Authors: Ian McDonald
‘I warned you.’
A touch on her arm: her father.
‘Come along, Rachel.’
The office door opens and two of Duncan’s security enter.
‘What do you think I’m going to do, Father?’
‘Come along, Rachel.’
Rachel Mackenzie kisses her son, then turns away from him, fast so no one will see the look on her face. Never, ever again will she let her uncle, her father, her grandfather, see the marks of the nails they have driven through her heart.
‘Mum, what’s happening?’ The door seals behind her but she can still hear the cries of her son. ‘What’s happening? I’m scared! I’m scared!’
Never let go, her father had said. Use their weapons against them.
The lock is vast, built for rovers and buses, but Marina feels a heart-clench of claustrophobia as the inlock closes behind her. While the lock chamber depressurises, Marina observes. Minute observation is her way of dealing with her fear of confining spaces. Lose herself in the sensory. The crunch of dust under her boots. The dwindling hiss as air is abstracted. The tightening of the sasuit’s grip on her body as the smart weave adjusts to vacuum. Weird, the familiars hovering over the shoulders of her squad. They should be wearing virtual sasuits.
José, Saadia, Thandeka, Patience. Oleg is dead. Physics killed him. He mistook weight for mass, speed for momentum. A Joe Moonbeam error. He thought he could stop the moving freight pallet with one hand. Momentum had driven the bones of his outstretched arm through his chest and burst his heart.
Oleg, Blake up in Bairro Alto. As many people have died in Marina’s short life on the moon as in all her years on Earth. Oleg’s death has widened the rift between her and her squad-mates. José no longer speaks to her. Marina knows the squad blames her. She is a jinx, a storm-crow, a karma magnet. She’s started to hear a new lunar word; apatoo: spirit of dissension. The moon is the mother of magics and superstitions.
Marina can’t get the Long Run out of her head. She can’t understand how hours and kilometres disappeared. She can’t understand how she could lose herself in something so irrational. It was nothing more than endorphins and adrenaline, but in her bed she feels the rhythm of the feet, hears the heartbeat of drums. She can’t wait to go back. Body paint next time.
Rotating red lights.
The lock is depressurised,
Hetty says. She and every familiar wink out and re-visualise as the name of the squaddies, hovering green over each head. Green for all systems normal. Yellow for alert: air supply, water, batteries, environmental warning. Red for danger. Flashing red: extreme danger, immediate risk of death. White for death.
‘Coms check,’ Carlinhos says. Marina says her name and the little tongue-twister of the day to check that she is not touched with oxygen narcosis. ‘Copy,’ she adds hastily. So much to remember. ‘Outlock is opening,’ Carlinhos says. His sasuit is a patchwork of stickers and logos and icons but in the middle of his back is Ogun, São Jorge, his personal orixa. On the wall beside the outlock is an icon of Lady Luna. The skull side of her face has been worn away by thousands of gloved fingers. Touch for luck. Touch to foil death. ‘This is Lady Moon. She is drier than the driest desert, hotter than the hottest jungle, colder than a thousand kilometres of Antarctic ice. She is every hell world anyone ever dreamed. She knows a thousand ways to kill you. Disrespect her and she will. Without thought. Without mercy.’
One by one the Jo Moonbeams line up to touch Lady Luna. Deserts, jungles, Antarctica: those aren’t words Carlinhos has ever experienced, Marina thinks. They sound like a old mantra. The duster’s prayer. Marina brushes fingers across the icon of Lady Moon.
Through the soles of her boots Marina feels the outlock door grind up. A slot of grey between grey door and grey floor opens on to ugly machinery: laagers of surface rovers, service robots, coms towers, the upcurved horns of the BALTRAN. Dumped machinery, wrecked machinery, machinery under maintenance. An extractor, too tall for even this huge lock, roped off with chains of yellow service flashers: a Christmas tree of lights and beacons. Ranges of solar panels, slowly tracking the sun. Far distant hills. The surface of the moon is a scrapheap.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Carlinhos Corta says and leads his squad up the ramp. Marina steps out on to the surface. There is no transition, no crossing from indoor to great outdoors, not even a particular sense of bare surface and naked sky. The close horizon is visibly curved. Carlinhos leads the squad around a kilometre loop marked out by rope-lights. Hundreds of Jo Moonbeams have walked this way, bootprints overlay bootprints overlay bootprints. Bootprints everywhere, wheel tracks, the delicate toe-tips of stalking and climbing robots. The regolith is a palimpsest of every journey made across it. It is very ugly. Like every kid with access to binoculars, Marina had turned the magnification on King Dong; a giant spunking cock a hundred kilometres tall, boot-printed and tyre-tracked into the Mare Imbrium by infrastructure workers with too much time on their hands. Fifteen years back it was already blurred and scarred by criss-crossing tracks of subsequent missions. She doubts anything now remains of its gleeful frat-boy esprit.
