by Ian McDonald
* * *
Amanda Sun thrusts her mittened hands in her armpits for warmth and shivers in her quilted warmsuit. Cold is psychological, she tells herself, watching the children, cute as cuddle-bears in their brightly patterned warmsuits, throwing a handball in low, fast passes. Bodies weave and block, jump and shoot at the improvised goals markered on the sides of two habitation containers. Young voices shout and cheer in high-pitched Portuguese.
‘I think I like Boa Vista better this way.’ Her breath steams. ‘There were never enough children. Too quiet.’
‘I never liked this place,’ Lucas Corta says. Thermal boots clump down the ramp from the service locks to the floor of the great chamber. Engineers have run up lighting pylons; pools of floodlight step down the length of the old Corta palace, each one illuminating a rosette of habitats huddled around a generator and a steaming water recycler. The faces of the orixas are starkly underlit; shadowed and judgemental. Construction bots spider through the gloom, making fast the gas seal. Frost coats the mummified grass, edges the flash-frozen leaves. Ice locks the stream and mutes the cascades, frosts the tumbled pillars and domes of the pavilions. It is long, slow work to raise the rock temperature from the moon’s background minus twenty to skin-warmth. The children play and the voices echo from the icy stone faces.
‘Yet here you are,’ Amanda says.
‘It was an affront to me.’ Nelson Medeiros’s escoltas and Sun wushis with sharp haircuts follow discreetly.
‘You’ve never taken affront well.’
‘Thank you. I don’t intend to live here.’ Lucas and Amanda leave the children playing behind. Oxala and Yemanja look down on a herd of moondozers, assiduously scraping the dead vegetation from the habitat floor and loading it into recycling dumpsters. ‘I have an idea of wilding,’ Lucas says. The big machines steer carefully away from the soft, padded humans. ‘My mother was disgusted by living creatures. She saw them as pollution. I like the idea of letting life run rampant. Vines crawling up the faces of the orixas; creepers growing from the eyes. Birds and crawling things and noises you hear but can’t see. Life preying on life.’
‘You never showed that kind of imagination when we were married.’
‘Imagination was never in the contract.’
‘A lot of things were never in the contract, thank the gods.’
The furthest third of Boa Vista has been scraped down to the base anorthosite, bone-bare, a cleaned-out skull. Bins of growing medium and biomass await distribution. In the quadrangles between the residential containers men and women drill with knives and batons. Shouted orders, instructions, guidance: a touch on a wrist here, a shoulder there, an arm taken to show the true move, the sure parry.
‘Bryce Mackenzie must be ecstatic over you recruiting a private army at his door,’ Amanda says.
‘I offer needed employment to helium workers who have lost their contracts due to the commercial mismanagement of Mackenzie Helium,’ Lucas says.
‘Cortas always did look after their own,’ Amanda Sun says.
‘Ariel tells me you tried to contract her.’
‘She’ll have told you what she told me,’ Amanda says.
‘I will be having a conversation with her.’
‘She won’t take your contract.’
‘Family is family,’ Lucas Corta says. Yellow tape across a temporary seal warns of vacuum beyond. Amanda Sun peers through the porthole to see rubble, old dust, a new elevator and piles of construction material. ‘This is where they blew the emergency lock. The whole of Boa Vista depressurised through here. We found Rafa half a kilometre away, on the surface.’
‘Enough, Lucas.’
‘Squeamish, from a woman who tried to kill me?’
‘As I said to your sister, you weren’t Eagle of the Moon then.’
Lucas grimaces.
He has become weak at hiding his feelings, Amanda Sun observes. Earth has stretched him, broken him.
‘I will fight with every breath and heartbeat to keep Lucasinho out of the Palace of Eternal Light.’
‘You misunderstand me, Lucas. Lucasinho is served best at the university. We will not argue that he be moved to Shackleton. The university will rebuild his memories. Of course you care, you care deeply, but with you, Lucasinho will always be in danger. With me, he’ll have stability, care. Protection. Love. You Cortas, the only thing you ever needed to learn was how to love right. But you never did.’
