by Ian McDonald
‘Mackenzie business is Mackenzie business, Lady Sun.’
‘Of course, Bryce. But, for the old affection between our families, do not be a stranger at the Palace of Eternal Light.’
‘The Palace of Eternal Light,’ Bryce says. ‘That is where you’ve taken Darius?’
‘It is, and there he will remain,’ Lady Sun says. ‘I’m not having the boy ending up as another one of your little puppies.’ Bryce’s adoptees shuffle uncomfortably. Their society smiles tighten.
‘He is a Mackenzie, Lady Sun.’
‘Darius is a Sun first and a Sun always. However, we might be prepared to offer some recompense?’
Bryce dips his head, the shallowest of bows, and Lady Sun moves on to her final target. Duncan Mackenzie leans on the balcony, his Red Dog cocktail balanced on the rail. Queen of the South’s towers are decked in flags and colours, banners and balloons and mythological creatures: preparations for the great celebration of Zhongqiu. In the chaos of Ironfall and its aftermath, Lady Sun had forgotten. At the Palace of Eternal Light, lasers will compete in the traditional Mooncake Festival ice sculpture competition.
‘I’ve always envied you Kingscourt,’ Lady Sun says. ‘We let your father have the central site. I should have fought harder.’
‘With respect Lady Sun, what my father had, he took.’
She remembers when Robert Mackenzie stood on that stone floor and declared that here he would make his headquarters. The lava chamber had not even been sealed for atmosphere when he moved in constructors and began building the first levels of Kingscourt. Queen of the South had been the logical place to drive roots into the moon – a lava chamber five kilometres long by three high, close by the ice of Shackleton crater – but the Mackenzies had moved quickly, to Hadley where they built their first smelter, then the insane ambition of Crucible, ever-circling beneath the hammer of the sun. Kingscourt remained the womb of the Mackenzies, where children were born and nurtured, dynasties engineered. Over the decades Lady Sun had watched it grow to meet the ceiling and now it stood as the central spine of a forest, a cathedral of pillars.
‘I’m sorry, Duncan.’
Duncan Mackenzie wears his habitual grey, and grey his familiar Esperance, but to Lady Sun’s eye it looks less a hue, more a draining of colour from his soul, a hardening of spirit.
‘Robert Mackenzie.’ Duncan sets down his cocktail. ‘I can’t raise a glass of this piss to my father.’
Through her familiar, Lady Sun summons a bodyguard. The young woman produces two thimble glasses. Lady Sun slips the flask from her purse.
‘That, I think, is worthy.’
They clink dewed glasses and throw back the gin.
‘I see that even in the midst of calamity, it’s business as usual for Mackenzie Metals. Your father would have been proud. Bryce is stabilising the price fluctuations on the terrestrial helium-3 markets. Very astute. It’ll be some time until the rare earth division is producing again. Clever to make money on helium.’
‘Bryce has always been a pro-active Head of Finance,’ Duncan says. Lady Sun refills the glasses.
‘A strong hand on the wheel. Any hand on the wheel. The terrestrials like that. They think we’re a rabble of anarchists, criminals and sociopaths. The markets do so detest uncertainty. And the succession is unsecured. We know far too well how slowly the wheels of Lunar law turn.’ She hands Duncan the second glass of pure gin.
‘I am the heir of Mackenzie Metals.’
‘Of course you are. That’s not the question.’ Lady Sun raises her glass. ‘The question is, who’s in charge, Duncan? You or your brother?’
* * *
Lady Sun circles back into the reception. A greeting here, a compliment there, a snub or a sigh. After a respectable interval she drifts up to Sun Zhiyuan.
‘Satisfactory, nainai?’
‘Of course not. This place stinks of laowai.’
‘The drinks are atrocious.’
‘Wretched.’ Lady Sun leans close to her sunzi. ‘I’ve set the fuel. Now you touch the fire.’
* * *
The Mackenzies of Kingscourt will feast in this salon. Piñatas filled with gifts hang from the ceiling. The bar is set up. Here is the stage for the band. In a few days it will be Zhongqiu and girls in puffball skirts, guys in shoulder pads, asexuals in elegant gowns will drink dance drug make out in this room. Mackenzies will arrive from all across the moon over the coming days, pay their respects and come to the bar. Memories are short. The dead bury the dead.
