The Luna Deception Page 18

  “Before she got all that surgery.”

  Kiyoshi, overhearing, cracked up. “That’s one hell of a neck job you gave her. Tak about going under the knife.” After a second, Elfrida started to laugh, too. The two of them hooted until Elfrida began to cough. Mendoza patted her on the back.

  “How’d you get here, anyway?” she said to Kiyoshi. “It’s like you’re my guardian angel or something.”

  “Some angel I’d make,” Kiyoshi said, sobering. “No, the one you should thank is him.” He nodded at Mendoza.

  Elfrida gazed up into Mendoza’s face. The look in her eyes nearly made him bust out bawling. It was what he had hoped and longed to get from her one day. A look of love.

  Because he sucked at romantic moments, he indicated the bagged-up head on Elfrida’s lap. “It’s tragic, isn’t it? I mean, her part in the whole thing … I guess she trusted Derek Lorna, believed they were in it together. And then he betrayed her.”

  “Yeah,” Elfrida said. “But she deserved it. She murdered Charles K. Pope.”

  “Whoa. Why?”

  Kiyoshi said, “To take his place, obviously.”

  “Actually, no,” Elfrida said. “Because she wanted to be with Derek Lorna. She thought they were going to do great things together. So she installed the program he sent her, without even running an anti-virus scan. And that’s not tragic. That’s just stupid.”

  She began to cough. Mendoza patted her back, fed her gatorade from a pouch. The Superlifter docked with the Monster, a violent smooch of metal.

  “Sorry,” Kiyoshi said. “Now, Elfrida, listen, we haven’t got direct docking capability. The Monster’s airlocks are so old, their seals don’t fit modern ones like on a Superlifter’s. So we’re gonna have to spacewalk to the operations module. Think you can manage that?”

  “Sure,” Elfrida said, although she looked grayer than ever. “Floating is easier than walking.” She held the bagged-up head out to Mendoza. “John, could you carry this for me?”

  As they floated across to the operations module, in the shadow of the Monster’s bulk, the eyes of Angelica Lin—no, Gloria dos Santos—reflected the ship’s exterior warning lights, seeming to wink redly at Mendoza.

  Kiyoshi said via suit-to-suit radio, “Make sure you don’t drop that. It’s going to put Derek Lorna in jail.”

  “Huh?” Mendoza said.

  “Duh. Lin, dos Santos, whatever her name really was, she must have had a BCI. It’ll have records of her contacts with Lorna. Hard evidence. That’s what the courts look for.”

  Mendoza looked at the head with a fresh perspective. It struck him as disgusting to steal a dead woman’s memories. He switched channels. “Jun?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is this for real? Are we going to cut her head open and extract her BCI?”

  “Absolutely not,” Jun said. “We’ll have to deliver it intact to the Interplanetary Court of Justice. We obviously can’t take it to Earth. And I wouldn’t want to trust it to a drone delivery service. But I’ll think of something. Anyway, it can go in the freezer for now.”

  “ … OK.”

  “I know what’s on your mind,” Jun said. “They’re dragging us down to their level. But Elfrida almost died for this. We can’t just throw it away because we have high moral principles about not violating the dead.”

  Mendoza reached the airlock ahead of the others. He reached out his free hand and pulled Elfrida the rest of the way in. His admiration for her increased by the moment. Of course she hadn’t taken Gloria dos Santos’s head as some kind of grisly souvenir. She had taken it precisely because she knew it contained the evidence that would convict Derek Lorna of genocide.

  A medibot met them on the inside of the airlock. Elfrida gratefully reclined into its embrace. “First time I’ve ever been on your ship,” she croaked to Kiyoshi. “Wow, is this place a mess, or what?”

  She drifted into unconsciousness.

  Mendoza followed the medibot to the Monster’s sickbay and watched it transfer her into a temperature-controlled sleeping-bag, which was secured to the wall amid a platoon of advanced medibots, bioprinters, and scanners, many still adorned with factory inspection seals. None of this fancy equipment would do Elfrida any good. The prescription for shock and dehydration had not changed in centuries: rest, fluids, more rest, and more fluids.