Marina looks up. And stops leaving footprints.
A half Earth stands over the Sea of Fecundity. Marina has never see a thing bluer, truer. The Atlantic dominates the hemisphere. She makes out the western limb of Africa, the horn of Brazil. She can track the swirl of ocean storms, drawn in to the bowl of the Caribbean where they are stirred into beasts and monsters, sent spiralling out along the curve of the Gulf Stream towards unseen Europe. A hurricane blankets the eastern terminator. Marina can easily read its spiral structure, the dot of its eye. Blue and white. No trace of green but Marina has never seen anything look more alive. On the VTO cycler she had looked down at the Earth from the observation blister and wondered at the splendour unreeling before her. The streaming clouds, the turning planet, the line of sunrise along the edge of the world. For the first half of the orbit out she had watched Earth dwindle, for the second half she had watched the moon wax. Marina has never seen the Earth from the moon. It squats in the sky, Planet Earth; so much bigger than Marina had imagined, so terribly far away. Bright and brooding and forbidding, beyond reach and touch. Marina’s messages take one and a quarter seconds to fly down to her family. This is home and you are a long way from it, is the message of the full Earth.
‘You staying out here all day?’ Carlinhos’s voice crackles on Marina’s private channel and she realises, startled and embarrassed, that everyone is back at the outlock and she is standing like a fool, gazing up at the Earth.
That is another difference. From the cycler she had looked down on the Earth. On the moon, the Earth is always up.
‘How long was I standing there?’ she asks Carlinhos as the lock repressurises.
‘Ten minutes,’ Carlinhos says. Airblades blast dust from the sasuits. ‘When I first went up I did exactly the same thing. Stood staring until São Jorge gave me a low oxygen warning. I’d never seen anything like it. Heitor Pereira was with me: the first words I said were, “Who put that there?”’
Carlinhos unlocks his helmet. In the few seconds when conversations can still be private, Marina asks,
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we have a drink.’
‘Did he touch you?’
The little rover bowls flat out across Oceanus Procellarum. It hits every bump and rock at full speed, bounds into the air, lands in soft detonations of dust. Speeds on, throwing great plumes of dust behind its wheels. Its two passengers are banged and bruised, jolted hard, snapped back and forth, to and fro in their safety harnesses. Rachel Mackenzie pushes the rover to the very limits of its operational envelope.
Mackenzie Metals is hunting her.
‘Did he do anything to you?’ Rachel Mackenzie asks again over the whine of the engines and the creak and thump of suspension. Robson shakes his head.
‘No. He was real nice. He made me dinner and we talked about his family. Then he taught me card tricks. I can show you. They’re real good.’ Robson reaches into a patch pocket of his sasuit.
‘When we get there,’ Rachel says.
She thought she would have longer. She had been so careful with her decoys and deceptions. It was a skill of Mackenzie women. Cameny had booked a railcar to Meridian. Rachel had even hacked the lock to create the illusion of two people exiting. Robert Mackenzie had stopped the railcar on remote within twenty kilometres. At the same time, two rovers had set out from Crucible in opposite directions. The first rover took the obvious route, north-east to the Taiyang server-farm at Rimae Maestlin. A logical road to escape; the Suns were doggedly non-aligned in lunar family politics. The wrath of Robert Mackenzie held no fear for House Sun.
Rachel has taken the illogical road. Her course seems headed south-east to the old polar freight line. Power stations and supply caches are strung all along the track. By ancient tradition – ancient by lunar standards – the Vorontsovs must stop a train for anyone who flashes it down from the trackside. Everything after that is negotiable, but the tradition of support and rescue endures. Duncan Mackenzie will have contracted private security to meet trains at all the main stations – Meridian, Queen, Hadley. But those aren’t Rachel Mackenzie’s destination. Not even the rail line.
