The Luna Deception

by Felix R. Savage

  “By the way,” he thought to ask her. “Have you ever heard of a guy called Derek Lorna?”

  “Lorna?” She laughed, a bit hysterically. “We came here to kill him.”

  “Oookay. Actually; shit. Did you succeed?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Like I said, the guy I came with just completely dropped out of touch.”

  Then it might be too late. If it wasn’t, Kiyoshi had no time to lose.

  A vending machine stood by the path. Kiyoshi’s Chinese-made laser pistol was already in his hand. He shot the vending machine’s fingerprint scanner, scooped blueberry muffins and cinnamon rolls into his rucksack. Never skimp on the details.

  Nadia struggled into his spare EVA suit, saying, “Don’t look.”

  Kiyoshi gave her the pistol to hold while he changed into his own suit. He was getting his helmet on when she fired into the trees. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought I saw … Oh, help!”

  Kiyoshi slapped his helmet seals shut. Through his faceplate, he saw people drifting towards them. Drifting was the right word. Their toes hung several centimeters above the ground. The trees and ferns barely stirred as they passed.

  He grabbed the pistol from Nadia and shot at the nearest ones. They didn’t even slow down. His pulses seemed to be going straight through them.

  “Run.”

  She was already running, lithe in the Chinese-red EVA suit he’d bought from someone in Docking Bay 14. He followed her. Bounding high, they crashed through the canopies of the trees. Ahead, a thatched awning marked the airlock.

  Kiyoshi’s faceplate turned black. All his filters were set to normal, but he was blind. He collided with a tree. “Nadia!”

  “I can’t see!” she screamed.

  “Where are you?”

  “Here!”

  That was no help. “Something’s gunked up our helmets,” he said, sliding to the ground.

  “I know!”

  Kiyoshi enabled his suit’s infrared filter. The grid showed him Nadia, bright and clear. Of their pursuers, not a sign. Just Nadia, kneeling in a cool field of green.

  “Ugh! My helmet seals are all gunked up. I’m taking it off.”

  “No! Keep it on!” Kiyoshi bellowed, a second too late.

  “Got it!”

  The next sound to come from her was a choking noise. Kiyoshi remembered Father Tom at the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, asphyxiating in what had looked like good, clean air. He his scrubbed his gloves over his faceplate—it was like trying to wipe oil off glass. He cleared a smeary gap.

  Nadia knelt among the ferns, helmet off, clutching her throat. The people who’d been chasing them stood around her. As if they saw Kiyoshi looking, they turned and stared. Then they stooped to Nadia again.

  The gunk crawled over his faceplate again, blinding him. He stumbled to the airlock, using IR to navigate. He collapsed into the chamber. Coughs racked his chest.

  “Studd?”

  “There’s something on your suit,” Studd said. “Your telemetry’s all screwy.”

  “I know.” He stumbled into the vacuum. Suddenly he could see again. The gunk slid down his legs, as if he were getting painted black, in reverse. It spread into a pool on the regolith. In the slanting light of the sun, it looked like he’d grown a new shadow.

  “Jesus Christ.” He crossed himself. Coughed again.

  “OK, it’s gone now,” Studd said.

  “I found Princess Nadia,” Kiyoshi said. “But then they ate her.”

  “Who did?”

  “A bunch of people who weren’t there.”

  “It’s got to be those nanoprobes,” Studd said. “Totally serves them right for screwing with the laws of nature.”

  “Shut the fuck up, punk. I need the Wakizashi. Bring it as close as you can get.”

  “Um, there isn’t really room to land.”

  “So land on top of something. I don’t think it matters anymore.”

  xxxvi.

  Mendoza stumbled through Derek Lorna’s garden, looking for Dr. Hasselblatter’s kid. The boy’s father was looking for him, too. Overgrown, the garden offered all too many places for a would-be Knight of the Milky Way to hide.

  A rosebush hidden in the QuickGrow™ grass snagged Mendoza’s trousers. He stopped to extricate himself. He heard some people hurry past in the street, talking. Coughing.

