Luna--Wolf Moon--A Novel

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Bryce is relocating to João de Deus,’ Yuri Mackenzie says. ‘Tranquillity Ops Managers have received orders to surrender the control codes.’

  ‘That fucker has no right,’ Denny Mackenzie says.

  ‘My brother is mounting a coup,’ Duncan says. ‘He has to go for helium. We have the only rare earth smelter on Nearside. If we move fast, we can kill this before it breathes. Who have we got on the ground in Tranquillity and East Fecundity?’

  Denny Mackenzie lists teams, dusters, resources. Duncan is distracted by his new gold teeth. He lost two in the flight from Crucible. Duncan hopes the poor bastard who lost his place to Denny died on the bend of his blade, quick and clean.

  ‘How many can we trust?’ Duncan asks.

  The list is shorter by half.

  ‘Take twenty solid jackaroos and get me those extractors. Deny them to Bryce. Whatever means you think appropriate.’

  ‘Use their weapons against them,’ Denny says. Duncan remembers that maxim. Hadley Mackenzie, his half brother, had been teaching Robson Corta how to fight among the shafts of blazing light in Crucible’s Hall of Knives. In three moves he disarmed the kid, pinned him and brought the tip of Robson’s own knife within a hair of the boy’s throat. An eleven-year-old boy. Lady Luna is fickle. She loved the Cortas; the lucky, flashy Cortas. She has never been kind to the Mackenzies. Hadley Mackenzie died on the edge of Carlinhos Corta’s knife. Carlinhos died on Denny’s blade, when João de Deus fell. Lady Luna tests who she loves.

  ‘And send teams to Crisium,’ Duncan says. ‘Yuri, take charge of that. I’m not losing Mare Anguis twice.’

  Denny is already in the elevator. He will be putting out contracts, assembling squads and materiel to strike hard, strike fast. Bryce’s flaw is that he has never understood the physical. Codes, orders, commands, analyses is his way. Dusters in the field, boots on the regolith win every time. Duncan will plunge his knife into that flaw and twist it until the blood pours free.

  ‘Adrian.’

  ‘Dad.’

  The Eagle of the Moon has flown back to his eyrie in Meridian but Adrian came to Hadley. Family is what holds when the iron falls.

  ‘I need you to give us the LDC.’

  Adrian Mackenzie hesitates. Duncan reads a dozen emotions in the muscles around his mouth.

  ‘The Eagle’s influence over the Lunar Development Corporation is not as sure as it used to be. Eagle and LDC differ on certain issues.’

  A turn-tongued, diplomat’s-oko answer.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Duncan says but the voice of Vassos Palaeologos, once steward of Crucible, now steward of Hadley, cuts in.

  ‘Mr Mackenzie.’

  The perfect retainer, Vassos would only interrupt with the most important news.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Vassos is a small man, balding, sallow skinned. His familiar is the concentric blue rings of the matiasma, the eye that banishes evil.

  ‘A report from Meridian Station. Wang John-Jian is dead.’

  John-Jian was the best production engineer on the moon. Duncan had secured his loyalty at the memorial at Kingscourt. This is a deep wound.

  ‘How? What happened?’

  ‘On the platform. A targeted insect.’

  Cyborg drone-insects, armed with fast-killing toxins, are the signature weapons of the Asamoahs but no one in Hadley’s small control room believes for an instant that AKA sanctioned this assassination. It was chosen because it was small, silent, precise, cruel and involves no expensive collateral that might demand damages. A very Bryce Mackenzie murder.

  Strike hard, strike fast. Strike fast. Bryce has gone in one smooth power curve from rivalry to war. Esperance calls Denny’s familiar. Denny is in motion, accelerating out from under Hadley’s half-kilometre tall black pyramid down the Aitken-Peary polar line.

  ‘I’ve got five full squads. Staunch jackaroos.’

  ‘Good work. Denny. I want this over fast. Gut the fucker.’ A rumble of approvals and murmured yeahs from around the control room. Duncan holds out a hand.

  ‘Does anyone here deny that I am Chief Executive of Mackenzie Metals?’ Duncan Mackenzie asks.

  Yuri is the first to take the offered hand. Corbyn, Vassos. Adrian is last.

  ‘I’m staunch, Dad.’ But he won’t look at his father, won’t hold eye contact when Duncan seeks eye contact. Are you with me, son? You aren’t with Bryce, but who are you with? You shake my hand, but do you pledge allegiance? Bryce may have the company, Duncan has the family.