The rover is windowless, airless, unpressurised, little more than a transmission and power system. Automatic return and overrides have been disabled on this and the decoy, sent in the opposite direction. Rachel has always been a good coder. The family has never valued the talent; any of her talents. Her true destination is the isolated BALTRAN relay at Flamsteed. She has a series of jumps laid in. But Mackenzie Metals rovers are closing in from the extraction plants to the south and east. Cameny is shut down to a whisper: Rachel doesn’t want to advertise her location through the network. She hopes the hunters will be trying to cut her off at the rail line. Journey times can be calculated with high precision. The equations are sharp and cold. If they guess the relay, they will catch her. If they guess the mainline, she will escape. But she has to go on to the network, which will advertise her position to the whole moon.
‘We’ll be there soon,’ Rachel Mackenzie says to her son. Look at him, strapped in in his sasuit across the narrow belly of the rover, his knees touching hers: look at him. The helmet visor masks his hair, the shape of his face and draws all attention to the eyes, his eyes, his great green eyes. There is no world finer – not this grey world, not the big blue world up there – than those eyes. ‘I have to talk to someone. I’m making Cameny active but don’t switch on Joker. Not yet.’
The sense of opening as Cameny connects to the network is physical; like breathing from the bottom of the lungs.
Ariel Corta’s familiar curates the call. Hold please. Then Ariel Corta herself appears in Rachel’s lens.
‘Rachel. What is happening?’
Ariel’s dress, hair, skin, make-up are immaculate. Rachel has thought her sister-in-law snobbish, aloof, careerist. She possesses enough honesty to recognise envy – those Brazilians have all the gifts and graces. Ariel has defeated her family many times in court, but she needs her now.
Rachel summarises the escape. Cameny flicks over the nikah.
‘One moment please.’ Ariel is briefly replaced by Beijaflor, then back. ‘It’s a standard-form marriage contract committing my nephew to a ten-year marriage to Hoang Lam Hung. It’s tight.’
‘Get him out of it.’
‘The contract is legal and binding. The obligations are clear. I can’t release Robson from it under any of the clauses. I can get the contract voided.’
‘Do it. He’s eleven years old. They made me sign it.’
‘Legally, there is no minimum age of wedlock or consent. Duress is not necessarily a defence in our law. I would have to demonstrate that by failing to consult Robson regarding his preferences before signing the sexual activity clause, you violated your parenting contract with him. That would nullify the nikah. I wouldn’t be acting for you, I would be acting for Robson against you. I would be trying to prove that you are a bad mother. Lucretia Borgia degrees of bad mother. However, in taking out this action, by escaping with Robson, you are acting like a good mother. It’s a Catch-22. There are ways around it.’
‘I don’t care how bad you make me look.’
Does she see Ariel Corta, perfect Ariel Corta, loose the smallest smile?
‘There would be a lot of dirt.’
‘Mackenzies built their fortune from dirt.’
‘So did I. Robson would need to retain me and agree a contract. Yet again, only a good parent would advise him to hire me. I must advise you off the record that taking this to court means clear and open conflict between our families. It’s a declaration of war.’
‘It’s a declaration of war if Rafa finds out that I let Robson go without a fight. He would tear Crucible apart with his bare hands to get him back.’
Ariel Corta nods.
‘I can’t think of a more intractable situation. It’s almost as if your grandfather deliberately chose the most provocative act possible.’
The rover lurches. Rachel’s safety harness snaps against the sudden acceleration. And again. Something is crashing against the rover, again and again. She feels not hears the vibrations of cutters, drills. A sudden deceleration: the rover is slowing.
‘What’s happening?’ Ariel Corta asks. Concern on her perfect mask.
‘Cameny, show me!’ Rachel shouts.
‘I’m alerting Rafa,’ Ariel says, then Cameny flashes the exterior cameras up on Rachel’s lens. The maintenance drone clings to the rover like a little toothed nightmare. Manipulators and cutters hack at cabling and power conduits. Again the rover slows as the drone severs another battery. How can this machine be here? Where did it come from? Cameny pans the cameras: there are the upraised horns of the BALTRAN relay among the thicket of solar panels, not two hundred metres away. That’s the answer: her family has retasked the relay’s maintenance drone.
But they’ve forgotten the rover is a depressurised model. Two hundred metres of vacuum is a stroll in sasuits.