The Luna Deception Read online

  Franckel came up behind him. “Calm the hell down, guy.”

  The spaceborn man was half a meter taller, perhaps stronger, but Mendoza had a laser pistol, and Franckel was not to know it was out of change.

  Franckel backed up, red crosshairs wavering on his chest. He raised his hands. “OK. OK. The priest didn’t mention that you were fucking crazy.”

  “That’s right,” Mendoza said. “I’m fucking crazy. Which way is the airlock?”

  “That way.”

  Everyone in the cavern skittered back. Mendoza sensed movement. He whirled to confront frozen men, like a game of Red Light, Green Light.

  “Leave him alone,” Franckel shouted. “Let him go.”

  Mendoza understood that Franckel’s goal was to get him and his pistol out of the hab. He slammed the airlock in the squatters’ faces. His Star Force surplus suit had been taken away. Coughing on moondust, he put on one of the squatters’ filthy patch-jobs. The legs and crotch sagged, stretched out.

  He exited the airlock, ran past the control center, and bounded out along one of the platforms. Through a gap between two cargo containers, he spotted Fr. Lynch—he still had his Star Force surplus suit—and an extremely tall spaceborn individual, presumably the guy Fr. Lynch had been talking to. They were walking out of the terminal.

  Mendoza sprinted after them. His over-large suit hampered his stride.

  A row of divots appeared in the side of a container ahead of him.

  Something smacked him in the arm.

  He glanced back, saw two or three squatters stride-gliding along the platform. They carried what looked like long sticks.

  Susmaryosep, those are guns. They’re shooting at me.

  He glanced at the arm of his suit. The outer layer of fabric was torn, revealing a pristine white thermal layer.

  He leapt between the moving containers to the next platform over, trying to deny the squatters a shot. But zigzagging like this slowed him down. They would try to cut him off.

  He caught up with a robot forklift heading out of the cavern, leapt and clung onto its load, digging the toes of his suit’s boots into the gaps between sacks of beetroot. His feet screamed for mercy.

  The entrance loomed. Maybe, just maybe he’d make it.

  The sun shone into Faustini Crater almost horizontally, glittering on rock scarred with overlapping blast-melt patterns. Parked spaceships of all shapes and sizes dotted the crater floor. Service vehicles zipped around.

  And there were Fr. Lynch and his companion, walking into the launch zone, just as casually as if they were taking a stroll in a park on Earth.

  Mendoza located the suit’s radio. He enabled ALL FREQUENCIES. “Father! Wait! Please!”

  They didn’t look back.

  He jumped down from the forklift and ran after them. They hadn’t picked up his signal.

  ★

  But someone else had.

  As Mendoza would’ve realized if he had given it a second’s thought, ALL FREQUENCIES included the shipping terminal’s public comms band. This was monitored by the Spaceport Authority, so they could keep tabs on the squatter community.

  The Shackleton City elite regarded the spaceport squatters as semi-feral pets. They played a useful role in purging the city of the unhappy and the criminally inclined.

  Mendoza’s shout of “Father! Wait! Please!” merged into the babel on the local radio frequencies—and was instantly intercepted by the searchbots that Derek Lorna had set to hunt him.

  VOICEPRINT MATCHING: 65% (the microphone in Mendoza’s stolen suit was lousy)

  KEYWORD MATCHING: FATHER (Derek Lorna knew how Catholic priests were traditionally addressed)

  “Worth checking out,” Lorna decided. He told his MI assistant: “Triangulate the source of that signal and get me some visuals.”

  ★

  Mendoza bounded out of the shipping terminal into the sunlight.

  Far ahead, the tiny figures of Fr. Lynch and his companion had vanished between the parked spaceships.

  Something struck him hard between the shoulders.

  Falling, he looked back at a mountain. The cargo terminal was in the central rubble pile left over from the days when Faustini Crater had been a water mine. He saw the squatters standing in the entrance of the terminal. One of them, probably Franckel, gave him the finger.

  His faceplate bounced off the rock. He struggled to breathe.

  A three-wheeled buggy whizzed across the launch zone and braked beside him. The driver jumped out. Consciousness fading, Mendoza admired the luminous halo of backscatter around the shadow of the driver’s helmet. It was like an angel had come to rescue him. If only such things could be true.

  x.

