Moondust

by Gemma Fowler

  Day-Cycle 03

  Aggie pressed her forehead against the cool shuttle window. The commuter shuttles were super-fast maglev trains that sped across the base through a raised network of clear Plexiglas tunnels. They had some of the best views on the surface, but today Aggie didn’t care.

  After Rix had dropped the Angel bombshell in Spooner’s office, Aggie had been escorted to her pod and told to wait for her orders. The orders had arrived the next morning in the form of an incredibly early wake-up call from Celeste.

  Rix’s plan, as Aggie understood it, was simple: her colleagues in Domestic had been told that she’d been transferred to the new Surface Analysis suite in Sector B. It was an insane cover story – Aggie was by far the most incompetent person ever to grace the underground hovel of Domestic – but it meant she got to keep her yellow overall and her anonymity . . . for now.

  She sighed and closed her eyes. Last night her Adrianne nightmares had been worse than ever and the nervous energy that was currently fizzing through her body was just exhausting. She felt as if she needed a week of sleep, not the ‘Exciting Tour of G Face’ that had just been put into her personal schedule by someone called Mir-from-Earth-Relations.

  Aggie checked the schedule on the comms unit on her forearm again.

  Mir-from-Earth-Relations.

  Aggie wondered if she was named after the old space station. Her file listed her father as a cosmonaut in New Russia, so it sort of made sense. The thought of asking her that, of engaging the girl in some sort of normal conversation, made sweat erupt on her palms.

  Mir-from-Earth-Relations knew.

  Someone else knew.

  It was exciting and terrifying in equal measure.

  The shuttle shuddered, making Aggie’s forehead bounce off the glass. She looked around and caught the understanding eyebrows of a blue-clad tech head in the opposite seat. She turned away quickly, scrunching herself deeper into the corner.

  Out of the window, the bright colours of the Civilian Sector started to slip away and were replaced by dusty white mining domes, dirty red tunnels and huge tangles of evil-looking mining equipment.

  The Prison Sector.

  Not just the Prison Sector, but the furthest reaches of the Lunar Base itself. The new G Face was built right at the end of the shuttle line, where the Earth-facing Near Side disappeared into first the Borderlands and then the restricted Far Side.

  Aggie had never been into the Prison Sector before, let alone this lonely, dusty outpost. She’d always wanted to explore the Moon, to get out and see this strange alien world where they lived, but Lunar Inc. was usually strict about its borders. For obvious reasons, really, given that the place was crawling with prisoners.

  ‘Last stop, lady,’ a gruff voice boomed above her, ‘If ya don’t move you’ll wake up in the depot. Gotta be quick.’

  Aggie glanced up and saw a squat engineer in a dusty orange overall grinning at her as he held the shuttle doors open.

  ‘Good job you’re so yellow, otherwise I wouldn’t a seen ya there.’

  The shuttle doors whined as he held them. Aggie got up from her seat and stumbled past him out onto the platform.

  The engineer laughed at her face. ‘Not what you was expecting, ay? That makes two of us, then.’

  A temporary roof had been inflated over the magnetic track, and the curve of clear plastic bubbles was their only protection from the Moon’s atmosphere beyond. The ground beneath her surface boots was rocky and littered with bits of discarded machinery and materials.

  ‘Analysis?’ The man asked from beneath his dust-crusted helmet.

  Aggie nodded and looked away.

  ‘Lucky you. This face is gonna be the easiest ride of your whole shift. Been here eighteen days already, ain’t seen nothing but moon rock.’

  Aggie followed the engineer along the platform to where a gaggle of black-overalled guards, mine ops in white and engineers in orange were queuing at a set of huge airlocks that led into the half-built dome of G Face.

  The prisoners didn’t use the airlocks, she remembered from some distant training session. They were housed in inflatable habitats – habs – tucked inside the domes themselves. No one wearing a red overall had any reason to leave their face during their lunar rehabilitation. Aggie had never even seen a Lunar Inc. prisoner up close, and she hoped to keep it that way.

  Aggie tucked into the back of the queue and looked up at the giant Eye that hung from the top of the gate. Its red iris flickered this way and that, scanning every set of eyes that passed under it and entered the airlocks.

