The Luna Deception Read online

  “Come on,” the Jesuit said. “Quick.” He led Mendoza into the alleys behind the station. Lean-tos, awning-shaded patios, balconies, chicken coops, and rabbit pens narrowed the already-narrow canyons. This was one of the “Free” areas where people could indulge their inner architects, as long as they selected one of three approved patterns of fake brick.

  “Father, what were they throwing at us? I thought those things were grenades, but they didn’t explode.”

  “Shit,” Father Lynch said.

  “What? What?!”

  “Shit. That’s what they were throwing at us. Compacted, dehydrated fecal matter. Local agriculture doesn’t need as much manure as we produce, so the recycling facilities process the excess into tiles for insulation and rad-shielding. Some facilities outside are entirely built of the stuff.”

  “Huh,” Mendoza said. “And I always thought they added flavoring and sold it as ReadiPak meals.”

  They both laughed aloud, a release of tension.

  The Jesuit ducked into a curbside pho restaurant. Mendoza followed him past the kitchen and up a pulley-style zipshaft. You stood on a plate and hauled yourself up. Easy when you weighed 1/6th of what you would on Earth, and had just sweated off another couple of kilos, running for your life. They got off on the third floor. WITHNAIL & I. WHO-CERTIFIED THERAPISTS.

  “This is where I was going to bring you, anyway. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to explain. Withnail and I—well, there’s no Withnail, but I Cheong is a good friend of mine. She’ll be able to help you.”

  The Jesuit spoke into a hidden intercom. The door valved. A spaceborn East Asian woman came from behind her desk. She wore a cross around her neck. Her smile crumpled when she saw Father Lynch’s expression.

  “It’s urgent,” the Jesuit said. “Can you do him immediately?”

  “Of course,” I Cheong said. She switched on a professional manner. “Please go through to Consulting Room B. A therapist will be with you in a moment.”

  Mendoza went into the cubicle she indicated. It held a cot and nothing else. He wondered what kind of therapy this joint provided. Some places flaunted WHO certification, but exploited needy patients, trapping them in a cycle of emotional addiction at fifty spiders a pop. He was sure Father Lynch wouldn’t have anything to do with such a racket, but …

  The door opened and a therapist entered. It was a granny-class geminoid bot with a wispy white bun, wearing surgical scrubs.

  “Hello, John,” it said. “Try to relax. You won’t feel a thing.”

  It pushed him down, yelling and clawing, on the cot. It slapped a patch on his neck. Before he could rip the patch off, blackness swallowed him.

  vii.

  Mendoza awoke on an unfamiliar bed for the second time in 24 hours. But this was nothing like waking up in Derek Lorna’s guest bedroom. The bed was hard and scratchy. Also, he had the worst headache of his life.

  A shadow moved across the dim light source. Fr. Lynch stooped over him. “Good, you’re awake. Lie still while I finish packing.”

  “Thirsty.”

  “I Cheong told me to give you this when you woke up.”

  Mendoza’s fingers closed around a pouch. He squeezed its milk-flavored contents down his throat. The Jesuit knelt in front of a chest-of-drawers, packing a rucksack.

  This must be where Fr. Lynch lived, in the small priory attached to the convent behind St. Ignatius. From where he lay, Mendoza could see a crucifix on the wall, the only decoration. Carved of pale wood, it would have been too subdued for most Filipinos’ taste, but Mendoza liked, if that was the right word, the tortured serenity on the face of the crucified Christ. Fr. Lynch stopped in front of it. Moved a hand to its hook, as if to lift it down. Then shook his head.

  “Time to go,” he said to Mendoza.

  Mendoza levered himself upright, bracing for a surge of pain. It didn’t come. The drink in the pouch must have been some kind of analgesic.

  I Cheong had drilled into his skull with miniature robotic instruments and removed his BCI and its fuel cell. She had explained the process to him after the surgery, when he surfaced from the anesthetic. He remembered seeing the actual components on her gloved fingertip. Two bloodied scraps of metal and crystal.

  Now, he felt in his hair and found two nuskin bandages, one above his left ear, and one at the base of his skull.

  His vision was empty, clear. Nothing happened when he rolled his eyes or purposefully blinked.

