Luna--Wolf Moon--A Novel

by Ian McDonald

  Darius links Robson’s arm again.

  ‘Okay. Enough.’ Darius has spotted bigger game among the frond-shadows. ‘Sport is crass anyway.’ Cousins and more remote relatives pass and compliment Robson on his clothes, celebrity and survival. None ask to see the lip-gloss-smeared bruises. A live band plays bossa nova. It’s been bigger than ever since the fall of Corta Hélio; a global music. Guitar, acoustic bass, whispering drums.

  Robson freezes. Clustered between the band and the bar are Duncan Mackenzie and his okos Anastasia and Apollinaire, Yuri Mackenzie the CEO of Mackenzie Fusion, Yuri’s half-brothers Denny and Adrian and Adrian’s oko, Jonathon Kayode, the Eagle of the Moon himself. Darius tugs gently on Robson’s arm.

  ‘Work the room.’

  Anastasia and Apollinaire’s delight at Robson’s adventure is effusive. Hugs, kisses, making him stand and turn one way then the other to check injuries – his complexion is better than yours, Asya. Yuri is smiling and unimpressed, Duncan disapproves; a fall from the roof of the world is a blatant breach of family security, but his disapproval bears no weight. Duncan Mackenzie carries no authority since Robert Mackenzie took back control of Mackenzie Metals. Yuri is CEO of the helium-3 company Mackenzie Metals scavenged from the corpse of Corta Hélio. Denny is a tense, set-jawed twitch of energy as constrained as helium in a fusion pinch-field. Denny is a link in a chain of vengeance: Carlinhos killed his uncle Hadley in the Court of Clavius; Denny slit Carlinhos’s throat in the sack of João de Deus. Seize your enemy’s fallen weapon and turn it against them.

  The Eagle of the Moon wants to know Robson’s secret. You fell three kilometres and walked away? Robson is starstruck. He has never seen the Eagle in the flesh: he’s taller than Robson imagined, almost as tall as a gen three but built like a mountain. His formal agbada robes only magnify his gravity.

  The secret? Darius answers for tongue-tied Robson. Try not to hit the ground.

  ‘Sound advice.’

  The voice is quiet and refined, low in pitch and soft but it silences even the Eagle of the Moon. The Mackenzie men dip their heads. The Eagle of the Moon takes the offered hand and kisses it.

  ‘Lady Sun.’

  ‘Jonathon. Duncan; Adrian.’

  From time beyond remembering, the Dowager of Taiyang has been Lady Sun. No one knows the true age of Sun Cixi – none would dare ask. Her years may rival even Robert Mackenzie. Not for Lady Sun 1980s retro. She wears a faux-wool day suit from 1935, skirt to below the knee, wide-lapel led hip-length jacket, single button. Fedora, wide band. Classic style is never out of fashion. She is a small woman, even by first generation norms; dwarfed by her bodyguard of handsome, smiling Sun boys and girls, fit and fast in their fashionable powder-blue Armani suits and killer Yohji Yamamoto coats. She compels every eye. Her every movement communicates will and intent. Nothing is unconsidered. She is poised, electric, crackling with potency. Her eyes are dark and brilliant, seeing all, reflecting nothing.

  A hand extended, a cocktail arrives in it. A gin Martini, barely hazed with vermouth.

  ‘I brought my own,’ Lady Sun says, taking a sip. Not a lipstick mark on the glass. ‘And yes, it is terribly rude but I simply cannot drink that piss you call a 1788.’ She turns her needle eyes on Robson.

  ‘I hear you’re the boy who fell the height of Queen of the South. I suppose everyone’s telling you how wonderful you are for surviving. I say you’re a damn fool for falling in the first place. If a son of mine did a thing like that, I’d disinherit him. For a month or two. You’re a Corta, aren’t you?’

  ‘Robson Mackenzie, qiansui,’ Robson says.

  ‘Qiansui. Corta manners there all right. You always were smooth, you Brazilians. Australians have no finesse. Take care of yourself, Robson Corta. There aren’t many of you left.’

  Robson purses his right hand and dips his head the way Madrinha Elis taught him. Lady Sun smiles at his Corta decorum. An arm around Robson’s shoulders, a wince of pain. Darius steers him onward through the party.

  ‘They’re going to talk politics now,’ Darius says.

  * * *

  Robson smells Robert Mackenzie before he sees him. Antiseptics and antibacterials barely mask the piss and shit. Robson catches the oily, vanilla perfume of fresh medical electronics; hair grease, caked sweat, a dozen fungal infestations and a dozen more antifungals fighting them.

