from the satellite network. The outgoing comms traffic from Marius Hills had dwindled to a dribble of life-support status updates: machines talking to other machines, assuring them that all was well.

  It was so unlikely as to be impossible.

  Lorna sat with his hands in his lap, staring at the feeds. “Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud,” he muttered. “Victoria McFate. Erik Sigurdsen.”

  “The Fragger pilots,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “What about them?”

  “What if they’re not dead? What if they reached Mars? And were—killed, taken prisoner …”

  “And came back?” Mendoza said.

  “They don’t have to have come back,” Lorna said. “They don’t even have to be alive anymore. All the PLAN would have needed was the information in their heads and bodies, including their DNA. To quote our favorite used-car salesman: ‘D.I.E. is protected by top-notch biometric security.’ Well, that’s how you crack it.”

  Mendoza reflected that there was a reason people called Derek Lorna a genius. It wasn’t raw IQ that counted, but the ability to make an intuitive leap like this, which seemed obvious the minute someone else said it.

  “It could be done remotely, using redirects to disguise the source of the signals,” Lorna added.

  Mendoza nodded. “So we’ve found our saboteur.”

  “I think so.”

  “It’s the PLAN.”

  “Yep. They’re using the pilots’ access privileges to screw with the Dust control software. Deliberately crashing swarms. Stealing them. Hiding them, to make you think they’re lost.”

  “But what for?”

  Lorna stared at him. “When the PLAN steals our technology and uses it against us, has it ever had any goal other than genocide?”

  xxxv.

  At that very moment, Elfrida Goto was stepping off a commercial flight at Faustini Spaceport. The spaceport had not been badly damaged in the PLAN attack. She rode the ground transfer bus to the terminal, which was clogged with aid workers, porter-bots overloaded with emergency medical supplies, and grimy groups of evacuees. She recognized the scene from her years in the Space Corps. She envied the aid workers their glow of self-righteousness. She hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

  Once, she’d been one of the do-gooders. And if things had gone otherwise on Mercury, she might have been one of them still. But now she had a different mission.

  She edged through the crowd, clutching her battered old Space Corps rucksack. A looped public announcement warned new arrivals that the local commuter rail network was down. Officials were giving out reservations for Flyingsaucer hops to the city. People turned away impatiently—“I’m going to walk.”

  Which had been Elfrida’s plan all along. She selected a quiet corner and changed into her EVA suit, stripping naked in full view of the crowd, which raised some eyebrows. You didn’t do that on Luna. But Elfrida had once been the kind of person who didn’t give a crap about anyone’s stupid rules, and now she had to be that kind of person again.

  Sunlight flooded the rim of Faustini Crater, coming in from its usual ominous angle, the sun just a few degrees above the horizon. Elfrida walked through the wreckage of the spaceport’s flywheel farm, where they used to store energy during the long lunar nights. She took one last look at Earth before plunging down into Shoemaker Crater, which was mostly industrial.

  Scratch that. Mostly a bomb site.

  Although weeks had passed since the attack, salvage bots were still pulling bodies out of the wreckage. Elfrida bounded past them unchallenged. Her EVA suit bore the UNVRP logo on the chest. The logo was all that was left of UNVRP now. Venus would never be terraformed. Humanity’s horizons had shrunk dramatically. A whole future world had vanished. And Elfrida knew exactly whose fault that was.

  She had come to Luna to kill him.

  No one had given her permission, least of all the ICJ. She had escaped her court-ordered supervision by jarking her therapist, who’d been tasked with watching her. An old friend, Magnus Kristiansen, who worked for Médecins Sans Frontières, had helped her get on a flight to Luna. She’d told Kristiansen she was going to visit Mendoza. He’d been happy for her, said it was about time she settled down with a nice guy.

  Little did he know Mendoza was millions of klicks away, in the Belt.

  There was no one to do this necessary thing except Elfrida.

  And so she walked on.

  ★

  “I have to take a leak,” Mendoza said. “Excuse me.” He stepped out of the bedroom, leaving Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter yelling at the secretaries of important people who weren’t taking his calls anymore.

  In the bathroom, Mendoza doused his face with water from the faucet, a rare luxury on Luna. He opened the window and looked out. Bloomsbury’s fake sun had risen, but the dome seemed oddly quiet. Then again, the rich didn’t have to get up for work. Something rustled down below. It was Dr. Hasselblatter’s son, hunting aliens in the long grass.

  Back in the bedroom, Lorna and Dr Hasselblatter stood staring at the screens. They were absolutely motionless. Somehow, Mendoza knew just from their backs that something terrible had happened.

  He pushed between them.

  The screen showed the main optical surveillance feed from the Hope Energy campus. People knelt in circles on the lawn, heads down. An odd posture. Mendoza could not imagine what they were doing.

