by Ian McDonald
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
The Mackenzie Metals–Corta Helio war broke the powerful Corta family and scattered the survivors. Ariel Corta, paralysed from the waist down after an assassination attempt, escapes into anonymity in Meridian’s High City with her bodyguard and truest friend, Marina Calzaghe, until a summons from Jonathan Kayode, the Eagle of the Moon, to be his one true adviser among a host of enemies who would dethrone him, calls her back into lunar society. Wagner Corta, the wolf, ekes out an existence as a worker on Taiyang’s sun-belt – a girdle of solar panels around the moon’s equator. His life alternates between his work team and his wolf-pack until he becomes guardian and protector of Robson Corta, who had been held as a hostage by Bryce Mackenzie, Head of Finance of Mackenzie Metals. Now he must choose between his wolf-nature and caring for the vulnerable Robson. Lucasinho and Luna Corta are safe under the protection of the Asamoahs at Twé, though Lucasinho frets at his confinement. And Lucasinho’s father, Lucas, has taken the boldest step of all. The Moon believes him dead, but he escaped to VTO’s orbiter and over the course of a year, transformed himself into something felt to be impossible: a moon-born capable of surviving Earth’s gravity. Not for long – just enough for him to cement deals he has been making while looping between moon and Earth. He forms a consortium of terrestrial governments, corporations, capital funds and, with the Vorontsovs and their orbital mass-driver as a deadly space-based weapon, seeks to take back what was stolen from his family. He also brings back Alexia, the first Earth-born Corta in two generations to brave the glory and terror of the moon.
To succeed, first Lucas must sow confusion. His mother Adriana, founder of Corta Helio, implanted attack code inside the control systems of Crucible, the Mackenzie’s immense foundry-train. A simple command – issued by Alexia after Lucas is almost killed by lift-off from Earth – destroys Crucible. Lives are lost, including Robert Mackenzie, CEO of Mackenzie Metals. His sons, Duncan and Bryce, battle for control of the company. Duncan controls the traditional refining industry, Bryce the helium-3 business taken from the Cortas. Their vicious civil war threatens to engulf the whole moon and destabilise the vital helium-3 market upon which Earth depends. Lucas has his opportunity and strikes. The moon is an industrial colony, not a nation state; it has no defences. Combat units drop from orbit to storm and occupy key infrastructure sites, VTO’s mass-driver threatens the whole nearside of the moon, the Dragons fight back but when Twé, the prime agriculture site for the whole moon, is besieged, there is no option but to surrender in the face of starvation.
In the chaos, Lucasinho and Luna escape from besieged Twé but find themselves marooned on the surface with the only path to safety a perilous trek through the fringes of the invasion. When Luna’s suit is compromised, Lucasinho gives her his last breaths of air. She brings him to safety but can even a Moonrunner survive that long without oxygen?
Terrestrial machines and mercenaries occupy Meridian. Jonathan Kayode is defenestrated and Lucas Corta, a shadow of his former self, physically ruined by the harshness of his visit to Earth, is installed as Eagle of the Moon with Alexia as his Iron Hand. His first job is to try to recruit Ariel to his side, but she refuses, though it puts her in great danger. Every one of the Four Dragons wants leverage and Cortas are hostages-of-choice. Bryce Mackenzie makes an attempt to capture Robson Corta but is foiled. Wagner and Robson escape to the comparative safety of Theophilus in the Sea of Tranquillity.
Lucas Corta is triumphant. The moon is his: what will he do with it?
NEAR SIDE of THE MOON
ONE
Eight figures escort the casket across the Sea of Fecundity. Four to carry, one at each handle; four to guard the cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. They shuffle in heavy armoured shell-suits. Dust scuffs high from their boots. When carrying a casket, co-ordination is everything and the bearers have not yet learned the required rhythm. They lurch, they jolt, they leave smeared tracks, blurred footsteps on the regolith. They move like walkers unaccustomed to walking on the surface of the moon, to the suits they wear. Seven white shell-suits and one, the last, scarlet and gold. Each white suit bears an emblem out of time and place: a sword, an axe, a fan, a mirror, a bow, a crescent moon. The lead walks with the aid of a furled umbrella, silver tipped, the handle a human face, one half living, one half naked bone. The tip stitches precise holes in the regolith.
