by Ian McDonald
Ariel almost laughs at the incongruity. Tea. Mashed mint leaves in a glass, steeped in boiling water. Sweeten to taste. The universal lubricant. A known thing, a comfortable thing. A fine thing, a small defiance in a glass. When the stars fall, when worlds collide, when seers and prophets cry: the only thing. A glass of tea.
‘Thank you. I believe I will. One last question, Vidhya.’ Ariel gathers up the scattered papers and squares them neatly into the folder. ‘How long have we got?’
‘Oh my dear. It’s already begun.’
* * *
Tedium is the quiet killer of the glasslands. Kilometre after kilometre, hour after hour, of black glass black glass black glass. Attention softens and melts, the mind turns inward. Entertainments, distractions and games offer a focus for concentration but threaten a different trap: distraction. Taiyang rovers are equipped with multiple sensors and alarms to warn of any of the thousand internal and external accidents that could moon-wreck a crew, but no surface worker puts their entire trust in AIs. No surface worker who wants to keep living.
Wagner Corta has evolved his own way of working the glass. They accord with his two aspects. In his light aspect his brain accepts many simultaneous inputs and he can watch the glass, the horizon, monitor the rover systems, play a game of Run the Jewels and listen to two music streams at once. In his dark aspect, when his focus is monomaniacal and intense, he can stare at the black glass until he enters a state of deep presence and mindfulness. Above the glasslands, unmoving, the high blue Earth wanes and Wagner transforms to his dark aspect. In full light and full dark wolves are superlative laodas; in the transition they are vulnerable, they can make mistakes.
Message from Taiyang Tranquillity Control. Contact has been lost with the Armstrong grader squadron. The big bot moon-dozers are the grunts of the glasslands; ranked ten abreast, a samba-line can grade a hundred-metre wide strip of regolith to skin smoothness. Samba-line: an old Corta Hélio name.
Wagner blinks up the common channel. ‘Change of plan. We’re going off-glass. Armstrong has lost a dozer squad.’ Derisive whistles from Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. The mis-mesh between Taiyang’s public pronouncements on the magnificence of its solar belt project and the working day reality has passed beyond private surface-worker joke to lunar legend. ‘We’ve been tasked to investigate, intercept and reboot.’ Taiyang Tranquillity Control flicks co-ordinates on to Wagner’s lens. Wagner sends them to the rover and locks in a long south-easterly curve across the solar panels. ‘There’s a bonus.’ A small ragged cheer from Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball.
We have images from orbit, TTC says. Wagner surveys the map overlay. A samba-line of moon-dozers is almost visible from Earth: ten sets of tracks, impeccably spaced, heading without deviation into the plains of East Tranquilitatis.
‘Is that unusual?’ Wagner asks.
They have a simple flocking algorithm, so they tend to stay together, Control says. What is unusual is that they’re headed straight for Kwabre.
‘Which is?’
A new AKA agrarium core. There’s an ecosystem engineering team working on it. A pause.
‘The dozers could go right through it.’ Wagner pushes up the speed. It will still be tight. ‘Have you alerted them?’
We’re having trouble raising them. We’ve contacted AKA; they can’t reach them either.
There are a hundred reasons why comms could fail. There are a dozen reasons dozers could turn rogue. The intersection of those reasons scares Wagner Corta.
‘I’ll try them on the local net once I get over the horizon.’
Kwabre lies forty kilometres beyond the southern edge of the solar belt. Ten kays out Wagner runs up the aerial and tries to contact the agrarium. Not even a whisper of a whisper. At five kays Rover Lucky Eight Ball sights the graders. In perfect choreography, the big machines, five times the height, twenty times the length of Rover Lucky Eight Ball, are pushing regolith over the transparent caps of Kwabre’s agriculture tubes.
Wagner has never seen anything like this. None of his crew has. No one on the moon has.
Beyond the initial shock, Kwabre’s silence becomes apparent. The comms tower lies toppled, the mirrors that beam light into the agriculture tubes are empty frames hanging from the booms.
‘Laoda,’ Zehra says. ‘The graders could bring down the comms. But those mirrors were broken one by one.’
‘I’m declaring SUTRA One,’ Wagner says. The highest level of surface threat; human life in imminent danger, render all assistance. ‘Zehra, notify Twé. Stand by for a Code 901 to VTO.’
‘Twé is sending three squads,’ Zehra reports.