  One last piece of theatre. Duncan Mackenzie likes to search out the theatre of the everyday, turning presentations into productions, finding the melodrama in meetings. His signature head-to-toe grey, the shimmering grey sphere of Esperance, are all calculated effects. A silent command and behind him the long-shuttered windows of Hadley Control slide open. The heavily glassed slots in the thick sloping sinter walls of Hadley yield enormous views over the Marsh of Decay and the thousands of dark objects waiting there.

  The mirrors wake.

  Hadley rises from an array of five thousand mirrors. At Duncan Mackenzie’s command, long-stilled mechanisms jar and creak, grind dust in their motors and actuators. Juddering, the mirrors turn their faces to catch the sun. The mirror field blazes so bright the men in Control throw their hands up in front of their eyes before the photo-chromic glass reacts and brings the shafts of blazing, dusty light down to bearable levels. The power of the Mackenzies has always been the sun. Hadley’s mirror array had been the envy of two worlds, the summit of solar-smelting technology, but it had not been enough for Robert Mackenzie. For the fourteen days of the lunar night, the mirrors were dark, the smelter cold. He had conceived a smelter that would never go dark, that would always have the high noon sun pouring into its mirrors. He built Crucible. The Suns boast of their spire-palace, the Pavilion of Eternal Light. A cheap boast, a fortune of location and selenography. The Mackenzies engineered their endless noonday. They shaped the moon itself to create it.

  The mirrors lock into position; five thousand beams focused on the smelters at the apex of the dark pyramid. Even in the light of a full moon, it will be visible from Earth; a sudden star kindling in the grey of Palus Putridinis.

  Duncan Mackenzie closes his eyes but the light still sears his eyelids red. He shuts them the better to feel. Subtle, but unmistakable once he has isolated it from the background hum of the awakening city. An old body-memory; the all-pervading tremor of Hadley under production; the vibration of liquid metals pouring from the smelters down the refractory gullet at the centre of the pyramid.

  He turns to his board.

  ‘Mackenzie Metals is back in business.’

  * * *

  Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball gets the distress call five hundred kilometres out from Meridian. The glassers have been out for a lune in the highlands east of Tranquillity. The crew has been working the northern edge of the solar array, checking the performance of the sinterers, maintaining and repairing, reporting and analysing. Glass work is well paid and boring boring boring. For the past three days the crew has been repairing damage from a micrometeorite shower over the Dionysus region. A thousand pinholes; ten thousand cracks, a whole sector of the solar belt gone dark. Painstaking, detailed work that can’t be hurried, that can’t be done any faster or more efficiently. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball is impatient to get back to Meridian. None more than Wagner Corta, laoda of Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. The Earth grows round. Changes sweep over him. His crew has no problem working with a wolf – both the boundless energy and ability to think three different thoughts at the same time of his light aspect and the intense focus and concentration of his dark aspect are valuable talents on the surface. The times between, when the Earth waxes and wanes, are the difficult ones, when he becomes restless, moody, unpredictable, irritable and unapproachable.

  Crew Lucky Eight Ball. Wagner gives the same speech at the start of each tour of duty. Some veterans have heard it seven times. That’s our name. The new workers lo
ok at each other. Lady Luna is a jealous queen. To call a thing lucky, fortunate, favoured, blessed is to invite her wrath. And we are. The old hands stand with arms folded. They know it’s true. Do you know why we’re lucky? Because we are boring. Because we are diligent and attentive. Because we focus and concentrate. Because we are not lucky. We are smart. Because on the surface you have a thousand questions, but only one question matters. Do I die today? And my answer to that is no.

  No one has ever died on the Little Wolf’s squad.

  Out on the glass, forty kilometres south of Dionysus, a spinning red asterisk flashes up in Wagner Corta’s lens: SUTRA 2, the penultimate of the five levels of surface threat. The ultimate level is white. White is the colour of death on the moon. Something has gone very bad out in the sinterlands. Wagner checks atmosphere, water and battery levels, flicks command of the rover to his junshi Zehra Aslan while he acknowledges the emergency and briefs Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. His light-aspect familiar, Dr Luz, flashes up the rescue contract. Mackenzie Metals. Memories flock to him – huddling afraid and alone at Hypatia Station while his family fell, slipping home to the pack feeling a knife in every shadow, hiding among the bodies of the wolves, hating himself for surviving.