It has never rained in the Sea of Fecundity.
The casket has a porthole. This would be unseemly in a coffin; this is not a coffin. This is a medical life-support pod, designed to protect and preserve the injured on the surface of the moon. Behind the window is a young man’s face, brown-skinned, high strong cheekbones, thick black hair, full lips, closed eyes. This is Lucasinho Corta. He has been in a coma for ten days; ten days that have rung the moon to its core like a stone bell. Ten days in which Eagles fell and rose, a soft war was fought and lost on the stone oceans of Luna and the old order of the moon was swept away by the new order of Earth.
These ungainly figures are the Sisters of the Lords of Now and they bear Lucasinho Corta to Meridian. Seven Sisters, plus one; the back-marker in incongruous scarlet and gold. Luna Corta.
‘Is there word of the ship?’ Mãe de Santo Odunlade tsks in frustration and peers at the tags on her helmet display, trying to identify the questioner. The Sisterhood of the Lords of Now by doctrine eschews the network. Learning a shell-suit interface is a sharp curve. The Mãe de Santo finally identifies Madrinha Elis as the speaker.
‘Soon,’ Mãe Odunlade says and raises the umbrella to point to the eastern horizon, where the ship from Meridian will touch down. The umbrella is the sigil of Oxala the Originator. With the sword, the axe, the mirror, the bow, the fan, the crescent, it is an instrument of the orixas. The Sisterhood bears not just the sleeping prince but the sacred emblems. All Santinhos understand the symbolism. João de Deus is no longer the city of the saints.
Ship on approach, the Mãe’s suit says. In the same instant the horizon seems to leap into the sky. Rovers. Dozens of them. Fast, hard, bearing down. HUDs sparkle with hundreds of glowing red contacts.
The Mackenzies are here.
‘Firm, my sisters,’ Mãe Odunlade cries. The cortège marches forward towards the line of blazing headlights. The lights blind but she will not lift an arm to shade her eyes.
Mãe, the ship has committed to landing, the suit says.
A rover pulls out of the encirclement and swings in to confront Mãe Odunlade. She lifts the sacred umbrella high. The cortège halts. Seats descend, safety bars lift, figures in the green and white sasuits of Mackenzie Helium drop to the regolith. They reach for holsters across their backs and d
raw long objects. Rifles.
‘This can’t be permitted, Mother.’
Mãe Odunlade bridles at the familiarity. No respect, not even Portuguese. She locates the speaker on her HUD.
‘Who are you?’
‘I am Loysa Divinagracia,’ says the woman at the centre of the armed posse. ‘I am Head of Security for Mackenzie Helium, North-East Quartersphere.’
‘This young man requires advanced medical attention.’
‘Mackenzie Helium would be honoured to offer the services of our fully equipped company med centre.’
Sixty seconds to touchdown, the suit says. The ship is the brightest, fastest star in the sky.
‘I am taking him to his father.’ The Mãe de Santo steps forward.
‘I can’t allow that.’ Loysa Divinagracia plants a hand on Mãe Odunlade’s breastplate. Mãe Odunlade smacks the woman’s hand away with the sacred umbrella, follows with a blow to the side of her helmet. Such insolence. Polymer cracks, atmosphere jets, then the suit heals and seals.
Guns level.
The Sisters of the Lords of Now close in around the life-support pod. The sword of Ogun is drawn, the axe of Xango, the bow, the razor-edged fan. How can the orixas be honoured, if their emblems are without practical use?
Luna Corta lifts her cumbersome arms to shoulder height. Sheathes unlock, magnets engage: knives fly to her hands and dock. The light of Earth in its first quarter, low on the western rim of the world, glints from the edges of the meteoric iron blades: the battle-knives of the Cortas.