The junshi whispers at the same instant that Zhen, Amanda’s familiar, sounds the security alert. She sees from Lucas’s face that he has received the same message.
‘We should evacuate,’ Lucas says as escoltas and wushis fall into defensive patterns. ‘Boa Vista is under attack.’
* * *
‘What’s happening?’ The common channel is a tumult of voices, shouts, terrified cries. Suit lights bob and flash in the absolute dark. Name tags flicker on Finn Warne’s lens; his suit HUD shows ghost-figures surging down the tunnel. ‘Report!’
‘Contact!’ Charlie Tumahai from the demolitions team.
‘How many?’ Finn Warne asks.
‘Fucking Brasilians coming out of the walls!’ Charlie Tumahai shouts. His identity tag flashes white, fades.
‘Fuck!’ Finn Warne shouts. Mining Santa Barbra lock: routine. Mining São Sebastião elevators: piece of piss. All João de Deus’s service locks, secondary and emergency locks, the BALTRAN ports, the train station; the air conditioning and water plants: all planted with tamper-proof demolition charges. He had handpicked his team. No Santinhos. Only the most staunch from Mackenzie Helium’s field operations. The old tram tunnel: last and piss easiest. Cut off the last escape. Now that escape is an invasion. The Cortas are coming.
‘Jaime! Sadiki! Anyone!’
‘What are your orders, boss?’ Nicola Gan, from the east Procellarum engineering team.
Orders. Orders.
‘Pull back. Get out of there.’ Finn Warne freezes momentarily in his hard shell, in darkness, necessities wheeling around him. What to do? ‘Take everything with you.’
‘Boss…’
‘Everything. If they find one of the charges, they’ll work out how to defuse them.’
The bobbing helmet lights far up the tunnel swivel and fix on him.
‘Move move move!’
Sprint, he orders his suit.
The surge of speed knocks the breath from lungs, the sense from his brain, everything but the oval of light before him: the tunnel terminus, João de Deus. Five seconds of sprint remaining, his familiar says. Four. Three. Two. One. He slides into the former station, gasping.
‘Nicki.’
‘Boss.’
‘I need you to stay as a marker.’
‘What’s your idea?’
He goes to the common channel.
‘Crew, arm and drop all explosives. Sauve qui peut.’
Finn Warne can see the white tags of his jackaroos strung along the tunnel. They’re not soldiers, they’re not fighters; they are engineers, surface workers. And he can’t get everyone out. The first of his squad arrive. He clicks away from the common channel to Nicola Gan.
‘Nicki, get out of there. I’m blowing the tunnel.’
‘Boss, Sadiki and Brent are still back there.’
‘Get out of there. Run!’
‘Fuck you!’
There’s not enough time. There is never enough time.
Shoot, he commands.
A flash of light, far down the tram line. The station quakes. A tectonic rumble. Nicola Gan arrives in the old station as Finn Warne’s squad start to cycle through the locks.
Familiar: message to Bryce Mackenzie. João de Deus has been secured.
The lock cycles, four more dust-blackened jackaroos step into the chamber.
We have sustained casualties.
SIX
At twenty kilometres per hour, Ariel Corta rolls down Kondakova Prospekt. She has worked it out most carefully. Seven minutes to Meridian Station. Her batteries are fully
charged but she will use sixty per cent of her power at full speed on the streets. She will get to the platform with twenty seconds to spare on twenty per cent power. VTO trains run to the millisecond. Lucas will begin to suspect when she is within two minutes of the station. But in a move to placate the citizens of Meridian he has pulled his bots off the prospekts. Hateful things, spiky and twitchy, threatening dismemberment, impaling, remorseless blood. People loathed them; kids had been slashed trying to upend them or tip them over the street barrier or immobilising them with zip-ties. Old women spat at them. Memories of occupation, of machines logging and registering every one of Meridian’s seven hundred thousand habitants, of siege, of destruction and deaths out on the killing mares, were strong and close. Only a few recognise them, and the smiling, tea-drinking, taser-armed mercenaries who replaced the bots, for what they are: a thing the moon had never known and never needed. A police force.