  When the red light paused over her, Aggie shivered; there was something horribly human about the way it looked at her.

  ‘Next.’ The clipped tone of the guard at the gate made her jump.

  She hurried forwards into the nearest airlock and felt her overall click. The dual-gravity suits automatically re-adjusted to surface conditions as you stepped through any gate, the thin mesh exoskeleton hidden in the fabric becoming rigid and the helmet and visor unfolding from their casing inside the collar.

  As the first set of airlock doors closed behind her with a soft thud, Aggie peered out at the face, trying to get a better look at what lay beyond. It was a distraction technique she’d learnt during her countless counselling sessions. Ever since Adrianne, Aggie had never been comfortable in small, confined spaces, especially see-through ones.

  ‘Hey Agatha,’ Celeste said from the Ether on the wall. ‘Did you know that due to our increased construction schedule, the G Face now has a fully stable Earth environment?’

  Aggie shook her head. The computer loved to tell her pointless facts.

  ‘That means you are no longer required to wear a helmet and visor on the face.’

  ‘That’s cosmic, Celeste.’

  ‘OK, Agatha.’

  A rush of air erupted from below her feet. Then stopped. The lights in the airlock flicked to red.

  ‘One moment, please.’

  Aggie looked around; she couldn’t see anything that looked wrong. Panic crept over her skin. ‘Celeste?’

  The computer didn’t reply.

  The thick Plexiglas walls of the airlock started to constrict around Aggie. The air coming into the airlock suddenly felt thick and syrupy.

  ‘Celeste!’ She choked.

  There was dust. Heat. Her father’s face pressed against the glass, tears behind his glasses, red lights, the drone of the alarm—

  ‘Hey Agatha.’ The Ether swirled. ‘The G Face systems are experiencing some operational problems this morning.’

  The red light went out. There was a rush of cool air, and Aggie felt the floor vibrate as the airlock doors began to open.

  ‘Lunar Incorporated apologizes for any inconvenience.’

  Aggie shook herself and stepped shakily out of the airlock.

  ‘Stay bright, Agatha,’ Celeste said, before the doors whipped shut.

  The air on the other side of the airlock was thick with dust. Aggie stopped and sucked great mouthfuls of it, trying to calm herself down. She was just being a black hole. It was an airlock, the safest place in the world.

  A stream of orange- and black-dressed personnel were starting to make their way through the airlock now with no problem, smiling and chatting to the Ether as they passed. Why couldn’t she be like them? Some Angel of Adrianne she was going to be. She couldn’t stay cool if she tried.

  Aggie re-joined the queue of personnel who were walking down the rocky trail towards the mine. She fanned her face and took long dusty breaths. The last thing she wanted was for Mir-from-Earth-Relations to think she was weak.

  ‘Agatha?’ a voice suddenly permeated the dust beside her. A female voice, with an accent that sounded New Russian. Aggie cast around her and spotted a sky-blue outline a few metres away.

  ‘Yes?’ she shouted to the figure, tripping over a rock and coming skidding to a halt by a pair of perfectly shiny blue surface boots. She straightened up and found herself face to face with a pretty girl who m
ust have been Mir-from-Earth-Relations.

  Mir-from-Earth-Relations blinked, twice.

  Not one hair was out of place on Mir’s head, not one scrap of dust was visible on her overall. Aggie had been on the face for five minutes and already her overall was caked with grime.

  ‘Agatha?’ Mir asked again, looking her up and down.

  ‘Reporting for duty,’ Aggie said with a nervous laugh, patting her overall down self-consciously. She realized the trip had made her hair come loose, her bun was now dangling somewhere behind her left ear. With the dust and hair and panicky red face from the airlock, she must have looked like a clown.

  Mir’s green eyes shone against her dark skin as Aggie struggled to pull her unruly hair back into its tie.

  ‘Agatha Sommers?’ Mir repeated, glancing down at her forearm to check her notes.

  Aggie smiled. ‘The one and only.’

  Mir continued to look puzzled. The silence had started to get awkward.

  ‘I can take my contacts out if you like.’

  Mir jumped. ‘Earth, no!’