  Plugged and socketed into his environment unit, Robert Mackenzie inhabits the green, whispering-fern pergola at the centre of his garden. Birds chirp and whirl through the ferns, glimpses of flashing colour. They are brightness and beauty. Robert Mackenzie is a man old beyond age, beyond the limits of biology. He sits on a throne of pumps and purifiers, lines and monitors, power supplies and nutrient drips, a leather purse of a man at the heart of a pulsing tangle of pipes and lines. Robson cannot bear to look at him.

  Behind Robert Mackenzie, the shadow behind the throne, Jade Sun-Mackenzie.

  ‘Darius.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Darius, that vaper. No.’

  The thing in the chair croaks and convulses in a dry laugh.

  ‘Robson.’

  ‘Sun qiansui.’

  ‘I hate it when you say that, it makes me sound like my great-aunt.’

  Words now from the thing on the throne, so slow and creaking Robson does not at first realise they are addressed to him.

  ‘Nice one, Robbo.’

  ‘Thank you, Vo. Happy birthday, Vo.’

  ‘Nothing happy about it, boy. And you’re a Mackenzie so speak the fucking King’s English.’

  ‘Sorry, Pop.’

  ‘Still, nice trick, falling three kays and walking away. I always knew you were one of us. You getting any off it?’

  ‘Any?’

  ‘Puss. Cock. Neither. Whatever it is you like.’

  ‘I’m only…’

  ‘You’re never too young. Always capitalise. That’s the Mackenzie way.’

  ‘Pop, can I ask you something?’

  ‘It’s my birthday, I’m supposed to be magnanimous. What do you want?’

  ‘The traceurs – the free runners. You won’t go after them?’

  Robert Mackenzie starts in honest surprise.

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘Because they were there. A Mackenzie could have died. Repay three times, that’s the Mackenzie way.’

  ‘It is, Robbo, it is. I have no interest in your sports mates. But if you want it official, I will not touch any of your free-runners. Red Dog, witness that.’

  Robert Mackenzie’s familiar, named after the town in Western Australia where he built his fortune, once wore the skin of a dog but over iterations and decades has changed like its owner to become a pattern of triangles: ears, a geometry that hints at muzzle, a neck; slash eyes: an abstraction of a dog’s head. Red Dog tags Robert Mackenzie’s words and forwards them to Robson’s familiar, Joker.

  ‘Thank you, Pop.’

  ‘Try not to make it sound like sick in your mouth, Robbo. And give your pop a birthday kiss.’

  Robson knows that Robert Mackenzie sees him close his eyes as he brushes his lips against the scaly, paper-crisp cheek.

  ‘Oh yes. Robbo. Bryce wants to see you.’

  Robson’s belly tightens. Muscles clench painfully. His stomach seems to open on to nothing. He looks to Darius for help.

  ‘Darius, give your mother five minutes,’ Jade Sun says. ‘I hardly ever see you these days.’

  I’ll find you, Darius messages through Joker. For a moment Robson considers hiding in Fern Gully’s maze of paths and brakes but Bryce has anticipated that: Joker rezzes a path on Robson’s lens through the short dresses and big-shouldered suits and bigger hair.

  * * *

  Bryce is talking with a woman Robson does not recognise, but from her height, her discomfort in lunar gravity, the cut of her clothing, he guesses she is from Earth. The People’s Republic of China, he decides, from her confidence and aura of customary authority. The woman excuses herself. Bryce bows
to her. For a big man, an immensely big man, he is light on his feet. Dainty.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’

  Bryce Mackenzie has eight adoptees. The oldest is thirty-three-year-old Byron, protégé of Bryce in the finance department. The youngest is Ilia, ten years old, orphaned after a habitat breach at Schwarzchild. He survived eight hours in a refuge coffin; corpses and rock piled on his faceplate. Robson can understand that. The refugee, the needy, the abandoned, the orphan: all swept into Bryce Mackenzie’s family. Tadeo Mackenzie has even married, a woman too, but those same lines of power that Robson feels nerving the sun-bleached skeleton of Crucible are stitched through the skins of every adopted son. A tug and all are drawn together.

  ‘Robson.’

  The full name. The cheek offered, the filial kisses.

  ‘I am very very cross with you, you know. It may take me a long time to forgive you.’

  ‘I’m all right. Just a bit of bruising.’