Now Bryce Mackenzie plots. He has summoned four Mackenzie Metals executives. They have power, experience, authority. They are all male. Twenty levels below, Robert Mackenzie’s memorial performs its convolutions of respect and hypocrisy.
‘You’re here because I know and trust you,’ Bryce Mackenzie asks. ‘I’ve firm bids on our L5 helium-3 reserve.’ Bryce maintains a stash in the gravitational limbo of the L5 libration point, hedging against price movements.
‘How much?’ says Alfonso Pereztrejo, Mackenzie Fusible Head of Finance.
‘All of it.’
‘It will force the price down,’ Alfonso Pereztrejo warns.
‘That’s what I’m hoping,’ Bryce Mackenzie says. ‘I don’t want terrestrial helium-3 extraction profitable. We are in no shape to take on competition. Output is still only at thirty per cent.’
‘Fecunditatis, Crisium and Mare Anguis are still unproductive,’ Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie says. He is Mackenzie Metals’ Head of Operations, a veteran jackaroo, lungs half turned to stone from decades of dust. Rare earths, helium, organics, water; he can take the moon in his hands and wring profit from it. ‘The old Corta Hélio heartland. There’s evidence of sabotage. Those Brazilians hold grudges.’
‘Then I want João de Deus tamed,’ Bryce Mackenzie says. ‘Whatever it takes. I want MH back at full production in two lunes.’
‘MH?’ says Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie. He is Mackenzie Metals’ chief analyst; young and clever and ambitious; a model of the capitalist virtues.
‘My father is dead,’ Bryce Mackenzie says. ‘Mackenzie Metals – the Mackenzie Metals my father built, the one we knew – is dead. The age of the family corporation is over. Metals are done. We are a helium company now.’
‘The succession is settled, then,’ Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie says dryly.
‘If we wait for the lawyers, this company is fucked,’ Bryce says.
‘With respect, if the succession is not settled, we can’t refinance,’ Dembo Amaechi says. He is Head of Corporate Security; the quiet one, the one who has not spoken so far. ‘There is no authority to make contracts.’
‘I have finance,’ Bryce says. ‘Sun Zhiyuan has talked to me already.’
‘Outside money,’ Jaime says.
‘Bryce, your father never…’ Dembo says.
‘Least of all from the Suns,’ Rowan adds.
‘Fuck my father,’ Bryce explodes. He quivers with frustrated passion. ‘MH. Mackenzie Helium. Are you in or out?’
‘Before we start filing contracts,’ Dembo Amaechi says ‘I have information on the mirror malfunction.’
No one misses the weight he lades on the word malfunction.
‘We were hacked,’ Dembo says.
‘Obviously,’ Bryce Mackenzie says.
‘It was a clever piece of code. It integrated itself into our operating system, masked itself from our security, updated when we updated.’
‘And you want to get into bed with the Suns?’ Jaime shouts at Bryce. ‘This has Taiyang written all over it.’
‘There’s the unusual thing,’ Dembo says. ‘It’d been there for a long time. Sitting. Waiting.’
‘How long?’ Bryce Mackenzie asks.
‘Thirty, thirty-five years.’
‘East Procellarum,’ Bryce Mackenzie whispers.
Bryce had been eight when the Cortas struck Crucible. Duncan had grown among the heat and ugliness of Hadley, Bryce the intrigues and politicking of Kingscourt. Robert Mackenzie’s policy was t
o keep the heirs separate. No one catastrophe could decapitate Mackenzie Metals. One day his mother Alyssa said, It’s ready. We’re going to a new home. The train ride from Queen was long, the one from Meridian longer, but when his mother called him to the window of the railcar he saw the burning star on the horizon and knew emotions he had never experienced before. Awe and fear. His family – his father – could hook a star out of the sky and shackle it to the moon. This was power beyond an eight-year-old’s conceiving. He stared up at the rows of mirrors, filled with captured sun. Everything new, print-fresh, smelling of plastics and organics. New rover smell, a whole city of it. I’m going to live there, in the greatest machine in the universe.