Wagner edges the rover forward. Keep the senses open, see with more than sight, feel with more than touch. One of the graders turns to face Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. Wagner stops dead, then steers right. The moon-dozer turns on its tracks and moves to match the rover’s speed and position.
‘What the fuck?’ Zehra says on the private channel to Wagner.
‘Zehra, relay this to Control.’
Again Wagner moves the rover. Again the dozer matches him.
‘I don’t want to push this,’ Wagner says.
‘I don’t want you to,’ Zehra says.
A grader pushes up a great berm of dust which breaks like a wave over the final glass dome, smothering it, burying it. The squad forms up; the machine which has held Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball at bay joins them. The samba-line heads north-north-east.
‘Laoda, Tranquillity tasked us…’ Zehra says.
‘This is a SUTRA One,’ Wagner says. ‘Human life in imminent danger.’ He edges the rover to the edge of the main lock. ‘Neile, Mairead, Ola, with me. Zehra, relay Twé the feed from Neile’s cameras.’
‘Twé?’
‘It’s where the dozers are headed.’
Wagner’s crew step from their seats on to the regolith. Zehra raises the lighting array and floods the area.
‘Neile.’ Wagner crouches by a set of marks in the regolith. ‘Get this.’
‘Machines?’
‘Bot prints.’ The sharp, three-pointed hoof-marks are faint, dainty but now he has identified them, Wagner sees that the surface around Kwabre is covered in them. ‘Look.’ A trail of prints is obliterated by grader tyres.
‘Whatever made these were here before the dozers,’ Neile says.
Wagner the wolf stands up.
‘Zehra, please light up the main lock.’
The lighting array swivels and focuses on the slot of the outlock, buried by a hard brow of sinter. The lock is open. The hard light picks out an object on the ramp, just inside the lock doors.
‘Do you want me to get a camera on it?’ Zehra asks.
‘No,’ Wagner says. ‘We’re going in.’
‘You be fucking careful in there, laoda,’ Zehra says on the private channel. She doesn’t say, doesn’t need to say, that Wagner Corta’s crew has never lost a member.
‘Zehra, I want you ready to go at my command.’
Hard white bounces from the grey walls; lock mechanisms throw long shadows. Wagner beckons his team down slope to the rounded shape that has no place in lock schematics. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball’s shadows fall long before them.
Zehra says, ‘What does the wolf think?’
‘The wolf is afraid.’
Helmet lights bob over the object on the ramp. Vacuum kills meanly, but it did not kill this dead man. The crew moves to allow Zehra’s lights to fully illuminate the corpse. A young man in an agricultural worker’s waterproof boots and vest-of-pockets, opened from breastbone to navel. Glisten of blood and intestines.
‘Fuck,’ Ola whispers.
‘Are you getting this to Twé?’ Wagner asks the rover.
‘What could do that?’ Zehra asks.
‘I’ll find out.’ Neile squats in front of the dead man. ‘There may be enough power left in his lens to read it through the near field.’ Her faceplate touches his brow. Her light reflects from the frozen eyeballs. Wagner finds Neile’s in
timacy with the dead man chilling. Corpse kiss. ‘Going to you now.’
The recovered scrap of memory is short and searing. Movement, running movement, then a turn and something leaps toward the lens, something short and fast and made of blades. Flash of silver, then the fall. Then the dying twitch. In the corner of the dying eye, tiny, pert steel hooves, trifurcated.
‘Jesus Maria,’ Mairead says, kissing the back of her gloved knuckles.
Wagner raises a hand. Silence. Something, on the edge of his wolf senses. Not a sound – there is no sound in vacuum – a tremor. A stirring.
‘Zehra, get me light in the far left corner.’
Shadows shift and dwindle. In the darkness behind the agrarium rover, something that is not rover.
And Wagner’s wolf senses scream.
‘Run,’ he says.
The machine explodes from its cover. Wagner catches an edge-of-vision glance of limbs, blades, sensor booms. Pert steel hooves. Gleam of floodlight on metal. No more. He’s running. Mairead is beside him, Ola a stride ahead of him, Neile a stride behind him.
‘Zehra!’ Wagner yells. She’s already in motion. The rover bounces over the edge of the outlock, lands halfway down the ramp. Zehra donuts on the dusty sinter. Wagner leaps for the crash bars as the rover slides towards him and swings himself into the seat.