  Mendoza woke up with industrial-strength lights glaring in his eyes. The syrupy voice of a medibot informed him that it had removed a .22 caliber bullet from his back. The bullet had just missed his left lung, the medibot said. Mendoza was lucky.

  He didn’t feel lucky.

  Doped up, leaning on a helper bot, he hobbled out of the clinic into what seemed to be an administrative area of Faustini Spaceport.

  The bot kept a vise-like grip on the compression cast on his upper torso. It guided him to some kind of employee lounge. Windows commanded a reduced-glare view of the launch zone, framed by clumps of ferns. There were two sets of pew-like ergoforms, one set facing the window, the other set facing a grotto with a waterfall trickling into a little pool. The tinkling of recorded wind chimes accentuated the hush.

  Half a dozen miserable-looking men and women sat on the benches. They looked up when Mendoza and his helper bot came in.

  “Whoa,” one of the men said. “What’d they do to you?”

  “What is this place?” Mendoza said.

  “Chapel,” said one of the women. “Non-denominational.”

  Mendoza’s helper bot lowered him onto a pew. “I didn’t know there was a chapel at the spaceport.”

  “The Muslim employees sued.” The woman touched a button. Her pew collapsed into a long prayer mat. She lay down on her back. “I might just stay like this,” she said.

  Mendoza sympathized. He was still woozy from the anesthesia. “Are you guys employees?”

  “Of the spaceport? No,” said the man who’d spoken first. “I’m a travel agent. She works for the Shackleton City Visitor Center. So does he. She’s in customer service at Harrods. They’re from the post-sales feedback analysis division at Victoria Construction.”

  “I’m getting a funny feeling that you aren’t here by choice.”

  “Define choice,” said the travel agent. “The Leadership in Robotics Institute approached me about this job. I chose to accept. I didn’t ask any questions, either. What did you do, try to run?”

  “Something like that.”

  The travel agent raised his eyebrows, and all of them turned away from him, as if stupidity might be contagious.

  Mendoza gazed blearily out of the window. The dark filter on the glass turned the lunar morning into twilight. A ship launched like a sparkler burning up. He wondered if Fr. Lynch had gotten away.

  Derek Lorna came into the chapel. He sported a pink tailcoat over a red shirt, a white cummerbund, and baggy tweeds that ended in joke boots with tiger faces on the toes. “OK, everyone!” He clapped his hands. “We’re all here now, so we can get started. Are you psyched for this job? Just say yes and save me the trouble of making a motivational speech.”

  A couple of people laughed.

  “This is John Mendoza. All of you have expertise in customer relations, which is why you were chosen for this job. But Mendoza is a psephologist. That said, he’s just had an emergency operation, and a couple of days ago, brain surgery I think?” Lorna grinned at Mendoza. “So he’s just here in an advisory role. You can ask him technical questions. Apart from that, comestibles are coming. Any other questions at this point?”

  The woman from Harrods said, “Uh, would it be possible to clarify what we’re here for? Sir.”

  “
Grin. We’re here to steal an election.”

  ★

  “Just kidding,” Lorna said. “This is what they used to call a get-out-the-vote operation. You’re probably thinking, what’s the point of that? Voting is compulsory. Well, yes, it is. But a lot of people, especially those proud nonconformists who infest our asteroids, don’t like being compelled to do anything. Mendoza, would you explain the NOTA problem to the group?”

  Woodenly, Mendoza said, “NOTA: none of the above. It’s a protest vote. If NOTA were a person, he or she would have won every election in the last ten years by a margin of two to twenty percent. In one judicial contest on, I think, Ganymede, some guy changed his name to None Of The Above and won handily. That’s the kind of trick that only works once, though.”

  “Thanks,” Lorna said. “That’s it in a nutshell. Now, if everyone would gather around …”

  Lorna touched a button, converting one of the ergoform pews into a long desk. He took a sheaf of portable screens out of his briefcase and laid them in a row. There were only six. Lorna clearly meant it about Mendoza just being here in an advisory role.

  Lorna turned one of the screens on. “Here are the latest poll numbers from the Inferior Space Election Commission.”

