by Ian McDonald
Her familiar whispers in her ear. Ariel.
‘Abena. I’m sorry. I’m all right now.’
Abena does not know if she can face Ariel. She’s seen a nakedness deeper than skin. She’s seen vulnerability rip open a woman for whom composure is everything. Abena stands up, smoothes down her thrown-on clothes, breathes deep until the breaths no longer shudder.
‘I’m coming.’
Then the motos and bikes pull in around Ariel’s cab.
* * *
Armed and armoured figures step from the opening motos and slide from the bikes: Vorontsovs in umlaut-heavy stab-proof kevlar, mercenaries in whatever protection the printer delivers cheap, clumsy Terrestrial fighters in black battlesuits. They surround Ariel’s moto.
Abena freezes.
Ariel needs her.
‘Leave her alone!’ she shouts.
One figure turns: a short woman, chestnut-skinned, in an incongruous Miuccia Prada dress and four-inch Sergio Rossi heels.
‘You are?’
‘I am Abena Maanu Asamoah,’ Abena says.
Ariel’s voice comes from the centre of the ring of armed males.
‘Let her through,’ Ariel says. ‘She works with me.’
The woman in Prada nods and the fighters part.
‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ Ariel whispers. ‘You should not have seen that.’
Abena has a hundred responses but they are all well-intentioned, cheerful, senseless, insensitive, ignorant, glib. Banal, naive and jejune, Ariel had called her when they met at the Lunarian Society. All she has, Abena understands, all she has ever had are responses.
‘We’ve come for Ariel Corta,’ the woman in Miuccia Prada says. Abena can’t place her accent but there is a baffling familiarity to her face, her eyes, her cheekbones. Network search returns nothing and the woman’s familiar is a pewter sphere traced with damask filigree. So why do I feel I’ve met you before? ‘The Eagle of the Moon requests a meeting,’ the young woman says. Globo is not her first language.
‘The Eagle’s requests aren’t usually delivered by armed idiots,’ Ariel says and Abena wants to cheer.
‘There has been a change of leadership,’ the young woman says.
Now Ariel looks at the eyes, the cheekbones, the set of the mouth. Recognition – impossible recognition – dawns. And Abena realises where she has seen them before; on the face of the woman beside her.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Ariel asks in Portuguese. The young woman answers in the same tongue.
‘I am Alexia Corta.’
* * *
The repair bots have been diligent, but Ariel’s courtroom eye notices the smudges of smoke around the door frames, the dusty boot-prints on the polished sinter floors. Grains of broken glass glitter, caught where walls and floors meet. In a side room two bots diligently clean a large stain from the carpet.
Details are good. Details are disciplines. This is a court, she goes to a trial. Everything may be tried here, including her life.
The escort were ordered to remain in the vehicle dock. Alexia Corta’s heels click with military rhythm on the hard floor. Ariel Corta reads the discipline and control in her every step. Jo Moonbeams overstep, overuse their over-powered legs. The new arrival fresh off the Moonloop bounding and soaring down Gargarin Prospekt is a joke sliding into stereotype. This young woman never puts a foot wrong. In Sergio Rossi heels too.
Another detail. A little bright coin tossed tinkling and twinkling into a pit.
Has Marina’s capsule docked or is it still flying out, falling free, toward that far brilliant star? She could work it out with a few flight details from Beijaflor.
Ariel pulls her concentration back. Focus it here, focus it on useful information. Alexia Corta calls herself the Iron Hand, Adriana’s old title. She models herself on Adriana. She has ambition and a high opinion of her ruthlessness.
‘Please wait here,’ Alexia Corta says to Abena.
‘Do not offer to push me,’ Ariel says.
‘Of course, Senhora Corta.’
From the moment Alexia spoke her name, Ariel has known who she will find on the other side of the double doors, behind the stupidly ornate, pointless desk. What she finds erases all thoughts of Marina and pushes the present, pervading hurt down to persistent, dull and, in the end, bearable ache.
‘You look like fucking death, Lucas.’ Ariel speaks in Portuguese, the language of intimacy and rivalry, family and enemies.