We have protected them, Mãe de Santo Odunlade said, in the biolight-glow of the room where Lucasinho lay in the Mother House. Until a Corta comes who is bold, great-hearted, without avarice or cowardice, who will fight for the family and defend it bravely. A Corta who is worthy of these blades.
Carlinhos had been the family fighter. He had owned these knives before her. He had shown her the moves once, with chopsticks for blades. He scared her; the speed, the way that he became something she did not know.
Carlinhos had died on the edge of these knives.
Madrinha Elis steps between Luna and the ring of rifles.
‘Put the knives away, Luna.’
‘I will not,’ Luna says. ‘I am a Corta and Cortas cut.’
‘Do as your madrinha says, wilful child,’ Mãe de Santo Odunlade says. ‘It is only the suit makes you big.’
Luna falls back with a sullen hiss but she does not reholster her beautiful knives.
‘Let us through,’ Mãe Odunlade says on the common channel, and Luna hears the Mackenzie woman answer, Give us Lucasinho Corta and you are free to leave.
‘No,’ Luna whispers and then she, the Sisters, the pod, the Mackenzie blades are drenched in blinding light. The dazzle breaks into hundreds of separate lights; rovers, dustbikes, the navigation lights of shell-suits and sasuits, all racing across the dark regolith. A vast plume of dust rises beyond them, casting moonbows in the diffracted Earth-light. They bear down on the Mackenzie encirclement. At the last minute blades and shooters flee as a wedge of rovers, dustbike outriders and a host of running dusters splits open the Mackenzie line.
From aerials and masts, from rigging wires and struts, from rovers and suitpacks and shoulder mounts, stencilled on the helmets and chestplates of surface armour, spray-painted, fast-printed, graffitied in vacuum marker: the half-black, half-white mask of Our Lady of the Thousand Deaths, Dona Luna.
João de Deus has risen.
The wedge of dusters unfolds into a phalanx of pikes and spears. Dustbikers brace polearms against footpegs. Luna saw a thing in a story like that when she was a very small kid, a crazy bit of old Earth: metal men sitting on big metal animals, with long spears tucked under their arms. Knights-in-armour, Luna’s familiar tells her, remembering as she remembers. Knights with lances.
Blue lights flicker high above the encamped armies: the attitude thrusters of a VTO moonship manoeuvring over the Mackenzie lines to a safe landing site. The main engine gives a final, brief burn as the ugly amalgam of fuel tanks, radiator panels and structural beams comes in for landing.
Gauntlets and gloves tighten on spear shafts. Pikes brace. Fingers close on dustbike steering bars.
‘Luna,’ Madrinha Elis says.
‘I’m ready,’ Luna says. Luna’s suit is primed, the power reserves activated. Give the word, and it will run, run faster than her own legs could ever carry her. She knows the feats a standard-issue suit can achieve: she used them when she carried Lucasinho, anoxic, by any standard dead, to the refuge of Boa Vista. ‘I’ve done this before.’
The dust from the moonship’s descent burn engulfs Santinhos and Mackenzies. Madrinha Elis shouts, Go, child.
Run, she orders but the suit is already in motion.
So are the Mackenzies. The moment of surprise is over; rovers peel off to outflank the Santinho dustbike cavalry and cut off the path to the ship. Santinho foot-soldiers charge to intercept the Mackenzie force and hold open the way.
A body falls. A figure in a sasuit twists and goes down. A shell-suit splinters into flying shards. The Mackenzie guns have opened up. A helmet shatters. A head flies into bloody smash; the banners of Dona Luna fall, one by one. Now Luna sees the blood, the plugs of flesh, the body fluids gouting into vacuum.
Sister Eloa of the Crescent of Iansa goes down at Luna’s side, tumbling and rolling. The top of her head has been ripped away. Slugs are flying unseen all around Luna but she can’t think of them, can’t think of anything but the moonship, settling on its landing gear, unfolding a ramp from its transport pod.
