The Luna Deception (19 page)

“Are you robbing banks for the boss-man now, Jun?” Fr. Lynch said.

“Not yet.”

Fr. Lynch did not smile. “Then where did you find that kind of money?”

“I sold something,” Jun said.

★

Kiyoshi returned to the docking bay with a spring in his step. A citrusy aroma clung around him. He felt like he’d begun to adjust to the gravity. His mood was greatly improved.

That changed when he saw a stranger on the Superlifter’s steps, trying to open the airlock.

“Hey!”

Another person stood on a ladder, painting over the sheet of insulation foil Kiyoshi had splarted onto the Superlifter’s nose.

“What are you doing?”

Both strangers looked down at him. The one on the steps was a long-haired youth with a guitar slung on his back. On the ladder stood a girl with four arms. Each of her four hands held a canister of spray paint. They looked like typical Midway denizens: beautiful, louche, and clueless.

“You know how to get into this type of truck?” Guitar Boy said hopefully. “It wants me to input the combination to reset the iris scanner, but I can’t input the combination without validating my ID
with
the iris scanner. It’s fucked, man.”

“It’s called double-locking your stuff,” Kiyoshi said.

“You from the dealership?” the girl said.

“No.”

“Those skunks,” Guitar Boy said. “Guess we should have known better than to buy a fifth-hand ship from a guy in a helicopter beanie. But the price was right.
Fuck.”
He sat down on the top step.

Kiyoshi decided to play this cool. He started up the steps. The girl watched him warily. “When the price is right, something else is usually wrong,” he offered. “How much did they take you for?”

“Eleven million.”

“Shit!” The Superlifter was worth half that much again. “Where’d kids like you find that many zeroes?”

“Ha!” said the girl on the ladder. “He doesn’t recognize us!”

“Should I?” Kiyoshi was almost at the top of the steps now. He was pinging Jun, and not getting any answer.

“Brainrape,” Guitar Boy said,

“What?”

“Brainrape!”
the girl said. “Duh!” With her upper left arm, she indicated the artwork she had roughed out on the Superlifter’s nose. It seemed to depict a phallus thrusting into a screaming man’s opened brainpan.

“That’s us,” Guitar Boy confirmed. “Well, actually this is only half of us. Dave and Jim went to pick up our stabilizer braces. They say you need them in zero-gee, or you’ll flab out.” He gazed doubtfully at Kiyoshi’s stork-thin physique. “Anyway, we’re pretty big in the Belt …”

“We’re
huge
in the Belt,” the girl interjected. “Eighty thousand tracks downloaded on Ceres, last month alone!”

“Yeah, so we’re going on tour. So that’s why we bought this crappy ship, which we can’t even get into. The dealership isn’t answering my pings. Dude just took our money and flew away on his stupid fucking beanie-mounted helicopter.” Guitar Boy’s mouth twitched into a smile, which immediately faded. “This shit on Mercury, and now
this,”
he sighed, equating his personal inconvenience with the violence that had engulfed a planet.

“I might be able to help,” Kiyoshi said. “I’ve piloted a Superlifter myself in the past. Pilots tend to be paranoid, y’know? Hence the double-locking protocol.” He knew that if Guitar Boy had already tried and failed several times to open the airlock, it would now be in lockdown mode. Even Kiyoshi wouldn’t be able to open it the regular way. “’Scuse me …”

He knelt on the top step and reached under it.

“Aha,” he said, holding up a slim strip of metal. “Spare key. These idiots always hide them in the same place.”

“Great!” Guitar Boy grinned. “You
frug,
man!”

Kiyoshi saw two more youths, presumably the other members of Brainrape, approaching the ‘Lifter’s parking space, carrying piles of stabilizer braces with pizza boxes balanced on top.

“By the way,” he said, easing past Guitar Boy. “Which of you guys is the pilot?”

“None of us, man. Helicopter Beanie said a pilot comes with the ship. Like, not a real pilot, but an MI, y’know? They can do everything these days. You just have to sit and watch over them.”

If Brainrape had succeeded in getting into the
Wakizashi,
they would have found that its MI was not the usual autistic, super-competent calculating machine. They would have met a thing that lived in a fridge and wanted to eat them alive. Kiyoshi wondered what the hell Jun had been thinking, to let the Ghost slip through his fingers. He wondered if Jun was responsible for this mess at all. He wanted to believe not.

“Let me ask you—sorry, what’s your name?” he said, wiggling the key in the hidden slot beneath the iris scanner.

“Charles. Charles Richard Brentner.”

“Charles, would you let an MI play your instruments on stage, while you sat back and watched?”

“Naw, man! What kind of a show would that be?”

