by Ian McDonald
Hahana nods and the traceurs explode away from Robson in vaults and runs, somersaults and straddles, a dozen different motions, a dozen different traces up into the high city.
Baptiste who taught him the shapes and names of the moves. Netsanet who drilled him until those moves became part of him. Rashmi who showed him the feats his body could perform. Lifen who gave him new ways to perceive the physical world. Zaky who made him a traceur.
Dead.
Robert Mackenzie had promised that he would not touch Robson’s équipe. But Robert Mackenzie was dead and the world which had been so certain, guided along rails, was melted, shattered, thrown to vacuum.
He killed them. Baptiste and Netsanet and Rashmi and Lifen and Zaky.
He is utterly alone.
* * *
On the second day Zehra joins Wagner in the repair bay. The damage to the rover is extensive but easily repairable. Pull a module, replace it with another. The work is steady and repetitive and falls into its own pace and rhythm. Wagner and Zehra work without words, without the need for words. Wagner’s focus is intense. Analiese comes to see him in the workshop. Maybe he might want lunch. Maybe a break. She sees the familiar dark concentration, that can focus on one thing for hours on end. She wonders what the light Wagner is like. Would she even know him? The wolf and his shadow. She leaves the workshop without Wagner knowing she was there.
Hypatia is too small for a three-shift calendar and keeps Meridianal Normalised Time. At midnight on the third day the repairs are complete and Wagner and Zehra rest from their labours. The rover gleams under the floods. To the inexpert eye it is the same beaten six-wheeler towed into Hypatia main lock and pushed by its exhausted crew into the repair bay. That eye can’t see the beauty of the new modules and motors; the fresh wiring and routing; the parts custom-designed by Wagner, bespoke-printed, hand-fitted by Zehra.
‘When are you leaving?’ Zehra says.
‘Soon as the batteries are recharged and I’ve completed checks.’ Wagner walks around the rover. His right eye flickers with diagnostics. The replacement lens is adequate but with every moment he resents more and more the dull, flavourless personality of the default familiar. It’s one thing; stubbornly, indivisible.
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘You’re not. Gods know what’s out there.’
‘You won’t get out the lock without me,’ Zehra says.
‘I’m laoda…’
‘And I slipped a line of code into the command chain.’
From the beginning Wagner has understood that his relationship with his junshi depends not on management but respect. When he met her, as junshi of the first glass crew he took out of Meridian Main lock, she sat back, perched on the rover step while older, dirtier hands tried to scare, intimidate, faze, bully the pretty Corta boy. When their ammunition was spent, she swung up into her seat on the opposite side of the rover. Not a word. Crews had been killed by enmity between laoda and junshi. As the machine drove slowly up the ramp into the outlock, Zehra said on the private channel, You don’t know what you don’t know, Corta boy. But I’m with you.
The batteries are full. The rover checks twenty different flavours of clean. Its crew is suited and booted, suit packs full. Wagner files a departure plan. As the seat descends and the bar lifts, Zehra touches his arm.
‘You’ve got a ten-minute window. Go and say goodbye to her.’
Wagner does not need his cheap and nasty little familiar to tell him that Analiese is in the pod. From the end of the catwalk he hears the buzzing, resonant harmony and seething drone of the setar. She’s improvising: his dark self runs along the notes, finding his own progressions and sequences. He has no appreciation of music, he never has, but he understands and fears its power to enchant and direct the mind, its mastery of time and rhythm. Lucas used to lose himself in the subtle complexities of bossa nova, a chord for every note. Wagner saw in his brother’s rapture something of the ekata of the pack, but it was singular, atomised joy. A private communion.
The music ends mid beat. Her familiar has told her he is at her door.
He loves the way she carefully places the setar in its case before anything else.
‘You fill that suit well, jackaroo.’
‘Better than when I came here.’
‘Much better.’
When they disembrace, she slips a package into his gloved hand.
‘I printed out your meds.’
Analiese’s hand arrests Wagner as he tries to slip the bubble pack into a suit pocket.
‘I can see it, Lobinho. Take some now.’
