by Ian McDonald
Long, like that. We look where he’s looking and see what he’s seeing.
A rover—a big one—parked up alongside our Redrover. Five suits standing around Little Red. A cable connecting the two rovers.
‘What are they doing?’ Kobe says, and before I can tell him to leave it to me, he’s off, full pelt. Those shell-suits have power-assist. They run fast.
‘Leave it alone!’ Sidibe shouts even though whoever they are, they can’t hear her on our channel, and before I can give any order, she’s off as well and even non-power-assisted she’s only a couple of footprints behind Kobe.
Footprints. We’re stomping all over humanity’s first steps on another world.
Fuck it. In for a cent, in for a bitsie.
‘Jair, let’s go!’
And we run, not caring where our boots go. Because I have a horrible gut-sick feeling about those people and their cable.
Sidibe is helmet-to-helmet with one of the suits. There are geometric patterns on the helmet and gloves: adinkra, the symbol system of the Asamoahs. I read some adinkra: a sort-of G with like a nail through it: Ohene Tuo. The King’s Gun. These are blackstars and that is their captain. Four stand around the captain, two more guard the cable between their rover and Little Red. Good people don’t stand like that.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask on the common channel.
‘They’re stealing our power!’ Sidibe shouts, loud enough to hurt, then launches into a stream of Akan that I am sure is so full of curses even Laine would raise an eyebrow.
‘Stop it!’ I shout.
A channel opens.
‘No,’ says the King’s Gun. A woman’s voice. Moonborn accent.
‘Kobe! Save Redrover!’ I shout. And Kobe wills his armour forwards and his right arm swings, woosh, and his left arm swings, woosh, and the blackstars fly back because if one of those fists connects with a helmet, it’s going to take more than a squirty gun of sealant to make it all vac-tight again. Kobe seizes the cable and wrenches it from Redrover’s charging socket.
‘Now, that was rash,’ the Asamoah woman says, and Sidibe is on her back on the regolith and the King’s Gun has a knee on her chest and the tip of a knife at the place where helmet seal meets sasuit. ‘Behave.’
My head is full of noise and numb; thick dust and clouds of smoke; ideas, images, words, but I can’t touch any of them. I am helpless. The world of stories is full of brilliant martial arts moves and last-ditch escapes and cunning plans where we win. The world of real doesn’t allow these things. Anything I do could get us hurt. Killed.
This is adventure. I hate you, adventure.
‘Kobe, leave it.’
I hear the wail growing inside him, bubbling.
‘Kobe, it’s all right.’
It’s not all right. It’s so not all right.
‘Kobe, please.’
The growl fades. He steps back to my side.
‘Wise.’ The woman speaks in Akan and the blackstars plug the cable back into Redrover. I imagine I can hear the life blood being sucked out: Little Red turning to Little Pink turning to Little Beige. Deadrover.
‘Leave us something!’ I shout. ‘We have to get back.’
‘Where’s back?’ the Ohene Tuo says.
‘Meridian,’ Jair says.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ the Ohene Tuo says. ‘Forget about that.’
‘You can’t just leave us!’ I shout. Sidibe gets to her feet. She’s slow and scared and her vital signs are flickering red all over my HUD.
‘I can,’ the woman says. ‘Out here I can do anything. You have to get back to Meridian, I have to get back to Twé.’
‘I would have given you some,’ I shout back.
‘You see, I can’t stake my crew’s lives on your “give” and your “some”,’ the Ohene Tuo says. ‘You have a mission, I have a mission. There’s only enough power for one mission and I have the resources, strength, and numbers to ensure that it is my mission that succeeds.’
‘Give us some back,’ I say. I am cold, so cold I feel myself shivering. It’s not cold-cold—vacuum is the best insulator; the problem up on the surface isn’t cold but too much heat. Listen to me, I’m getting like Kobe: taking refuge in facts. This cold is inside my head: among the dust and stuff tumbling there are numbers and they grind and mill and stick to each other, number to number, into equations that are cold and hard and the scariest things I have ever seen.