  Bryce looks him up and down. Robson feels eyes peeling away his clothing.

  ‘Yes, boys are extraordinarily resilient creatures. They can absorb incredible amounts of damage.’

  ‘I missed a hold. I made a mistake.’

  ‘Yes, and physical exercise is so very important, but Robson, really. Hoang was responsible. I put you in his charge. No, I simply can’t take the risk again. You’re safer in Crucible.’

  Robson thinks his heart might have stopped.

  ‘I’ve bought you a present.’ Robson hears excitement in Bryce’s voice. He could vomit with fear and loathing.

  ‘My birthday’s not until Libra,’ Robson says.

  ‘It’s not for your birthday. Robson, this is Michaela.’

  She turns from the conversation in which she has been engaged, a short, tight-muscled white Jo Moonbeam. In her time on the moon she’s learned Mackenzie etiquette: a brief dip of the head.

  ‘She’s your personal trainer, Robson.’

  ‘I don’t want a personal trainer.’

  ‘I do. You need building up. I like muscle on my boys. You’ll start tomorrow.’

  Bryce breaks off, looks up. Robson sees it too, a shift in the angle of the light.

  The light never moves. That’s the power of Crucible: unwavering noon light focused on the overhead smelters.

  The light moved. Is moving.

  ‘Robson, come with me if you want to live.’

  Light-footed Bryce is also fast. He snatches Robson by the arm and almost flies; great soaring lunar leaps as the alarms sound and every lens is over-ridden by the emergency alarm. General evacuation. General evacuation.

  * * *

  Sunlight touches Duncan Mackenzie’s face and he looks up. Every Mackenzie in Fern Gully looks up, faces striped with the sudden shadows of fronds. Lady Sun lifts an eyebrow.

  ‘Duncan?’

  As she speaks, Esperance, Duncan Mackenzie’s familiar, whispers the one word in his ear he has dreaded all his life.

  Ironfall.

  The apocalypse myth of Mackenzie Metals: the day the tons of molten rare earths in the smelters rain down. No one on Crucible has ever believed it possible. Everyone on Crucible knows the word.

  ‘Lady Sun, we have to evacuate…’ Duncan Mackenzie says but the Dowager of Taiyang’s entourage has closed around her, pushing without hesitation through the startled party-goers. They shove Jonathon Kayode out of their path; the Eagle’s guards drop into a tight phalanx, hands reaching for holstered blades.

  ‘Leave that, get us out of here!’ Adrian Mackenzie shouts. The swirl toward the lock to the next car is becoming a stampede. Shouts into screams. ‘Not that way you idiots! The drop pods!’

  ‘Adrian, what’s happening?’ the Eagle of the Moon asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Adrian Mackenzie answers, crouching in the shelter of the ring of bodyguards. Knives drawn, the Eagle’s guards push dazed, lost party-goers out of the way. ‘It’s not a depressurisation.’ Then his eyes go wide as his familiar whispers the same word to him: Ironfall.

  ‘Mr Mackenzie.’ Duncan Mackenzie’s Head of Crucible is a short Tanzanian, Jo-Moonbeam-muscular. ‘We have lost control of the mirrors.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sir, in just over a minute the temperature will hit two thousand Kelvin.’

  The light through the fern fronds is as bright and hot as fresh forged knives. Every bird, every insect in the fern jungle has fallen silent. The air burns Duncan’s nostrils.

  ‘My father…’

  ‘Sir, I’m tasked with your protection.’

  ‘Where is my father? Where is my father?’

  * * *

  Bryce Mackenzie’s grip is steel. Beneath his mass lies muscle. He flings aside party boys and party girls – make-up smeared, heels broken – as he drags Robson towards the green flashing circles of lights that mark the drop pods.

  ‘What is it, what’s happening?’ Robson asks. Around him voices ask the same question, clamouring louder as uncertainty becomes fear becomes panic.

  ‘Ironfall, boy.’

  ‘But it can’t. I mean…’

  The light grows stronger, the shadows shorter.

  ‘Of course it can’t. This isn’t an accident. We’re under attack.’

  Hoang, Joker whispers and his face appears on Robson’s lens.

  ‘Robson, where are you? All you all right?’