Then the Cortas struck, cut the rail before and behind. Bryce watched the sun set on the crucible of eternal light and felt two new emotions: affront and humiliation. The Cortas had defiled a purity and beauty beyond them. They could never attain such power and wonder and so had struck in pettiness and envy. Unlike his brother, Bryce had never known a world free from the shadow of the Cortas. Unlike his brother, Bryce was an ungainly boy, dyspraxic and uncoordinated, poor at the sports his father and uncles adored, but from his earliest days in the growing spire of Kingscourt he took an interest in his family’s business. By the age of seven he understood the principles of rare earth extraction, refining and marketing. Crucible was an extension of himself, a third hand. His pain at its shaming was physical.
Thirty-five years the code had hidden inside Crucible’s AI, growing it, adapting, expanding.
‘Our initial findings are that it was remotely triggered,’ Dembo says.
‘A Corta,’ Bryce Mackenzie says. ‘We should have exterminated them down to the last child.’
‘We’re businessmen, not blades,’ Rowan says. ‘The Cortas are three kids, one of those so-called werewolves and a washed up ex-lawyer. So, the Cortas destroy our home. We go one better: we take their machines, their markets, their city, their people, every thing they owned and held precious and in five years no one will remember the name of Corta. Remember what your father always said, Bryce? “Monopolies are terrible things”.’
‘“Until you have one”,’ Bryce answers.
* * *
Robson wakes screaming. His face, there is something over his face, he can’t raise his hands to push it away from him. Hard, unyielding surfaces on every side of him. And the knock knock knocking, knock knock knocking. He’s dead, in a silo. Awaiting reprocessing. The knock knock knocking is the Zabbaleen, rolling his casket over the joints in a corridor floor. With their knives they’ll cut out everything useful; then the bots will hang him up in the kiln and dry every last drop of water out of him and suck it up with their tube-mouths. Then they will take the leaf and leather that is left and drop it into the grinding mills. And he can’t move can’t speak can’t do anything to stop them.
‘Robson.’
Light. Robson blinks. He knows where he is now, in a sleeping capsule in a dormitory at VTO Lansberg.
‘Robson.’ A face in the light. Hoang. ‘You’re okay, Robson. It’s me. Can you move? You need to move.’
Robson grabs the handles and heaves himself out of the capsule. The dormitory is a rack of capsules, ladders, cables. Hot beds and sleep pods warm with body odour.
‘What time is it?’ Robson is still stupid from clinging nightmares.
‘Oh four,’ Hoang says. ‘It doesn’t matter. Robson, we have to go.’
‘What?’
‘We have to go. Bryce thinks your people destroyed Crucible.’
‘My people what?’
Hoang reaches inside the capsule and pulls a wad of crumpled clothing out of the netting. Robson’s Marco Carlotta suit.
‘Get dressed. The solar furnaces were hacked. It looks like Corta Hélio code.’
Robson pulls on the suit. It smells almost as bad as he does. He ducks into the capsule and slips his half-deck of cards into the pocket closest to his heart.
‘Corta code?
‘No time.’ Hoang touches forefinger to forehead. Familiars off. ‘Come on.’
Lansberg Station jostles with bodies and baggage. Track teams from Meridian and Queen and the great VTO marshalling yard at St Olga exchange places on the trains with Ironfall survivors.
‘I’ve booked you to Meridian but you’re not getting off there,’ Hoang says, steering Robson towards the locks. ‘You get off at Sömmering. It’s a VTO place, like this. Someone will meet you.’
‘Why not Meridian?’
‘Because Bryce will have blades meeting every train.’
Robson stops dead.
‘Bryce can’t kill me. I’m a Mackenzie.’
‘To Bryce, you’re the closest Corta. And he won’t kill you. Not until he’s had his pleasure. You’ll want to die long before then. Come with me.’ Hoang extends a hand. VTO track-queens barge past, sasuits in heavy backpacks, helmets under their arms.
‘Last time I ran away from Bryce…’ Robson says.
He didn’t see his mother die. Don’t look back, she said. Whatever happens, do not look back. He was the good son and so he didn’t see the bot, the blades that severed his mother’s hamstrings, the drills whining through her helmet visor. Launch it, Cameny. Get him out of here. Her last words. Still he didn’t look back. The BALTRAN capsule sealed, he grabbed for straps and then acceleration smeared out every drop of blood in his body. He went dark. Free fall. He fought nausea. Throw up in your helmet in free fall and you are dead. Then deceleration as brutal as the launch. The whole thing again. And again. And again. Grateful for the shock, the pain, the sickness and the discipline to control it because they clothed the truth that she was dead. His mama was dead.