‘Can’t take the risk,’ the Ohene Tuo says. She speaks in Akan and her blackstars disconnect the socket. It retracts like some sick kind of monster-penis into the belly of their big rover. She raises a hand, turns a finger, and her blackstars jump back into their seats. ‘We’re powered. And a little over. Left you enough to get you to the big dig at Hypatia, if you’re careful. But I wouldn’t hang around. Sun-storm coming. You’ll want rock over your head when she hits. Take care. Thanks for the power. Moon is hard, baa.’
And they plug up and close up and drive off. On our power. Our stolen power. Big plumes of dust from their six big wheels. I watch them over the horizon and my brain is bursting and my cheeks are burning and my heart is a mess of molten steel. I have never been so angry. I have never been so humiliated. I have never been so helpless.
‘What are we waiting for?’ Jair swings himself up into his seat. ‘You heard what she said. There’s a storm coming.’
The last thing I want is to be on that rover. I can’t even bear the thought of the feel of the seat under me. To even touch it is to take in the pollution, the ruin of all the greatness we felt only a few minutes ago. All gone. All puffed away like air from a broken helmet. I feel stupid, I feel like moon and Earth and yes, fuck it, sun are all looking at me and shaking their heads.
‘Cari.’ I wince at the sound. Cariad. See? She even gives herself a stupid name. ‘We need to move. We got beaten and beaten bad, and that hurts, but that’s not important. What’s important is what we do now.’
‘Yes,’ I say. Jair’s is the only voice that cuts through the high-pitched whine in my head, the noise you get when you want to cry, need to cry, but you cannot must not will not. ‘Yes. I have to fix this. Kobe?’
He’s already in his seat.
‘Lay in a course for Hypatia.’
‘Yes, Cari.’
And I can bear my name. When Kobe says it, it sounds like respect. We’re in the place beyond shit, the tank where the zabbaleen store all the shit and piss of an entire city, up to our noses: robbed blind, maybe enough power to get to safety before the solar storm hits and floods Nearside with charged particles, but who do they turn to? Cariad Corcoran.
‘Sidibe.’ No answer. No movement. This is bad bad bad. ‘Sidibe, come on.’ I take her arm and guide her to her seat, settle her in, pull down the safety bars. Nothing. ‘Kobe, take us out.’ I hardly notice the thrum of the engines, the surge of acceleration as we cut a wide arc in the regolith and drive west-southwest. I’m trying to reach Sidibe. I open a private channel. She flicks me away. I lean my head against the crash bars, trying to get close enough to feel the vibrations of whatever is going on inside her own helmet. The Asamoah woman pulled a knife on her. Had her on her back. Blade at her throat. Didn’t matter that she was a kid. She was coming between the King’s Gun and the thing she needed to save her crew.
I think Sidibe may be crying, all alone in her helmet.
I’m glad I can’t hear her. It might get me crying too, and if I started, I’m afraid that I might not be able to stop.
* * *
Eight kays short of Hypatia, Redrover runs out of power. It’s no surprise: Little Red had been warning us every kay for the last fifteen. I told Kobe to shut it off. What’s the point in being warned of something you can’t avoid?
We roll to the gentle halt on the edge of the small crater in the southwesterly corner of the Sea of Tranquility. Kobe has to find the manual release to drop us all to the rego.
‘People,’ Jair says, ‘we killed Redrover.’
‘You al
l right?’ I say to Kobe on a private channel. I can hear the catch in his breathing but I haven’t time for Kobe-wrangling. Or Sidibe-wrangling or anyone-wrangling. We need to move. I’ve run the numbers. Cold cold numbers. Eight kays, normal walking pace, allowing for fumble time getting into an unfamiliar lock: we will arrive at Hypatia on the last breath of suit power. No power, your suit dies and pretty soon after you die. I’d thought, well, maybe I could run some of the power from Redrover’s cells into the suit cells. My conclusion: Redrover was faster and surer than four kids in suits; so burn its batteries to the ground. Now it’s strictly by numbers, and even a few minutes’ delay is the difference between stepping smiling into a living breathing habitat and falling in as zabbaleen fodder.
‘I’m sad,’ Kobe says. ‘But we have to move on, don’t we?’
‘We do, Kobe.’