  ‘Oh no, it was a joke. I was joking! I couldn’t take them out here, anyway, with all the dust and grit. And, you know, gloves. It’d—’ Aggie stopped when she saw Mir’s face.

  ‘OK,’ Mir said with a quick glance at the top of Aggie’s head. ‘Let’s go, shall we?’

  Without saying anything else, the girl strode away into the depths of the mine. Aggie grimaced. That had not gone well. She’d never really tried it before, but making new friends clearly wasn’t her thing.

  Eventually Mir led Aggie onto the face and suddenly Aggie forgot about everything else. She had never seen the inside of a mining dome before. It knocked all the breath out of her.

  The face that spread out before her was a dirty, clanging maelstrom of machinery, sweat and noise. Under the glowing white of the gravity dome, it stretched for miles in every direction, the edges fading away into a flurry of dust and activity.

  Everywhere she looked, white, black, red and orange specks crawled over lumps of rock and machinery. Dust plumed from machines as they ground the moon rock with giant metal teeth, sending chunks cascading down into some unseen tunnel network that connected the faces to the underground lumite-processing plant. Spider-like builder machines crawled on the inside of the white dome, slowly stretching nano-fabric panels over the complex valves and ducts of the gravity generators that pumped and whirred, busily keeping the personnel’s feet on the ground as they worked.

  Aggie stood still for a long while, just taking it all in. She was amazed by G Face, by the scale of it, by the productivity inside it. Lumite was literally keeping the world running. A rush of pride washed over her with such force that she felt giddy. This was her godfather’s achievement.

  ‘Follow me, please, Agatha,’ Mir shouted and Aggie quickly stumbled after her before she lost her again. Mir didn’t walk, she marched.

  ‘We’ll see the staging area first, it’s in the centre of the face, quite a walk, better if we go quickly.’

  Mir led Aggie to where a great stage was being erected. A towering black column, surrounded by three huge vid screens, was flanked on one side by a colossal drill that made all the others on the face look minute and insignificant. The shining serrated teeth of its rotating drill discs hung just metres above the stage.

  ‘Now we’re away from the other personnel – I’m Mir,’ the girl said, offering Aggie a petite hand.

  Aggie dragged her eyes away from the face. Mir had stopped and was now standing beside her, looking up at the giant drill that framed the stage.

  ‘And I’m Aggie. I promise,’ Aggie said, concentrating on not crushing the girl’s tiny hand in her fist.

  Mir smiled in a polite way that suggested she still wasn’t completely sure.

  ‘That’s Daisy,’ she said, pointing to the massive drill. ‘The mine ops named it. It’s for luck, apparently.’ She’d started the march again and gestured for Aggie to follow. Aggie had to speed up to stay with her. ‘It’s box-fresh, actually. It’s the biggest drill on the whole mine. We should mention that, I think . . .’

  Mir typed something into the comms unit in her forearm. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she asked when she’d finished.

  Aggie’s stomach dropped. Oh no. She did not recognize Mir. Not at all. Aggie squinted. From Analysis? Surely not, she wasn’t over sixty.

  ‘We had Astro-Geology class together, at the Academy.’ Mir smiled. ‘With Seb? But he said you might not remember. You did keep to yourself a lot. I know why now, of course, but we did the assignment on the properties of silicon in lunar impact craters.’

  Aggie winced. ‘I’m sorry that I put you through that.’

  Mir laughed. ‘Ah no, you weren’t too bad. Seb was worse, I remember. If I’d known who you were, though, well –’ Mir mimed fainting and laughed. She looked down at the comms panel again, her face suddenly solemn. ‘My mom, she was a First Responder at Adrianne. She was there when they found you. She thought you were so brave, we all did.’

  Aggie felt as if she’d been kicked in the guts. When they’d found Aggie alive and digging desperately in the rubble, the First Responders had refused medical help so that they could join her, to look for survivors. They’d worked for days in the toxic air – they didn’t find anyone else.

  ‘I’m sorry Mir, my memories aren’t—’

  Mir waved her hand dismissively.

  ‘She was blinded, obviously,’ she continued tightly. ‘Of course she has implants, but still, she doesn’t see well.’

