by Ian McDonald
‘Good girl. Charlene, Efron.’
Jinji switches the suit supply over to pure O2. It hits Lucasinho like an axe. He wavers, hands move to hold him up. He breathes deep, deeper, supercharging brain and blood with oxygen. He’s done the Moonrun. He’s run fifteen metres across the surface in only his skin. This is easy. Easy. But on the Moonrun he was brought down to micro-pressure over an hour. This will be instantaneous. The human skin is a robust pressure containment surface … Sasuit lesson one. All you need is something tight to maintain that pressure, hold water and retain warmth.
De-pressuring the suit in five …
Lucasinho empties his lungs. In vacuum you breathe out to stop your lungs rupturing.
… Two, one …
‘Stand by,’ Malcolm commands.
Evacuating. Air shrieks to silence as Jinji empties the suit. Lucasinho screams silently at the sudden pain stabbing through each ear. Charlene moves in with her blade, carefully cutting the tape and peeling it back.
‘Keep still kid, hold him still.’
‘Clear.’
Then burning heat as Malcolm tucks the pack inside the tight weave. Lucasinho has to breathe. He has to breathe. His brain is winking out cell by cell. He thrashes. A woman’s voice, faint and high as a saint, shouts, Hold him still. Lucasinho opens his mouth. Nothing there. Expands his lungs. Nothing there. This is how you die in vacuum, everything closing down, narrowing in, throbbing. The tiny, distant voices, the iron hands holding him, everything burning.
Tiny distant voices …
And he’s back. Lucasinho lunges forward. Safety bars hold him in. He’s safe in a seat on the Mackenzie rover. Air. Air is wonderful. Air is magic. He takes ten deep breaths, in fast, out slow; in slow, out fast. Mouth, nose; nose, mouth. Nose. Mouth. Glorious breathing. Warm. Heat. He feels pain beneath his bottom left rib: the heat pack, tightly compressed by the sasuit and the p-tape. He’ll bruise there, but Lucasinho appreciates the ache. It means he doesn’t have frostbite.
‘Luna?’ he croaks.
‘You’re back then,’ Malcolm says on the common channel.
‘Over here,’ Luna says. ‘Are you all right?’
‘If he’s talking, he’s all right,’ Malcolm says. Lucasinho looks around him, at the cables and tubes plugging him into the rover. He thinks water and is rewarded with cold, pure refreshment from the nipple. Lucasinho’s gasp of pleasure over the common channel makes the jackaroos laugh. ‘It’s still recycled piss, but at least it’s someone else’s piss,’ Malcolm says. ‘There’s even some nutrient shit. I reckon you’re starving enough to eat it.’ Efron tethers Lucasinho’s appropriated single-seater behind the big rover and swings up into his seat.
‘So if you haven’t any objections, Lucasinho Corta,’ Malcolm says, ‘we’re going to Secchi.’
* * *
There is something in front of his face. Lucasinho wakes with a cry of claustrophobic panic. He’s in the suit, the same fucking suit. Sleep-drool has dried on his cheek to a crystalline crust. He can smell his own face inside the helmet.
‘You’re awake.’ Malcolm’s voice. ‘Good. We have a problem.’
Jinji resolves a map: the convoy and the Corta Hélio cache are obvious, as is the line of contacts between rovers and safety.
‘Those are…’
‘I know what they are, kid.’
‘Can you circle round?’
‘I can, but the moment they catch sight of us, they’ll run us down. We’re big and we’re heavy and I’ve seen those fuckers move.’
‘What do we do?’
‘We’re going to drop you and the girl. You take the other rover – there’s enough charge to make it – and run straight for the bivvie. We’ll try and draw the bots off.’
‘But you said you couldn’t outrun them.’
‘Where’s your fucking faith, kid? Without you, we might lose them. We might even take a few of them. These guns are pretty good at taking out the fuckers. What I know for certain is that if we stick together, we die together.’
Suitpacks are loaded with water and air, power cells charged. Luna positions herself in the saddle, Lucasinho carefully tapes her to the rover; then himself to her. Lucasinho has explained their danger simply and honestly and she knows what to do without question or instruction. The single-seater rover powers up at Jinji’s touch. Malcolm touches forefinger to helmet: a salute before battle. He guns the big rover, circles and in moments he is over the horizon. Lucasinho waits for his dust plume to settle before opening up the single-seater.