I give the rules. We have to conserve every milliwatt of power. So: essentials only. No comms apart from me, no HUDs apart from Jair, who, as Sidibe still isn’t acknowledging an external universe, is now Department of Surface Activities. Peril fucking Suits. The big decision is who gets to navigate. Navigation HUDs don’t draw much power, but it’s some power. Problem for Cariad Corcoran: Kobe has no sense of direction, Jair is monitoring everyone else, I’m on comms, and Sidibe is orbiting Planet Trauma. So—swallow hard, be the Adult in the Room—the solution to Cariad Corcoran’s problem is: Cariad Corcoran.
Jair and Kobe line up behind me.
‘Sidibe?’
Not a word, but she falls in behind Big Kobe. Kobe pats Redrover’s wheel as we set off up the low crater rim. Kobe is my big worry. Shell-suits store more power, but they eat more power too. I think I have the numbers right. I need to have the numbers right. Then there is Jair: is he reading the signs right, will he know if anything goes wrong and if it does will he tell me? And Sidibe, who is like walking death . . . Everyone is my big worry. Especially me.
* * *
It goes like this. Walk walk walk walk walk. Rocks, stones, crater big, crater small, crater just right. Stones, rocks. In the distance, west of us, the pickup platform of the South West Tranquillitatis Moonloop tower. The main body of the tower—two kilometres tall—is down under the horizon. Up there in the golden west the big golden sun is getting ready to spew out all manner of cosmic shit over her planetary family, their moons, and Team First Footprint. Stones, rocks. Sound effects: suit systems clicking, cooler creaking, rustle of dust through the boot soles, and the only other three people in the world (it seems) breathing hard and heavy in your ear.
Then there’s a hiss on my comms. A private channel opening.
‘Emer?’
I let it go. I also let it go that I and only I command the comms.
‘Hey.’
‘E . . . Cariad.’
My name. She called me by my name.
‘Are you all right?’
I know. It’s dumb and it’s a cliché and it means absolutely nothing (right? What does that mean? And all right?), but you have to unlock the door before someone can push it open. I hear her breathe deep.
‘I’m so angry,’ she says. ‘Just so angry. I can’t even begin—’
She breaks off. She hears the catch in my breath. That catch of breath? Because I’m scared scared scared that she blames me for what happened to her. I brought her to Tranquility, I talked her into coming in the Prince Igor banya in Queen; I had the idea of an expedition to the First Footprint because I couldn’t deal with my mum marrying her dad; because I hated the idea of having a new derecha who was shinier, smarter, braver, better than me. That everyone knows this. Kobe, Jair. That everyone has always known this. That everyone blames me for everything. That I am the sick heart of all evil.
All this in one catch of the breath. Breath comes before talk.
‘It’s not you,’ Sidibe says. She knows me too well. Her voice hardens. ‘Why should it be you? Why does it always have to be Cariad Corcoran? This is nothing to do with you. That woman attacked me. Put me on the ground. I hate saying that. It makes my skin feel like fingers all over it. It makes me feel polluted.’
I almost say Sorry, then pull the word back. Sorry would make it about me again. She’s right. This is nothing to do with me. This is all Sidibe’s. I can’t feel what she felt, on the ground, under the hand of a bigger and stronger woman. I can’t feel her helplessness. I can’t feel all her self-belief, all those times that Gebre told her she was great and golden and special, all that confidence and pride, torn from her in a second like someone ripped her wings from her shoulders. I can imagine, I can conjure up a feeling, but it’s not what she felt, on her back, under the knife. All I can do is listen.
I listen.
Sidibe has much to say.
At the end of it, I begin to understand Sidibe Sisay.
* * *
As Sidibe talks, as she spills and flows and I listen, I am also watching the power indicator in the corner of my visor drop from yellow through orange and red to pink towards the white.
Kobe breaks radio-hygiene. Look! Look at what, Kobe? Grey, greyer, grey-most? Oh, right, so: he’s that much taller in that shell-suit than the rest of us and he’s seen a thing we can’t. Yet. One minute on, I see the tips of Hypatia’s comms towers over the horizon and I am so filled with joy I feel nauseous. Sick-happy. I didn’t know that could be a thing.
I make it to the main lock on the very edge of white. Seven minutes of power left. We tumble into the lock chamber, plug into the charge points, and watch the door close. Someone has spray-painted a Lady Luna on the inside of the outlock door, one part of her face on each half. Black life and white death coming together. Lady Luna: you got emotions I can’t even begin to explain. Numb-afraid. Happy-vom. Now dread-relief. Relief that we made it to Hypatia. Dread that something else is waiting beyond the inlock door.
