Masada's Gate

by Chris Pourteau

  The people had died, but the buildings survived. The dome had been rebuilt with new tech from the Erkennen Faction that could autoseal minor cracks. A heavily reinforced, rapidly deployable testudo shield—named for the ancient Roman formation of overlapping shields overhead, tortoise-like, to protect soldiers from enemy arrows—could be erected in under sixty seconds. The testudo had certainly proven its worth a couple of weeks ago, when a shuttle smashed into the orbital ring around Callisto, raining debris down and threatening to repeat history by destroying the colony’s three domes.

  Below the Longhouse, that first, doomed group’s storage units now served the Soldiers of the Solar Revolution as quarters, meeting rooms, and training grounds. Whenever Kwazi entered the oversized closet that housed his bed and a lone nightstand, he discovered both relief from Braxton’s arduous training schedule and a sinking sense of depression from the close confinement—every time.

  The room, windowless being underground, was cramped. Even at his modest height of five-foot-eleven, Kwazi had to stoop. Entering the small space reminded him of working a double shift in the Martian mines—eventually the rock felt too close, the air smelled too recycled. You got tired of seeing rusty-red dust everywhere, and a feeling of claustrophobia set in. Your life felt too dependent on technology you couldn’t control. Paranoia, a racing heart, a short-fused temper—Miner’s Mania, they called it.

  But that was the downside. The upside was that, once the SSR cut him loose, Kwazi could do whatever he wanted, as long as he did it below the surface. Away from the eyes of Callistans who would no doubt recognize him from SynCorp’s propaganda broadcasts. And away from Adriana Rabh’s faction agents, searching for him high and low on Helena Telemachus’s orders.

  He sat on his cot and stretched upward, luxuriating in the simple act of extending his neck. Calling up Dreamscape in his implant, Kwazi lay back against the chilly wall of his quarters. Before losing himself in the program, he set the alarm Braxton had requested. He couldn’t risk being denied Dreamscape again.

  He closed his eyes.

  The reality of his dark quarters disappeared, replaced by a sweeping vista of the Martian surface, muddy crimson and stretching to a semi-blue horizon, the color the result of the setting sun’s rays dancing along the thin atmosphere’s edges. He’d always hated having to wear a vac-suit during his walkabouts on Mars, but here in Dreamscape, breathable air was a given. Food and water—no need to worry about either. Dreamscape was about experiencing the unexplored limits of imagination, not attending to life’s mundane necessities.

  The flat disc of Olympus Mons stretched to the edges of his vision. It seemed to comprise the entirety of the Red Planet. The highest point on Mars, Olympus Mons appeared from orbit as a cloudy plateau with a single eye stamped at its center. But the eye was really just a depression, and the plateau’s contours the ancient engravings of the largest volcano in the solar system. A favorite thing to do when vacationing from his work below the surface had been to sit on a cliff’s edge of the grand plateau, marveling at Mars’s endless emptiness.

  Amanda Topulos sat there now, her back to him. The light, Martian breeze played with her blonde hair, the reddish haze highlighting its hint of strawberry. Kwazi thought it complemented her cheeks, which seemed just a tad bit windburned. So odd, seeing her without her vac-suit out here. Odd and wonderful.

  “How’s the training?” she asked without pulling her eyes from the view.

  Kwazi walked to the edge of the outcropping and sat down next to her. The wind tasted gritty, but it was more a sensation than dust entering his mouth. On Mars, everything felt gritty, all the time. That was one detail Dreamscape always fashioned exactly right from the fertile plains of his memory.

  “Painfully,” he said, a touch of wryness in his voice. “But better.”

  “That’s good. Better is good.”

  He glanced over at Amy. Kwazi still felt self-conscious sometimes about staring at her, like he hadn’t yet earned that intimate privilege. But he so enjoyed the simple pleasure of watching her admire the view he’d never had the chance to actually see with her when she was … but no, he wouldn’t think of her that way. She was alive to him, still. More alive, in some ways, than ever before. So he enjoyed watching her enjoy the view.

