Luna: Moon Rising

by Ian McDonald

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Ocean asks.

  ‘I do not,’ Marina says and sets off, crutches leaving two lines of holes in the dust. Canaan and Tenjo trot at her heel. This is not the Long Run, it can never be, but it can be a ritual of another kind, her own communion with her body and her space.

  Everything that is ten times more difficult in Earth gravity is twice that with the addition of crutches. The curving slope to the concrete bridge is a descent from a sheer mountain col. The potholes are craters the size of Aristarchus. The gravel and stones on the country road turn every step into torment and she forgot to bring water.

  ‘Tenjo, Tenjo, you’re the smart dog, go and get Marina some water,’ Marina puffs as she swings her way up the road. Gods, the gate is so far away.

  Gods. Ariel used to say that.

  Fifty steps and a rest. Fifty more steps and another rest. Cut it into pieces. Her feet hurt. Her feet hurt so much. How far has she come? On the moon she could blink up her familiar. Here it’s an icon on her shades, blink blink blink blink blink before she gets into the fitness app. Half a kilometre.

  Gods.

  The dogs look up. Seconds later Marina hears the engine that alerted them. A car coming through the trees. She sees its dust before it makes the right-angle turn out of the trees into the open. She steps back. It’s coming fast. Does it see her? She could wave a crutch. No, she would fall. It’s not slowing. It must see her. It’s coming at her. At her. Dust and speed and noise. At her. Marina throws herself into the ditch. As the car roars past, peppering her with stones and grit, she hears men’s voices.

  Fuck off back to the moon!

  Winded, every bone and joint aching, Marina tries to push herself to her feet. She can’t. She doesn’t have the strength. She kneels on all fours in the dry ditch, panting, trying to listen over the sound of her own breathing for the car engine. Is it going on its way or has it turned round to come back for her? Listen. Oh listen.

  A crunch of tyres on gravel, a squeak of brakes and the sound of wheels sliding to a stop.

  Marina can’t look.

  ‘Marina?’

  Bending over her is Weavyr on her bike.

  ‘Get help!’ Marina cries. ‘Help me!’

  * * *

  ‘Hey, Mom.’

  Marina pushes the wheelchair into the dark room. Night-lights glow. She hadn’t noticed that the ceiling is covered in luminous stick-on stars.

  ‘You awake?’

  A grunt from the bed.

  ‘No.’

  Old family joke; maybe the oldest. Marina hears the head of the bed rise, lights come up to a soft glow.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘A pick-up on manual drive happened to me.’ Marina wheels to the space by the side of her mother’s bed. Medical technology purrs and blinks, pumps hum. The perfumes of the essential oils, the herbs, the incenses are stronger in the night. ‘I’m all right. Dr Nakamura thinks I must be made of teak or something.’ She slaps the arms of the wheelchair. ‘I’ll be out of this thing in a day or two.’

  ‘I heard,’ her mother says. She lays a wire hand on the cover. Marina takes it.

  ‘They’re our fucking neighbours,’ Marina says.

  Her mother groans and clicks her tongue.

  ‘Nasty saying.’

  ‘Sorry. They wanted to run me off the road. They ran me off the road. On crutches.’

  ‘The cabin looks nice white.’

  ‘Mom, I have to tell you something.’

  Marina squeezes her mother’s hot, dry paw.

  ‘It’s not going to get any better. I don’t know if you follow the news, but up there, on the moon, well, things are shaking up a little. The Suns have turned on their solar power grid … What I’m saying is, when things shake up there, they break down here. I think I’m a danger to everyone in this house.’

  Her mother’s mouth opens in a silent oh of surprise.

  ‘And there’s … business up there. I didn’t come away clean. I broke a heart. I did the wrong thing. I need to do right.’

  ‘But if you go back…’

  ‘I can never come home again. But that’s it. Mom, I love you, and Kessie, and Ocean and Weavyr are gifts from God, but this isn’t home. There’s no place for me here.

  ‘Mom, I need to go back to the moon.’

  SEVENTEEN

  The tie is the thing. The suit was never an issue, two shades darker, two cuts sharper than the old man’s signature grey. Close enough to be respectable, not so close as to mock. The shirt is simple: pure white, softened by a bias pattern. Tie. Here Darius hesitates. He wants the primrose yellow but it lacks force, presence. But the others are dull, over-patterned or so alien to him as to be painful to wear. Primrose it must be, but how to give it authority? The tie-pin will work the politics. His familiar Adelaide presents a range of variations on Australian themes. The flying kangaroo: no. Animals make Darius shudder. The Red Dog logo also, but for different reasons. It was the sigil of Robert Mackenzie. Darius wants to inherit, not usurp. A tight glitter of five jewels like a constellation of stars. This he does not recognise.