‘Um, folk,’ Jair says. That Um again. ‘The lock? It’s not pressurising.’
‘Is there something wrong with the lock mechanism?’ I ask.
‘No,’ Jair says. ‘There’s something wrong with Hypatia.’
The lock cycle completes, the inlock door plots. HYP left, ATIA right. Ahead is an elevator platform. We ride it down—what else can we do?—into relief-dread. Now the suits are recharged, the HUDs on all our visors are telling us the same thing: This is your sixty-minute air warning. Sixty minutes.
Hard light blinds us; when the visors have darkened, we see the reason.
Hypatia is a bustling, thriving city of seven thousand residents located in southwest Mare Tranquillitatis. Hypatia is an important research and industrial centre and a major interchange between Equatorial One and the branch lines to Sinus Asperitatis and Mare Nectaris. Or Hypatia will be when Hypatia is finished. Right now, Hypatia is a construction site.
The elevator dumps us onto the middle deck of a massive scaffold rig in what will be Hypatia’s main station, which is just a big big tube carved from raw rock, two kilometres long, straight as truth. That blinding light is from dozens of work-arrays; even in the hot glare I can’t see all the way to the end of the tunnel. Dust. Always. Dust. There is an atmosphere in Hypatia. It’s made of dust. Machines. I can feel the rattle and rumble and shakey-shake through the metalwork. Maybe a good thing there is no air in here: it would be like being inside the Blessed Angel Michael’s own trumpet.
Amalia, three derecho-wards around the ring, plays trumpet. Jazz trumpet. I’ve heard her. I don’t understand her music—too many notes—but I did ask her why she didn’t blow out her cheeks like a festival balloon, like I’ve seen in the archives. That’s bad technique, she says. Bad technique.
‘Is there anyone here?’ I ask. I said about being inside a trumpet. There’s another thing I saw in the archives of Earth: insects. Crass things called termites, all white and pasty, that live in tunnels inside these huge mounds in the hot places on Earth, which is kind of everywhere now. They scurry about in those tunnels, millions of them, up and down, across the roof, all over. They scared me until I reali
sed that they were really, really small, then they scared me because there were millions of them. A million tinies is worse than one big, don’t you think?
The machines in this tunnel are like termites, up and down, across the roof, all over.
And this is just one tunnel of an entire city.
I see patterns shift on Jair’s HUD; he’s into the city’s network, squeezing into places that only a smart neko can go.
‘Um, Cari.’
I’m not going to like this.
‘We’re the only living things here. Everyone else moved out. The solar storm.’
‘We’re underground, aren’t we?’ I say, and I can’t believe why I’m arguing. ‘Big rock up there.’
‘Maybe they thought, because it’s not sealed yet, better safe?’ Jair says.
‘We are safe, aren’t we?’ Kobe says.
Before I can say, We are, trust me, Kobe, my suit pings. Cariad, fifty minutes of air remaining. Fifty minutes. Since recharging in the elevator, I have all my HUDs and monitors back. I must have been breathing deep and anxious because in the next few minutes I have to captain like I have never captained before.
‘Jair, can you find us air?’
He knows what I just heard.
‘There’s an airplant about a kay down the tunnel up on the top level,’ Jair says and highlights it on my map overlay. It’s high.
‘Wait,’ I say, but Kobe and Jair are already loping down the gantry. Sidibe is right at Jair’s shoulder. It’s not right that that bothers me. I know. But it does.
The airplant is a chunk of industrial tech half the size of Redrover. It’s big and it’s high. It’s very high. A thirty-metre climb. Sidibe is halfway up before I can blink. Kobe is behind her like one of those killer bots you see in nightmares, coming for you hand-over-hand, hand-over-hand. Even Jair has hooked claws over bars. He calls down to me.
‘You coming, Cari?’
‘Right . . . so.’
I look up. Sidibe is already at the top, swinging out one-handed to look down at me. I can’t look at her, I can’t look at Kobe and Jair. My head turns inside my head. I know that makes no sense. Since when does how we feel make sense? I see myself up there, climbing up the struts, and my head turns inside my head and I fall backwards.