The Luna Deception Page 21

  “Right,” said one of the cyborgs. He fastened his fists, which were actually four-pronged grabbers, onto the Lorna-bot’s jaw and left shoulder.

  The bot spoke, indistinctly: “Don’t be fucking stupid. We can work together.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Kiyoshi muttered. A wave of dizziness hit him. He knew what was going on: his blood pressure was too low for this gravity, and the exertion had drawn oxygen away from his brain. He leaned against a pillar and bent double to get the blood flowing back to his head.

  The pillar was one of those that held up the roof. It was a solid thing in a hab full of flimsy prefab structures.

  Which was why Kiyoshi survived the blast that obliterated the Lorna-bot, killed both cyborgs instantly, and blew a hole in the floor so big that a nanocarbon tube factory fell into the long-term storage area.

  ★

  Mendoza and Elfrida heard the blast. But they were several streets away by then, and it didn’t sound all that different from the backdrop of industrial noise.

  They had reached their destination.

  The Don Bosco building proved to be a factory, externally similar to its neighbors. But this factory was neither a cave full of welding sparks, nor a hole in the wall where one person watched over a 3D printer. Mendoza and Elfrida followed the receptionist across a production floor crammed with workbenches. Teenagers crowded the benches, handcrafting religious objects: Buddha statues, Shiva wall hangings, Mormon tabernacles, Stars of David, rosaries, Muslim prayer rugs, crucifixes, and other doodads. The teens chattered and laughed as they worked.

  “It gets them off the streets,” said Angelo Ekumbe, consul of the New Holy Roman Empire. “We can’t pay them as much as we’d like to, but there will always be a market for religious merchandise.”

  Mendoza found his serene confidence soothing.

  The consul escorted them into an office full of boxed-up religious merchandise waiting to be shipped. Behind his desk hung the flag of the NHRE. The consul took off his baseball cap and put on the violet biretta of a papal nuncio. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  Mendoza sat down. Elfrida did not. She fumbled with the zip of her rucksack and took out a large, heavy object in a ziploc bag. They’d packed the rucksack full of freezegel sachets, but these had mostly defrosted by now, and Mendoza detected a faint, awful smell.

  The consul recoiled. He reached under his desk.

  Mendoza lunged, trapped the man’s hand before it could reach the hidden panic button.

  “Please let me explain,” Elfrida said. Her voice was steady. “Yes, it’s a human head. I’ve brought it here because of what’s inside it: a BCI containing incriminating evidence against the director of one of Luna’s best-respected research institutes. This will prove that Derek Lorna, of the Leadership in Robotics Institute, intentionally released a version of the Heidegger program on Mercury, to commit mass murder.”

  The consul found his voice. “Why … here? Why not take this … evidence … to the peacekeepers?”

  “Well,” Elfrida said, “it was my mother’s idea. She works for the NHRE, in an unofficial capacity. Her name’s Ingrid Haller. She asked some people at the Vatican what we should do. And they told her to tell me to bring it to you, that you’d get it where it needs to go.”

  The consul nodded slowly. “Praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ,” he said, “for his mercy is infinite.”

  ★

  Kiyoshi picked up the pieces.

  He found one head, two feet, one grabber, four steel-reinforced ulnas and wrist joints which had survived the explosion intact, and a lot of less easily identifiable bits.

  In a space station, as on a spaceship, an explosion was a code-red emergency. Within a minute and a half, a wave of repair bots arrived. They boiled out of the hole in the floor and began to sort through the debris.

  Soon after that, two vans full of peacekeepers screamed up to secure the area.

  Kiyoshi pointed out the bits he’d collected. “These are the casualties. You can run DNA tests, notify their families.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Tell them it wasn’t an accident. Those guys died in a war.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Forget it.” Kiyoshi walked away. The peacekeepers let him go; they were busy arresting the trunk-room dwellers below for living in a non-designated area.

  ★

  Mendoza and Elfrida went out to dinner with the NHRE consul. They ate vat-raised shrimp and hydroponic kale and quinoa salad. They drank white wine. The consul proposed a toast to “Peace and justice,” which both of them enthusiastically seconded. Afterwards, they wandered through the West Side, stopping now and again to kiss.