  Wagner signs the contract, flashes it to the Palace of Eternal Light for executive authority. There is memory and there is survival. He works for the Suns now. They tried to kill him, when he lifted the corner of their intrigue to set Mackenzies and Cortas at each other. The Magdalena wolves of Queen of the South saved him that time. When the House of Corta fell, the Meridian pack sheltered him, paid his Four Elementals, until he realised that with Corta Hélio destroyed the Suns no longer held any animosity towards him. Wagner applied for a glass crew and got a contract the next day. He has worked Taiyang for over a year. He is the good wolf.

  They find the first body twenty kilometres west of Schmidt crater. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball flick up their safety bars and drop to the regolith. The rover’s medical AI searches for vital signs but, to the glassers, it’s clear there is no life inside the suit. The tight weave has been opened throat to balls.

  ‘Clean edges,’ Zehra Aslan says.

  Wagner crouches to study the slash. Lady Luna knows a thousand ways to kill, none of them clean. A blade did this. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball leaves a tag for a Zabbaleen recycle team: carbon is precious, even abandoned in the boulder fields of West Tranquillity. Emergency beacons lead the rover along a string of corpses. By the tenth the crew no longer leave the rover. Wagner and Zehra photograph, report tag, move on. Stabbed, slashed, amputations. Beheadings. Death by a blade’s edge.

  Zehra crouches to closer examine a tangle of four bodies.

  ‘I don’t recognise this suit design.’

  ‘Mackenzie Helium,’ Wagner says. He stands up, surveys the close horizon. ‘Tracks.’

  ‘Three rovers, and something much bigger.’

  ‘A helium extractor.’

  In the shadow of the western wall of Schmidt crater, Wagner finds a rover. Its spine is broken, its axles snapped. Wheels lie at crazy angles, aerials and comms dishes bent and crushed. Every seat bar is up. The crew tried to escape their stricken vehicle. They didn’t make it. Sasuited bodies litter the crater floor. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball investigates the corpses. Wagner plugs Dr Luz into the dead rover’s AI and reads its logs, voice and data records. He needs to patch together the events that ended here, in the cold shadow of Schmidt.

  Zehra Aslan stands up and waves.

  ‘We’ve got a live one here!’

  Barely. A sole survivor in a ring of bodies. A golden sasuit. Wagner has heard of this suit. Half of Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball has heard of this suit. Wagner’s medical AI identifies a score of traumas, a dozen violations. Crush and heavy impact injuries, multiple lesions and abrasions, a deep puncture wound between the seventh and eight ribs. The golden suit has healed over the puncture; the tension of the weave will hold the wound shut.

  What do you think? Zehra asks on Wagner’s private channel. Call in a moonship?

  We’re forty minutes from Hypatia, Wagner says. We’d be there before any moonship. They’ve got full medical facilities.

  The survivor’s sasuit is low on power and O2. How long has he been out here, waiting? Hoping? Wagner has often thought, out in the tedium of the pristine black glass, of what he would do if Lady Luna deserted him and left him wounded on the surface, air running down, power too low even to call for help. The long look at death, advancing with every breath one step across the dead regolith. Nothing surer, nothing more true. Open the helmet. Look Lady Luna in the face. Take the dark kiss. Would he have the courage to do that?

  Wagner runs a jack into the golden suit.

  ‘We’re going to move you now.’

  The man is unconscious, verging on comatose but Wagner needs to speak.

  ‘This may hurt.’

  Wagner’s crew lift the survivor and strap him to the carry rack. Zehra runs lines from the air and water processors into the suit.

  ‘His core temperature is way too low,’ she says, scanning readouts on her helmet. She patches a connector to the environment pack. ‘I’m going to cycle his suit with warm water. I’m shit scared I’m going to drown him in his own suit but if I don’t the hypothermia will kill him.’

  ‘Do it. Willard, get Hypatia. We have a casualty incoming.’

  The man stirs. A groan in Wagner’s helmet speakers. Wagner presses hands to his chest.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  Wagner winces at the sudden cry of pain in his earphones.

  ‘Fuck…’ An Australian accent. ‘Fuck,’ he says again, in deep bliss as the heat bathes him.

  ‘We’re taking you to Hypatia,’ Wagner says.