No comms, Malcolm said. See you at Secchi; or in the next one.
You know who we are, Lucasinho said on a private channel. Why are you helping us?
Whatever comes out of this, it’ll never be the same old moon again, Malcolm said.
‘Luna,’ Lucasinho says. They are plugged together again, for radio quiet and intimacy.
‘What?’
‘Have you had some water?’
‘I’ve had my water.’
‘We’ll be there soon.’
* * *
Analiese Mackenzie waits at the inlock. The doors take forever to open, but here they come; dust-darkened despite the airblades, helmets and suitpacks hooked in their hands. Their boots are stone, their suits lead. Cold exhaustion in every sinew. The fighters shuffle past her, eyes downcast. They fought a battle at the gates of Hypatia. Demolition charges had destroyed the three bots that had survived AKA’s arrow storm, but at the price of seven blackstars.
Suicide missions. And the rumours say that reinforcements are already dropping over Eastern Tranquillity, braking thrusters stuttering in the sky.
Reinforcements. How does she know a word like that?
He comes shuffling.
‘Wagner.’
He turns to the sound of his name. He knows her. He cannot forget her, not in his dark aspect, the only Wagner Corta she has ever known. That doubt, that reticence that hesitates over the first step towards her isn’t from fear of misrecognition but from guilt. He ran to Meridian. She told him not to come back to their home in Theophilus, but he knows he left her to face her own family alone. The Mackenzies have never forgiven traitors. She paid a price. He survived when her family destroyed his. He kept his head down and lived. He looks like death now. He looks defeated.
He looks at his crew. A handsome, strong-featured woman nods to him. I’ll take it from here, laoda.
‘Analiese.’
He can’t understand what he’s seeing. Theophilus is her home, what is she doing in Hypatia?
‘Come on, little wolf.’
The bed fills the cubicle. Wagner fills the bed, spread and sprawled, somewhere deeper than sleep. Analiese was lucky to get even this tiny capsule. When the rail network went down, Hypatia, as the quartersphere’s busiest interchange, became a refugee camp of street sleepers and hot-bunkers, stranded passengers lying in the warmth from the heat exchange ducts.
She leans against the corridor wall and watches the wolf. He is a mess. His skin is bruised and seamed from the creases of a too-long-worn sasuit. The soft brown she loved to touch is grey and dull with fatigue. He was never mass and muscle but he’s bones and wire now. He can’t have eaten for two, three days. He’s terribly dehydrated. He reeks.
She traces back the path from bed to first sight; a touch of eyes at the University of Farside’s 15th Paralogics Symposium workshop on doxastic and other belief logics. He glanced away first. She leaned to her colleague Nang Aein, still hung-over from first-night drinking, and asked, Who is that? Her familiar could have given her the name in a thought from the attendee list but this was conspiracy, she wanted him to see her ask about him.
‘That’s Wagner Corta,’ Nang Aein said.
‘Corta? As in?’
‘The Cortas.’
‘He has eyelashes to die for.’
‘He’s strange. Even for a Corta.’
‘I like strange.’
‘How are you with scary?’
‘I’m not scared of Cortas.
’
‘Are you scared of wolves?’
Then the session broke up and everyone headed for tea and she kept her eyes on the scary Corta so she wouldn’t miss whatever moment he chose to look back at her. Which he did, at the double doors of the colloquium hall. He had the darkest, saddest eyes she had ever seen. Dark ice from the birth of the world, held in the permanent shadow. As a child she had wounded all her toys, the better to nurse and heal them. She found him at the point of gravitational stability between three conversation clusters, tea-glass between fingers.
‘I’ve never liked it either.’ She had always been astute at the tiny observations that cued social openings. His tea was untouched. ‘It’s not a proper drink.’
‘So what do you call a proper drink?’
‘I could show you.’
On the third moccatini he told her about the wolf.
On the fifth she said, All right.
* * *
The little wolf sleeps for a night and a day and a night and wakes instantly, every sense glowing. His first words: My crew.