  From orbit, Mars could seem uniform and homogeneous and featureless and cold. Up close, especially from the heights of Olympus Mons, it was anything but. The wavy, red dunes gave the landscape character. Randomly scattered, innumerable rocks hinted at a past with a story behind it—a story of building and breaking down and rebuilding. Uniformity became consistency, reassuring in its predictability. Like the mild smile tugging at the corners of Amy’s lips now was predictable, but not boring for being so. Quiet and comfortable. Kwazi thought it was his favorite of her expressions.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  Her smile ticked up a notch. “How lucky I am,” she said. “To be here with you.”

  Kwazi snorted. “You’re the lucky one? You have no idea how long I wanted to ask you out. To spend time with you like this.”

  “Like this,” Amy repeated, gazing across Olympus Mons. Her tone—it was odd, he thought, as her gaze remained fixed on the horizon. It was almost like she was trying to avoid looking at him.

  “Something wrong?” he asked in the way you ask a question out of obligation. In here, nothing was supposed to be wrong. Everything was supposed to be exactly, unbearably right. Shaped from the perfection of the dreamer’s own desires for what they wanted the real world to be. What they wanted their relationships to be.

  Amy placed her hands on the dusty rock and adjusted her seat.

  “Well, we could have pillows,” she said.

  The relief rolled out of Kwazi as nervous laughter. He reached over and placed his hand lightly on the rock face, his fingers extending, shy and tentative, over hers. Being able to touch Amy in a way he never had in real life had proven something to Kwazi—that it was Dreamscape that was real, not his life outside it. Out there he’d been a miner, a mouthpiece for SynCorp, and now a member of the SSR. This was where he chose to exist as himself and not the Kwazi Jabari everyone else expected him to be. He merely walked through a door and found Amy, alive with her half smile.

  She rotated her hand, intertwining her fingers with his in a grip that was as human as any he’d ever felt. Fleshy and soft in the palm, bony and harder near the knuckles. He could feel the tendons working when she squeezed his hand. What wasn’t real about any of that? And when she turned to face him, her strawberry smile warmed him from his core like a tiny sun; the heat, the feeling of life moved outward along his limbs. Kwazi wondered if she felt the same life force pulsing through his palm, his fingers. If she felt the same sharing of togetherness.

  “I love you, Kwazi,” Amy said. The breeze snatched a length of blonde hair across her eyes, and she reached up to brush it aside. She turned to face him, the view seemingly forgotten. “I don’t know how you did this, but I love you for it.”

  Her voice was like a scream heard from miles away, a reminder that this was other.

  “You don’t…”

  But before he could finish his thought, Amy reached over and caressed his cheek with her thumb, wiping away the Martian grit. Then she leaned in and kissed him with lips he’d only ever imagined kissing before. The substance of this reality was overwhelming, and Kwazi forgot the scream of doubt and surrendered to this singular, perfect moment on Mars he was sharing with the woman he loved.

  Chapter 5

  Ruben Qinlao • Point Bravo, the Moon

  Richard Strunk laid Tony on the gray-dust ground inside Point Bravo sounding station. Ruben spun the wheel of the access door’s locking mechanism clockwise, sealing out the airless surface, then wiped the thick lunar powder off the atmo gauge. Slowly, like mercury in an old-fashioned thermometer, the digital level began to rise again.

  Strunk was watching the gauge too. Through the visor of the enforcer’s snug vac-suit, Rube
n could see the uncertainty on Strunk’s face. Even after the indicator phased to green. Strunk tapped the side of his helmet with an index finger, then engaged comms.

  “You first.”

  Ruben decided the situation presented them both with a perfect teaching moment. Richard Strunk liked to lean on his bulk and baritone voice for authority—even when talking to Ruben, a regent who was every bit his boss Tony Taulke was. Ruben verified his own suit’s readings, then double-checked the digital display next to the bulkhead’s door. Unsnapping his helmet, he removed it and took a deep, dramatic breath. The air was there, but it tasted like dust feels—coarse and dirty. Ruben kept that off his face, offering Strunk a smile instead.

  “All clear.”

  As he slowly unfastened his helmet, Strunk mumbled something he wasn’t sharing over comms. He took a tentative breath and set the helmet aside.

  “Lucky the damned seals still work,” he said. “Why would they keep air in this place, anyway? Ain’t it abandoned?”

