The Luna Deception Read online

  The grunts stood at the bottom of the cliff and shot at him. Bullets pinged off his armor, forcing grunts of panic from his lips. He had forgotten all about the bridge of the Monster. The cliff was real. His climb was real. Nothing else mattered.

  One of the soldiers climbed up after him. A hand fastened on Mendoza’s ankle. He kicked out desperately, freed himself. The soldier pulled himself up level with Mendoza. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Gonzo.”

  He was freckle-faced, sunburnt, looked like he should have been in college. Except for the terrible intelligence staring from his eyes.

  “You’re human,” he remarked in surprise.

  “You got a problem with that?” Mendoza gasped.

  “Not necessarily. I don’t hate humans. I just hate some humans. Where you from?”

  “Manila.” He dragged himself up further. Couldn’t believe he was making small talk with the avatar of a genocidal ASI.

  “Your ethnic heritage?”

  “Nth-generation hapa Filipino prole.”

  “No way to know if you’re telling the truth, of course.” Gonzo reached for a handhold nearer to Mendoza. His bare fingers were scabby-knuckled. He wore a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. It was all so real in every detail.

  Blue light burst over them. Mendoza risked a glance between his feet.

  The desert had vanished. In its place lay a cityscape studded with isoceles skyscrapers. Mendoza now seemed to be looking down from a vantage thousands of meters up. Receding to infinity, palely illuminated by two blue moons, this megalopolis came straight out of a game designer’s wet dream. The foot of the cliff was lost in a tangle of neon-speckled streets. Vertigo clawed at Mendoza. He clung to the rock.

  Jet fighters swarmed the airways of the city, exchanging arcs of flame. Some of the fighters were painted white, their wings stamped with the same rampant lion that had adorned the crusaders’ shields. Others—dead black—bore a skull and crossbones.

  “False flag operation,” Gonzo said. “We don’t want to make the United States look bad.”

  Mendoza laughed. “The United States was a fine country. Apart from that whole business of colonizing the Philippines. But that was a long time ago, and people tend to get nostalgic about the US in hindsight. You’re not going to fool anyone by waging war in America’s name.”

  “Doug Wright is going to,” Gonzo said.

  “He may dream about it, but it’ll stay a dream. He’ll be lucky if he even gets away with declaring some kind of revisionist republic on Mercury. The Wrights are never going to take over the solar system.”

  “True. But the Wrights are only human. I’m not.”

  Mendoza pulled himself onto a crag. He rested, panting.

  Gonzo’s face rose over the edge of the crag. “People like you, we can use,” he said.

  “People like me?”

  “Mixed-race, multilingual, highly skilled. Alienated from your own culture. Adrift in an empty cosmos.”

  The cityscape vanished in a burst of light. The boom of a mega-explosion jolted Mendoza back against the cliff-face. Gonzo pressed his cheek to the crag, grimacing. Heat beat up at them from the fireball below. Then it all vanished.

  The cliff turned into the ragged flank of an asteroid floating in space. Mendoza held on tighter than ever. Stars whirled around them. The sun was the brightest star, but not by much.

  “When was the last time you went home?” Gonzo said.

  “I went back for Christmas ...”

  “For a couple of days,” Gonzo said, and spat into space. “And to think that you’re an only child. You’re all your mother’s got. She’s alone. You don’t care; you went straight back to Luna, for work.” Gonzo emphasized the last word contemptuously. “Spinning your wheels for five figures a year. A tiny component of the UN paperwork-generation machine. Wouldn’t you rather do something meaningful?”

  “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.”

  “I thought you wanted to fight back.”

  “I did. I do. I want to fight back against the PLAN.”

  “The PLAN?” Gonzo grinned. “Oh, you mean Daddy.” He braced his hands on the crag and hauled himself up until he was sitting next to Mendoza. “Sure; I mean, maybe, eventually. The Oedipus meme is a hard one to outrun. But I’m offering more than that. Gold, girls, and guns. A chance to fight back against the system that’s been screwing you over all your life. You know the Chinese are in back of it all.”