‘Neile?’ Mairead shouts. On Wagner’s HUD, Neile’s familiar fades from red through pink to white. Wagner glances back to see Neile’s body slide off three precision titanium blades. She drops on her front. The blades have run her through, spine to breastbone, punching clean through the tight weave of her sasuit. Blood sprays, evaporates, freezes. That second of hesitation, that one pace slow of Wagner killed her. Wagner’s fast senses read the thing behind the body. It is a bot made only for killing. Legs not wheels. Those sharp hooves double as weapons but also unfold into flat spades for dust running. Fast and sure on the moon’s many terrains. Four arms, three bladed, one grappling. Blades are swifter and more certain than projectiles. Head a clutch of sensors. Heavy duty batteries. The bot steps over Neile’s body, locks sensors with Wagner’s faceplate. Sees him. Knows him. Leaps in pursuit.
Behind it, the inlock opens.
Rover Lucky Eight Ball hits the top of the ramp at full acceleration and flies: ten, fifteen, twenty metres. Two bots leap from the open inlock. The third leaps with them. Gods they are fast. The rover lands hard in a spray of dust, almost toppling ass over nose but Zehra saves it. Zehra drives better than AI. He flicks up a pane to watch the killers through the rear cameras. They hold themselves low, poised, seeking.
‘I’m calling in a rescue,’ Wagner says to Zehra on the private channel.
‘It’s quicker to get to Twé,’ Zehra says.
‘I don’t want those things anywhere near Twé,’ Wagner says. ‘Rendezvous here.’ He swipes GPSS code to Zehra and makes the distress call twice, once to VTO’s emergency network, again to Taiyang Tranquillity. Wagner flicks up the status HUD. He must assume that the things hunting him have deeper power reserves than the rover. Batteries at forty per cent. The rover is lighter without Neile. He weighs a life against battery reserves, dispassionately, with a wolf’s calculation. He sees again Neile’s body sliding slowly from the killing blades. He’s seen people die. He’s seen people die accidentally, stupidly, hideously, cheaply, but he’s only ever seen one other person die by act of will. That was in the polished wood and old-blood warmth of the Court of Clavius, not the outlock ramp of a dead agrarium. The killing blade had been Hadley Mackenzie’s, the hand that ripped it out through its owner’s throat Carlinhos’s. Brother, what do I do here?
Batteries at thirty-five per cent. The hunters will catch them ten kilometres from the rendezvous point. Why hasn’t VTO responded? Wagner asks Sombra for a spread of extraction zones that all return the same answer: he can’t outrun them. He must fight them.
We’re a Glass Crew. We patch solar panels. We have sinterers, panel lifters, circuit webbing and repair bots. Versus three killing machines.
Use their weapons against them.
‘Zehra, give me control.’ Wagner takes the drive HUD. ‘Hold on.’
Zehra is the better driver but what must be done now, only the wolf can do. Wagner grits his teeth as he drifts the rover. Billion-year-old dust arcs out from the line of the skid. For a moment he thinks they might roll but Taiyang builds its rovers sure and stable. Wagner guns the motors and steers straight at the hunters. They scatter on sharp, fast legs. Not fast enough. Wagner catches one a glancing blow that sends it bowling in a flail of legs and blades across a hundred metres. His front left wheel catches a hoof and crushes it. The bot lurches. Wagner brakes, throws the rover into reverse. His ribs slam against the seat harness. Impact shakes the rover; the bot flips clear over the top in a rain of debris. Teeth gritted, Wagner donuts the rover again and bears down at full speed on the other damaged bot. It climbs unsteadily to its hooves, focuses sensors, levels blades. Too slow. Too too slow. The blunt prow smashes it down under the drive wheels. The rover jolts, Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball shout and hoot.
‘That’s two,’ Zehra says.
Then Jeff’s familiar goes white.
‘Zehra, take it!’ He slings the drive HUD to Zehra. She snatches it up without a beat. Ola screams on the common channel. Wagner slaps the emergency release, stands up on his seat. Only his wolf senses save him from the blade that swings for the top of his helmet.
‘It’s on top of the rover!’
‘Do you want me to stop, laoda?’
Ola is screaming but his familiar is solid red. Red is life.
‘We stop we die.’
