by Ian McDonald
He strides up the ramp. Behind him the great ziggurat of Hadley is a physical pressure, dark and looming. His first few footfalls kick up dust like an amateur but by the time he reaches the firing range he has fallen back into the old jackaroo lope. He missed this. Five suits greet him. The shooting party has set up on one of the service lanes between the ranks of mirrors.
‘Show me.’
A jackaroo in a shell-suit customised with a space-orc paint job slips a long device from her back. She levels and aims at the target. Duncan Mackenzie zooms in to make out the object far down the lane.
‘If she takes out one of my mirrors…’ he jokes.
‘She won’t,’ Yuri Mackenzie says. The shooter fires. The target explodes. The rifle ejects a heat sink pellet. The shooter turns to Duncan Mackenzie, awaiting instructions.
‘It’s essentially the same gauss rifle we used in the Mare Anguis war, but we’ve increased the acceleration. You can shoot it line of sight or engage the AI assist and fire over the horizon.’
‘I’m not happy with the shell-suit,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.
‘The recoil from the more powerful accelerator is pretty savage,’ Yuri says. ‘The shell-suit has more stability. And it offers some protection, should the worst happen.’
‘You’ve got twenty seconds rather than ten seconds,’ Vassos Palaeologos says. Duncan Mackenzie rounds on him.
‘No Mackenzie ever ran from a fight.’
‘Boss, he has a point,’ Yuri says. ‘This is not our fight. The Asamoahs have never been our allies.’
‘And we thought the Vorontsovs were,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.
‘With respect,’ Yuri presses, ‘we are uniquely vulnerable. VTO is taking out power plants all over the eastern quartersphere. Hadley could not sustain an orbital strike. Even an attack on the mirror array would effectively put us out of business. I can show you simulations.’
‘Print up fifty,’ Duncan Mackenzie orders on the common channel. ‘Contract any Jo Moonbeam ex-military. And I’ll need shell-suits. Not with that shit on them.’ He flicks a gloved finger at the shooter’s fangs, flames and skulls design. ‘Something that will tell everyone who we are and what we stand for.’
He turns and strides back down the corridor between the brilliant mirrors to the dark slot of the outlock. Above him the pinnacle of Hadley blazes with the light of ten thousand suns.
* * *
‘Cake,’ says Lucasinho Corta, ‘is the perfect gift for anyone who has everything.’
Coelhinho is one hour out from Lubbock, reaching down the gentle slope of Messier E’s north-western wall. Luna gave the rover its name. Rovers, she insisted, should have names. To make the kilometres pass, Lucasinho argued that names were silly. Machines were machines. Familiars have names, Luna argued. And the rover remained Coelhinho. So Lucasinho suggested they sing shared songs and after that Lucasinho tried to remember a bedtime story Madrinha Flavia had told him, which Luna knew better. They told riddles, but Luna was better at those as well. Now Lucasinho is delivering a discourse on cake.
‘Stuff is easy. If you want something, if you’ve got the carbon allowance, you print it out. Things aren’t really so special at all. Why give someone something they could print themselves? The only special thing about gifts is the thought you put into them. The real gift is the idea behind the object. To be special, it has to be rare, expensive, or have a lot of you invested in it. Pai once gave Vo Adriana some coffee, because she hadn’t had coffee in fifty years. That was rare and expensive, so that’s two out of three – rare and expensive – but it’s not as good as cake.
‘To make cake you take raw, unprinted materials like bird eggs and fat and wheat flour, and you put your time and heart into them. You plan every cake – is it going to be a sponge or a kilo-cake, is it going to be layers or lots of little cakes, is it a personal cake or an occasion cake? Is it orange or bergamot or chai or even coffee; is it going to be frosted or meringue? Is it going to be in a box or tied up with ribbons, are you going to fly it in by bot, does it have a surprise in the middle, will it light up or sing? Should you be serious or joky, are there allergies or intolerances or cultural or faith issues? Who else will be there when they cut it? Who’s going to get a piece and who isn’t? Is it even for sharing at all, or is it private, passionate cake?
