The Luna Deception Read online

  The bot’s momentum carried it into the opposite wall of the corridor. It tumbled onto its back, paralyzed, smoking.

  At the end of the corridor, the onlookers peeled aside with cries of alarm. Another bot skidded between them. It was the one Mendoza had seen harvesting mulberry leaves, or an identical unit. It waved its secateurs menacingly.

  “Run,” Fr. Lynch said.

  They sprinted through the residential hab, out into an area cluttered with skips, sorters, and processing equipment. A couple of the skips came to life and hurtled at them, potatoes falling over their sides.

  A ramp led into a hole in the ground. They ran down it, amid rolling and bouncing potatoes, onto a railway platform. This was no commuter rail station. Large cargo containers waited in a line on narrow-gauge tracks. Simon stood at the far end of the platform, waving.

  “Got everything ready, Father.”

  “Thanks, Simon.”

  “You’ll be going too, will you?”

  “Yes, I think I’d better.”

  Simon gave Mendoza a sour look, as if this were all his fault. “Put your EVA suit on,” he snapped.

  The skips seemed to have lost their way. They ran aimlessly across the platform, banging into the cargo containers and the wall, until each of them in turn fell between the containers onto the track.

  “No cameras down here,” Simon said. “So the fuckers can’t see you.”

  Mendoza stripped—this was no time for modesty—and struggled into his Star Force surplus suit. It was at this point he remembered about his feet. He forced them into the hated boots without stopping to inspect any further damage he may have done by running barefoot through the farm.

  “Guess this is it,” Simon said. “You be careful, Father. We want to see you back here again.”

  “I hope you will.” Fr. Lynch hugged the old man. “Make sure you go to confession the next time Father Tang comes. It doesn’t matter if he can’t speak English. The sacrament is still valid.” He put on his helmet. So did Mendoza.

  The cargo container hinged open. They climbed in on top of vacuum-packed sacks of potatoes. By slinging sacks out onto the platform, they made a cavity just large enough for the two of them to sit in, knees drawn up.

  Simon gestured for them to keep their heads down. The container sealed itself, locking them in darkness, and started to move.

  ix.

  “Father?” Mendoza said over the suit-to-suit radio. The cargo container swayed, picking up speed. They sat crushed together in the dark, their knees interlocking. The roof was so low that Mendoza could not straighten his neck. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was all my fault.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I suppose some of the surveillance cameras at the farm are still working. I thought they had jarked the lot. But that’s the only explanation. You must have been facially recognized. Then, when Lorna got wind of your location, he hijacked the bots to try and stop you from getting away.”

  “No. It was me.”

  “Don’t be stupid. You evaded that little silver bugger, engaged with it, neutralized it … my self-defense lessons must be paying off. Smile.”

  “I checked my email. On your tablet. While I was waiting for you in the clinic.”

  Silence.

  “I took precautions. I know how to log in untraceably. But I also ran a couple of searches using words, phrases, that … must have been picked up. If you’re scanning for keywords, you can trace them back to their network of origin. That’s much easier than tracing the ID that they came from. So Lorna, if it was him, would have guessed that I might be in Farm Eighty-One. Then he just had to find a pair of eyes, and the doctor’s assistant was right there.”

  More silence.

  “I guess there must have been some working cameras in the processing area, too,” Mendoza added lamely.

  “Yes. I was aware of those. I was going to take you around them.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You were probably experiencing information withdrawal. It’s every bit as addictive as dope. And unlike a junkie, an information addict can’t take a pill and be cured. But maybe this will be a start.”

  “I’m cured now.” Mendoza felt no desire whatsoever to access the internet. Ever again.

  “These terms, phrases, what were they?”

  “Mercury. Wrightstuff, Inc. And my … my friend … Elfrida Goto.”

  “You had a few minutes of stolen internet access,” the Jesuit said dryly, “and you used it to stalk her profile? You have got it bad.”

  “I wasn’t stalking her profile. I can’t; she’s blocked me. Father, there’s bad shit happening on Mercury. There was a riot or something at UNVRP headquarters. Lots of people are dead. I just needed to know if she—if she’s OK ...”