  He kissed her forehead and left her to sleep.

  ★

  Fr. Lynch caught him outside the sickbay. “Finally, you’re back. Thank God you were able to rescue her.”

  “Father, what do you think about mutilating the head of Angelica Lin, sorry, Gloria dos Santos, to get at her BCI?”

  “From a theological standpoint, it’s wrong to mutilate a corpse. But it’s also true that her BCI is not part of her body, so removing it would not count as mutilation. In fact, some in the Church hold that implants and augments are unnatural to begin with.”

  “Is that why you don’t have a BCI?”

  “No. My own views on that question are not absolutist. I just don’t trust their security. Now, if you’ve got a moment, Mendoza—”

  “But was it wrong to cut her head off in the first place?”

  “Of course it was.”

  “Then Elfrida—”

  “She’s not a Christian, is she? You can’t hold her to the same standards. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Actually, she’s been baptized into the Faith,” Mendoza said. “It happened before I met her. I don’t think she took it seriously. It was operationally convenient, or something. But … OK, OK.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Go on, Father. Sorry.”

  “I need your help with something. Now.”

  “What is it?”

  “I need you to break into a corporate database and copy certain relevant portions of their records.”

  “A local database? Everything down there is a smouldering ruin. The Crash Test Dummy fragged all the industrial facilities.”

  “Not quite. It didn’t touch any of the facilities belonging to Wrightstuff, Inc.”

  xvii.

  In the Wrightstuff, Inc. polar habitat of Mt. Gotham, a man named Doug Wright lay on a stretcher cranked up to a sitting position. He was monitoring multiple screens in a situation room full of holographs that morphed and danced but didn’t really tell you anything you could not get from a written report. It had not been his choice of décor.

  He had hardly slept since disaster struck Mercury. The other Wrightstuff habs at the north and south poles were holding on. Doug had instructed them to send out EVA teams to search for survivors at the factories in the twilight zone, before the terminator advanced far enough to swallow the sites in lethal daylight. The reports from the EVA teams had now started to come in. They made depressing reading, but Doug was forcing himself to peruse every word.

  At least, that was what he’d been doing before the priest called him.

  Doug frowned at the figure projected on the virtual comms screen of his retinal implants. The dog-collar said Roman Catholic. The short-sleeved black shirt and slacks said business. The grim, square-jawed visage said trouble.

  “Do I know you?”

  “No.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I just need a quick word,” the priest said. “It’s about Yoshikawa Spaceport.”

  “The spaceport on the nightside. A few of the Marines made it there. You over there now? Are you hit?”

  “No, the spaceport is undamaged, and that’s what I want to ask you about.”

  Doug jerked his head at the other men in the room. “Doug. Doug. Out. You too, Doug.”

  The priest’s eyes flicked, watching them troop across the background of the comms camera. He did not remark on the fact that they all looked exactly the same, and were all called Doug. But the Doug on the stretcher—Doug #2, to give him his official name—was sensitive about his genetic heritage. He preempted the reaction he expected by saying, “Yes, we’re clones. You wanna make something of it?”

 
; The priest swallowed visibly. A muted reaction, considering.

  “I’m guessing you’re from the New Holy Roman Empire,” Doug pressed.

  “The NHRE! Throw a stone in Rome and you’ll hit a spy.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “I’m a Jesuit. I work with some people you know nothing about, and it’ll stay that way.”

  “OK. So what’s this about?””

  “You’re injured,” the priest said. “What happened to you?”

  Doug saw no point in not telling him. The whole solar system was going to find out, anyway. “I just killed the president of this company. Got shot by one of his bodyguards.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Now, if you’ve got some more bad news, I’d like to hear it.”

  “Why did you kill the president, if I may ask?”

  Doug shrugged, which sent a twinge through his bandaged torso. The answer was, he’d learnt that President Doug was the one who’d brought disaster to Mercury. Him and some mysterious lady called Lorna, whoever she was, had unleashed the Heidegger program—the freaking Heidegger program—on this planet, so that President Doug could look like a hero for stopping it. Then a grateful solar system would have allowed him to declare independence. That had been the theory, anyway.