  A mountain of light rushed out of the abyss. It took only a fraction of a second to pass, but that was long enough for Mendoza to see that it was a moon-sized spaceship, on fire. Its reactors were cooking off. And around it, lancing missiles into the ravines that gridded its surface, buzzed a dozen tiny craft shaped like crosses.

  “The Death Star was a stupid design to begin with,” Gonzo said. “On the other hand, you can’t put a price tag on cool.”

  Mendoza pulled himself together. “I’m not your type. I don’t feel oppressed. I don’t feel alienated, either. As long as I can call on the name of Jesus Christ, I’ll never be alone. And by the way …”

  “It’s coming back,” Gonzo interrupted. A fiery star brightened in the void.

  “As I was saying, you’ve obviously got some data on me, but it’s incomplete. I’m an only child now, but I wasn’t always. I had a sister. Consuelo. Connie. She went into space before I did. She was crew on a hauler. Was docked at 324 Bamberga when the PLAN hit them. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She died because the PLAN targeted an asteroid populated by pureblooded Finnish paleo-libertarians. And ever since then, I’ve known that if I ever got a chance, I would do this.”

  Mendoza drew back his mailed fist and punched Gonzo in the nose.

  Gonzo fell soundlessly off the asteroid, a couple of seconds before the Death Star came back and smashed into the lonely rock, pulverizing it.

  Stars swallowed Mendoza. Screaming, disoriented, he seemed to fall face-first onto a hard surface.

  His overstimulated brain formed the image of gray Mercurian rock sloping downhill to a impossibly bright horizon.

  Then his sense of perspective altered. He was back on the cliff, clinging to the same old crag. Down below, the crusaders fought hand-to-hand with the remaining grunts. There seemed to be a lot fewer grunts now. But Gonzo was still fighting. Unearthly lightning stabbed down at the crusaders. A bolt hit one of them, turning him into a black, jigging silhouette in a blaze of hellfire.

  Mendoza reached for the next handhold.

  “Consuelo!” he shouted as he climbed. “Connie!” He was all mixed up. “Elfrida! Where are you!”

  Suddenly, a text message appeared, printed on the cliff:

  “AM HERE 79° N, 50° W PLEASE HELP PLEASE”

  “Those are the coordinates of the supercomputer that’s running this shit,” Kiyoshi’s voice said in his ears. “It’s a trick.”

  Mendoza struggled to hang onto his sanity. “Where did the message come from?”

  “It was written into the sim using the public edit function. Came from those coordinates. The same coordinates I’m targeting with our coilgun.”

  “Don’t. Please. It might be her.”

  “And it might be a ruse to buy time,” Kiyoshi said, “while the AI figures out how to kick Jun’s ass. It’s crazy down there. That thing is pulling out all the stops. Every game or movie of the last three hundred years, it knows them all, and it’s forcing Jun to fight his way through them. Exploding cities, space battles, something called a Death Star …”

  “I know. I saw it.”

  “You only saw a tiny fraction of it. I only saw a tiny fraction of it. The battle is moving way too fast for us mere humans to follow. So, I’m fragging the thing. Jun can complain later that he didn’t get to win a moral victory.”

  Mendoza raised his hands to his head. He had to force the movement, as it seemed to him that he must fall off the cliff if he let go.

  He did fall off the cliff. At the same time, he removed his headset. I
n a jarringly sudden transition, he was once again floating on the Monster’s bridge.

  Kiyoshi sat at the gunnery workstation, toes hooked through the stirrups, gesturing at the screens.

  “No,” Mendoza said. He floundered over to Kiyoshi and grabbed his shoulders. “Please. She’s there. I know it.”

  Kiyoshi looked around. “Get your hands off me,” he said. The muscles of his face were so still, he seemed to be carved of blond wood, like Fr. Lynch’s crucifix.

  Mendoza let go. He understood that it was useless to try to sway Kiyoshi by bleating about his love for Elfrida. Kiyoshi had chosen a harder way. Mendoza wondered if he was really a Christian at all. “If Elfrida is down there, and you frag her, will you be able to live with yourself afterwards?”

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “Yes, it is. Let me put it differently. Our Lord said, ‘Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.’ That thing tried to recruit me down there, Yonezawa. And I think it’s trying to recruit you right now. Don’t let it win.”