Stealth. Ariel has shut down Beija Flor and uses what cover she can but she is the most famous wheelchair user on the moon and heads turn, comments pass. She trusts in stubborn human indifference. She rolls into a knot of Long Runners to slide past two gendarmes loitering in the sunline dapple of trees that run down the centre of Kondakova Prospekt. A little mental kick of the chair control brings her up to speed with the runners. Bodies in much paint and few clothes, tassles and bangles and war-stripes, fall effortlessly into place around her. She can barely remember the holy colours of the orixas. There’s defiance in the endless circle of motion. Running as resistance.
Marina had been a Long Runner.
Marina will be often in her thoughts. Lone travel is a melancholy, meditative journey.
The hub rises before her, the enormous central chamber from which the three quadras radiate. She can’t but cast an eye up to her brother’s Eyrie. There are orchards up there, of oranges and bergamots still bearing traces of decorative silver leaf from the disastrous wedding of Lucasinho Corta.
Meridian Station. She braces herself against the small lurch as the chair locks to the moving stairway and carries her down to the plaza. Meridian Station is thronged at every hour; she guides her chair from knot to knot of passengers, arriving, departing, greeting extravagantly, making tearing farewells. There are cameras here. Seeing is one thing, noticing another. Everyone is surveilled, no one is looking.
Ariel joins the throng of passengers on the stairways down to the platforms. She opens up Beija Flor and buys her ticket as her chair unclicks from the escalator treads and rolls on to the platform. Her chair knows the embarkation area and drives her to the correct lock. The lighting turns the walls of pressure glass into mirrors of ghosts and deceptions. Two minutes. The old Polar Express north is on time. She’ll tell Lucas when she is well over the top of the world. She owes him an explanation for why she will not represent him in the Court of Clavius.
She has never been to Farside. She knows the Nearsider myths and legends; that it is a web of old, leaking tunnels, tight and claustrophobic, chaotic, choked with the bodies and odours and breaths of tens of thousands of students. Like a bloodstream, or a nervous system. The old apartment up in Bairro Alto had been tight and cramped, full as a double-yolked egg with her and Marina. She woke many a night imagining the room clamped around her like a cast. That had been two of them. Thousands of times more bodies pulsed through Farside’s tunnels and corridors, trams and tubes and telpherages.
The great train, two decks of clunky, angular lunar engineering, pulls up alongside the platform. Locks match to millimetre finesse and seal. Power: a hair below twenty per cent. Within acceptable parameters, given that she had to burn the batteries to keep up with the Long Runners.
What makes her glance up the platform? An incongruity of colour – hard greys among the browns and rusts of lunar fashion? The disrupting pattern: a wedge of people all advancing as one from the escalators along the platform? The movements of passengers away from them; the walk becoming a trot becoming a run.
LMA mercenaries.
People pour from the train. She can’t get through. She can’t board.
‘Excuse me,’ she shouts, willing her chair forwards. She knocks against a little girl, sends her reeling into the glass. The girl’s parent snatches her to him, hisses outrage. ‘Sorry sorry sorry.’
They see her. They are coming for her.
‘It’s all right,’ says a woman’s voice. ‘I’ve got you.’ Hands grab the arms of her wheelchair. The woman smiles into her face. She wears a Fair Isle knit, corduroy breeches, knee socks and brogues.
Other hands seize the chair handles and try to tug her away from the train. Ariel lashes out, slaps at them, tries to beat the hands off but they pile on.
‘Now that’s a very poor idea,’ the woman says. She has an upswinging, perky Aus accent. She moves – a foot, a fist, the flat of a hand – and three mercs are down. Passengers flee, screaming. Knives flash, the woman moves away from the blades like liquid and the knives are sliding across the platform. One merc is on her back, gasping. One stares at her empty hand. One picks himself up from the polished sinter, hand to face, blood seeping through fingers. ‘This train is ready for departure,’ the woman says, shoves the wheelchair ungently through the lock and into the vestibule as the locks seal.
The train moves out. Ariel looks back at the bodies on the platform. She touches the brim of her hat in salute, then the Transpolar Express enters the tunnel.