‘Cake is subtle. Just one cupcake in the right place, at the right time, can say, There is no one but you in the whole universe right now, and I give you this moment of sweetness, texture, flavour, sensation. And then there are times when only something huge and stupid will do, like something I’d jump out of in full make-up, with icing butterflies and birds and little bots singing soap-opera songs, and it heals hearts and finishes feuds.
‘Cakes have a language. Lemon drizzle says, This relationship tastes sour to me. Orange is the same, but hopeful. Kilo-cake says that all is well with the world, everything is good and centred, the Four Elementals are in harmony. Vanilla says: careful, boredom; lavender is hoping or regretting. Sometimes both. Candied rose petals say, I think you’re cheating, but rose frosting says, Let’s make a contract here. Blue fruits are for blue days, when you really feel the vacuum over you and you need friends or just a friendly body. Red and pink fruits are sex. Everyone knows that. Cream can never be eaten alone. That’s the rule. Cinnamon is expecting, ginger is memory, cloves are for hurt; real or in the heart. Rosemary is regret, basil is being right. See, I told you so: that’s basil. Mint is a horror. Mint is bad cake. Coffee is the hardest and it says, I would move the Earth in the sky to make you happy.
‘That’s social cake. Then there’s the science of cake. Did you know cake tastes better on the moon? If you went to Earth and had cake you’d be so disappointed. It’d be flat and heavy and solid. It’s to do with pore size and crumb structure, and crumb structure is so much better on the moon. Every cake you make is three kinds of science: chemistry, physics and architecture. The physics is about heat, gas expansion and gravity. Your raising agents push up against gravity. The less gravity, the higher it raises. You might think, so, if lower gravity makes for better crumb structure, wouldn’t the perfect cake be one you made in zero gee? Actually, no. It would expand in all directions and you’d end up with a big ball of fizzing cake mix. When you came to bake it, it would be very difficult to get heat to the centre of the cake. You would end up with a soggy heart.
‘Then there is the chemistry. We have our Four Elementals, and cake has them too. For us it’s air, water, data, carbon. With cake it’s flour, sugar, fat, eggs or some other kind of liquid. Take two-fifty grams flour, two-fifty grams sugar, two-fifty grams butter, two-fifty grams eggs, which is about five. That’s your basic kilo-cake. You cream the sugar and butter. I do it by hand. It makes it personal. The fat encases the air bubbles and creates a foam. Now you beat the eggs in. Eggs have proteins that wrap around your air bubbles and stop them exploding and collapsing when they’re heated. Then you fold in the flour. You fold it in because if you beat flour too hard you’ll stretch the gluten.
‘Gluten is a protein in wheat, and it’s elastic. Without it, everything you bake would be flat. Stretch it too much and you end up with bread. Bread and cake are totally opposite ways wheat can go. I use special soft self-raising flours from wheat with low protein content. That means they have an agent built in that reacts and creates gas that blows up the gluten bubbles. That’s why my cakes are sweet and short and crumbly.
‘Baking is like building a city: it’s all about trapping and holding on to air. The gluten forms pillars and cells that support the weight of the sugar and the fat. It has to stand up, it has to stay up and it has to keep everything inside safe, aired and watered. You have to create a shell that keeps the cake moist and light. The sugar does that; it allows the crust to colour and set at a lower temperature than the inside of the cake. It’s all to do with caramelising. It’s like the gas seal that keeps our air from escaping through the rock.
‘Now, after all that, the baking. Baking is a t
hree-part process: rising, setting and browning. As the temperature of the cake rises, all the air you’ve beaten in expands and stretches the gluten. Then at about sixty Celsius your leavening agents kick in and release CO2 and water vapour from your eggs and whoosh, your cakes rises to its final height. At about eighty Celsius the egg proteins come together and gluten loses its stretch. Finally, the Maillard reaction takes over – that’s the browning I told you about – and seals the surface. It locks the moisture in – if you’ve done it right.
‘Now comes the most difficult bit – deciding if it’s ready to come out of the oven. It’s dependent on many tiny things – humidity, draughts, air-pressure, ambient temperature. This is the art. When you think it’s ready, take it out, let it stand for about ten minutes to come loose from the baking tin, turn it on to a rack and let it cool. Try not to have a piece as soon as it comes out of the oven.