  “I see,” the Jesuit said. “Is she?”

  “I don’t know. It’s still a developing story. They don’t even know who started it. Some of the reports called it a riot, and some said it was a rebellion.”

  “Or a diversion,” Fr. Lynch said, “engineered by Derek Lorna and his friends at Wrightstuff, Inc. But why?”

  Mendoza had no speculation to offer. His mind was full of Elfrida, maybe in peril, maybe dead.

  The cargo container rocketed on. From time to time it braked sharply. Once it stopped for several minutes. Then it started moving again. Mendoza was getting a severe crick in his neck.

  “How are you feeling?” Fr. Lynch asked.

  “Not great.”

  “Take another painkiller if you need to.”

  “Yeah. The stuff I took earlier worked great. I’ll do another dose of that if I need to.”

  “What stuff?”

  “It’s in the suit’s pharma suite. What was it? Nicozan.”

  “Nicozan? You took Nicozan?” To Mendoza’s astonishment, Fr. Lynch laughed out loud. “That explains it.”

  “What? I don’t get it.”

  “So that’s why you fearlessly engaged with that bot. Nicozan is the stuff Marines take on live-fire exercises, boy. And in combat, if they ever get unlucky. They call it morale juice.” Fr. Lynch was still laughing.

  “And I thought it was all me.”

  “Oh, I’m not discounting your courage. But Nicozan boosts your reflexes. Deadens pain.” Fr. Lynch’s voice turned stern. “And inhibits cognitive control neural structures in the frontal cortex. Impairing your judgment and decreasing your sensitivity to risk.”

  “Oh, dog! That must be why I checked my email! I’m not that dumb as a rule.”

  “Or maybe you were just feeling lost and isolated.”

  Mendoza stared into the darkness. Fr. Lynch really did know how to cheer a guy up.

  “We’re almost there,” Fr. Lynch said presently. “This rail network transports cargo to and from the spaceport. We’ve passed under the Malapert Ridge, and now we’re about to reach the shipping terminal in Faustini Crater. I wasn’t planning to come with you this far, but here I am. So we’ll be able to do the next part together.”

  It hit Mendoza that he had ruined the Jesuit’s life. Fr. Lynch had not planned on coming with him all the way. But now he was on the run, too. His ministry at St. Ignatius, his dojo, his semi-pro kendo career—all had been destroyed in a few moments of violence. Because Mendoza had been stupid.

  Sorry didn’t cover it.

  ★

  The cargo container inched forward in jerks. Fr. Lynch said, “The people we’re about to meet are friendly, but don’t tell them what happened at Farm Eighty-One. In fact, don’t tell them anything. Make it up if you have to.”

  “I can’t believe a priest is telling me to lie,” Mendoza joked nervously.

  “I’m telling you to use your brain. Simon’s people will be fine. You can get away with a lot when you’re sitting on two percent of the city’s food supply. These people have no such protection.”

  The container hinged open. A gangly spaceborn individual in a charcoal-colored suit jumped up on the potatoes.

  Fr. Lynch was already moving. Mendo
za’s feet had gone to sleep. He stumbled. The worker shoved him down to the platform. Other workers were already unloading the container, as it continued to stop-start along the platform in a train of identical containers.

  A dozen parallel tracks crossed the cavern, and carried the emptied containers back into a tunnel at its far end. Beyond, plasma flared on a sunlit plain. Giant forklifts navigated in and out of the cavern.

  “Spaceport cargo terminal.” Fr. Lynch pushed Mendoza. “Move. It’s never a good idea to stand around in a soup of spaceship exhaust.”

  They dodged and wove across the tracks to a control center where workers were monitoring the flow of goods. The workers’ spacesuits were not charcoal-colored, after all. They were filthy with ingrained moondust, patched and repatched. One of them escorted Mendoza and Fr. Lynch into a tunnel that ended in a hatch-type airlock.

  Inside the airlock, they all took off their suits. Mendoza and Fr. Lynch got dressed. Their escort did not have to. He’d been wearing a pair of ragged jeans under his suit, and he seemed to think that was enough.