‘Luna!’ Mãe Odunlade’s voice on the private channel. ‘Take the right side of the casket. The suit can handle it.’
‘Mãe…’
‘Elis will take the other side.’
‘Mãe…’
‘Don’t argue, child!’
Her armoured hand locks on to one of the handles. The gyros stabilise the weight. She sees her madrinha lock on to the other handle.
Santinhos engage Mackenzies. Two, ten, twenty, drop under withering fire but there are always more spears, more pikes. Hand-to-hand violence, close, intimate, passionate as sex. Spear points drive deep, punch through bodies from front to back, tear suit, skin, bone, shatter visors and stab down through faces, skulls, brains.
‘What’s happening?’ she asks on Madrinha Elis’s private channel.
‘They’re buying us time, anjinho.’
The phalanx of spears reforms, links, locks, lunges in attack. The shooters break and retreat. In that instant, between the walls of pikes, Luna feels her suit tighten its grip on the handle of her cousin’s casket, lean forward and sprint for the ship. She hits the ramp at full speed, brakes hard to avoid the rear bulkhead of the transport pod. Crew in sasuits secure the pod. Luna feels the deck vibrate through her boot haptics.
Main engine burn in ten nine eight …
Luna’s final glance through the closing doors is of the remaining Sisters of the Lords of the Now, white suits back to back, the sigils of the orixas held high. Around them, a ring of pikes, and the bold banners of Our Lady of the Thousand Deaths. Beyond, the Mackenzies, numerous as stars. Then the engine fires and dust covers everything.
* * *
Mãe de Santo Odunlade watches the moonship lift from the blinding dust on a diamond of rocket-light.
Meridian will harbour them. Meridian will heal them. The Eagle of the Moon will take them under his wings.
The Santinhos encircle the Sisters with pikes and lances. So many down, so many dead. This is a terrible place to die.
Mãe Odunlade finds the icon for the common channel.
‘The regolith has drunk enough blood,’ she calls to every duster and Santinho in the Sea of Fecundity, to every blade and mercenary, to Bryce Mackenzie, wherever he hides himself.
The Mackenzie gunline stands firm.
‘There is no need for anyone else to die out here.’
Two rovers start from the rear of the encirclement, acceler
ating with startling speed in pursuit of the moonship, now a constellation of hazard lights, burning westwards. Mechanisms unfold from the backs of the rovers; things with multiple barrels, belts of ammunitions. Gods and spirits, those things are fast. Already they are on the horizon. Streamers of light arc up – seeking the lights of the VTO ship. Mãe de Santo Odunlade does not know what she is seeing but she understands what it means. If Bryce Mackenzie cannot have Lucasinho Corta, no one will. And she understands another truth. There will be no mercy here for anyone who lifted hand and blade in the name of the Cortas.
‘In the name of Oxala, light of light, ever-living, ever-fearful, ever-sure!’ Mãe de Santo Odunlade raises the umbrella high above her head. Opens it. As one, the remaining Sisters lift high their sigils. The sword of Ogun, the fan of Yemanja, the bow of Oxossi, the axe of Xango.
The shooting begins.
* * *
Luna can’t unlock her fist from the medical pod. Lucasinho is free, Lucasinho is safe; she should let go of him now, but the suit reads a truth she can’t acknowledge and won’t release her. This suit: she feels she has been in it forever. This suit, it has protected her, guided her, helped her. Betrayed her, endangered her.
A memory: Lucasinho wrapping tape around the joint seal where razor-edged moondust ate away the pleated fabric, step after step, kilometre after kilometre, until the joint blew out. She touches the knee joint, the glove haptics relay the rough imperfection of the binding. She had not noticed the patch when the Mãe de Santo had told her to come now, child, suit up, we are leaving.
Where are we going, Mãe?
Meridian. The Eagle has sent a ship for his son.
She pulled on a suit-liner, stepped into the huge hulk, the haptic rig embraced her and the shell sealed and she was back in the lock at Lubbock BALTRAN station and Lucasinho was calling her to step forward. The suit does all the work.