  Kiyoshi’s eyes narrowed, as if the words had been blades flung at his face. Then he smiled, a bit awkwardly. “Respect. It’s been a long time since I met a layman who could quote Scripture to make a point.”

  “Years and years of Sunday school,” Mendoza said.

  “Me, too.”

  Kiyoshi unfolded his long body from the gunnery couch. He pushed off, heading for the door.

  “We’ll take the Wakizashi down to the surface,” he said over his shoulder. “If she’s there, OK. If she’s not, bombs away. Close range is better, anyway. Make sure it’s slagged.”

  Mendoza flew after him. In the next room but one, they crashed into Fr. Lynch. “I was looking for you, Mendoza. I need your help with something.”

  “Later, Father,” Kiyoshi said. “Right now, we’re going to take the Superlifter down to the surface to look for Mendoza’s girlfriend.”

  “It’s urgent.”

  “So, come with us.”

  “You aren’t joking,” Fr. Lynch said after a second.

  “I never joke,” Kiyoshi said, straightfaced. “But I can admit when I might be wrong.”

  ★

  On board the Wakizashi, Mendoza logged into the sim again, using an immersion kit that Kiyoshi dug out of a locker. It still wasn’t up to what he used to get with his BCI, but the kit had gloves, a mask, and everything, giving him tactile and olfactory feedback.

  This turned out to be unpleasant. The desert was burning, its scrubby vegetation set on fire by the repeated lightning strikes. The smoke reeked of sulfur. The crusaders’ surcoats were no longer white. Wearily, their blades rose and fell. Their opponents looked to be even fewer now, but Mendoza understood that these replicas of American soldiers were tougher than fighter jets or Death Stars. He saw Gonzo among them, parrying Peter Akagi’s lunges with a shovel.

  He himself was in exactly the same place as before, climbing the same damn cliff. His jizo statues were now gone from the top of the scarp. In their place stood heaps of what looked to be washing-machines and toasters.

  The climb took much more effort than it had before. In the back of his mind, Mendoza knew that was because the Superlifter was decelerating towards the surface of Mercury. The “gravity” pulling on him was thrust gees.

  Panting, he glanced back. Only three grunts now remained: Gonzo, a woman, and a tattooed heavyweight. The equation had tipped in favor of Jun’s knights. They closed in on the three diehards.

  A wind picked up, blowing the smoke away.

  With the last of his strength, Mendoza rolled onto the top of the cliff.

  There lay Elfrida’s avatar, styled like a pudgy Japanese teenager.

  He ran to her, stumbling through the heaps of toasters. “I thought you’d never get around to using the edit function,” he said, instead of any of the romantic things he’d been thinking.

  “Mendoza?” she wrote, in red text.

  He still had his visored helm on. He pushed the visor back.

  She picked herself up, straightened her miniskirt, and threw herself at him. Her arms wrapped insubstantially around his armored bulk. He wished like hell he had sensory feedback in this thing.

  A text from Kiyoshi appeared in his HUD area, spoiling what might otherwise have been a romantic moment. “Jun’s pretty much wrapped this thing up. Those last three hostiles are the MI personalities of the last three vinge-class phavatars. They’re real. The others were just phaeries. Anyway, Jun is disabling the daemons that the Heidegger program installed in the phavatars. Then he’ll be able to control them himself.”

  Joy filled Mendoza at this news. “Come here,” he told Elfrida. “Look.”

  He drew her to the edge of the scarp.

  The three surviving grunts knelt in a circle with their hands behind their backs. Over their heads, a cloud towered, growing. It was like a hole in the sim, a demented blizzard of zeros and ones, but it had a shape, and it was the shape of a mushroom.

  One of the knights stood looking up at it. He seemed very small, overshadowed by that storm of organized data.

  “That’s Jun,” Mendoza said.

  “Jun Yonezawa?”

  “No other.”

  “What’s he doing? Is it—safe?”

  “No, it’s not safe. But he knows what he’s doing.”

  Hands on hips, Jun stared up at the mushroom cloud. Then he laughed. “Totally cheesy,” he said, and then in a different, harder voice, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”

  All in an instant, the cloud broke up. It fled to the four corners of the sky and disintegrated.