  Mendoza was not sure why Elfrida had changed her mind about him. Was she just grateful to him for saving her life? It seemed like more than that. It felt real. But he wasn’t about to spoil it by questioning her feelings.

  ★

  “Well, that went OK, except for those guys getting blown up,” Kiyoshi said. He was speaking aloud rather than subvocalizing, but who cared? No one understood Japanese, anyway. “Funny. It was like a battle of the phavatars. He had a selfie. You had me … What a dumbshit to use a selfie, though. If he’d just used a maintenance bot or something, we wouldn’t have spotted him.”

  “It was probably all he had,” Jun said, his voice almost drowned out by the noise of the Nodetrak.

  “It was vanity,” Kiyoshi said with the severity of an inquisitor. “Sheer vanity. Jesus, the auto-destruct thing, too.” He smiled, and had to force himself to stop smiling, because people were looking at him oddly.

  By the time he got back to the parking bay, the blues had set in. He booked a departure time, and then had to cancel and rebook because Elfrida and Mendoza weren’t back yet. He sat on the steps of the Superlifter, same as before. Strummed idly on the strings of his new guitar. He’d bought it on a whim, walking back through the market, thinking of Brainrape. At least they hadn’t shown up yet. The guitar was an acoustic whose warm sound got lost in the ambient noise.

  “You keep buying stuff,” Jun said.

  Kiyoshi thought, It was either this or something else, but he didn’t say that. He said, “If Elfrida and Mendoza don’t show in the next half-hour, I’m leaving them.”

  “We should probably leave them anyway.”

  Kiyoshi raised his eyebrows; he hadn’t expected that. “The boss-man wants to talk to them.”

  “I don’t think we should drag them into this.”

  “They’re already in it,” Kiyoshi said, noticing to his irritation that he was now arguing against himself. He also noticed that Jun sounded strangely remote. He had been quieter than normal since Lorna’s phavatar self-destructed. He’d seen it all through the surveillance cameras. Maybe even he had been shocked to learn what they were dealing with. It was one thing to know that Derek Lorna would not scruple to kill innocent bystanders. It was another thing to see it for yourself.

  Well, Lorna would soon be explaining his crimes to the International Court of Justice. Mendoza had called to say they had succeeded. He and Elfrida were probably out celebrating.

  They wobbled up at last, drunk and giggly. Elfrida vanished into the cockpit, to pee, she said. Mendoza sat down beside Kiyoshi on the steps. “Sorry we took so long getting back.”

  “No problem.”

  “We went out to eat with the papal nuncio. He’s a stand-up guy.” Without asking, Mendoza picked up Kiyoshi’s cigarette, which was lying on the steps, and took a drag. He coughed. “WTF is in this?”

  “Bit of THC, some nicotine, herbal flavorings, and a dash of vitamin K.”

  “Dude, are you a junkie or something? Ha, ha. I’m just kidding. But seriously, what’s up with the pastries?”

  Kiyoshi moved the box of donuts he had also bought in the market to his other side, out of Mendoza’s line of sight. Carefully keeping details to a minimum, he relayed the boss-man’s invitation.

  Mendoza’s dark eyes
grew huge. “Out to the Belt?”

  “Yes. I can’t tell you where at this time. You’ll understand that.”

  Mendoza hesitated. Then he shook his head. “I can’t. I have to go home and see my mother.”

  Kiyoshi smiled: it was touching that the guy cared about his mother. But Mendoza misinterpreted his expression. He seemed to think Kiyoshi was laughing at him.

  “I’m all she’s got, man. My sister was killed by the freaking PLAN. Ten years ago. It just about killed Mom. too.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. And I understand. Of course you should go home. You’re Earthborn, after all.”

  Elfrida stumbled out of the airlock. Her eyes were swollen, her nose pink. Mendoza, drunk, did not notice; he put his arm around her and grinned goofily. But Kiyoshi saw how subdued she was. He subvocalized: ~Did you say something to her?

  Jun’s voice, when at last it came, sounded exhausted. “She asked to come with us.”

  ~Oh. So I guess she’s crying because she’ll be separated from Mendoza?

  “No. She’s crying because I said no.”