He laughs. Ariel can’t bear it. His laugh is the sound of precision mechanisms jammed by shattered glass.
‘I have been dead. For seven minutes, I’m told. It was disappointing. No looking down on things on top of the closet. No white light and spa-music. No ancestors calling me up the glowing tunnel.’ He moves a bottle of gin to the centre of the big empty desk. ‘My old bespoke recipe. The network never forgets.’
‘I won’t, thank you.’
She would love to. She would love more than anything to take the bottle away to a hidden place and drink it until everything went smooth and blurred and painless.
‘Really?’
‘Special occasions only.’
‘A family reunited isn’t a special occasion?’
‘Don’t let me stop you.’
‘Alas, my medical team has put me in the same position as you regarding alcohol.’
This hollow, bleached, cracked shell is a puppet of her brother. His once beautiful skin is grey. Grey streaks his hair, his beard. His eyes are sunken, his skin patched with moles and liver spots from direct sunlight. His bones sag. Even under lunar gravity his muscles barely hold him upright behind the desk. Ariel notes the crutches leaning against the desk. It is as if, by some reverse relativity, thirty years have passed down in Earth’s gravity.
‘We can’t go to Earth. Mother Earth will kill you. All that. I went, Ariel. She tried. I had a massive heart-attack on the transfer up. But she didn’t kill me.’
Ariel catches Alexia’s eye.
‘Leave us.’
Lucas nods. ‘Please, Alexia.’
Ariel waits for the door to close, though Alexia would be a fool if she were not monitoring every word spoken in the Eagle’s Eyrie.
‘And her?’
‘She’s clever, she’s hungry, she’s refreshingly ambitious. She may be the most ruthless person I have ever met. Including you, irmã. She ran a little business empire down there, producing and selling clean, reliable water to her community. They called her the Queen of Pipes. Yet when I offered her the moon, she came. She is the Iron Hand. She has the blood of Adriana Corta.’
‘She will kill you, Lucas,’ Ariel says. ‘The instant your influence and position waver.’
‘Family first, family always, Ariel. Lucasinho is at João de Deus. He’s in a bad way. The Sisterhood of the Lords of Now are caring for him. I always thought my mother’s attachment to them was a symptom of her decline, but they seem to be the focus of resistance to Bryce Mackenzie’s occupation of my city. I’ll deal with that in time. Lucasinho took Luna four hundred kilometres across the Mare Fecunditatis. Did you know that? He gave the last breath in his lungs to get his cousin to Boa Vista. On the Moonrun, he went back to help an Asamoah boy. He’s brave and he’s kind and I want him to be well and I want so much to see him again. Family first, family always.’
The rebuke is old but accurate and never fails to wound. It goes deep today, into already bruised flesh. Ariel has always chosen, will always choose, world over family. Like every facile truth, there is a deeper truth at the core of it, molten and spinning. The world chooses Ariel Corta. The world has always pushed itself on her; laid its insistent, needy hands all over her. Few people have character and talents enough to satisfy a world. It needs, she feeds it. It never stops asking, she never stops giving, thought it insulated her against anything or anyone else that might ask something of her.
‘I won’t be swept up into your happy little dynasty, Lucas.’
‘You may not have a choice about th
at. How safe do you think any Corta will be when they learn who commands the Eagle’s Eyrie?’
‘I seem to have made a career out of saying “fuck you” to Eagles of the Moon,’ Ariel says but she sees the traps Lucas lays around her.
‘You were my predecessor’s legal counsel,’ Lucas says. ‘I’d like you to continue in that position. See it as a change of management.’
‘Your predecessor died at the bottom of Antares Hub.’ Beijaflor filled in the political revolutions that unfolded while Marina Calzaghe left her. Defenestration. It makes Ariel shiver that there is such a term for such a murder; so precise, so perfumed and polite.
‘I had nothing to do with that,’ Lucas says. ‘Jonathon wasn’t a threat. He was finished, Ariel. He would have seen out his days with some sinecure lectureship at the University of Farside. I bore no ill-will to Jonathon Kayode.’