  UNVRP DIRECTORSHIP ELECTION

  POLL DATA PROVIDED BY INFERIOR SPACE ELECTION COMMISSION

  NOTA: 32%

  Amanda Patel: 31%

  Zazoe Heap: 12%

  “And she’s dead,” Lorna said. “Those voters are either grief-crazed or mentally defective. Put them in the NOTA column.”

  Angelica Lin: 9%

  Pyls O. Mani: 8%

  Mork Rapp: 7%

  Abdullah Hasselblatter: 1%

  Wow, Mendoza thought. No wonder Lorna is in a good mood.

  Dr. Hasselblatter had tumbled from the top to the very bottom of the pack.

  That couldn’t be fallout from the violence on Mercury. Something else must have happened while Mendoza was cut off from the internet.

  “Who’s Amanda Patel?” said the woman from Harrods customer service.

  “The NEO candidate,” Lorna said. “A pediatrician. That’s just the nonconformists venting their spleen. Our job today is to convert all the Patel voters, and as many NOTA voters as possible, into Angelica Lin voters.”

  “How?” asked the woman from the Shackleton City Visitor Center.

  “Through individual outreach,” Lorna said. “Don’t look at me like that. Yes, it’s a lot of people. Four hundred and thirty thousand, approximately. But it’s perfectly possible to mass-tailor individual outreach campaigns using story-writing MI resources. Isn’t that right, Mendoza?”

  There was a rattle at the door of the chapel. A fully loaded breakfast buffet trundled in under its own power. Inhaling the aromas of coffee, toast, scrambled eggs, and sausages, Mendoza realized he was starving.

  “Convert half of them, and it’s in the bag,” Lorna said.

  “There’s only a few hours left until the polls close,” said one of the construction industry analysts.

  “So grab some food and get on it, would be my recommendation.” Lorna’s voice had a steely edge.

  Everyone went quiet.

  Except Mendoza. Rightly or wrongly, he figured he hadn’t much to lose. He cleared his throat. “It’s not that easy. You have to have a saleable product. Angelica Lin may be easy on the eyes, but her platform is just Charlie Pope lite.’”

  Someone laughed, and stifled it.

  “Very funny,” Lorna said flintily. “Obviously, we need to add value to our proposition. I was coming to that. You’re authorized to offer this selection of free gifts to each targeted voter, provided they send us a vid grab or screenshot of their vote for Angelica Lin.”

  A premium internet avatar

  A year’s supply of nutriblocks

  A weekend getaway on Luna, including a tour of One Pig Base and a complimentary hamper of pork products

  A fifteen-minute live consultation with Frank Hope III to supercharge your personal and financial trajectory (latency time not included)

  A home immersion kit worth S3,000

  “Something there for every income level, as you see,” Lorna said. “And they’ll also be entered into the bonus raffle for …”

  A full scholarship to Eton’s exclusive Luna campus for one (1) child between the ages of 6 and 16

  “Oh, wow. Can we vote, sir?”

  “Chuckle!” Lorna said. “Isn’t S10,000 for a single day’s work enough for you?”

  “Ha, ha; yes, of course, sir.”

  “But isn’t this illegal, sir? I mean, uh …”

  “No,” Lorna said. His blue eyes were as cool as winter skies. “Not whatsoever.”

  The man who had spoken was one of the construction industry analysts, a fat little Earthborn guy wearing a t-shirt with embedded vid of a toddler’s birthday party. “Thanks for clarifying that, sir,” he mumbled.

  Lorna left the room. They grabbed plates of food from the buffet. Conversation was subdued. Mendoza went to sit next to the man with the birthday-party t-shirt. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Emil.” The guy slid a scared glance at Mendoza’s cast.

  “Is that your daughter? She’s adorable,” Mendoza said.

  “Thanks.”

  The others were talking about the mechanics of the job ahead of them. Mendoza heard someone say “Let’s ask the psephology guy.”

  This was very obviously the B team. They’d never get it done without his help.

  He buttered a bran muffin. “I’m just here in an advisory role,” he told Emil. “But if I’m going to be any real help to you guys, I’ll need a screen.” He gestured at the fold-up sticking out of Emil’s back pocket. “Mind if I borrow yours?”