They hit so hard, so precisely that Wagner almost reels. He had confused a depressive state with combat fatigue and the intense focus of his need to reach Robson in Meridian. He has not made that mistake in years. Out on the surface it could kill him and Zehra.
‘Thank you. No, that’s, that’s inadequate.’
‘Come back. When it’s over – whatever happens.’
‘I’ll try.’
Walking down to the vehicle bay, he hears again the sparkling of the setar. He has three minutes remaining in his departure window.
‘I’ll need that code,’ he says to Zehra, back to back with her in the junshi seat.
‘What code?’
Zehra shuts herself in with her music for the first twenty kilometres and Wagner is glad to be left alone with the experience of drop-back into full medication. It’s a ride through an interior war zone. The physical world zooms in and out of focus. Attention flies to one subject, then veers to another fascination. He visualises Analiese’s mutilated ear. It was not an accident. Accidents are never so neat. She paid for her betrayal. The hand behind the knife was kind. The customary Mackenzie price for betrayal is a finger. That would have silenced the bright joy of the setar forever.
How long has Zehra been talking to him?
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I said, I would have liked you to ask me.’
It’s an easy run to Meridian, along the line of Equatorial One, on the glass. The rover’s radar mast is up. Wagner’s helmet shows no hostiles between him and the cache at Silberschlag. Comms with Hypatia are good, Taiyang engineers are restoring the network by rags and patches. The rail network is operating: at least one line, one train: from St Olga to Meridian. The war is over, the war is lost, the war is won, the war continues, the war has changed to something different; Wagner and Zehra drive through uncertainties and rumours. You can be in the middle of a war and not know it, Wagner thinks. And again his focus strays and again he must apologise.
‘Ask you what?’
‘You’re going to Meridian for Robson. Did you think to ask me why I want to go with you?’
Wagner has assumed that Zehra journeys with him out of personal loyalty and, realising that, discovers he knows nothing about his junshi.
‘No, I didn’t. That was wrong.’
‘I have someone back there.’
He never knew. He never thought.
‘My mother,’ Zehra says. ‘She’s old, she’s alone and the moon is falling down around her.’
‘Oh,’ says Wagner Corta.
‘Yes,’ says Zehra Aslan.
They drive out along the pure and perfect glass.
* * *
Wagner opens the throttle and runs the rover at full speed. The solar belt is his terrain: smooth, safe, sane and boring boring boring.
Boring is good. Boring is no shocks and no surprises. Boring gets you back to the people you love.
Boring is the landscape of talk. In one hundred and fifty kilometres Wagner learns more about his junshi than he has in ten contracts. Zehra carries a third name: Altair. Aslan is her biological name, her contract name. Altair is her family name, her true family. Nomathemba, a Jo Moonbeam from Johannesburg, is her true mother. The Altairs are a nurture stream. No one has ever been born into the Altairs. All its members enter by adoption, fostering or partnership. Nomathemba adopted Zehra at the age of three months. She has three siblings
and two co-mothers. Nomathemba has been dying slowly of silicosis for a year now, her lungs hardening, turning to moon rock. Zehra is in the process of adopting a little boy from Farside: Adam Karl Jesperson. It’s scaring the living shit out of her, but the Altairs are strong. Zehra needs to complete the process and present Nomathemba with the latest bubble in the stream before her breath turns to stone.
Alarms flash all over Wagner’s HUD. He skids the rover to a halt. Zehra is in his ear immediately. He stops. An hour west of Hypatia. He flicks the anomaly on to her visor. Together they climb up on to the top of the rover, each gripping the comms mast, to eyeball the shock and surprise. There is a concavity in the smooth black horizon.
‘Something hit,’ Wagner says.
‘Hard,’ Zehra agrees.
They edge toward the impact though the radar indicates no activity. For three kilometres Wagner nudges the rover through a debris field of black-glass teardrops. The teardrops shatter between his wheels and the black solar array. The final dozen metres are up a low ridge of shattered glass shards. Wagner thinks he see pieces of machinery among the glass. Machinery and other fragments. From the top of the ridge the rover looks down over the moon’s freshest crater. Wagner and Zehra walk down the few metres to the crater lip. The suit visors give them the dimension: two hundred metres across, twenty deep. Not on the most recent satellite map of Flammarion.