  Doug unconsciously sneered at the memory. Asshole had wanted a historic victory.

  And now Doug #2 had a historic catastrophe on his hands.

  He had taken the priest’s call because he hoped the priest was calling from the New Holy Roman Empire. Doug was already talking to his own contacts in the NHRE, hoping to enlist their support at the UN when the blowback hit. He had thought this priest might be a back-channel diplomat. But the signal delay said he wasn’t on Earth. He was much closer.

  “I’m not telling you anything until you tell me why you want to know,” Doug said.

  “All right. Yoshikawa Spaceport. There’s a kind of bunker here. A rock-shielded facility, camouflaged by regolith. What’s in it?”

  “Where are you?” Doug said.

  “Will you answer the bloody question?”

  “If you can see that bunker, I’m guessing you’re in orbit. You’d better watch your back. Whoever whacked the Crash Test Dummy, they’re still out there.”

  The priest laughed. “That was us.”

  Tension drained from Doug’s body. Maybe the priest was a friend. But he remained wary enough to say, “And who are you, again?”

  “Never mind that. The point is, you owe us.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “So tell me about that camouflaged bunker at Yoshikawa Spaceport.”

  A ping flashed up in Doug’s HUD area. One of his EVA teams had just reported that the GESiemens consumer electronics factory looked to be only superficially damaged. It was still moving, crawling away from the oncoming terminator. ~Survivors? Doug subvocalized.

  “Doug,” said the priest. “I know you’re having a tough day. And I’ve no wish to make your life any harder. But I need this information. Perhaps this’ll convince you that I mean it.”

  All the holographic displays around Doug vanished. The bare walls of the situation room were exposed—for an instant. Then the lights went off. With a gentle whine, all the systems in the room powered down.

  In the silence, Doug heard the thunk-thunk of deadbolts shooting home, locking the pressure doors. The room suddenly felt cramped, airless.

  He heard his brothers whaling on the doors. The muffled thuds might as well have been klicks away. The situation room was nuke-proof, blast-proof. And it should have been hack-proof, too.

  “That IV line going into your arm,” the priest said quietly, “is delivering a low-dose cocktail of painkillers. Now look.” The dosometer display ticked up from 25 mcg/hour to 35. “It wouldn’t take very much more to kill you.”

  “H-h-how are you doing this?”

  “Suffice it to say I’ve an associate with expertise in this area. Truthfully, we were planning to just lift the information we need from your corporate records. But there’s nothing there about this bunker, or any expenditures associated with it.”

  Doug nodded jerkily. “The customer insisted on total information security. KIIYH.”

  “KIIYH? That’s a new one on me.”

  “Keep It In Your Head.” Doug touched the bristles above his left ear, where his BCI snuggled inside his skull.

  “I see. Well, I don’t believe you know what this is all about. I’m not the one to judge your actions, anyway. But I will have to insist that you give me what information you’ve got.”

  Doug raised one hand and gazed at the IV line taped to its back, the pink tinge of his own genetically tailored blood backing up in the tube. He had almost died today. Hundreds of purebloods had been brutally slaughtered. Mercury had suffered a blow that would set the planet’s development back a generation. Though he disavowed President Doug’s filthy tricks, he was instinctually averse to giving up any more of the competitive edge that Wrightstuff, Inc. would need to get back on its feet.

  He suspected the priest did come from the New Holy Roman Empire, though the man denied it. The NHRE were interested in the same thing everyone else was. The same thing that President Doug had killed, lied, and ultimately died for. Mercury’s untapped stocks of helium-3.

  And now they wanted a piece of the Hope business, too?

  Fine. Let them have it.

  At the end of the day, Doug might be a clone, but his mind was his own, and he chose not to follow in President Doug’s footsteps by gambling with his people’s lives.

  “All right. The bunker at Yoshikawa Spaceport is ours, as you guessed. We have a joint venture with GESiemens, building medium-haul shuttles, and the customer is looking to scale up in the near future. The bunker’s a final assembly facility. It’s right next to the spaceport, so we can do test launches using the runway there.” He shrugged. “Here’s the project file.” He sent it from his BCI’s memory crystal to the priest’s ID.