She parks the chair. The woman rocking the land-girl fashion sits down opposite her, strips off a glove and offers her hand.
‘Ariel Corta, I bloody well hope. Dakota Kaur Mackenzie, at your service. Ghazi of the Faculty of Biocybernetics.’
Ariel picks up the glove, squeezes it; the leather resists and in an instant turns steel hard.
‘Your timing is immaculate,’ Ariel says.
‘We had someone on every train.’
Ariel smiles.
‘In the right car?’
‘There aren’t that many spaces can take a wheelchair.’
‘You’d almost think you had Three August Sages to forewarn you.’
‘They said you were a spiky fucker,’ Dakota Mackenzie says. ‘Are all you Cortas cunts?’
‘We also have a wolf in the family. You’d like him.’
Light knifes through the window as the train leaves the tunnel and merges with the Polar Mainline. The car sways over the points, then the maglev engines open up and with a surge of power the Transpolar Express accelerates to twelve hundred kilometres per hour. Children run up and down the aisle; students on their way back to the Farside research facilities from their Nearside colloquiums laugh and shout and chatter. Workers sleep, their sasuit helmets and suitpacks cradled like infants.
‘I deserve a fucking drink,’ Dakota Mackenzie says. She orders a Lobachavsky.
‘A what?’ Ariel asks.
‘It’s a new thing, on our side. White rum, cow-cream, ginger, cinnamon. Undergrads get blasted on it.’
‘Looks like a glass of cum,’ Ariel says as the steward sets it down, together with her drink.
‘And what’s that?’
‘Tarragon, lime and lemongrass spritzer.’
‘Fuck’s sake. Well, if mine’s cum, yours looks like an STI. I thought Cortas drank.’
‘Not this one.’
‘Spare us the zeal of the newly converted. What was it? The Corta cocktail?’
‘The Blue Moon. Rafa claimed he invented it. It’ll have been some off-shift duster in a João de Deus bar. I never liked it. Too sweet. Blue Curacao is a mad and bad thing to do to an innocent martini.’
Dakota lifts her Lobachavsky, sets it down again. Her eyes are wide. ‘Move,’ she whispers.
Ariel pushes back from the table without thought or hesitation.
‘The train is slowing,’ Dakota says.
Ariel’s eyes widen. The old custom: anyone may stop and board a train, anywhere on the moon. Dakota reaches for the handles of Ariel’s wheelchair; Ariel slaps her away.
�
��Don’t push me.’
Dakota heads towards the back of the train. Ariel rolls after Dakota Mackenzie.
‘VTO is in Lucas’s pocket,’ Ariel says.
‘Who says it’s Lucas? We’re twenty minutes from Hadley. This is Mackenzie country. Cortas are hostages of choice.’
By the fifth car back, the other passengers have noticed that the train is stopping.
‘What happens if they get on at the back of the train?’ Ariel says.
‘Then I fight,’ Dakota says. ‘Again. On a train this time. But they won’t. Because Mackenzies, Vorontsovs, LMA, moon pixies and space fairies, they all get a train at the front.’
Ten cars, the final set of pressure doors opens and the two women push into the lock. Behind them is the last bulkhead, behind it twelve hundred kilometres of maglev track and post-industrial wasteland. The Transpolar Express comes to a halt out on the grey desolation of Palus Putridinis and settles on to the line.
Ariel edges as close as she can to the tiny porthole in the outlock door. No sign of any new passengers, only tracks, scarps and berms and mazes of dozed-up regolith. Broken machinery, abandoned habitats, obsolete comms relays. The crashed and the scrapped, the failed and the smashed. Seventy years of scraping and sifting for precious metals have gouged and wounded the moon deep. The wounds of heavy extraction may never heal.
Ariel feels the gentle lurch of the train levitating on its magnets. The Transpolar Express is under way again.
‘Five aboard,’ Dakota says. ‘Sasuits and helmets.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I’m in the train system.’ Dakota grimaces. ‘Shit. They’re heading straight for our booked seats.’
‘How long until they get to us?’