They’re all right, Analiese says but he won’t take her word for it, not until he’s called through to Taiyang’s Hypatia office. Zehra took care of the debrief and put Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball on furlough. Taiyang can provide him with a basic access familiar but the full restore back-ups of Dr Luz and Sombra are at Meridian and communications across Nearside are still down. The sight of Wagner, familiar-less, digitally naked, arouses Analiese Mackenzie.
A night and a day and a night is an age in war. Where information fails, rumours thrive. Twé remains besieged, buried, silenced, while its agraria die in the gloaming, light-starved. Queen of the South has five days of food left, Meridian three. Hot-shops have been attacked; 3D-printers hacked. Taiyang coders have successfully reverse-hacked some of the possessed graders but any attempt to marshal them into siege-busting squadrons draws fire from orbit. Ice. VTO is firing ice from its mass driver. The Vorontsovs have a cometary head moored up there; enough ammunition to stage a new Late Heavy Bombardment. And the trains sit idle in the stations and the BALTRAN is down and any rover venturing up on to surface draws bots with blades on their feet. There’s an entire Equatorial express stranded on the rails in the middle of the Mare Smythii. They ran out of water a day ago. They’re drinking their own piss. Their air supply has failed. They’re eating each other.
Rumours and whispers. Duncan Mackenzie has sent twenty fifty a hundred five hundred shooters – Jo Moonbeam soldiers one and all – to break the siege of Twé. Supported by AKA archers, they’re going to assault Twé’s outlocks and liberate the city. The Asamoah-Mackenzie army has been cut to pieces, their body parts scattered across the Sea of Tranquillity. Meridian is under siege. Meridian’s power has failed and the entire city is in darkness. Meridian has been occupied. Meridian has already surrendered.
I have to get to Meridian, Wagner says.
You need to heal, Lobinho.
She hires a private cabin in a banya. Three hours should do it. There is a steam cell and a slab and a small plunge pool. Wagner lies prone on the sintered stone slab, glossy with sweat. With a curved strigil Analiese scrapes dirt and dust and caked perspiration from his skin.
‘You were waiting for me,’ Wagner says, cheek pressed on the smooth warm stone, head turned to one side.
‘I was coming back from a concert in Twé,’ Analiese says. ‘I got stuck when the trains went down.’
‘You helped me escape and I abandoned you.’
Analiese straddles Wagner’s back and slowly scrapes the perspiration-glued dirt from his neck.
‘Don’t talk,’ Analiese says. ‘Give me your arm.’ It hurts still, a sudden tearing of a scab she thought long grown-over. Fresh blood.
‘I’m sorry,’ Wagner says.
Analiese slaps his lean little ass.
‘Come here.’
She slips his cleansed, glowing skin into the hot water of the plunge pool. Wagner gasps, skin tingling. Analiese slips in beside him. They lean against each other. Analiese scoops wet hair away from her face. Wagner sweeps her hair behind her ear and runs his finger down the edge of her ear to the line of pale scar tissue that is all that remains of her left lobe.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘An accident,’ she lies.
‘I have to get to Meridian.’
‘You’re safe here.’
‘There’s a boy. He’s thirteen. Robson.’
Analiese knows the name.
‘You’re still not strong enough, Lobinho.’
She can’t persuade him. She never could. She contends against forces beyond human strength: the light and the dark, Wagner’s two natures, the pack. Family. Neck deep in warm, healing water, in the middle of a war, she shivers.
* * *
Secchi is a survival-scrape, a sinter tube no wider than the airlock at each end, bermed over with regolith. Lucasinho and Luna fit into it like twins in a womb. Lucasinho can’t imagine the jackaroos in here as well. But there is air and water, food and regolith overhead, a place for Luna to slip out of the shell-suit. Lucasinho is swathed in so much p-tape the only way to remove his sasuit is to cut it off. The heat pack is a rectangle of dull, warm pain hard under his low left rib. The only comfortable way to lie is on his right side facing the wall. He lies on the pad that still smells print-fresh, drained in every joint and muscle but unable to relax for the drop into sleep. He lies in his dusty, too-small sasuit staring at the curving sinter wall, imaging the depth of dirt smeared over, the vacuum beyond, the tick of radiation through space, soil, sinter, Lucasinho Corta: listening for the sound of the lock cycle that mean Malcolm’s jackaroos have returned, or the bots – which he has never seen but has imagined in every bladed, spiked, stabbing detail – cycling through to kill them in their cots.