  The Southern Cross, Adelaide answers. The constellation Crux, visible only in the southern hemispheres of both Earth and moon.

  ‘Show me,’ Darius says.

  His vision soars out from the Palace of Eternal Light, away from the beacons and searchlights of the surface teams, whose mission has gone from rescue to investigation; high above the splinters of the Pavilion of Eternal Light, out among the stars. Darius peers to find Crux: there. Four bright stars against the shine of the galaxy, one lesser light.

  ‘It’s not very impressive.’

  It features prominently on the Australian national flag.

  ‘Print it,’ Darius says. ‘Real diamonds?’

  I could not source them in time, Adelaide replies.

  He knots the primrose-yellow tie, straightens. Checks teeth, eye make-up. Runs a comb through his hair. Last of all, he slips the Southern Cross pin through his tie three centimetres beneath the double Windsor knot.

  ‘Okay, Adelaide. Tell them I’m ready.’

  * * *

  This is the Seventh Bell.

  The lesson of the School of Seven Bells is that its lessons are not for the knife alone.

  Be aware of the breath and when you become aware, become unaware. Over-attachment is a trap. Find your weight, your mass, understand the difference between them. Remember that we are born with our senses undifferentiated and that life is a journey away from that unity of sensation to discretion. Over-focus is an error.

  Adelaide shows him the cameras. When the dot in the bottom right corner of his eye goes red, he will be live. There is Mariano Gabriel Demaria. But it is Lady Sun who commands his eye. He will not shake, he will not hesitate.

  ‘Duncan Mackenzie is dead,’ she said as she hurried him away from the melee in the Great Hall. At first he had not understood what she was saying. ‘Listen to what I’m telling you, boy. Duncan Mackenzie is dead. Mackenzie Metals is headless. Bryce will try and take control now. It’s why he did it.’

  ‘Bryce destroyed the Pavilion of Eternal Light?’

  They were in a moto, hurtling through tunnels cleared of traffic by executive command.

  ‘We knew it was a BALTRAN shot before the debris hit the ground. Bryce wanted to make it look like the Vorontsovs but he is not as clever as he thinks. He used that trick on the Cortas.’

  ‘The method that won you this fight will kill you in the next,’ Darius said.

  ‘We must move quickly. We have a destiny for you to fulfil.’

  Lady Sun inclines her head to Darius.

  Countdown.

  The dot turns red. The moon is watching.

  ‘I am Darius Mackenzie. I am the last son of Robert Mackenzie and his true heir. I claim the title of Chief Executive of Mackenzie Metals.’

  Lady Sun is smiling.

  * * *

  The Mackenzie Helium railcar slows, drifts in to the siding and come
s to a halt. At the track-side is a VTO maintenance shed bermed deep with regolith, a small solar array, a comms tower and the standard lunar scrapheap of abandoned machinery. To the west the Mare Insularum curves into the horizon, to the east rise the northern outliers of the Apennines. Nothing more.

  ‘I’m stating the obvious,’ Bryce Mackenzie says, ‘but this is not Hadley.’

  ‘The situation at Hadley is changing fast,’ Finn Warne says. Bryce shifts in his seat. He cannot be comfortable for more than a few minutes.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘We would not be welcomed.’

  ‘I don’t expect to be fucking welcomed. I expect to be fucking respected.’

  ‘Hadley is hostile. I can’t needlessly endanger you.’

  ‘Hadley won’t find me a coward,’ Bryce spits. ‘I have twenty staunch jackaroos back there.’

  ‘Duncan put two hundred armed jackaroos on the field against the terrestrials. They never gave their guns back.’

  Bryce rolls petulantly back in his seat, notices a tic on his lens. He leans painfully forward to tap the railcar porthole. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Rovers from the Wallace and Mare Vaporum extraction teams. We’re going to transfer to rovers and meet up with the Imbrium and Serenetatis squads. Two hundred and twenty jackaroos. We finish this on the ground, out in the mirror field.’

  ‘Siege?’ Bryce asks.

  ‘The siege of Hadley,’ Finn Warne says. Bryce smiles. Dust plumes from the eastern horizon announcing the advent of Mackenzie Helium.