  ‘I’m with Bryce,’ Robson shouts. The voices are terrible now. Hands tear at him, trying to rip him away from Bryce and his place in the drop pod. Bryce Mackenzie hauls the boy through the snatching hands and reaching arms. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m out, I’m out. Robson, I will find you. I promise. I will find you.’ Hoang’s face explodes in a puff of pixels. Network is down, Joker announces. A brief, terrible silence fills Fern Gully. Every familiar has vanished. Everyone is disconnected. Everyone is alone, against all others. Then the screams truly begin.

  ‘Bryce!’ Robson yells, hauling back on Bryce’s hand. Like trying to move the moon herself.

  A rearguard of blades defends the lock, two deep, knives drawn.

  ‘Bryce, where’s Darius?’

  The blades part to admit Bryce and Robson. They push back the surging, panicked party-goers. The outlock is open, the ring of lights pulses green.

  ‘Bryce!’ Robson tries to slip his fingers free. Bryce stops, turns, eyes bulging in astonishment.

  ‘Stupid, ungrateful brat.’

  The slap stuns Robson. His jaw pops, stars explode in his vision. He feels blood burst from his nostrils. Every bruise on his body shrieks. Robson reels, then hands seize a fistful of Robson’s jacket and haul him through the lock into the pod.

  ‘Come on come on,’ Bryce shouts. Head ringing from the blow, Robson falls on to the padded bench. Six blades tumble into the pod, then the door scissors shut.

  Pod drop in ten, the AI says. Bryce buckles in beside Robson, crushing him against a bulky Ukrainian blade. Nine.

  ‘Robbo. Robbie. Robson.’

  Robson tries to shake clarity into his vision. Darius, strapped in directly opposite. His eyes are wide, his face is pale with terror. He clutches his vaper in a clenched fist.

  ‘Darius.’

  Two, one. Release.

  The bottom drops out of the world.

  * * *

  The inner lock seals, the outlock opens. Jade Sun seats herself decorously in the drop pod. Robert Mackenzie’s life-support unit manoeuvres in the tight lock. The inner door beats like a festival drum: fists fists fists. Mackenzie engineering is built for the moon: human hands are nothing to it, no matter how many, how desperate. In a few seconds the mirrors will turn their full focus on the Fern Gully, on every one of the thousand cars of Crucible. Twelve thousand mirrors, twelve thousand suns. Mackenzie engineering cannot withstand the light of twelve thousand suns.

  Then the hammering on the door will end.

  Fifty seconds to Ironfall, Jade Sun’s familiar advis
es her. The network is down, but Robert Mackenzie’s Red Dog will have told him the same. ‘Jade, help me, woman. I can’t get this fucking thing to move.’

  Jade Sun-Mackenzie settles back on the padded bench in the sanctuary of the drop pod.

  ‘Jade.’ A command not a request.

  Jade Sun-Mackenzie straps in. In the lock, Robert Mackenzie jerks and lunges with all his meagre, brittle strength, as if he might shift the massive life-support throne with his own sparrow weight.

  ‘Why the fuck isn’t this thing moving?’

  ‘Because I don’t want it to, Robert.’

  * * *

  Duncan Mackenzie’s belly lurches as the locks release and the pod drops. Jonathon Kayode fixes eyes with him across the ring of seating. The Eagle of the Moon is grey with fear. His fingers are locked tightly with his oko’s. Not one of his bodyguards have made it into the pod with him. For a few seconds the pod falls free on its cables, then the brakes cut in; a sudden deceleration that shakes a whimper of fear from the Eagle of the Moon. The pod lands soft and solid on its wheels. Explosive bolts detach the lines, each a small jolt. Engines whine; the pod races away from the dying Crucible. The great train is a line of blinding light curved along the horizon: a nova sunrise.

  ‘Is my father safe?’ Duncan Mackenzie demands. ‘Is he safe?’

  * * *

  The chair will not move. Robert Mackenzie’s wreck of a body shakes as he wills the life-support unit to obey him. His eyes, the muscles of his jaw that hold the final reserves of his dreadful will, the veins on his throat, his wrists, his temples, strain and bulge. The throne defies him.

  ‘We hacked your LSU, Robert,’ Jade Sun says. ‘A long time ago. Sooner or later, we’d have shut you down.’ The drop pod vibrates, soft concussions as other pods fall from their escape locks. ‘The mirrors aren’t our doing, but what kind of a Sun would I be if I didn’t seize an opportunity?’

  Thick drool ropes from the corners of Robert Mackenzie’s mouth as he raises his hands towards the tubes lined into his neck.

  ‘You can’t disconnect, Robert. You’ve been part of it too long. I’m closing the lock now.’