  His skin was an unnatural shade of blue-black, contrasting with crimson-dyed dreadlocks.

  “Hi,” Mendoza said, flapping one hand.

  “It’s the hyronalin,” the man said. The rims of his eyes and the inner surfaces of his lips looked virulently pink in his indigo face. “You’ve probably taken it if you ever went out to the Belt or somewhere. Increases cellular resistance to radiation. Well, it turns out that megadoses also cause massive overproduction of melanin. No one’s figured out how to turn that pathway off yet.”

  “Nor are they even trying,” Fr. Lynch said, “since the only people who take megadoses for years on end are spaceport workers. You have no idea what it could be doing to your bodies.”

  “Better blue than dead. I’m Philip L. Franckel.”

  “He’s got a law degree,” Fr. Lynch said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Mendoza said.

  “No, you’re not. You’re running away from something. A failed marriage, bad debts, or maybe you just got sick of tugging your forelock to our lords and masters, so you decided to GTFO.”

  “Yeah, something like that,” Mendoza said, remembering Fr. Lynch’s injunction not to tell these people anything.

  “Shrug. NOMB.”

  Franckel threw open the hatch at the other end of the airlock. Heat and a pungent odor of burning washed in. They followed him into a smaller cavern. In the middle of the space, a fire crackled. Mendoza went closer, scarcely able to believe his eyes. But the warmth on his skin did not lie. The fire was real. Most—but not all—of the smoke went up an improvised flue that dangled from the ceiling. The smell took him back to his childhood: it was the same odor of burning rubbish that used to envelop Manila when the wind blew from the suburbs.

  “Why should we donate it all to the recyclers?” Franckel said, jerking a thumb at the fire, which was indeed burning garbage. “We’re a good cause, too.”

  Mendoza squatted among the indigo-colored people, numbed by all this strangeness. He accepted a cup of instant coffee. A cup, whose contents threatened to roll out over the rim every time he lifted it. Curtains hung on the walls of the cavern, framing screen views of forest and seashore as if they were windows. It was unbearably poignant.

  Simon at Farm Eighty-One had uttered a truth that people in Shackleton City rarely mentioned. Dr. Miller had alluded to it, too. The spaceborn could never ‘return’ to Earth. Their long fragile limbs and weak lungs, their lazy hearts accustomed from the womb to micro-gravity, made it physically impossible for them to endure Earth’s gravity for more than a few weeks at a time. And they numbered in the tens of millions, thanks to sheer organic population growth.

  They were a problem.

  So what did you do with them all?

  Answer, according to the Shackleton City bigwigs: You established a faux-Victorian regime that generated lots of service and menial jobs. And you created mythologies to explain why only human beings could do those jobs. (“Animals won’t thrive for bots. They need the human touch.”)

  The spaceport squatters had no such illusions.

  “They could automate the fuck out of our operation anytime they wanted to,” said a navy-skinned woman. “And they do want to. But the one time they tried, we sabotaged their bots. So they haven’t tried again.” She smirked. “If they want to get rid of us, they’ll have to come in here with gas or sub-acoustic weapons. Smoke us out like rats. And people would find out. There’d be vids of dead children all over the internet. So we’re still here.”

  Mendoza knew better than to ask why they wanted to keep living in holes, bathed in life-shortening radiation, mainlining hyralonin, scavenging for necessities. Never ask anyone why they love their home. His coffee left a coating of grit on his teeth. Moondust in here, moondust in everything. He’d probably just swallowed a year’s quota of rads.

  “We’re all interdependent, Rachel,” Father Lynch said. “You need the city, and they need you.”

  “Oh, sure,” the woman shrugged.

  Mendoza said, “About how many people come through here on average? Running away, like me?”

  “NOMB.” None of my business, the motto of the spaceport squatters. But Mendoza figured the answer was quite a few. Enough people chafed under Luna’s paternalistic regime. And some of those might conclude that anywhere was better than here.

  “The city turns a blind eye,” Fr. Lynch said. “They’re very happy for people to leave.”