  ‘Boss.’ Bailey Dane, sergeant of the railcar security squad, calls from the rear cabin. ‘Gupshup News. You got to see it.’ Bryce Mackenzie despises the gossip networks and chat channels but they react faster than any other part of the lunar media. Fake news wears fast shoes. And there is Darius Mackenzie, with his quiffed-up hair, his primrose-yellow tie and Southern Cross pin in exactly the right position, claiming Mackenzie Metals. Fucking popinjay.

  ‘Get me into that fucking rover!’ Bryce Mackenzie bellows.

  * * *

  Thadie slides open the panel and her eyes widen.

  ‘There’s a bar in here.’

  ‘Of course there is.’ Denny Mackenzie leans back in his chair and puts his feet up on the footstool. ‘Fix us something, will you?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Denny turns back to the curve of pressure glass and the northern reach of the Apennines. The railcar is private charter, not a liveried executive-class Dragon transport but still comfortable, fast and well equipped. ‘Sour. Lemon, enough to make you pucker up. A little punishment. Sweet. Syrup. Vanilla syrup. Little less than a pucker. Life is not sweet. The kick. Gin. Ice cold, of course. Four fingers. No, make that three. Gold leaf. A sprinkle. Stir, pour, consume.’

  Thadie opens, prints, prepares and pours four glasses, for Denny, herself and Ji-Sung and Agneta, the two others who came down with Denny Mackenzie from Bairro Alto. The rest of you follow later. The Jack of Blades owes you. Understand? The Mackenzie debt. Last in each glass is a pinch of gold dust. It settles slowly through the cold liquid. Denny takes a sip and falls back in his seat.

  ‘Fucking magnificent. Been too long, lover. I need a name for you. Sunshine Express. No. Fucking ridiculous.’ He lifts the glass to the vacuum. ‘The Hero’s Return!’

  Moonquakes are of four types: deep, impact, thermal and shallow. These last are the most destructive and travel fastest. Within seconds of the news breaking from the Palace of Eternal Light, Meridian shook from prospket to Bairro Alto with the aftershocks of the assassination of Duncan Mackenzie. And the people of the High Town felt them, and gathered on their staircases and catwalks.

  But he made you outcast.

  ‘My dad is dead!’ Denny Mackenzie roared.

  Told you you were no son of his.

  ‘I obeyed him. That’s the Mackenzie way. I was staunch.’

  Disinherited you.

  He held up the hand he had maimed in obedience to the Mackenzie way.

  ‘Blood says otherwise.’

  What does it say, Jack of Blades?

  ‘Go and take what’s mine.’

  You’ve no allies, no help, no bitsies.

  ‘I’ll get there if I have to fucking walk!’ Denny Mackenzie shouted. ‘Allies? Who of you is with me?’ Thadie, Ji-Sung and Agneta dropped from their roosts and perches to stand with Denny Mackenzie. Bairro Alto cheered them all the way down the staircase but one voice said, Who will defend us now?

  On level 85 Denny’s familiar sparked back into life. Air, water, data. Money. And a message. Meridian Main Station. From a staunch jackaroo.

  ‘It’s a trap,’ Agneta said.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ve taken Bryce Mackenzie before, taken the best he had, his First Blade. Meantime, we take the elevator. Unless you want thigh muscles like that fucking tree in Twé.’

  ‘You have got a knife,’ Ji-Sung whispered down on the prospekt as the motos and bicycles zipped past.

  ‘Two knives,’ Denny Mackenzie said. And at the escalators down into the maw of Mackenzie Main Station, another message. Private railcar reception. You won’t come home like an oxygen beggar. From a jackaroo who remembers.

  The receptionist’s hand had risen to summon security, then the barriers opened and Denny ushered his comrades through into thick carpets and sensitive mood lighting.

  ‘Welcome, Mr Mackenzie. Your railcar is at stand five, departure in thirty minutes. Please enjoy our extensive facilities.’

  ‘Showers, mates!’ Denny shouted.

  ‘We got showers,’ Thadie said.

  ‘These are hot.’

  Ten minutes to Hadley, Mr Mackenzie, the railcar says.

  ‘Come and see this.’ Denny beckons his comrades forward. ‘This is one of the sights of the moon.’

  The railcar runs through the destroyed lands of the southern Palus; rilles graded flat, craters scraped to wrinkles in the skin of the moon, regolith worked and reworked, sifted and sifted until every atom of value has been sucked from it.