‘I’m getting a big heat signature off this,’ Zehra says. ‘Seismology says the place is still ringing like a temple gong.’
‘It must have been something significant for VTO to risk a strike so close to Equatorial One,’ Wagner says. ‘Any chance?’
‘No chance at all,’ Zehra says.
‘Mackenzies, Asamoahs?’ Wagner asks.
‘People with contracts and debts.’
They died, their elements fused with the molten silicon still radiating in the infra-red, but what affronts Wagner most, the offence that touches him, is the hole in the pure and perfect glass.
They meet the first overturned grader fifty kilometres westward. The moon is profligate with junk; obsolete and damaged equipment has always been abandoned in place. The helium fields of Fecunditatis and Crisium, the mines of Procellarum where the regolith has been stripped two hundred metres deep, are littered with extractors and sinterers, solar plants and graders. Metal is ubiquitous, metal is cheap. It’s the elements of life that are precious. It is not unexpected to find a discarded grader. The surprise is to find one so comprehensively trashed. It looks as if it has been dropped from orbit. It lies on its side, panels stoved in, innards strewn in pieces around the corpse, suspension snapped, wheels at crazy angles. The dozer blade is snapped in two.
Five kilometres further on Wagner and Zehra come across two more graders; dead, smashed, one overturned, the other with its blade deeply embedded in the first grader’s flank.
‘Anything we can salvage?’ Wagner asks.
‘Yes, but I’m not going near that,’ Zehra says.
‘There are a lot of tracks,’ Wagner says.
‘All heading to Meridian,’ Zehra says.
Over the horizon they enter the carnage; a wrecking yard, the graveyard of graders. Metal hulks capsized, upended, embedded in each other like monstrous machines fucking. Thirty-five graders. Wagner imagines the divine judgement of some heavy metal deity. The dead machines are powerfully sculptural and pathetic.
‘They’re not all dead,’ Zehra warns. A grader, blade wedged deep in the engines of its rival, strains and heaves to dislodge itself. Its wheels spin on the black glass.
The grader comes out from behind a pile of scrap so tangled, so smashed Wagner can’t recognise it as once-working machinery. It stops dead in front of Lucky Eight Ball and lowers its blade.
‘Zehra,’ Wagner shouts. She’s already opening up the engines, reversing as fast as she can. But the same traitor glass that frustrated the dying grader betrays Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. Wheels spin, the rover crabs sideways. The live grader charges.
Zehra slews the rover; it waltzes across slick glass. The blade misses by a scant metre. The rover power-slides. Zehra fights for control. A jarring impact as Lucky Eight Ball side-swipes a dead grader.
‘It’s coming round again,’ Wagner cries.
‘I know that!’ Zehra shouts. ‘I fucking know that!’
The grader lines up. Attacks. Dies. Wagner sees the warning lights go dark on its steel skeleton. Power out. But it has momentum: an unguided, unthinking, unstoppable hulk. It bears down on Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. Zehra threads the rover through the narrow gap between blade and wreckage. And they are clear of the machine graveyard, out on clear and perfect glass.
‘The Suns must have counter-hacked some of them,’ Wagner says. ‘Grader civil war. It must have been a hell of a spectacle.’
‘You go ahead and sell court-side seats,’ Zehra says. ‘Tell you what though, those Suns may have saved Meridian.’
‘I’m getting a rough ride here on the right,’ Wagner says.
‘I’ve got a dead wheel and motor rear right,’ Zehra says. ‘We must have wrecked it when we slid into the wreckage.’
‘Will that affect us?’
‘Not unless we run into more of that. I’ll take it offline anyway. Let it free-run.’
After the battlefield, the run into Meridian is clear, quick and untroubled. Wagner raises Meridian control on his cheap and nasty little generic familiar.
‘This is Taiyang Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball, Lucky Eight Ball, tag TTC1128, requesting immediate ingress to Orion Quadra main lock.’
‘Lucky Eight Ball, hold your position.’
‘Meridian, we are damaged and low on air and water.’
Nice lying, laoda, Zehra says on the private channel.