  Derek Lorna had gone into panic mode. But Derek Lorna in panic mode was still smarter than anyone else. He’d explained how the Dust must have reached Shackleton City. “The PLAN attack. It wasn’t an attack! It was a Dust drop. If the PLAN had wanted to nuke us outright, they could have. But they had something much nastier in mind … something arty. That’s how their sick, Romantic minds work. I’m talking about Teutonic Romanticism, the movement that gave us The Sorrows of Young Werther, not to mention Martin Heidegger. Not flowers and valentines.”

  Mendoza had said, “So the Dust has been here for weeks.”

  “Yes. Lying low.”

  “So I didn’t personally doom Shackleton City by bringing Dust from Hopetown?”

  “No,” Lorna had said. “But you probably have doomed Bloomsbury by bringing Dust from Mockingbird Village. Oh fuckety-fuckety-fuck. We have to get out of here now. Take this mask.”

  It was only a rebreather mask, with a tank of compressed oxygen that went in Mendoza’s shirt pocket. Rebreather sets were intended for use in the event of a loss of pressure. The seal around his mouth and nose was far from secure. Dr. Hasselblatter had one, too, but he had pushed it down around his neck, the better to yell.

  “JUNIOR! Come here RIGHT THIS FUCKING SECOND! We’re LEAVING!”

  Way to panic the neighbors. Mendoza faced the horrible truth that their survival probably depended on escaping before anyone else knew what was going on. If a stampede happened, someone would steal the Moonhawk. It wouldn’t matter that there wasn’t anywhere to go. Anywhere would be better than here, as long as it was away from the invisible doom spreading through Shackleton City.

  How fast?

  How many Mockingbird Villages were there?

  Mendoza crashed through the grass, sweaty, furious with Dr. Hasselblatter’s kid, with himself, with God.

  He smelled something. Burning.

  A thin stream of smoke squeezed out of an upstairs window.

  He bounded indoors and took the stairs a flight at a time.

  Lorna squatted in front of the hearth in his bedroom, feeding papers into a sluggish micro-gravity fire.

  “I didn’t know that was a real fireplace,” Mendoza said.

  “It’s not. That’s why the smoke is going out the window.”

  “What are you burning?”

  “Personal papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “If you take one piece of advice,” Lorna said, “from the man whom Script magazine called ‘the most important computer scientist of his generation,’, let it be this: Do not store your personal data in digital format. Not even in your head. Secure data storage is an oxymoron.”

  Mendoza had never seen so much paper in one place in his life. “What is all that stuff?”

  “Oh, evidence for my defence at the Interplanetary Court of Justice. I’m going to handle it myself. Was going to.”

  “Is that what you’ve been working on all this time?” Mendoza picked up a folder.

  “Don’t look at that!” Lorna snatched it back.

  But Mendoza had seen the title: Some Observations Regarding the Entity Known as ‘Little Sister’ [DRAFT, NOT FOR RELEASE].

  He flinched, body-slammed by memories of his time on 4 Vesta. And with the memories came understanding.

  “So that’s it,” he muttered.

  “What’s what?” Lorna said warily, the firelight reddening one side of his face.

  “What the Dust really is. Why this is happening. You knew all along.”

  “You can’t prove it,” Lorna said, feeding the folder into the fire.

  Too late. Mendoza was a fast reader, and he had glimpsed the a
bstract. He drew his Saudi pistol and aimed it at Lorna’s face. “You—you genocidal monster!”

  Lorna sneered. Mendoza’s finger twitched on the trigger. He might have pressed it, but movement caught his eye.

  Elfrida walked into the room.

  “Ellie!” Mendoza could hardly believe his eyes. She must have evaded her court-ordered supervision and hopped on a flight. “What are you doing here?”

  She ignored him, walking straight towards Lorna. In her right hand she carried a Japanese katana. He didn’t know how he’d missed it at first glance, except that love was blind.

  “Aaargh! Get her away from me!” Lorna dodged behind Mendoza. “Security!”

  Lorna’s security was probably robotic, and probably lethal, but there was no way it could get here in time.

  “Ellie ...” Her eyes. Blind with rage, blank with determination. It was like looking into a mirror.

  Yet as she raised the katana, Mendoza’s own rage faltered. His native common sense revived.

  “Ellie! Yes, he’s a sack of shit, but he’s the only person left alive who understands the Dust! If you kill him, millions more people are going to die.”

  She gestured with the katana: Get out of my way.