‘Then we get into the economics of cake. Take it out of the oven. We don’t have ovens. Most of us don’t have kitchens: we eat out from the hot-shop. Hot-shop ovens are totally different from the kind you use to bake cakes. You have to get one customer built and there are maybe twenty people on the entire moon know how to build an eye-level cake oven.
‘So: the Four Elementals: flour, sugar, butter, eggs. Flour is the ground-up seeds of the wheat plant. It’s a kind of grass. Down on Earth it’s one of the big carb sources but up here in the moon we don’t use it very much because it doesn’t give very much energy for the space and resources it uses. It takes fifteen hundred litres of water to grow one hundred grams of wheat. We get our carbs from potatoes and yams and maize because they’re much more efficient at turning water into food. So to make flour, we have to grow wheat specially, then harvest the seeds and grind them into fine dust. Grinding flour is even harder than building a cake oven – there are maybe five people in the whole world know how to build a flour mill.
‘Butter is a solid fat derived from milk. I only use butter from cow milk. We have cows, mostly for people who like to eat meat. And if you thought growing wheat drank up water, for one kilo of dairy produce, it takes a hundred times that.
‘Eggs. They’re not so hard; eggs are a big part of our diet. But our eggs are smaller than eggs on Earth because we’ve bred smaller birds, so you have to experiment to get the number right.
‘Sugar is easy – we can grow it or manufacture it, but a cake-baker uses many kinds of sugar. There’s unrefined, pure cane, general sugar, confectioner’s sugar, caster sugar, icing sugar – sometimes you need all of these for just one cake. So, you see, even to make a simple kilo-cake, you’re using things and skills that are rarer and more precious than jewels. When you taste cake, you’re tasting all of our lives.
‘And that’s why, when anyone can print anything; cake is the perfect gift.’
‘Luca,’ Luna says.
‘What is it, anjinho?’
‘Are we there yet?’
‘Not this crater, but the next one,’ Lucasinho says.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
Coelhinho climbs the low wall of Messier A crater.
‘Okay,’ Luna declares. ‘But enough cake.’
Cake, and talk of it, is keeping Lucasinho Corta awake and alert against the cold creeping from the patched gash in the sasuit. He can seal the suit for atmosphere but there is nothing he could do about damaged heating elements. Lucasinho knows from his Moonrun training that human bodies radiate little heat in vacuum, but he feels the persistent chill draw the heat from his blood and heart. Cold creeps up on you, makes you comfortable and numb and disconnected. It had taken all Lucasinho’s strength to keep his teeth from chattering as he talked cake.
Coelhinho tips over the outer rim of Messier A double crater and a big six-seat rover flies up over the inner rim, bounces twice, races across the crater floor and slides to a stop in front of Lucasinho. He hits the brakes and prays Ogun he doesn’t roll the top-heavy rover.
One rover, three crew. Safety bars lift, the crew drops down from their seats. Each carries the logo of Mackenzie Helium on their sasuit, each lifts a device from the equipment rack; a thing Lucasinho knows but has never seen before. A gun.
A jackaroo approaches Lucasinho and Luna, gun cradled, walks all the way around Coelhinho, steps in close to Lucasinho. Faceplate to faceplate.
‘What’s happening?’ Luna says.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Lucasinho says, then jumps in his skin as the Mackenzie jackaroo jams their faceplate against Lucasinho’s.
‘Turn your comms on, you fucking galah.’ The voice is a muffled yell, conducted by physical contact.
Jinji opens the common channel.
‘Sorry, I’m short on power,’ Lucasinho says in Globo.
‘It’s not just power you’re short on,’ says the jackaroo. Now that comms are up each jackaroo’s identifier appears above their shoulder: Malcolm Hutchinson, Charlene Owens-Clarke, Efron Batmanglij.
‘We need power, water and food. I’m very very cold.’
‘Couple of small questions first.’ Malcolm swings his gun to point at Lucasinho. It is a long, hastily-engineered device, all struts and stabilisers, magazines and electromagnetic cartridge racks, quickly printed out and assembled. ‘We live in the most gender-fluid society in human history so it’s possible that Nadia has reassigned, but I’ve never heard of a reassignment that made you ten centimetres taller.’
As soon as comms went up, the suit would have flashed up the identifier of its owner, Lucasinho realises. The other two guns swivel on to him.