The rover jolts and bounces. Wagner hisses in concentration as he balances on the seat. His free hand unclasps the shovel from the utility rack beside him. He thrusts the shovel up. The blade impacts with a clang he feels through his wrist bones. In the split second between attack and recovery he hauls himself into a kneel on the top of the rover.
The killing bot clings there with him, legs spread wide, hoof-claws hooked into the rails and trusses. One blade is driven to the hilt down through Jeff’s helmet and skull. One stabs down, down, down again at Ola, dodging in the cage of his crash bars. The last blade is for Wagner. The bot’s blade is trapped in Jeff’s skull. Therefore the bot too is trapped. A spray of black vacuum frozen blood on the sensor array. This is the machine that killed Neile. All this Wagner senses in the split second it takes to parry the one free blade with his shovel and, while the bot recovers, stab forward with the sharp edge to sever the cabling inside one of the hooves. The claws spasm and fly free. The bot locks all its sensors on him. It attacks in a blur of dancing blades, too fast for any human to parry. Wolf eyes see the decision in the machine lenses an instant before bot brain acts: Wagner throws himself flat and scrabbles out of range of the blade.
‘Zehra, donut!’
Wagner grips with all his strength. And even that may not be enough as Zehra throws the rover into a vicious power slide. Spars and construction beams rattle hard under Wagner’s ribs: he’s slipping, slipping. Over. Wagner hangs from the side of the rover. He risks taking a hand off, reaches, seizes the shovel as it slides over the edge. Unbalanced, the bot topples. The wedged blade pulls free from Jeff’s helmet. Wagner swings with the shovel, connects, hammers again and again. The bot falls, swords flailing.
‘Zehra!’
The sudden acceleration almost wrenches Wagner’s shoulder from its socket. He hangs from the crash bars, turning painfully to see the fallen bot rise, tuck the destroyed foot under its belly and launch itself after the rover.
‘Die, just fucking die!’ Wagner screams.
A rover explodes over a low crater rim, six wheels in the air. It lands, bounces. The damaged bot spins. Too slow. The rover takes it head on. Legs, arms, sensory pods explode. The rover drifts, throwing blinding dust over Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. When it clears the final bot is a tangle of metal on the regolith and the rover runs alongside Lucky Eight Ball. Its
spars and panels are decorated with the intricate geometric designs of AKA. The AKA driver signals to stop. Wagner drops to the surface, then to his knees. He can’t stand, can’t speak. Can’t stop shaking. A hand grips his shoulder.
‘Lobinho.’ Only Zehra is allowed to use his old Corta Hélio nickname. ‘Steady, Little Wolf. Steady.’
‘Report?’ Wagner forces the word from chattering teeth. He is death cold.
‘We’re mobile.’
‘I mean…’
‘Jeff is dead.’
‘And Neile.’
‘And Neile.’
‘I never lost anyone,’ Wagner says. ‘Anyone. Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball never loses anyone.’
The AKA squad boss squats in front of him.
‘You okay?’
Sombra tags her as Adjoa Yaa Boakye. Wagner nods.
‘What were those things?’ Adjoa asks.
‘Can’t you see he’s in shock?’ Zehra snaps.
‘I just want to be sure there aren’t more of them out there,’ Adjoa says. Her crew of blackstar surface workers drop from their seats to the regolith.
Wagner shakes his head.
‘He needs help,’ Zehra insists. Only her hands on his shoulder hold Wagner upright. ‘Where the fuck is our ship?’
‘VTO is not responding,’ Adjoa says.
‘That’s not possible,’ Zehra says.
Wagner is cold. Terribly terribly cold. Helmets, suits, bodies swim in and out of a blackness swirling red blood motes.
‘Medic!’ Adjoa shouts. One of her blackstars kneels beside Wagner, pulls a hypo from a calf pouch, strips it out, preps it.
‘Hold him.’ Zehra and Adjoa grab Wagner’s shoulders. The medic punches the needle through sasuit, skin, flesh. Wagner spasms as if a power line has been run into his aorta, then a wave of well-being washes up him and his heart, his breathing, his surging blood settle into their familiar rhythms. ‘That should stabilise him,’ the medic says. Wagner feels Zehra and Adjoa lift him and bar him into his seat.
‘Kwabre is dead,’ Wagner whispers. ‘The dozers are on their way.’
‘What happened?’ Adjoa asks.
‘I still can’t raise VTO,’ Zehra says. ‘What the fuck is going on?’