  He put on his shoes. He had fallen asleep fully clothed. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s better if you don’t know that yet.”

  Two rucksacks leaned by the door. Fr. Lynch took the bulkier one and gave the other to Mendoza. It weighed next to nothing in Luna’s gravity.

  At the door, the Jesuit uttered a bad word under his breath. He went back into the room and took the crucifix off the wall. “Maybe I’m just superstitious, but I don’t like leaving Our Lord behind.”

  Mendoza kept quiet. The way Fr. Lynch said that, it sounded like he did not expect to come back here. How deeply had Mendoza dragged him into his troubles?

  The priory had a ladder instead of a zipshaft, proving how old it was. They climbed down into the grounds. The convent was dark. With no HUD, Mendoza could not tell what time it was, but he figured it must be the small hours of the morning.

  An enormous Vitamin C tree filled the front garden of the convent. Mendoza slipped on the rotten peel of one of its citrusy fruits.

  “Careful! Don’t forget you’ve just had brain surgery.”

  “It doesn’t feel like it.”

  “That’s the painkillers talking.”

  They went out to the street. Widely spaced streetlights yellowed the fronds of the pignut palms. The people here were hardworking citizens. They would be asleep in their beds. A streetsweeper bot trundled down the street, brushes swishing on the cobbles. Mendoza did not breathe until it had passed them.

  They walked to the airlock near St. Ignatius. Before ducking into the bushes, Father Lynch stopped to look around and listen.

  From the direction of the Evans Square commuter rail station, a distant siren whooped once, and fell silent.

  Father Lynch grinned. Mendoza had seen him grin like that only a few times before, when a kendo-ka pulled off a particularly difficult kata. Inside the airlock, he took out his tablet, wrote with a finger on the screen, and held it up for Mendoza to see.

  That was the cops finding your BCI. I Cheong ditched it at the station, to buy us some time.

  Mendoza grabbed the tablet and scrawled: But Father! They’ll get all my data!

  Think they don’t have it already?

  Hmm. Mendoza was pretty sure that his BCI had never been hacked. But on the other hand, what could Derek Lorna and his cronies learn from Mendoza’s data? Only that he collected classical music recordings, and had a crush on a girl. With any luck, they would dismiss him as a sad sack who screwed up everything he touched.

  He went to open the sharesuit locker. Father Lynch stopped him. He dove into their rucksacks and pulled out two suits of the second-skin type. They looked like thick, black wetsuits with flexible boots attached.

  Fr. Lynch wrote on the tablet, The sharesuits have beacons in them. We’re using these. They have inflatable helmets, and integrated oxygen and water reservoirs. Strip.

  Mendoza just stared until Father Lynch was down to his black ecclesiastical skivvies. Then, understanding that the Jesuit meant it, he turned his back and took off his own clothes.

  Father Lynch reached around his shoulder to show him the tablet. Condom-style urine collection system. The other tube is a suction system for solid waste. Insert it into your anus.

  By the time Mendoza got himself sealed up, he had pretty much managed to stop blushing. He pressed the button to inflate his helmet and fitted it to his neck seal. The odorless purity of canned air replaced the smell of moondust.

  “Comms check,” Father Lynch said in his ear.

  “OK. I mean, copy.”


  The Jesuit cycled the airlock. “These suits are Space Force surplus. They’re made for Marines, which is to say numpties who never finished school. You shouldn’t have any trouble with the onboard systems, but the MI assistants have been disabled, so if you can’t figure something out, ask me. Any questions so far?”

  “Are you seriously telling me that Marines go into battle with suction tubes up their asses?”

  Father Lynch laughed. “Most of them never go into battle at all. But yeah. It kind of detracts from the glamor, doesn’t it?”

  They exited the airlock and trudged away from the dome. Sharp pebbles dug into Mendoza’s feet, as if he were walking barefoot. So much for Star Force suit technology.

  “Stick to the shadows,” Fr. Lynch said.

  With the sun just a degree above the horizon, that wasn’t difficult. Even the smallest pieces of debris cast long, inky shadows. Mendoza looked up. A full Earth hung overhead like a blue Christmas tree ornament on black velvet, 40 times as bright as the moon seen from Earth. The Star Force suit’s faceplate provided true-color filtration. He had never seen Earth looking this beautiful, except in the fake sky of Wellsland. Outside, it was different. It was real. He felt a connection, across the centuries, with the very first moonwalkers, Armstrong and Aldrin. Then he stubbed his toe. “Ow shit!”