  “Got that, thanks. And the customer that ordered these shuttles?”

  “Hope Space Industries, on Luna.”

  “I had a feeling it might be.”

  The doors unlocked. Doug’s brothers piled into the room. The lights came back on. The priest was gone.

  xviii.

  “That didn’t go too badly,” Mendoza said. “Jeez, though, Father. You can be intimidating. If I was that guy, I would have been shitting myself.”

  Fr. Lynch flicked at his tablet, skimming the file that Doug Wright—or rather, one of Doug Wright’s surviving clones—had sent him.

  “He really believed we were screwing with his medibot. It never occurred to him that we might just be hacking the display,” Mendoza recalled. “That says something about him, that he would believe that of a priest.”

  It also said something about Mendoza, that he had helped Fr. Lynch with the deception. He wasn’t sure he liked what it said. But he accepted that he would have to be harder in future.

  If nothing else, he didn’t want to lose the tenuous respect he had won from Kiyoshi Yonezawa.

  Kiyoshi had been listening in on their conversation, and now he drifted towards Fr. Lynch to get a look at his tablet. The Jesuit tossed it to him. “There’s nothing there. It’s all price negotiations and corporate doublespeak.”

  “What’s this? An email thread discussing ship specs?”

  “Yes, but they don’t say what the final specs were, much less whether they achieved them in production. I’d like to call back, but I’m fairly sure this is all your man had.”

  Fr. Lynch faced Kiyoshi across the bridge.

  “We’ll have to land at Yoshikawa and take a look for ourselves.”

  “I have a question,” Mendoza said. “Are we assuming these shuttles are connected with Lorna’s scheme? Are they for use against the PLAN?”

  “I’d be very surprised if they were not,” Fr. Lynch answered. “All the same players are involved.”

  “Then it was true.” Every l
ast word.

  “That we don’t know. And we never will, unless we land at Yoshikawa and find out.”

  Kiyoshi floated gracefully over to the fridge. He took out one of his pastries and bit into it. “No can do, Father. The Wakizashi is practically out of propellant. The Monster’s got none to spare, either.”

  “According to these documents, Mercury has untapped stocks of helium-3,” Fr. Lynch said.

  “That’s nice to know.”

  “And the Monster’s new drive runs on He3, does it not?”

  “I can’t put rocks in the tank,” Kiyoshi spluttered. “Anyway, we’re OK for fuel pellets. The issue is propellant. You do know the difference, Father? Propellant is what you throw out the back of the ship, to make it go. Fuel is what you put in the reactor, to heat up the propellant. Our old engine was a D-D fusion drive. This one uses He3 and D. Propellant’s the same: liquid hydrogen. And that’s what we’re short of. We had enough for one trip down to the surface. We used that up, rescuing Mendoza’s girlfriend.” He gave Mendoza a slight smile, indicating that he didn’t blame him for that.

  Elfrida was still out cold in sickbay. Mendoza felt responsible for getting her home safely. He also felt responsible for safeguarding the evidence in Gloria dos Santos’s head. “I don’t get why we need to land,” he said, taking Kiyoshi’s side. “Can’t we find out about the ships some other way?”

  Fr. Lynch ignored him. “There’ll be fuel at the spaceport, Yonezawa!”

  “Propellant. There are also people there. Civilian staffers and a bunch of Marines, according to their Mayday broadcasts.”

  “They’ll be glad to see us—”

  “They’ll be glad to see my ship!” Kiyoshi took another bite of his pastry. Indistinctly, he said, “They want off this planet. If I was them, I’d try to commandeer the Monster, so I have to assume that’s a possibility. And I am not getting into a fight with Star Force, Father!”

  Fr. Lynch blew out air noisily. He raised his gaze to the ceiling. “Jun? Jun, are you there?”

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Jun’s disembodied voice said.

  “Don’t bother, bro,” Kiyoshi said. “I’ve calculated this thing to the nearest cubic milliliter. Do you know how much delta-V it takes to escape the sun’s gravity well? A shit-ton. And—huh?”