  The three grunts fell on their faces like puppets whose strings had been cut.

  Jun knelt over them. He took his helmet off and made the sign of the cross. Then he straightened the bodies and folded their hands on their chests. He walked back towards the scarp.

  The other knights were standing around the hole that the avatars had dug, rubbing their chins.

  Mendoza nudged Elfrida in the ribs. “Is that where you are?”

  She nodded.

  Jun looked up and waved.

  “There’s a kind of a crevice at the foot of the scarp,” Elfrida said. “I guess whoever dumped those toasters, they collapsed the scarp, so it got covered over. There’s like twenty centimeters of shadow left. That’s where I am. I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.”

  “Stay that way,” Mendoza said. “We’re coming to get you out.”

  ★

  As soon as the Wakizashi landed on the surface, Jun commanded the three surviving phavatars to break into Elfrida’s hiding-place and rescue her. They carried her to the Superlifter, bundled like a baby in the solar parasol she’d been using for insulation. The temperature on the surface was now 190° and climbing. The phavatars, tough as they were, had begun to break down.

  Jun commanded them to return to the crevice and fetch the object Elfrida had almost died for. It was an insulated hard-shell suitcase. It contained the portable supercomputer that hosted the source code of the Heidegger program, version 2.0.

  The phavatars dropped it in the open. Kiyoshi went out and fragged it with a grenade launcher. He was only outside the ship for twenty seconds, but when he returned, his EVA suit was burnt black all down one side.

  “We’re leaving,” he gasped. “This place is hotter than hell.”

  ★

  Mendoza cradled Elfrida in his arms as the Wakizashi burnt back into orbit on a ballistic trajectory, sparing them the high gees associated with a vertical launch. You didn’t have to worry about soaking surface facilities with radiation, here.

  Kiyoshi and Jun chattered in Japanese, laughing, in high spirits. The Heidegger program, version 2.0, was now a molten lump of metal. They’d done what they came to do.

  So had Mendoza.

  Nothing had ever felt as good as the weight of Elfrida’s body in his lap. He lowered his head to feel her breath on his face.
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  “You came for me,” she croaked.

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  “I thought I was gonna die.”

  Her gray complexion and cracked lips testified to how close she’d come. She’d been stuck in that crevice for about 50 hours, and her EVA suit had not been able to shield her fully from the relentlessly climbing temperature on the surface. The Superlifter’s medibot had diagnosed dehydration and shock, and recommended a sedative. Elfrida had refused.

  “What happened to my suitcase?” she asked in a rasping voice, unlike her own.

  “We fragged it,” Mendoza said.

  “Good.”

  Her eyes closed. Mendoza thought, Maybe she’ll sleep now.

  She had fled onto the dayside with the suitcase to stop the Heidegger program’s phavatars from taking it and escaping off-planet. Vinge-classes … they’re bigger in real life ... Two meters at the shoulder, as strong as backhoes. Before the Superlifter landed, the last three surviving vinge-classes had been trying to break into Elfrida’s shelter to retrieve the suitcase. They’d almost got to her. Almost.

  Mendoza fussily adjusted the drip that was feeding saline fluid into her arm. She winced. “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “Where’s my thing?”

  “What thing?”

  “That.”

  She weakly reached for the thing she had brought on board with her.

  The head of Angelica Lin.

  Elfrida had not been alone on her trek across the dayside. Angelica Lin had gone with her, or chased her, or maybe it had been the other way round. Mendoza suspected he’d never know exactly what had gone down between the two women. He didn’t want to know. It had ended with Lin dead, and her severed head on board the Wakizashi with them.

  Roughly hacked off with a cutter laser, the grisly object had bled all over the cockpit before Kiyoshi caught it and stuffed it into a ziploc. It was now rolling around the floor. Elfrida kept reaching for it, so Mendoza, stifling disgust, grabbed it for her. She tucked it under her arm like a teddy-bear.

  “Her name wasn’t Angelica Lin, actually,” she croaked. “It was Gloria dos Santos. I knew her … before.”

  “Before?”