  ~Why? The boss-man …

  “Think about what she’s been through. She needs to go home and recuperate. They both do. They’re gutsy kids, but our universe is no place for them.”

  ~Agreed, Kiyoshi subvocalized.

  It should have been liberating to know he wouldn’t be encumbered with extra passengers. But in fact, he felt kind of sad.

  xxi.

  Mendoza went home.

  His mother welcomed him joyfully. She made fried steak, kakanin butsi, pinoy-style spicy pork, and all the unhealthy desserts he’d loved as a boy. He went with her to Mass and answered people’s questions as politely as he could.

  It was mid-summer; the temperature in Manila was stifling. People dashed from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned church to air-conditioned shopping center. Mendoza tried sitting out in his mother’s pocket-sized garden, but the heat drove him indoors. He locked himself in the bathroom to talk to Elfrida.

  His mother wanted to know what he had to be so secretive about. When he explained about Elfrida, she burst into tears. Did he think Elfrida was The One? Would they live in Manila? She could evict her subletters to make room for them. John and Elfrida wouldn’t be going back into space, surely, after all they’d been through?

  Mendoza forestalled his mother before she actually began to plan the wedding. It was all up in the air, he said.

  In fact, Elfrida had seemed worryingly distant ever since they got back to Earth. The Interplanetary Court of Justice had placed her under supervision as a key witness in the case against Derek Lorna. And she was having mother issues, too.

  Mendoza lay under the air-conditioner’s tepid breeze, while his mother prayed her three daily rosaries, with the television going, and the subletters yukking it up on the other side of a thin wall. He thought: I had more privacy when I was living on the moon.

  ★

  “So,” Kiyoshi concluded, “we’re coming home.”

  He leaned back on the comms couch and bit into one of the donuts he’d bought on the Rocking Horse. Powdered sugar coated his lips.

  Twenty-three and a half minutes later, the comms screen burst into light. The silhouette of a shaggy-bearded man said, “No, you’re not.”

  “What?” Kiyoshi squawked.

  427,000,000 kilometers away, the boss-man continued, “I don’t care about Mendoza and Goto. I mean, they want to turn down the opportunity of a lifetime, fuck ‘em.”

  The boss-man did not know that Jun had put Elfrida off out of concern for her spiritual health. Kiyoshi had not told him. He was protecting Jun, as he had all his life.

  “But it’s insane to come back all that way with an empty ship. That old truck of yours has plenty of room for cargo. And now you have a decent drive, right? So I want you to pick up some stuff on Midway or wherever. Pharmaceuticals, memory crystals. Basic materials: printer liquid, biostrate, liquid nitrogen. Elements: bromine, phosphorus—we’re having soil issues again. Splart, we always need splart. I’m attaching a shopping list.”

  Kiyoshi groaned. He couldn’t go back to Midway! Maybe I’ll make that visit to Tiangong Erhao. Or buy the stuff online and get it delivered. Dronazon ships to deep space, don’t they?

  “Also, you may have to pick up another passenger. Unclear on that as yet. Awaiting developments.”

  Sparkles caught Kiyoshi’s eye. Must be sugar that had come off his donut.

  “So get that shopping out of the way, and enjoy the view of Earth, the home of mankind.” The boss-man chuckled cynically. He knew perfectly well that to Kiyoshi, Earth was the planet that had forced his people into exile for practising their faith. “I’ll keep you posted on the passenger issue.”

  Kiyoshi transmitted an acknowledgement. He did not ask how he was meant to pay for all that shopping. He knew the boss-man would tell him to put it on credit and he’d pay him back. Eventually. Probably.

  He floated up, scowling, from the comms couch, and returned to his own nest in the middle of the bridge.

  The Monster was quiet now. Their only remaining passenger was Father Tom, who kept to himself.

  Jun had been keeping to himself, too.

  Kiyoshi put on a headset, mask, and gloves. His body stayed on the bridge of the Monster, but his consciousness walked the corridors of the St. Francis, a turn-of-the-century Japanese colony ship.