  ★

  As soon as Mendoza got himself logged on under Emil’s name, he ran a search. “ALL DATABASES: DR. ABDULLAH HASSELBLATTER.”

  The first result—and the second, and the third, and the three hundredth result—was a viral vid of Dr. Hasselblatter having sex with a maidbot.

  “Oh boy,” Mendoza murmured. He ate the other half of his muffin and skimmed the commentary. The consensus was that the vid was real, not a fake.

  Links led to another vid. This one was a press conference where Dr. Hasselblatter had tried to explain away the first vid. It ended with a scuffle between Dr. Hasselblatter’s burka-clad wife and the UN peacekeepers providing security at the event.

  Helpful anti-censorship activists explained that the vid had originally ended with NSFW footage of Mrs. Hasselblatter’s burka being torn off. She had turned out not to be a Muslim at all—nor even human. ‘She’ had been a sex-bot.

  “Yuck,” Mendoza muttered, remembering the hints he’d picked up that there was something off about Dr. Hasselblatter’s personal life.

  I don’t want to go there, Lorna had said, but after their sabotage campaign backfired, he must have decided he had no choice.

  It had worked, anyway. The leaked vid had torpedoed Dr, Hasselblatter’s bid for the UNVRP directorship. The press conference had ended his career.

  Mendoza went back over the press conference vid, frame by frame. In one crowd shot, he found what he was looking for: a glimpse of Elfrida. She was standing on a desk, gnawing her knuckles as she watched her boss’s career implode. It must have been a horrible shock for her. Mendoza knew she’d respected Dr. Hasselblatter, as much as she groused about his ambition.

  So, sixteen hours ago she’d been alive and well.

  But that had been before the riots.

  Logged in as Emil, Mendoza did not dare search for Elfrida’s name. Instead, he compared the latest news reports on the riots. The death toll was still rising, but names had begun to be put to the dead, and Elfrida’s was not among them.

  She’s alive.

  She has to be alive.

  But the situation on Mercury was still in flux. Amateur vid feeds showed Star Force Marines stalking the halls of UNVRP HQ, children w
eeping as their parents were dragged away. That was the kind of thing that short-circuited Elfrida’s brain, as Mendoza knew all too well. She’d stop at nothing to help the survivors, even if it put her in danger.

  Would the situation calm down if Angelica Lin won the election? If Derek Lorna got what he wanted?

  Mendoza knuckled his eyes. The travel agent interrupted his thoughts with a cough. “Um, we were just wondering about these MI story-writing resources we’ve been given. If you could show us how they work?”

  Mendoza forced a smile. He had no choice. This was the only thing he could do that might help Elfrida. “Sure. I’ll walk you through it.”

  ★

  Nine hours later, the torrent of data flowing across their screens dwindled to a trickle and stopped. Mendoza looked at the other members of the team. “We did it.”

  They exchanged weary grins. They had successfully bribed 143,012 people to cast their votes for Angelica Lin.

  “It’s not over yet,” said Emil. “There’s two hours to go before voting closes.”

  “It’s mathematically over,” Mendoza said. “Check your news feeds. They’re already reporting Lin’s victory.”

  Derek Lorna had got what he wanted … at the cost of committing a crime that would put them all in jail for the rest of their lives, if they got caught. Not to mention the cost of all those bribes. It must have run into the tens of millions.

  Well, that wasn’t Mendoza’s problem.

  They wandered around the chapel, stretched their stiff muscles, and snacked on the remains of the lunch buffet that had replaced the breakfast buffet. Outside the windows, spacecraft continued to land and take off. It was getting on for 22:00, Luna time, but Mendoza did not feel remotely tired. His back hurt a bit. He crunched another of the painkillers the medibot had given him after his operation.

  While the others discussed what they were going to do with the money, Mendoza peeked at Emil’s screen again.

  He’d been poking around in the spaceport’s data management utilities. He had access, because the team had needed to use the spaceport’s computing resources to hide the origin of all those individually tailored polls. He had searched the launch schedule for ships likely to be the one carrying Fr. Lynch. He’d identified a handful of possibles. And he’d moved their launch slots back.