‘Yet you sit at his desk, with his title and seals and authorisations, offering me your designer gin from his printer.’
‘I didn’t ask for this job.’
‘You insult me, Lucas.’
He lifts his hands in supplication.
‘The Lunar Mandate Authority needed someone who knew the moon.’
‘This is not swapping one three-letter acronym for another. Board reshuffles don’t come armed with orbital rail-guns.’
‘Is it not?’ Lucas leans forward and Ariel sees in his sunken eyes a light she had forgotten. It does not illuminate; it casts shadows. ‘Really? You take the elevator up into the high levels and ask them if they know what the LDC did, if they can name even a single board member, if they even know who the Eagle of the Moon was. What they care about is the air in their lungs, the water on their tongues, the food in their bellies, who’s fucking who on Gupshup and where their next contract is coming from. We’re not a nation state, we’re not a democracy robbed of the oxygen of freedom. We’re a commercial entity. We’re an industrial outpost. We turn a profit. All that’s happened is a change of management. And the new management needs to get the money flowing again.’
‘Representatives of the governments of Russia, India, Brazil, the USA, Korea, South Africa. The People’s Republic of China sit in the LDC council chamber. You expect the Palace of Eternal Light to take orders from Beijing?’
‘The Lunar Mandate Association is a multi-agency body. It includes corporate representatives from Earth and the moon.’
‘VTO.’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you offer them, Lucas?’
‘Security on Earth, empire in space and respect on the moon.’
‘This is an invasion, Lucas.’
‘Of course it is. But it’s also sound business.’
‘Did you destroy Crucible?’
‘No,’ Lucas says. Ariel does not reply. Her silence requires more from him. ‘I did not destroy Crucible.’
‘The command that hacked the mirrors was old Corta code. It had been in there, wrapped around the control systems for thirty years. Code just doesn’t spontaneously activate. Someone had to wake it up. Someone had to send the instruction. Was that you, Lucas?’
‘I did not give the command.’
‘One hundred and eighty-eight deaths, Lucas.’
‘I did not order the destruction of Crucible.’
‘I’ll have one of your gins now, Lucas.’
He pours unsteadily into a Martini glass, adds homoeopathic drops of vermouth, slides it across the Eagle’s great desk. So many drinks Ariel has lifted, savoured, enjoyed purely and absolutely. Sharp, adult, personal sex in a glass. She leaves it untouched.
‘You asked me to represent you, Lucas.’
‘I did. You didn’t give me an answer.’
And the gin is cold and beaded with moisture and is always dependable, always sure. Family or world. That had always been her dilemma. Lucas has cleaved through it with one stroke. Family and world. Accept his offer and have both. Ariel looks long at the glass standing on the desk of the Eagle of the Moon and it is easy. The simplest thing. It always was.
‘I didn’t, did I?’ Ariel says. ‘No. No, I won’t. No.’
* * *
After an hour Lady Sun’s patience breaks. She sighs and raises her stick in the direction of Alexia Corta.
‘You.’
‘Lady Sun.’
Lady Sun has studied carefully this young woman behind the small desk by the doors to the Eagle’s office. Every muscle betrays her terrestrial birth. A Brazilian. Family. The legend is that Adriana found none of the Corta worthy of joining her on the moon. The girl has ambition, and discipline to reach it. She does not occupy her time with visible trivialities or distractions. She sits well, she has good stillness. So few younger people understand how to be still. Lady Sun summons her in part to break her infuriating self-possession, in part to see if she misses a move and sends herself soaring across the room. She moves well, if with obvious concentration.
‘We have been kept waiting,’ Lady Sun says. The board of Taiyang strike variations of boredom around the Eyrie’s comfortable antechamber.
‘The Eagle will see you when he is ready,’ Alexia Corta says.
‘We do not wait. We are not contractees.’
‘The Eagle is very busy.’