‘Luca. Are you asleep?’
‘No. Can’t you sleep?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Can I come in with you?’
‘I’m real dusty, anjinho. And stinky.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Come on.’
Lucasinho feels the small, tight heat of Luna’s body curl in around the curve of his back.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’
‘This is all right, isn’t it?’
‘That meal was good, wasn’t it?’
The bivvie’s cached meals come in two varieties: tomato-based or soy-based. Tomato, Luna decided. She was a bit soy-intolerant. Lucasinho did not want any digestive irregularity in a six by two metre shelter. They prepared the self-heating meals one at a time, because the container popping open when the contents were heated was so more-ish. Lucasinho’s saliva glands ached at the odour of tomato sauce on potato gnocchi.
‘No it wasn’t,’ Luna says in her cousin’s ear. ‘It tasted of dust.’ Then she laughs, a small private giggle that feeds on its privacy until she can’t hold it in and Lucasinho catches it and together on the cot they laugh like they laughed after their first BALTRAN jump, until their breaths are short and their muscles ache and tears run down their faces.
* * *
Lucasinho.
Lucasinho, wake up.
You have to wake up.
He surges awake, bangs his head on the low ceiling. The bivvie. He’s in the bivvie. He’s been asleep two hours. Two hours. That’s Luna beside him. She’s already awake. Both familiars have woken them. That’s bad news.
Multiple contacts are approaching.
‘Shit. How many?’
Fifteen.
Not the Mackenzie Metals jackaroos, then.
‘Can you identify them?’
They’re maintaining communications silence.
‘How long until they get here?’
At their current rate, ten minutes.
Get suited up, get Luna suited up, get out, get the rover running. Gods.
‘Luna, you need to get into your suit.’
She’s thick and dazed fr
om broken sleep. He scoops her up and slots her into the shell-suit. She fully wakes as the infraskeleton closes around her.
‘Luca, what’s happening?’
‘Luna, Luna, we need to get out of here.’
They need to get out quick and dirty. There’s a trick; he saw it in a telenovella and had Jinji look it up to check if it was possible. It is. It’ll buy them the precious minute it takes the lock to cycle. A minute is life.
Helmets lock, suit checks cycle and light green.
‘Luna, hang on to me.’
Her suit-arms are long enough to wrap around Lucasinho’s skinny frame. Gloves click on to the frame of his suitpack.
‘In three, two, one…’
Jinji blows the lock. The shelter explosively decompresses. Lucasinho and Luna are blown from Secchi in a jet of bedding, soya and tomato meals, chopsticks, toiletries, ice-crystals. They hit. Impact drives the air from Lucasinho’s lungs. Things crack. The heat pack is a steel fist. That never happened in the telenovella. They roll. Luna slams into the parked rover, Lucasinho into Luna.
‘Okay?’ he gasps.
‘Okay.’
‘Let’s go.’
Lucasinho gasps in pain as he tapes himself and Luna to Coelhinho. He’s damaged. What has he done to the suit?
‘Hold tight.’
Luna’s gloves lock into the rover’s frame. Lucasinho kicks in maximum acceleration. The front wheels lift. If they go head-over-ass here, they’re dead. Luna instinctively leans forward. Lucasinho gasps again as ribs and muscles grate. Coelhinho blasts away from Secchi. Its dust plume will be visible over most of West Fecundity. As long as Lucasinho can stay ahead of the bots. What had Malcolm called them? The fuckers. Fuckers they are. As long as the fuckers run out of power before him. He’s had hours charging. The fuckers won’t have had that. He assumes. Their batteries will be low. He assumes. Their battery capacity will be about the same as a Mackenzie Metals single-seat rover. He assumes. So many assumes. Fuckers.
‘Jinji, are they there?’
They’re there, Lucasinho.
‘Are they close?’
They’re closing.
‘Shit,’ Lucasinho swears under his breath. ‘How fast?’
At our current speed, our courses will intersect in fifty-three minutes.