‘Stay close, Robson.’ Hoang pushes into the crowd disembarking from the boarding locks, pushes through. An announcement, barely audible over the roar of the crowd. Something thirty-seven. All stops. All stops.
‘What about you?’ Robson says to Hoang.
‘I’m taking a later train.’
Hoang scoops Robson up in an embrace as great as the sky. Cheek to cheek.
‘You’re crying,’ Robson says.
‘Yes. I have always loved you, Robson Corta.’
Then Hoang shoves Robson into the lock.
‘Who’s meeting me?’ Robson shouts back as the lock cycles him on to the train.
‘Your uncle!’ Hoang yells. ‘The wolf!’
3: ARIES 2103 – GEMINI 2105
The cleaning bot found him collapsed in the corridor of the outermost, Earth-gravity ring, three metres from the elevator door.
‘Five minutes longer and you would have asphyxiated under your own bodyweight,’ Dr Volikova said as she accompanied Lucas Corta’s crash bed up through the half-gravity intermediate ring to the lunar levels.
‘I had to feel it.’
‘And how does it feel?’
Like every muscle weak and melting. Every joint lined with ground glass. The hollow of every bone filled with molten lead. Every breath iron in lungs of stone. Every heartbeat on fire. The elevator had taken him down a well of pain. He could barely lift his arms from the handrails. The doors opened onto the gentle curve of the g-ring. A hill of agony. He had to step out. On the second step he felt his hips swivel. The fifth and his knees buckled, unable to hold him up. Centrifugal gravity pinned him to the wheel, breaking him breath by breath. Gravity was a harsh master. Gravity would never weaken, never stop, never relent. He tried to push himself up from the floor. He could feel the blood pooling in his hands, his face, swelling his cheek where it lay against the floor.
‘We talked about hypotheticals,’ Lucas Corta said as his crash bed docked with the AI. Diagnostic arms unfolded ‘I want to talk practicalities. I am a practical man. You said it would take fourteen months to prepare for Earth conditions. In fourteen months I will take a shuttle down to Earth. My passage is booked. In fourteen months I will be on that ship, doctor, with or without you.’
‘Do not blackmail me, Lucas.’
His
first name. A small victory.
‘I already have, doctor. You are VTO’s pre-eminent expert on micro-gravity medicine. If you say it’s hypothetically possible, then it’s physically possible, Galina Ivanovna.’ Lucas had memorised the doctor’s first name and patronymic the moment she introduced herself as his personal physician, at the foot of this bed.
‘And don’t flatter me,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘You are physiologically different from terrestrial humans in a thousand different ways. Effectively, you’re an alien.’
‘I need three months on Earth. Four would be better. Give me a training scheme and I will follow it religiously. I have to go, Galina Ivanovna. Why should anyone agree to help me take my company back if I’m not prepared to sacrifice?’
‘It will be harder than anything you have ever attempted before.’
Harder than my brothers dead, my city burned, my family shattered? Lucas Corta thought.
‘I can’t promise success,’ Dr Volikova added.
‘I don’t ask that. This is my responsibility. Will you help me, Galina Ivanovna?’
‘I will.’
The bed’s diagnostic arms moved towards Lucas’s neck and arm. He raised slow, leaden hands to fend them off but the manipulators were quick, the pain of injections swift and sharp and clean.
‘What was that?’
‘Another abuse of my profession,’ Dr Volikova said, reading Lucas’s physiology from lens. ‘Something to get you going. You have an appointment.’
Light burned along Lucas’s Corta arteries into his brain. He came up off the bed as if it were electrified. His feet hit the deck. He was in no pain. No pain at all.
‘I will need a suit printed,’ Lucas Corta declared.
‘You’re properly dressed,’ Dr Volikova said.
‘Shorts and a T-shirt,’ Lucas Corta said with leaden disdain.
‘You’ll be better dressed than your host. Valery Vorontsov has an idiosyncratic sense of fashion.’
* * *
You’ll need these, the elevator crew said. Practise. It’s not as easy as it looks.