  ‘My crew…’

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  ‘They jumped us. They had it all planned. Fucking Bryce knew we were coming. We ran straight on to his blades.’

  ‘I said don’t talk.’

  ‘My name’s Denny Mackenzie,’ the survivor says.

  ‘I know,’ Wagner says. Wagner knows the legend of the man in the golden suit. In the dark time, when the light of the Earth is dim, Wagner has tried to imagine Carlinhos’s final vision: the face of Denny Mackenzie holding his head up by the hair, baring his throat, lifting the knife to show Carlinhos the thing that will kill him. He’s always been as faceless as he is now, behind the reflective faceplate. And I am as faceless to you. ‘You killed my brother.’

  Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball’s chat on the common channel is silenced as if with a knife. Wagner feels every faceplate turned to him.

  ‘Who are you?’ Stabbed and pierced, hypothermia, exhausted and reeling from industrial painkillers, at the mercy of the man with every reason on the moon to kill him. Still defiant. The Mackenzie Way.

  ‘My name is Wagner Corta.’

  ‘Let me see you,’ Denny Mackenzie says.

  Wagner retracts his sun visor. Denny Mackenzie clears his faceplate.

  ‘You killed my brother with his own knife. You drove him to his knees and tore his throat open. You watched him bleed out, then you stripped him and ran a cable through his Achilles’ tendons and hung him from the West 7 crosswalk.’

  Denny Mackenzie does not flinch, does not look away.

  ‘So what are you going to do, Wagner Corta?’

  ‘We’re not like you people, Denny Mackenzie.’ Wagner silently gives the order for Glass Crew Lucky Eight-Ball to strap in and move out. Seat bars fold down, sasuits link to the rover’s life support.

  ‘My people owe you,’ Denny Mackenzie croaks as the safety bars descend around Wagner Corta.

  ‘I want nothing from your family,’ Wagner Corta says. He flicks control of the rover to Zehra.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, Wagner Corta.’ Denny Mackenzie groans as the rover jolts over battle debris. ‘The Mackenzies will repay three times.’

  * * *

  ‘Marina!’

  No answer.

  ‘Marina!’
>
  No answer. Ariel Corta swears under her breath and reaches for the grab-rope. She pulls herself up from the empty cool box.

  ‘We’re out of gin!’

  Ariel grabs the ceiling net and swings from the kitchen alcove past her shameful hammock to the consulting cubby. Three short swings and a much-practised drop at the end into what she calls her Justice Seat. The apartment is too small for two women and a wheelchair. It’s been a lune since she last deprinted the wheelchair and left the occupancy at just two women. She needed the carbon allowance. She’s since drunk ninety per cent of it.

  ‘Let’s see me, Beijaflor.’

  Her familiar hooks into the cubby camera. Ariel studies her working face. Cheekbones highlighted with gradated powder. Orange eyeliner, black mascara. Her eyes widen, Beijaflor zooms in. This new crease, where did that come from? She hisses in exasperation. Beijaflor can edit it out for clients. Your familiar is your true face. She pouts her lips. Fuchsia, deep Cupid’s Bow. If Ariel can afford one thing on trend it’s cosmetics. And her top: Norma Kamali, bat wing and funnel-neck, in carmine. Still in the game.

  The upper half of Ariel Corta is professional. The bottom, out of camera shot, is slouch. From the waist down Ariel is a disgrace, swinging around the place in whatever pair of basic-print leggings Marina isn’t wearing. She always steals, never asks to borrow. That would be surrender. She could manage her caseload as easily from her hammock as the Justice Seat but that too would be surrender.

  ‘Beijaflor, get Marina to get some gin.’ There’s a good little printer down on Level 87. She takes folding, material cash.

  You have only ten bitsies of data.

  Ariel swears. She’ll need every bit of bandwidth for her clients. Now that she can’t have it, breakfast gin is the roof and the ground, the Earth and the sun, the background hum of the universe. She takes a drag on her long titanium vaper. It supplies nothing but hauteur and oral satisfaction. Ariel checks her hair. It’s fashionably big.

  ‘Let’s have the first one.’

  The Fuentes Nikah. Beijaflor calls Aston Fuentes up on Ariel’s lens and she quickly runs down the twenty-seven clauses in the contract with the potential to turn around and rip her client’s heart out of his chest. His mouth opens a little more with every legal point.