  Ruben stared out the porthole of Point Bravo’s access door. The Roadrunner rested, half buried by lunar sand. Between her rough landing and her unreliable engines, he couldn’t see how she’d ever be spaceworthy again. In losing the Roadrunner, Ruben realized he was losing one more thing that tied him to his sister Ming’s memory. The small ship with a big heart had helped him shoot a middle finger at Cassandra’s attempted assassination of Tony. It had provided a way around the Company’s tracking system controlled by the enemy. Now the wreck outside was just another footnote in SynCorp history.

  A history that might soon come to a bloody end.

  “Hey, Qinlao, did you hear me? Why’s there even air down—”

  Ruben turned away from the window. “It’s Regent Qinlao.” Ruben set his sentimentality aside and gave Tony Taulke’s bodyguard his full attention. “We should get something straight. In the shuttle I indulged a certain familiarity warranted by circumstance. Now is different. Now you need to understand something: as long as Tony’s unconscious, you work for me. Am I clear?”

  Strunk stared, nonplussed. Was he about to pull his stunner and shoot, or did the old ways hold? Ruben imagined him considering Cassandra’s need for an oversized enforcer and the compensation for providing such services. But when he spoke, Strunk’s voice was contrite: “Yes, Regent.”

  Nodding and hoping his relief wasn’t obvious, Ruben advanced across the small space between them. He took a little satisfaction in seeing Strunk, a man twice his size, fall back a few inches, allowing him access to Tony. Ruben didn’t care much for the hierarchy demanded by SynCorp’s leadership, but in Strunk’s case he’d needed to reaffirm who was in charge. Ruben cringed at how elitist his own thoughts sounded in his head.

  “To answer your question, when the United Nations built LUNa City, they embraced the ‘waste not, want not’ philosophy.” He knelt to unfasten Tony’s helmet. With a phish, suit atmo mingled with the musty air. “Since Point Bravo was tied to Point Charlie, where the city was finally founded, they used the tunnel connecting the checkpoints as part of the oxygen recycling system for the new colony. Water beneath the surface is mined for its oxygen, made into the hybrid of breathable air, and piped into the city. Thanks to the tunnel connecting the two sounding points, we have air to breathe.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Strunk. “How do you know all that?”

  “My sister Ming was the lead engineer for the United Nations when LUNa City was built,” Ruben replied. “We lived here for a while when I was a kid. She taught me all about that stuff.”

  “Okay.” Strunk’s tone expressed a compromise between respect for the answer and a layman’s desire that he hadn’t asked the question in the first place. “How’s Tony?”

  “Stable,” Ruben breathed. Tony Taulke’s color was sallow, but his breathing was strong. The antibiotics and pain meds from the Roadrunner seemed to be doing their job despite being way past their expiration date.

  Strunk stood up, and Ruben felt the size of the man’s shadow extend over him. The enforcer moved off to conduct his own overwatch of the lunar surface.

  “Your little ship took it hard on the jaw,” Strunk said. Ruben heard it as an attempt at casual conversation. So, the big man was trying. Maybe it was Strunk’s way of apologizing for having broken decorum earlier.

  “Like I said before,” Ruben answered with more sadness than he’d expected, “she won’t fly again.”

  “I don’t like that we’re stuck here without transportation.” Ruben could hear the tactician’s judgment in Strunk’s voice. “I don’t like it at all.”

  “Neither do I,” Ruben said, rising. “And there’s worse news still.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Our medical implants? They’re like homing beacons to SynCorp Central.”

  Strunk took a minute to process that. “You’re saying they can track us.”

  “Yeah—if Cassandra has access to Gregor Erkennen’s databases.”

  “Through our SCIs?”

  “Yeah. Once she matches a frequency with a DNA profile… But it’s possible she doesn’t have access yet. All we’ve seen is a lot of talk on CorpNet. So she’s got control of the subspace network. But Gregor’s security protocols for the Company’s databases are tight. It’s possible, maybe even likely, she doesn’t have access. Yet.”

  “That’s likely only a matter of time, though.” Strunk exhaled. “Motherfucker.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They find us, they find…” Strunk paused, staring at his helpless boss. “Tony’s got one too.”

  “Everyone does.”