  Something twitched, half-hidden b
y people’s backs. He reached out to the screen, zoomed in on the thing they were crouched over.

  A hand.

  Zoom.

  A charm bracelet.

  Jasmine Ah.

  Zoom.

  Something was wrong with Jasmine’s skin. The feed delivered pitilessly high resolution. The back of her hand was scabby, pitted. Glistening liquid oozed from swellings.

  One of the kneeling people moved, filling the zoomed-in view with a blur of fabric. Mendoza turned and stared at Lorna.

  “Those aren’t people,” Lorna said.

  “What are they?”

  “The Dust, doing what it was made to do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, of course you don’t understand!” Lorna screamed. He went red with rage. His eyes popped like blue marbles. “Because you’re a fucking moron! They’re all morons! And now they’re dead morons! Whose brilliant idea was it to operate the Dust inside the fucking domes? Guess we’ll never know now. Look at them, look at them!”

  Mendoza looked at them. He spotted Trey Hope. The CEO of Hope Energy was kneeling with his head down, his rear end in the air, in a knot of people clustered around … something …

  The thought popped into Mendoza’s mind: They’re eating people.

  “I can’t see the Dust,” he said desperately. “You can’t see it.”

  “You can see it fine,” Lorna said, “when there’s enough of it. I estimate there are trillions of probes in that dome now. If not quadrillions. More. I’m just guessing.”

  Lorna sat down on the floor and pushed up the right leg of his trousers. A UN-blue electronic cuff ringed his ankle.

  “I have a Ph.D,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “The Gray Goo Law exists for a reason.”

  “The Dust is bacteria!” Mendoza said. “It doesn’t fall into the category of self-reproducing nanobots!”

  “Correct. That’s how they cleverly got around the law,” said Dr. Hasselblatter. “But it’s a distinction without a difference.”

  “Nanotech and biology are two names for the same field, once you reach the sub-micron scale,” Lorna snapped. “We manufacture human tissues in laboratories; we grow computer memory in crystalline solutions. You tell me which is biological and which isn’t.”

  “But the Dust isn’t self-reproducing!”

  “Oh yes, it is, if there’s enough of it. There’s a thing called quorum sensing. In nature, a few hundred or a few thousand bacteria will lie low, so they don’t provoke an immune reaction. But a few million? A few billion? Your safety mechanism, I suppose, was simply the fact that you weren’t running enough probes for them to self-organize and start to feed. But then you started losing swarms, and those morons in charge must have just assumed they were gone, and issued new batches of probes. They weren’t gone. They were just lying low. Eventually they reached quorum. After that, it would all have happened rather fast.”

  “You’re saying everyone’s dead?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. We’ve lost Marius Hills. There’s no one left alive up there.”

  A recollection swam into Mendoza’s mind. “The Saudis locked down New Riyadh a few hours ago.”

  “Oh, well, then they’ll be all right. Too bad about everyone else.”

  A repair bot crawled out from under the bed and started to cut the cuff off Lorna’s leg, using a laser that blazed like a star in the dim room. The smell of burning plastic and singed hair arose. “Careful!” Lorna shouted.

  “What are you doing?” Mendoza said.

  “Removing the electronic restraint that confines me to this dome. I need to go to the Institute. Gather my team, start shoveling shit.”

  “Damage control,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “He doesn’t want to get blamed for this, too.”

  Lorna said to Mendoza, “The problem is, I haven’t got transport at the moment. The pigs confiscated my car. How did you get here?”

  “In a Moonhawk,” Mendoza said.

  “That’ll work.” Lorna froze. “Where did you come from, anyway?” he asked in a choked voice.

  “Mockingbird Village,” Mendoza said.

  “Oh. OK. Never heard of the place.”

  “You will have soon,” Mendoza said, remembering the smell of putrefaction, the ghostly form of Emmeline Diouf, and her silence.

  ★

  Kiyoshi prowled through Wellsland, looking for pastries.

  He went first to Moon Cakes, where he’d bought those choux à la crème, but it had turned into a food aid dispensary. A queue stretched out the door. With most of the greenhouses in ruins, Shackleton City was teetering on the brink of a calorie crisis, on top of everything else.

  Yet you could squint and imagine nothing had changed. Wage serfs in Victorian gear straggled into their offices. The artificial sun shone down on elegant townhouses. Beautiful, this habitat, that was the thing. All these trees. The sky was said to look just like Earth’s but better. The dome’s proportions deadened sound, so you didn’t get the tin can effect that turned many habitats into noise traps. The quiet made Kiyoshi want to kick off his boots and sprawl in one of these pocket-sized parks, doing nothing.