  “Watch your step.”

  They were walking in the shadow of Wilson Hill, a mini-crater to the north of Cherry-Garrard. The rim of the crater was festooned—like every bit of high ground in the area—with solar arrays. Boulders, junk, and heaps of unused glassbricks turned the low ground into an obstacle course. This area was not as heavily trafficked as the immediate periphery of the dome, so a layer of loose moondust still covered the ground. It puffed up at each step. The legs of their suits were already grubby gray.

  Ahead lay the next dome down on the Wiechert line, Oates. Behind them and to their left, the Cherry-Garrard recycling plant had come into view. Mendoza tensed, but nothing emerged from its inky shadow.

  “In these suits,” Fr. Lynch said, “we can’t be tracked.” They reached the edge of Wilson Hill’s shadow. “Count to ten. Then follow me.” Fr. Lynch took off at a fast lope. Seven … eight … screw it. Mendoza pushed himself into a kangaroo-hopping run. Owing to his defective boots, he did not catch up with Fr. Lynch until the Jesuit stopped in the shadow of the tri-peak Oates dome.

  “Why … count to ten?” Mendoza panted.

  “In case I got zapped by the PORMS.”

  “I thought you said they couldn’t track us!”

  “A sat might pick us up visually. That’s why we’re sticking to the shadows. But since I didn’t get zapped, I assume they’re not searching for us outside. At least, not yet.” As they walked on, Fr. Lynch continued, “I’m a person of interest to the police. Not just because I’m a priest, but because I’ve helped people to disappear before.”

  “You have?”

  “You aren’t the first person connected with the Church who’s had to drop out of sight.”

  “Oh.”

  “So they will assume I’ve sent you along the usual route.”

  “The usual route?”

  “Victoria line to Wellsland, change at Gingrich, and take the Spudis line out to the spaceport.”

  That wasn’t what Mendoza had been asking.

  “So they’ll concentrate on searching the visual surveillance logs from the trains.”

  “All they’ll have to do is run a facial recognition search. That takes about five seconds.”

  “Not necessarily. One of the other things I Cheong does is cosmetic surgery. A quick and dirty rhinoplasty here, a bit of filler there; just enough to throw the software off.”

  “Hey, at least she’s WHO-certifiied.”

  “Laugh. It’s quite the underground industry, actually.”

  “I hope she doesn’t get in trouble.”

  “Oh, she’s not doing anything illegal. Cosmetic surgery falls into the category of therapy. To answer your question, we’re going to the spaceport.”

  “Uhhhm,” Mendoza grunted in shock. He reappraised his surroundings. Oates dome loomed ahead of them, like a curvaceous circus tent. Between its outbuildings, he glimpsed empty kilometers of sunlit terrain: the skirt of Shackleton Crater. A paved road crossed the slope. Tankerbots crawled down the road, transporting water from the mine in the crater. They wouldn’t be going that way. Too exposed.

  They circled Oates dome. Now they could see the built-up heart of Shackleton City, a chaos of domes bounded by Malapert Mountain’s darkside. The spaceport wasn’t visible from here. It occupied the floor of Faustini Crater, whose walls functioned as natural berms to contain the radioactive backwash from the dozens of spacecraft that took off and landed every day.

  There went one now, flashing up and away from the horizon. A meteorite in reverse.

  “Father, how far is it to the spaceport?”

  “About a hundred and twenty kilometers.”

  “Isn’t that kind of a long walk?”

  “Yes. That’s why we’re going to do it in two parts. You’ll forgive me if I don’t tell you any more right now. There’s always the chance that we might get caught, in which case, the less information you have, the better.”

  “You sure know how to cheer a guy up, Father.”

  Fr. Lynch’s surprised laugh exploded into his helmet. “My family tried to dissuade me from my vocation. They said, ‘A gloomy Gus like you shouldn’t be a priest. You’ll get the parishioners down, Tom.’ But in today’s solar system, you need an outlook that is at least tinged with black.”