  “Elfrida! Don’t do it!”

  The blade sliced the smoky air, so near his face that he jumped back. She swung at Lorna.

  Mendoza made a split-second decision: he had to save Derek Lorna, for the sake of everyone else, even if it meant hurting the woman he loved.

  He shot at Elfrida, aiming for her sword arm, which could be fixed with a minor operation.

  But she was moving, and he hit her in the head.

  The plasma bolt boiled on impact, expanding at the speed of light. Mendoza bounded towards her, his heart breaking so hard he could practically feel the pieces slicing his ribs.

  In the instant it took for him to cover the distance between them, Elfrida exploded.

  A trillion tiny pieces of her clouded around Mendoza and Lorna. The pieces twinkled, losing their color, vanishing into the smoky air.

  Lorna moved first. “Dust!” he yelled. “She was Dust! It’s HERE!”

  He then appeared to completely lose his wits. He grabbed an industrial-size pouch with an interior decorator’s logo on it, and squirted it all over the room.

  “Turpentine!”

  Lorna seized burning papers from the hearth with his bare hands. He threw them on the bed, on the floor. Flames bulged up. Smoke swirled around the room, seeped through Mendoza’s rebreather mask. But it was not just smoke now. It was a gazillion motes of Dust. “What are you doing?” he howled.

  “It’s BACTERIA! Best way to kill it is heat! Burn it! BURN ALL THE THINGS!”

  Flames licked the carpet. The bed’s black vinyl sheets caught fire. Mendoza hauled Lorna to the door. Both of them were coughing. “Suits,” Mendoza managed.

  “Only have—one. Mine.”

  On the stairs they met Dr. Hasselblatter and his offspring. “What the hell? The house is on fire.”

  “Burn,” Lorna gritted. “Burn everything.” He doubled over, gasping for air.

  xxxvii.

  Kiyoshi hammered on the interior valve of the Wakizashi’s airlock. “Let me out!”

  “No,” Studd said. “You’re sick. You might die.” His projection squatted on the pilot’s console, at right angles to the floor. His face looked different from before. Squarer. Jaw and brows heavier. That resemblance Kiyoshi had noted before was more pronounced.

  “Open this fucking airlock!”

  “Jun would never forgive me.”

  “If you don’t let me out, we’re going to lose Luna.” Kiyoshi coughed. Flecks of blood dotted the faceplate of his helmet. Studd was right, he might die. God knows how many nanoscale devils were trapped inside his EVA suit, devouring him cell by cell. But he’d mainlined a bunch of stimulants. That always gave you a cosmic perspective. “We can’t afford to lose another planet. Humanity can’t.”

  “Luna’s not a planet. It’s a moon.”

  “It’s the hub of the space-based economy. High-end manufacturing, technology R&D, He3 exports. If Luna goes, so does the rest of the solar system. Humanity would have to fall back to Earth. As for the spaceborn, we’d be screwed.”

  “I thought you hated Luna.”

  I hated it because it’s beautiful. Kiyoshi coughed for a while before he managed to say, “Are you a crusader? Or just a risk-averse machine?”

  The eyes of the projection met the eyes of the man. Studd’s ravaged face twitched. “I’m an AI. My primary goal is to stay alive. My secondary goal is to keep you alive.”

  “You’re an AI,” Kiyoshi shouted, “but I am the fucking captain! Open the airlock!”

  The airlock opened.

  Kiyoshi fell in.

  Coughing.

  Hurting.

  Not everyone in Shackleton City was dying. He’d seen normal people in Wellsland, obliviously sharing the streets with the Dust devils. Nadia had been fine, until she pissed them off, and became the exception that proved the rule.

  It was the same rule the PLAN always used, and it went like this: command DIE PUREBLOODS DIE exit

  The PLAN’s definition of “pureblood” had been debated ad nauseam over the years. The latest thinking was that the PLAN used genetic markers as shorthand for distinctive mentalities, be those ethnically or religiously defined. What the PLAN really hated was unique cultural values. Unfortunately for Kiyoshi, he was ethnically 100% Japanese, steeped in Japanese culture, and a follower of a jealous God, so he matched the PLAN’s target profile in every way possible.

  He just hoped the cijiwu would keep him going until he’d done what he had to do.