  Aggie felt the guilt of her survival bearing down on her shoulders. Mir’s mum had lost her sight because of her. The First Responders had sacrificed just as much as Aggie had – more, even – but United Earth only cared about its precious Angel.

  Aggie kicked a rock with her boot. For the first time in years she had someone her own age to confide in, and already the Angel’s legacy was ruining it.

  ‘Mir, I’m—’

  ‘So!’ Mir smiled, pulling herself together. She held her comms unit out in front of Aggie. ‘Please, I can’t tell her about you yet, obviously, but . . . it would mean a lot, to all of us.’

  Aggie hesitated, looking at the comms unit then back at Mir.

  Mir’s eyes went wide. ‘For you to sign, obviously!’

  ‘Oh, right. OK.’ Aggie quickly scrawled her name onto it and shoved it back.

  ‘Hmm,’ Mir said looking at the signature with a frown. ‘This won’t do. I’ll put, “Practise Angel signature” on your to-do list. No one knows you as “Aggie”.’

  Aggie’s mouth fell open.

  Mir caught her eye. ‘Oh, don’t worry, the next weeks are all about learning to deal with the public. Though you should teach me something about interview technique. I’ve been watching the archives. So competent for a child.’

  ‘I’ve repressed most of it,’ Aggie said to herself.

  Mir laughed this time. But it wasn’t a joke.

  Mir continued with her unnatural, supersonic speed as she led Aggie past the front of the stage, and through a tented seating area. ‘Backstage,’ she muttered as she inputted still more stuff into her comms. Mir was so neat, so efficient. It was a running joke that Tranquillity personnel never mixed with the other sciences in the Whole Earth Complex. Aggie understood why now – it was as if they were a different species.

  As Mir guided her through the tented ‘backstage’ area, Aggie started to feel eyes on her. She glanced around and saw gangs of red-overalled inmates looking back at her from the shadows.

  Prisoners’ inmate numbers glowed on the chests of their dusty overalls as they worked. Their faces were half hidden, underlit by the strings of LEDs around the edge of their visors. Aggie’s breath caught. The prisoners were here? They were allowed this close? She picked up her pace.

  They climbed up a narrow set of black steps, ducked under two more sets of curtains and finally emerged onto the stage itself.

  ‘So,’ Mir began matter-of-
factly, ‘the seating area will be out there, obviously; the VIP’s will be in the raised section there . . .’

  The stage was massive. Bigger than Aggie had ever imagined it could be from the ground. The huge screens hung above her head and on either side of her; they looked easily as tall as the Domestic Analysis building. Aggie imagined her face beamed up there, as big as a planet . . .

  A bright flash blinded her from Mir’s comms unit.

  And suddenly she was seven again, wearing a violet dress and sitting quietly on a small chair, its rough fabric itching the backs of her legs.

  ‘Off you go, little one,’ her godfather said with a warm smile, gesturing towards the line of cameras with blinking red lights.

  In the tiny, hot studio; people with clipboards and phones lurked in the shadows. She took a deep breath and spoke the words she’d rehearsed . . .

  Another bright white flash brought Aggie crashing back to reality.

  ‘Aggie? Hello? Are you still with me?’ Mir was standing in front of her, holding the comms unit in her forearm up in Aggie’s face. ‘You don’t mind me taking a vid, do you?’ she asked quickly. ‘But, maybe . . .’

  Aggie blinked hard and the world came back into focus. Mir was gesturing to her hair, which had now completely broken free of its tie and was flapping around her shoulders. She felt as if she’d been electrocuted. ‘Frag!’ she shouted, pulling it back and tying it so tightly it gave her an instant headache. If anyone saw—

  Aggie stopped.

  The ground shuddered beneath her boots.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Oh, just another quake, probably,’ Mir said, still staring into the crook of her arm, ‘nothing to concern us. If you’re higher, you feel them more.’

  Aggie looked down at her boots. The ground was making them vibrate visibly, the screens above them groaned and started to sway. She could feel her heart starting to race.

  ‘Let me show you the platform,’ Mir shouted, beckoning Aggie forwards as if she was a loyal old dog.