Just an amplification of the facts, Wagner says. But he is angry. A thousand kilometres, through massacre, siege, war; attack and retreat, victory and flight, death and terror and he must wait for Meridian traffic control. You’re keeping me from my pack, my loves, my boy.
‘Line her up,’ he orders Zehra. She takes the rover between the beacons to the lip of the ramp, facing the massive grey lock door.
‘Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball, clear the ramp area,’ Meridian control orders.
‘Requesting emergency ingress. I repeat, we are low on O2.’
‘Your emergency ingress request is denied, Lucky Eight Ball. Clear the ramp area.’
‘Laoda,’ Zehra says and the same instant Wagner feels the shadow fall across him. He looks up into the belly lights of a VTO moonship hovering fifty metres above Lucky Eight Ball. Around it, station-keeping, seven more moonships hover on their thrusters. ‘I’m moving.’
The rover scuttles away, the moonship settles on to the ramp. Wagner notes a personnel pod. Hatches open, steps unfold. Figures in shell-suits step down and walk down to the lock gate. The moonship lifts, another darts in, lands, disembarks armoured personnel. Each of the ships in turn follows.
‘That’s the entire moonship fleet,’ Zehra says.
‘That’s seven hundred people,’ Wagner says. The lock gate lifts, the hard-shell figures walk into the darkness. The gate descends.
‘Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball, clear to ramp,’ Meridian control says.
‘What happened there?’ Zehra asks.
‘I think that while we were out there, we lost the war,’ Wagner says.
* * *
First come the drones. A swarm of them, a biblical plague, storming up from Meridian hub in a fizzing black plume. At first Marina thinks it is smoke – that great fear of the moon-dwellers: smoke: fire! Then she sees the plume divide into smaller streams, each aimed at a level. She freezes; her classmates, just released from the returnees group, freeze; Meridian freezes.
What are these things?
The streams form into smaller clouds, each following one of the quadra levels. The cloud engulfs Marina and her returnees. She finds herself eye to lens with a tiny, insect-sized drone. It hovers on invisible wings; she
sees a prickle of laser light in her right eye. Her familiar has been interrogated. Then it zips away, with all its swarm, rolling up 27th.
Are you all right? The returnees ask each other. Are you all right. Are you all right?
The drone clouds bowl into the quadra hub, wheeling like a flock to take a new prospekt.
The returnee group has been confused, nervous. Its article of faith – that they will all go back to Earth – has been cracked by the inexplicable news breaking on their news feeds and Gupshup channels. Rogue graders. Killer bots. Twé besieged. Foods shortages no food shortages, food rationing no food rationing. Food riots, food protests. On her way to the meeting, Marina skirted a small, well-behaved protest beneath the old LDC chambers. Protesting about something that hasn’t happened, to something that doesn’t exist. The trains are shut down, the BALTRAN is shut down. The Moonloop is shut down. Luna is closed to the universe. Some of the previous intake are stranded, panicking that they have overstayed their physiological visas. A day or two won’t make any difference, Preeda the facilitator says. What if that day or two becomes a week or two, a month or two? And what about the backlog? The Moonloop has only so many capsules. The cyclers are on fixed orbits.
The bone clocks keep ticking.
After the drones come the bots. Marina sees the pulse of movement sweep towards her down 26th East even as the word sweeps the network. Citizens trying to get off the streets. Diving into shops and bars, dashing for home, finding any cranny or sheltering crevice, taking a staircase or an elevator away from the rumours. They’re in the city. They’re on the streets. You’ll be all right if you’re indoors. Get indoors they’re knifing anyone on the streets. Children swept up and carried in arms, frantic parents trying to contact teenagers, apartments closing street doors, shuttering windows.
I’m going back, Aurelia says.
I can make it home from here, Marina says. Home is in the opposite direction to the flow of the people. She takes the 25th Street ladeira at a trot. Marina runs straight into the bot at the bottom of the staircase, picking a slow, intricate minuet along 24th right. It’s a jagged tripod of switchblade legs and flick-knife arms. Every part of it is edged and sharp. Every part of it can transform into a blade. Its many eyes register. Its head snaps to contemplate her.