  Strunk edged closer to the two regents, clenching and unclenching his fists. Like he was preparing for an attack. “We have to turn them off.”

  “My thinking, too.”

  “Know how to do that?”

  “Nope. I’m not a doctor.”

  Strunk’s eyes moved while he thought. “I could cut them out.”

  Ruben eyed him.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it.”

  The enforcer began casting around, looking for useful tools. He moved toward an old, wooden workbench.

  “Yeah, we’re not going to do that,” Ruben said.

  Strunk halted. “We have to—”

  “Even if I was comfortable with you cutting into Tony’s head, we can’t deactivate his medical implant. It’s helping to keep him alive.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “And we need to supplement his care with something else if we do deactivate it. Fischer gave us the name of that doctor in Darkside: Brackin. I’ll go get him and bring him here. You watch over Tony till I get back.”

  But Strunk was shaking his head. “Too dangerous. You’ll be recognized.”

  Ruben reached down and filled one palm with moondust, spat in it, then worked it with a finger like stirring soup before applying it to his face.

  “Facial rec will see past that,” Strunk said. Ruben continued roughing up his look. “I should go.”

  “I’ll find a hat or something. You forget, I used to live here. I went to school here as a kid. I know the place.”

  Faced with logic, Strunk closed his mouth.

  “All right. How long will you be gone?”

  “Several hours, at least. The lunar gravity will help me quick-travel through the tunnel. Once I come up in Darkside, I’ll need to be more discreet.”

  Strunk reached into his pocket and pulled out his stunner. Ruben wondered if he’d suddenly reconsidered signing up with the SSR. The assassin turned the pistol over and held it out butt-first. “Take it.”

  “I don’t need it,” Ruben said. He ignored Strunk’s raised eyebrow, a wise guy’s amusement at a rich man’s arrogance. “It’ll only raise questions if it’s found. In fact, here,” Ruben said, reversing the offer and handing Strunk his own stunner. “Take mine.”

  Strunk took it.

  “I have other, quieter options.” Ruben pulled out the katara daggers he’d taken from E
lissa Kisaan, whom he’d left a prisoner on Mars. “And I know how to defend myself.”

  Richard Strunk nodded. “I remember the fight on the station.” Ruben could see a grudging respect in his eyes.

  “Best get going,” Strunk said, settling down next to Tony. He looks like a worried son, Ruben thought. “The sooner, the better.”

  “Right.”

  • • •

  Ruben stared through the horizontal louvers of the air duct. His journey from Point Bravo to Point Charlie, then up through the air tunnel and into the bowels of mankind’s first off-planet colony, had gone as smoothly as he’d hoped it would. Now he stood in an accessway reserved for maintenance personnel that ran parallel to the public thruway, awaiting his chance to slip in among the foot traffic of Darkside’s population.

  Boy, had LUNa City changed.

  Make that Darkside, he reminded himself. The “pride of the UN,” as the colony had once been called, had long ago ceased being that.

  During his twelve-kilometer hike to Point Charlie, Ruben had wondered how he’d feel once he entered the city proper. Somehow, he’d never visited the Moon since briefly living here with his sister Ming. Their stay had ended rather abruptly, but Ruben was still able to unearth fond memories when he looked hard enough inside himself to find them. Of school friends and schoolwork and the life of a teenager, each day both excruciatingly boring and more fiercely significant than the last. Of being incarcerated briefly for breaking a bully’s nose. Of a red-haired girl named Angel, and his first kiss in a 3D sim-parlor.

  The people passing in the corridor beyond the louvers, murmuring their daily lives to one another, seemed both warmly familiar and utterly foreign at the same time.

  The United Nations had founded LUNa City as the indelible footprint of humanity’s first giant leap off the Big Blue Marble. When the Syndicate Corporation expanded into the solar system, the Moon and the newly renamed Darkside’s End were the diving board the Company leapt from to colonize the outer system. Darkside’s End: a bright city on a dull, gray hill that showed what the collective brain of Man could conquer with a little innovation spiced with muscle, grit, and determination. It had been a privilege to live here then, a goal parents touted to children—if they worked hard enough in school and dreamed beyond the limits of an Earth dying from a world climate stretched to the breaking point.