  He turned a corner. The fantasy evaporated. He had walked into an open-air hospital. Medibots and human nurses traipsed between stretchers holding rows of dying patients.

  “Hi,” Kiyoshi said to the nearest nurse. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I could buy some donuts? Or croissants would be good.”

  She just stared at him. Which was no wonder, really.

  Another nurse bustled up. The first one drifted away, leaving him to the newcomer, who was wearing an abaya. “What do you want?” her unseen mouth demanded.

  Head-to-toe Islamic gear in a non-Muslim city?

  Based on Kiyoshi’s experience, this might be:

  a Korean space pirate in disguise

  a sexbot

  or, less likely,

  a pious Muslim woman.

  Not ruling anything out, Kiyoshi said, “Salaam aleikum. Donuts? Danishes?”

  “Did my father send you to bring me home?”

  Sometimes the universe shat on you. And sometimes it shat physical iridium.

  “Princess Nadia? I thought you had wings,” Kiyoshi said.

  “I had them removed. They were getting in the way. Did Daddy send you to get me?”

  “Not exactly,” Kiyoshi said, hoping to assuage the sharp note of fear in her voice.

  “Oh.” She sagged. “You look like the kind of person he hires.”

  “I do?”

  “The dodgy-looking moustache. The black leather. The suspiciously overstuffed rucksack, which probably has your EVA suit in it, as well as a bunch of weapons that would have been confiscated if anyone was doing their job anymore. So I thought he might have sent you to rescue me. Sorry.”

  “Well, I’ve never said no to rescuing a princess,” Kiyoshi assured her, with his best Scuzzy the Smuggler smile.

  “Not a princess. A sheikha. Oh, just call me Nadia. I came here with a guy … but he’s dropped off the face of the moon, and …” She glanced over her shoulder. The slit of her niqab cut off her peripheral vision so that she had to turn all the way around, making the movement theatrical. “I’m scared to use my BCI, or anything.”

  “Why?” Kiyoshi said. He noticed that the other nurses had clustered together at a distance. They were staring at him and Nadia.

  “I’m scared,” Nadia said, her voice high.

  Kiyoshi took her elbow. “Do you have any stuff?”

  “No, no, nothing.”

  He started to lead her back the way he’d come, but there were several nurses back there, just standing and staring. Kiyoshi urged Nadia into a side street that ran behind the Museum of Commerce. On each stretcher lay a person in the final throes of radiation sickness. “Help,” Kiyoshi heard a whisper behind him. “Help.” Oh Christ, he thought, why have I got to see this? Why are You making me witness so much of Your suffering? Don’t You know there’s nothing I can
do about it?

  A woman in Victorian lady’s garb bent over the last patient, seeming to embrace him. Weird times.

  Nadia whispered, “That’s Dr. Miller. She was kind to me.”

  The doctor straightened up and stared. Kiyoshi nodded to her. When they were past, he looked back. The doctor had bent over her patient again—kissing him, or …

  “Hurry up,” he snapped to Nadia. He didn’t know what was going on here, but he knew for damn sure it wasn’t good. “Move!”

  Spaceborn, she fairly flew along beside him, jewelled sandals slapping on the cobbles.

  Kiyoshi headed for the main drag, reflexively seeking safety in numbers. When they got there, though, few people were about. It was mid-morning; people would be squirrelled away in their offices. If this were a normal day.

  He grabbed Nadia’s arm to slow her down as they reached Heinlein Park. This was the biggest open space in Wellsland. As Kiyoshi recalled, there was an airlock on the far side of the park. But ahead of them, people stood beneath the trees. Not talking or vaping or eating or anything. Just standing and staring, and their eyes, yes, their eyes were strange, and although their heads turned to follow Kiyoshi and Nadia, their eyes did not. It was as if, rather, they smelt the pair.

  “Uh huh, uh huh,” Kiyoshi murmured. “That doctor, did you see her?”

  “Yes …”

  “She wasn’t a human being. Nor are these people.”

  “What? What are they, then?”

  “Dunno. Demons.”

  Those eyes, as empty as the vacuum.

  “How can you tell?” Nadia half-screamed.

  “I’m a Catholic. I’m a pretty bad Catholic, but where I grew up, the Church was the biggest influence in our lives. I can always tell human beings from—robots; virtual projections; anything else. Demons.”

  “Oh,” Nadia said. “That’s why my family invested in D.I.E. My father and uncles think the PLAN is the Enemy: Al-Shaitaan. The Devil.”

  “They’re right.”

  He dragged her across a lawn, into the thickets of a botanical garden. Jurassic-sized ferns blocked their line of sight. He swung his rucksack off one shoulder and dragged out his extra EVA suit. He’d brought it for Derek Lorna, not for Nadia, but she could have it.