  Mendoza nodded. “But there are no emigration controls. Anyone can leave, anytime. So why—”

  “So why,” Rachel said, “aren’t you up there, sipping champagne in the departure lounge?”

  “Ah …”

  “Exactly. I’m not asking what you did. But whatever it was, you aren’t the only one. Plus, a lot of people just can’t swing the fare.” She stood. “C’mon.”

  Mendoza glanced at Fr. Lynch. The Jesuit was talking to a guy with a bandanna hiding his lower face, presumably another runaway. The guy was spooning nutriblock hash under his bandanna like he hadn’t eaten in a week.

  Mendoza followed Rachel, limping.

  “Something wrong with your feet?”

  “Long story.”

  “I get it. NOMB. Oh well, you’re not going to be doing much walking for a while.” She giggled, for some reason.

  They descended crude stairs blasted out of the rock. The firelight from the main cave threw their shadows ahead of them. The stairs bottomed out in a workshop with an airlock at one end. The other end was blocked by a mountain of rubble. Molded plastisteel crates stood around, partially filled with parcels and packets.

  “Let’s see if you can fit into any of these crates. You’ll have a suit on, so there has to be room for your helmet.”

  “Not again,” Mendoza said.

  “What, did you think we were going to hand you a fake ID and a first-class ticket? You’re going cargo class. I have to weigh you, any stuff you want to take, plus your extra oxygen tanks, etcetera. Then we make up the difference with LVHPs—low volume, high profit goods. Plus rocks.” She looked from Mendoza to the crates. “You’re little. You’ll have room to move around some.” She hesitated. “What did you do? I can’t remember the last time we had an Earthborn person through here. I mean, you could go anywhere you wanted to … Oh, sorry, sorry. NOMB. Try that crate over there.”

  Mendoza felt guilty for being Earthborn. Like he owed her some kind of explanation. “Maybe I just want to go home.”

  Her eyes widened, white in her blue-black face. “You mean, back to Earth? But you’re not going back to Earth.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t do flights to Earth. Why would anyone want to go there, and get squashed like a bendy straw? Not that you would get squashed, of course. But no. You would have to find someone else to help you out with that.”

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “No.” She giggled, appreciating his plight. “Oh, boy. I though
t you probably had quote, business, unquote, on Ceres. Maybe you can transfer when you get there.”

  “Is that where I‘m going? Ceres?”

  “Or somewhere in the Belt. I dunno. It’s wherever the ship is going.” She looked cross, as if Mendoza were finding fault with the service the squatters provided.

  “I can’t go to Ceres. I need to go to—to Mercury.” As he spoke, he found a hard core of resolve. He was going to Mercury, to pull Elfrida out of Derek Lorna’s mess … and if she was already dead, he’d avenge her.

  “Mercury?” Rachel said. “Well, we do do flights there. But not right now. There’s been a riot at UNVRP HQ, in case you haven’t heard.”

  “I heard.”

  “Star Force isn’t letting anyone land. Much less illegal immigrants.”

  That sounded like a dead end. But maybe Fr. Lynch could fix it. “I’m sorry,” Mendoza said. “I’ve got to talk to my—my friend.” He backed out of the workshop.

  “He doesn’t owe you any more favors,” Rachel yelled after him. “You blew the whole fragging network.”

  Mendoza limped up the stairs to the main cavern. He could not see Fr. Lynch or the man the Jesuit had been talking to.

  Franckel got in his way. “Looking for the priest?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He had to get moving. Said to tell you bye. His pilot couldn’t wait.”

  “He’s gone?”

  “You deaf as well as short?”

  “One-seventy-five is a perfectly respectable height where I come from.” Mendoza could not believe Fr. Lynch would vanish without even saying goodbye. Maybe these people were treacherous. Maybe they’d overpowered Fr. Lynch, were holding him somewhere … “Did he say where they were going?”

  “Dunno. Probably out to the Belt.”

  Mendoza bulled past Franckel.

  “Hey!”

  Which way was the airlock? He limped into one of the corridors that led off the cavern. Within a few paces, it narrowed to a crack stuffed with rags. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, these people maintained their pressurization by splarting garbage into the cracks of this warren.