  ‘There, see?’ Denny points at the dazzling star rising slowly above the close lunar horizon. ‘Hadley. We’ll be coming into the mirror array any moment now. Look!’ He stands up, arms outspread like a showman. Stars blaze up on either side of the track; the railcar drives on a track of shining molten steel through an array of five thousand mirrors, all focusing light on the peak of Hadley’s dark pyramid. ‘Fucking Taiyang thinks it controls the sun. We did it first and we do it best.’

  ‘Den.’

  ‘What, Thad?’

  ‘Those other lights.’ He rushes forward. Above the fixed suns of the mirror array lesser lights are falling, constellations of red and green. Sparkles of blue. Bright burns of white: one second, two seconds, again the nibs of blue flame. Thruster-fire.

  ‘Moonships,’ Denny whispers. ‘Those are descent burns.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘All of them. All over the fucking Palus.’

  ‘VTO? Your mother is a Vorontsova,’ Ji-Sung says. And the tip of a blade hovers over his cornea.

  ‘My mother is Mackenzie. Say her name.’

  ‘Apollonaire Vorontsova-Mac…’ A squeal of fear.

  ‘Her name?’

  ‘Apollonaire Mackenzie.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The knife is back in its sheath. ‘And if you ever disrespect my mother again, I will cut the spine from your back.’

  ‘Denny, you should see this.’ Thadie flicks the lead news item from the railcar’s AI to Denny’s familiar.

  ‘Darius, you little cunt,’ Denny breathes. ‘It’s the Suns.’

  * * *

  It’s felt before heard, a beat conducted through the rails to the body of the railcar: a tremor. Th-th-thumm. Th-th-thumm. Denny steps into the airlock and it becomes sound: a rhythm. Doors seal, pressure equalises. The outlock door opens and the heard becomes the seen. The platform, the ramps, the stairways and overpasses, the underpasses and tunnels are thronged with jackaroos. Jackaroos in sasuit
s, business suits, skirt suits, sports wear and sleep-wear, high fashion and low grunge; kilts and boots and vat-grown leathers: basic issue hoodies and leggings, shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, the quintessential Mackenzie worker style from the dawn days of leaky habitats, treacherous rovers and untrustworthy surface-activity suits. All beating out a rhythm on the stone skin of Hadley. Th-th-thumm. Th-th-thumm.

  Denny steps on to the platform. The pressing bodies make space for him. The rhythm stops: clean, mid-beat. Denny Mackenzie surveys the crowd.

  ‘So, mates, did ya miss me?’

  Hadley’s stone corridors and shafts take the shout and, like the tubing of a vast wind instrument, turn it into roaring thunder. Hands slap his back, play punch him, tousle his hair, try to grab hold of him; voices cheer and whistle and good-on-ya! and proper bogan, mate, proper bogan, and you little ripper or just make incoherent roaring noises. Denny’s comrades from Meridian are absorbed by the voices as they close behind the homecoming golden boy. Walk breaks into run; the rhythm picks up again: th-th-thumm. Th-ththumm. Denny Mackenzie runs, grinning, between two endless lines of cheering, clapping people. Now he bursts into Hadley’s central atrium; a pyramid inside the great pyramid. The floor is a flood of faces, reading his intention, parting before him. The escalator is not fast enough for him; he takes it five steps at a time and stands up on the balustrade of the level one deck.

  Hadley falls silent. Faces crane up, peer down from the higher levels. Denny takes them in.

  ‘My dad is dead,’ he shouts. ‘Bryce Mackenzie claims Mackenzie Metals. What do we say to him?’

  Fuck him! a thousand jackaroos shout.

  ‘Darius Sun is dropping combat bots and wushis all over the mirror array. What do we say to him?’

  Fuck him too! Hadley roars.

  Denny Mackenzie holds up his maimed hand, calling silence.

  ‘What’s this place called?’

  The city thunders back its name. Denny shakes his head. The answer comes back redoubled.

  ‘Hadley was my brother. First Blade of Mackenzie Metals. He should be standing here. He died in the Court of Clavius. He fought for this family. After him, I was First Blade. I fought for this family. Fought for what this family stands for. Honour and pride, mates. Honour and pride. I did things that some thought were against the company. Yes, but never against the name. Never against what it means to be a Mackenzie. You know that too. You welcomed me like a hero. Let me tell you who I am. My name is Denny Mackenzie, I am the last and youngest son of Duncan Mackenzie and his one true heir. I claim Mackenzie Metals, I claim this city and I claim your loyalty. Are you with me?’