‘Lucasinho, I’m scared,’ Luna says on the private link.
‘It’s all right, anjinho. I’ll get us out.’
‘Nadia’s suit, Nadia’s rover. Judging by the amount of tape on that suit, something hit her a killing blow.’
‘If I wanted to take her suit, do you think I would have done that much damage to it?’ Lucasinho says.
‘Are you sure that’s the kind of answer you want to give me?’
Bars hover on the edge of the red on all vital read-outs on Lucasinho’s helmet display.
‘I didn’t kill her, I swear. We were trapped at Lubbock BALTRAN. I tracked her and brought the rover and the suit back and patched them up.’
‘What the fuck were you doing at Lubbock BALTRAN?’
‘We were trying to get out of Twé.’
‘By BALTRAN.’ Lucasinho hates that way that this Malcolm Hutchinson turns Lucasinho’s every answer into the most stupid thing he has ever heard. ‘Mate, the BALTRAN is dead. The whole eastern quartersphere is dead. Gods know what’s going on at Twé. The Vorontsovs have shut down the railroads and they’re blasting every power plant they see into a hole in the regolith. I’ve had half my squad wiped out by fucking nightmares with fucking knives for fucking hands so you’ll understand if I’m a bit twitchy. So, where are you going and who the fuck are you?’
Lucasinho’s belly is painfully empty but he could heave acid into his helmet.
‘Let me talk,’ Luna says.
‘Luna, shut up. Let me handle this.’
‘Don’t tell me to shut up. Let me tell him. Please.’
The Mackenzie jackaroos are edgy. Lucasinho is about to talk himself into a bullet. A child’s voice might talk down the guns.
‘Okay.’
Luna’s familiar opens the common channel.
‘We’re trying to get to João de Deus,’ Luna says. The Mackenzie jackaroos flinch in their sasuits.
‘You’ve got a kid in that thing,’ Malcolm says.
‘There was only one shell-suit at Lubbock,’ Lucasinho says. ‘I tracked down the rover and, yes, I stole the suit.’ He remembers the name. ‘Nadia’s suit. I didn’t kill her.’
‘You’re taking a kid across Fecunditatis in a shell-suit.’
‘I didn’t know what else to do. We had to get out of Lubbock.’
‘You’re a long way from João de Deus,’ says the jackaroo with the Charlene identifier.
‘R
ight now we need to get to Messier,’ Lucasinho says.
‘We’ve just come from Messier,’ says the third jackaroo, Efron. ‘We left three dead back there. The bots will cut you to pieces.’
‘Hey Efron, kid present,’ Charlene says.
‘No point hiding the truth,’ Efron says.
‘We need air and water,’ Lucasinho says. ‘The rover is about out of power and we haven’t eaten since I don’t know when.’
‘I’m really hungry,’ Luna says.
Lucasinho hears Malcolm swear under his breath.
‘There’s an old Corta Hélio bivvie at Secchi. It’s the nearest resupply point now. We’ll get you there.’
‘That’s halfway back to Taruntius,’ Lucasinho says.
‘Okay then, starve or suffocate,’ Malcolm says. ‘Or, in your case, freeze. Efron.’ Efron detaches a small packet from his suitpack and tosses it to Lucasinho. It’s a heat pack: slow-release exothermic gel in a glass container. ‘That’ll keep you warm. There’s only one problem.’ He prods Lucasinho’s p-taped torso with the muzzle of his gun. ‘It has to go inside your suit.’
‘What?’
‘How long can you hold your breath, mate?’
Lucasinho’s head is reeling. Hunger, exhaustion, cold. Now he has to bare his skin to the cold surface of Lady Luna again.
‘I’ve got a Moonrun pin,’ he stammers.
‘Well fuck-a-dee-fuck for you, rich boy. Moonrun is ten, fifteen seconds. We have to get the old tape off, get the pack in and tape you up again. Forty, maybe sixty seconds?’
That could kill him. The cold will kill him. Could, will. Again, Lady Luna makes the decisions for him.
‘I can do that,’ Lucasinho says.
‘Good boy. Hyperventilate for one minute and then dee-pee the helmet. I’ll need to link to your suit AI.’
‘I have tape,’ Luna says as Lucasinho peels himself from her shell-suit.