  Kiyoshi had built this sim during his solo hauler days, as a hobby: the spaceship he’d always wanted, replete with virtual weaponry and gadgets. Jun had transformed it into a monastic labyrinth encrusted with crucifixes, statuary, and candles. Kiyoshi worshipped the Holy Wounds of Christ himself, and wore a crucifix, but this was a bit much for him. Images of the Passion, rendered in a vivid style reminiscent of Japanese woodblock art, stalked him through the ship.

  At least Jun had not messed with the observation deck.

  This (completely unrealistic, in terms of spaceship design) feature offered a panoramic view, stitched together from the Monster’s optical sensor feeds, of the volume in which they now drifted.

  One million kilometers from Earth, humanity’s home planet was a blue dot. Kiyoshi held up his thumb. It covered Earth. He felt a pang of unexpected compassion. Earth was so fragile. And yet if the home planet were ever to fall, humanity in space wouldn’t last long.

  He heard a small sound.

  Jun sat at the far end of the convex window, his back curled against the glass.

  “Hey,” Kiyoshi said, starting towards him.

  At that moment he felt a tap on his shoulder. That had been a real-life sensation.

  Another tap, more like a whack.

  Fuming, he pulled off his headset. The dimness of the St. Francis gave way to the bright lights of the bridge. Father Tom floated over him, poised to whack him again.

  “What?”

  “You’re not doing anything crucial at the moment, are you?”

  “If I was, you’d already have messed it up, Father.”

  “Good, because there’s something I want to show you.”

  “Let’s get Jun.”

  “I already showed him; he didn’t seem interested.”

  “Then it probably isn’t important.”

  “All the same, I’d like you to see for yourself.”

  Begrudgingly, Kiyoshi followed the Jesuit down to the materials lab. The last time this antique equipment had been used, it had been to analyze the regolith of 11073 Galapagos to determine whether the asteroid was suitable for human colonization. Now Father Tom had fired up the scanning electron microscope and the atomic absorption spectrometer. He pointed to the SEM’s 3D imaging screen. “What do you think that is?”

  “Looks like an insect.”

  Some kind of fly. No legs. You got funny mutations in artifical environments. Its wings moved feebly. Kiyoshi recoiled. “Is it dead?”

  “No. It’s immersed in … saliva, actually.”

  “Saliva?
”

  “Mine, boy. Nothing else to use for a medium.”

  “You didn’t find it on board, did you? More insects is all I need. We’ve already got ants. I tried to introduce spiders to keep them down, but they couldn’t handle zero-gee. Webs looked like nebulas.”

  “It’s not an insect,” Father Tom said.

  “What, then?”

  “How big do you think it is?” The Jesuit covered the measurement readout with his hand.

  “I don’t know, a few millimeters long?”

  “Ten microns long. The structures you see are on the nanoscale.”

  “Shit!”

  “Yes.” The Jesuit’s face hardened. “We were looking for the Mars probes. We’ve found them.”

  “Where?”

  “In your pocket.”

  “Eh?”

  “The pocket of your black leather trousers. It’s a good thing you never do laundry. It must have sneaked into your pocket while we were on the Rocking Horse. I extracted it with a magnet.”

  “What was it doing on the Rocking Horse?”

  “Spying, I expect. There are probably more of them on board, watching us right now.”

  “Fuck!”

  “Yes, boy.”

  “What are their capabilities?”

  “I haven’t entirely figured that out yet, but …” The Jesuit moved over to the atomic absorption spectrometer. “They’re peculiar things. Half biological, half electronic. Basically, they’re bacteria with transmitters.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, it’s true. This little fellow is emitting a signal at 512 MHz. That’s how I found him. He’s not saying much, to be sure. Only what kind of light he’s absorbing. But that’s useful data. Put a lot of them together, and you could use them as a camera.”

  “And there are more of them on board?”

  “There are bound to be. Bacteria don’t travel singly.”

  “Then we have to exterminate them. Do you have any idea how to do that?”

  “I do, actually …”

  Kiyoshi nodded along, but he wasn’t really listening. He was subvocalizing. ~Jun? JUN!

  “What?” Jun’s voice boomed into the lab, curt.

  Kiyoshi responded out loud, too. “If you’ve been paying attention, we’re infested with nanoscale bugs. Anything to contribute?”