  He bounded down the steps, and promptly fell into a crater.

  Tumbled head over heels. Fetched up against a rock etched with the words YE OLDE DUCKKE PONDE.

  Laugh.

  He staggered between abstract and realistic sculptures, through a maze of shadows. It was as if one of Earth’s famous museums had come to him.

  The dome of Bloomsbury loomed, its near side hidden in shadow. Kiyoshi enabled IR scanning. False-color heat whooshed from an airlock. Human forms, limned in flame.

  Kiyoshi ran into the shadow of the dome. People rolled on the ground, slapped at the flames licking over their suits. These were going out anyway. Things could burn in a vacuum, but you needed a better oxidizer than the outer garment of a designer spacesuit.

  Kiyoshi pushed through singed skirts and jokey alien costumes. Keyed his suit radio to the public channel. His helmet filled up with coughs and high-pitched sobs. These refugees were children, swimming in their parents’ EVA suits. “Lorna!” he bellowed. “Derek Lorna!”

  He eeled into the airlock just before it closed. As it cycled, it filled with smoke.

  The far end opened. Into hell.

  Kiyoshi stared down the length of a street lined with hemispherical bulges of fire that bubbled and wobbled as if they were made of jelly. Fire behaved differently in micro-gravity than it would on Earth: it appeared eerily tranquil—and was hard to put out. A thick pall of smoke hung over the burning buildings like a cloud. Fire-retardant foam fell like snow from the hidden roof, but it merely made the flames spit.

  Stretching back from the airlock, as far as Kiyoshi could see, people in EVA suits queued for their turn to escape. Their suits were continually catching fire, owing to the globules of flame that wafted down from the burning buildings. They put out the flames with handfuls of foam scooped off the street.

  A tall person in an EVA suit that mimicked evening wear, except for the iridescent bubble of helmet beneath his top hat, stood at the head of the queue. He tapped Kiyoshi’s arm. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “I know,” Kiyoshi said.

  “Clear the airlock, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Kiyoshi stepped out of the way. The queue surged forward. “Women and children first,” the tall man said.

  The queue fell back. Smaller for
ms were manhandled to the front, every hand slapping at the flames that had caught the dinosaur spines of their suits, their unicorn horns and decorative donkey ears.

  Kiyoshi walked past the queue, through the slow blizzard of flames. Like a thousand little candles, falling from the sky. He shouted over the clamor on the public channel, “Mr. Lorna! Derek Lorna, where are you?”

  Bodies lay on the street, halfway out of burning doors. Not everyone had got into their EVA suits in time to avoid death by smoke inhalation.

  Or by Dust.

  Kiyoshi dashed down a side street where the flames seemed to be less. Gardens smouldered behind high walls. Smoke hung in striations.

  A group of people knelt in the street. Their butts poked up. Their heads were down like dogs. They were eating …

  Kiyoshi backed up, nausea roiling his stomach. “Jesus Christ, Studd, are you seeing this?”

  “Yes,” Studd answered hollowly. “It’s symbolic.”

  “Symbolic?”

  “The PLAN’s war on humanity isn’t just a hot war. It’s also an information war, and a propaganda war. So aesthetics matter. Symbolism matters.”

  “So they’re symbolically saying, ‘WE WILL EAT YOU ALIVE’? That’s not symbolism, that’s just the truth.”

  Coughing, choking on the lining of his own lungs, Kiyoshi bellowed defiance.

  “Hey, assholes! We’ve got your number! Enjoy your meal, because we’re going to smash you into oblivion, so help me God!”

  “Amen to that,” a voice on the public channel echoed.

  “Brother?” Kiyoshi stumbled into a pirouette. Flames blocked the way he’d come. He wouldn’t be getting back to that airlock.

  “Over here.”

  Four people came around the building on the corner. Only two of them were walking. They carried the other two: a child, and a person in a spacesuit with joke antennae dangling from his helmet. Neither of the two walkers had suits, just rebreather masks, so Kiyoshi recognized the younger one.

  The Dust devils rose and clawed at them.

  “Jesus, I wish I’d stayed in Manila,” gasped John Mendoza. His rebreather mask had a built-in radio. “I wish I’d never heard of the goddamn Department of Intrepid Exploits.”