  Mendoza wondered where Fr. Lynch came from. The Jesuit appeared to have mixed African and European heritage, and he was definitely a native English speaker. Sometimes the expressions he used (‘gloomy Gus’) hinted at a regional dialect. Impossible to say more than that.

  Conversation ceased as they trudged down into the valley. Mendoza kept trying to check his email, the news, his heart rate, other stress indicators, and coming up against a wall of nothing. This was more than blindness. It was blind-, deaf-, and dumbness.

  I was a kind of cyborg, he thought. I had an extra pair of eyes, ones that could see information, and now they’re gone. What remained? The moonscape, and him. Trudge, trudge, trudge. His feet were really hurting. Gotta keep up. Fr. Lynch showed no signs of pain, striding tirelessly from shadow to shadow, dome to dome.

  They were following the string of domes that marked the underground route of the Wiechert line. The further in they got, the older the domes were, and the slummier. Some weren’t actual domes but just boxes, like Nightingale Village, the exurb where Mendoza lived. Had lived. Outside, people meandered, conspicuous in their bright orange sharesuits. A gang of children—the legs of their sharesuits shortened with alligator clips—sledded on homemade toboggans down a slope built of glassbricks. A maintenance bot was helping to improve the slope. It was strange to see one of those eight-legged nightmares being helpful.

  “They know they have to let people go outside,” Fr. Lynch said. “We would all go mad if they didn’t.”

  “Nod. I think some people would live outside if it weren’t for the radiation.”

  They passed two people in the shadow of a waste heat recycling plant, locked together, faceplates bumping. Lovers who could find nowhere else to be alone.

  “Yes, the radiation,” Fr. Lynch said. “Actually, these suits are much better shielded than the sharesuits. You needn’t worry about using up too much of your lifetime allowance.”

  Radiation was the least of Mendoza’s concerns right now. Two stinging aches in his skull warned him that the painkillers were wearing off. Before long, the aches had joined up and spread all the way around his head.

  At last he had to say, “Father, my head is kind of hurting. Is it much farther?”

  “Unfortunately, it is. Can you access your telemetry suite? The suits aren’t fully stocked, but there should be some meds in there.”

  “Ho
w do I access it?”

  “Voice command. With the MI assistant disabled, it’s a bit clunky. Give it a try.”

  Mendoza grappled with the interface and convinced the suit to inject him with a painkiller. That helped some with the headache, but didn’t do anything for his feet, or his legs. He had already walked further today than he usually did in a week, and walking on Luna was tiring to begin with, if you were Earthborn, your legs fundamentally maladapted to the bounding gait that was the most efficient means of lunar locomotion. His awareness constricted to the grimy shape of Fr. Lynch bounding ahead of him. Their journey across the city center, through the maze of support facilities around Wellsland and Verneland, felt like a trek across red-hot coals.

  On the verge of collapse, he rooted around in the medical suite again.

  “My MI is disabled,” the suit complained. “Please enable it.”

  “What’s this? Nicozan? What does it do?”

  “My MI is disabled. Please enable it.”

  “Oh, frag off.” Nicozan was the only drug on offer apart from the painkillers he’d already tried. Presumably it couldn’t do him any harm. “SUIT COMMAND: Inject me with a standard dose.”

  Moments later, his feet stopped hurting. Shadows gained coruscating halos. The Malapert ridge—much closer now—sparkled, clothed with a crystal forest of parabolic solar collectors. This Nicozan stuff was first-class.

  Mendoza caught up with Fr. Lynch as they skulked into the shadow of yet another big-box facility.

  “Here we are,” the Jesuit said.

  “Oh!” Mendoza now felt as if he could have kept walking forever.

  “Farm Eighty-One.”

  An airlock stuck out from the wall. Outside it stood an open-topped buggy.

  “Uh oh.” Fr. Lynch hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Well, we have to go in. Come on.”

  viii.

  In the airlock of Farm Eighty-One, an electrostatic scrubber blasted the moondust off their suits. Grey clouds filled the airlock. Mendoza laughed. “Guess we were pretty dirty.” Nozzles sprayed them with nanobeads to remove the last of the sticky dust. The smell of the detergent lingered after the airlock was pressurized: a fake floral scent like cheap air freshener.