‘Not too busy to see Yevgeny Vorontsov.’ The old drunken fool trooped in thirty minutes ago with his entourage of armoured dolts. Not even the decency to look embarrassed. Lady Sun had no doubt that his bodyguard was the junta of a younger, harder generation rumoured to be in control of VTO Moon. There was a consistent look. Muscled and disciplined. The design of their armour offends the eye. Garish and childish. Darius is a fan of the music from which they draw their iconography. Lady Sun finds a particular humiliation in being policed by figures from a boys’ video game.
Policed. That such a notion should come to the moon.
‘Senhor Vorontsov is a member of the LMA,’ Alexia Corta says and on that the double doors open and Yevgeny Vorontsov, that great bear of a man, rolls out. The hard-faced young women and men in harder suits shoulder around him. They almost push him out of the room.
‘The Eagle will see you now,’ Alexia Corta announces. The Suns untangle themselves from long, bored waiting.
Alexia Corta steps in front of Lady Sun.
‘You are not a board member, Senhora.’
Sun Zhiyuan freezes. The Sun delegation stops dead. Lady Sun enters first. That is the rule, the custom, the place of honour. Alexia Corta will not move.
‘There has been an error,’ Lady Sun says.
‘You sit with the board of Taiyang, but you are not a board member.’
‘You keep my grandmother waiting, then tell her she is not welcome,’ Sun Zhiyuan says in a voice of low, intimate violence. ‘Either my grandmother goes in, or none of us.’
Alexia Corta lifts two fingers to her ear, the gesture of a new arrival who has not yet learned the unconscious intimacies of familiars.
‘The Eagle would be delighted to see Lady Sun,’ she says. Wayfarer glasses hide her eyes and Lady Sun reads no embarrassment or education in the set of her facial muscles. This is a confident, arrogant young woman.
Sun Zhiyuan moves to allow Lady Sun to head the party.
‘You are an insolent young woman,’ Lady Sun hisses as she passes. She has never been so humiliated. Rage is a delight, a hot, feverish consuming sickness, a thing she never expected to feel so strongly at her age.
‘And you are withered old scorpion who will die soon,’ Alexia Corta whispers in Portuguese. The doors close behind Lady Sun and the board of Taiyang.
* * *
Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie stops at the penthouse door, one hand on the door frame, gasping. His lungs rattle with a thousand stone needles. Old dust is killing him. Old jackaroos should not be woken before the dawn by a summons to a meeting.
Old jackaroos know an emergency when they hear one.
The only light comes from the window, where Bryce stands, a dark mass against the pointillist night-glow o
f Kondakova Prospekt. Jaime blinks in the gloom. His familiar tells him who is here and shows their locations.
‘The Suns called in the loan,’ says Alfonso Pereztrejo, Head of Finance.
‘Fuck,’ Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie says reverently.
‘The repayment plan is generous, but they want it back,’ Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie says. ‘Fecunditatis and Crisium are still only at forty per cent output and we have no reserves.’
‘Lucas Corta has requested a meeting,’ Alfonso Pereztrejo says.
‘I will not kiss the fucking ring,’ Bryce says, turning from the window. ‘I will not surrender this to Lucas Corta.’
‘VTO can embargo us,’ Rowan says.
‘Then Earth goes dark,’ Bryce says. ‘I know what he’s doing. He’ll let Duncan drive us into the wilderness while we keep the lights burning. A territory here, a territory there: the new board, LMA or whatever they call themselves, all they care about is that the helium ships.’
‘It seems to me we need an agreement with the Lunar Mandate Authority,’ Jaime wheezes.
‘Lucas Corta is the gatekeeper,’ Rowan says.
‘I know what Lucas Corta wants,’ Bryce spits. ‘He wants his city back. I will depressurise his fucking city and every soul in it before I let him take it.’
‘I’ve a less bloodthirsty option,’ Jaime says. ‘You’ve heard of the Sisterhood of the Lords of Now?’
‘I’ve heard of it,’ Bryce says. ‘Some drum-banging rabble-rousing Brazilian cult.’
‘People respect them,’ Jaime says. ‘And you might, a little more, when I tell you that I’ve heard that they are sheltering Lucasinho and Luna Corta.’