“Well, that’s how pilots feel about flying their ships.” The key clicked home, resetting the iris scanner and keypad. Kiyoshi positioned his eyes in front of the scanner while keying in the combination: A-L-I-C-I-A, a sentimental reference no one else would ever get. The lock valved. Familiar, fetid air washed out. Kiyoshi stepped into the darkness. “This is my ship, as it happens. And I’m leaving. So I advise you to clear the area.”

He logged in. To his relief, the hub recognized him. The lights came on, the virtual command lever array leapt into existence, and Kiyoshi tripped over the sushi machine he’d bought on Luna. He couldn’t get used to everything being on the floor.

“Hey!” Guitar Boy yelled, stumbling into the cockpit. ”What are you doing? We paid for this ship, you wanna see the receipt?”

When a Superlifter was in its horizontal position, the crew couches flattened out to vertical, so they stood flush with the rear wall of the cockpit. Kiyoshi reached behind the pilot’s couch for his HabSafe™ laser rifle. It was specially designed to go through people, not walls. However, its main function was as a terrifier. Guitar Boy backed away from the red targeting beam that sprang from the rifle’s evil-looking muzzle.

“That’s right. GTFO.” Kiyoshi gesture-commanded the hub to initiate a launching sequence.

“Charles!” The girl sprang into the airlock, wrapped all four arms around her bandmate and dragged him backwards. Kiyoshi heard the sound of what he hoped was an expensive guitar smashing on the floor of the docking bay.

“Frug on, guys,” he murmured, and closed the airlock, but not before the sound of a klaxon penetrated the cockpit.

Without the Ghost enabled, the hub of the
Wakizashi
was extremely dumb. It had been made to cede most of its functionality to the thing in the fridge. What remained was not sufficiently aware to know that it was inside a docking bay. It began to spin up its He3-D fusion drive, which was small, but powerful enough to roast everyone in the docking bay, and possibly ignite the atmosphere of the Rocking Horse.

“Not yet! Stop!” Kiyoshi manually paused the countdown. He hadn’t realized quite how dumb this thing had become. He would have to do it all himself.
Fine.
He preferred it that way.

Standing with his back to the pilot’s couch, he gripped the twin virtual joysticks that stuck out of the couch between his legs. His BCI provided the illusory feeling of metal knobs digging into his palms.

If the
Wakizashi
had been sold out from under him, he was no longer the registered owner of the ship, and the Rocking Horse authorities wouldn’t allow him to take it out of the dock. So, he’d just have to scare them into letting him go.

He extended the Superlifter’s twin robot arms, normally used for handling cargo, and ground their claw-like ends into the floor of the docking bay. Pulled back.

The jackstands buckled.

The Superlifter’s rear end dropped. The edge of the drive shield crunched into the floor.

Like a 250-ton hermit crab, rucking up the antistatic floor coating, the Superlifter dragged itself towards the nearest airlock.

People screamed and ran out of the way. On his optical feed, Kiyoshi saw the members of Brainrape standing in the parking space he’d just vacated. A two-meter humanoid with a bug’s head was talking to Guitar Boy … who was now No-Guitar Boy. Kiyoshi grinned. But the security phavatar worried him. If they didn’t want to let him go, all they’d have to do was not let him out.

He fastened his straps with one hand and his teeth. The airlock loomed, a chrome anus as big as a cathedral.

“Hey, you in the Superlifter! Cease maneuvering immediately!”

A security phavatar’s head floated in front of him, its bug-eyes glowing UN blue, menacing. Kiyoshi waved a dismissive hand, which had zero effect. They owned this space. As long as he was logged into their network, they could show him whatever they wanted.

“Estimated damages to Rocking Horse infrastructure: 40,00 spiders … 42,000 spiders …”
This floating head was a bewigged lawyer.
“45,000 spiders …”

The floating faces multiplied, until he seemed to be sharing the cockpit with dozens of severed heads, all talking over each other.

“I thought you left with the
Monster?” The shaven-headed girl from Traffic Control blinked at him in puzzlement.

“Where’d the
Monster
go?” Kiyoshi asked before he could stop himself.

“Dunno. All I know is you paid for a week’s parking and didn’t even stay the night.”

“Hey, big boy.”
That was the girl who’d looked after him upstairs … or a simulation of her.
“Why were you in such a hurry to leave, anyway?”

“Because we’re about to lose another planet,” Kiyoshi shouted. “We already lost Mars. We don’t have any more planets to spare! And if Mercury goes, the money floating through here will dry up like spit in a vacuum. So I suggest you collectively wake the fuck up!”

The floating heads went away.

“Why didn’t you say so before?”
asked a different, deeper voice.

Kiyoshi hammered on the airlock with both claws. One of the handler arms broke.

“If you’re going to the aid of Mercury, Godspeed to you.”

The airlock’s chrome flanges melted into its rim. Kiyoshi dragged the Superlifter into the chamber as fast as he could.

“With whom am I speaking?” he asked.

The airlock closed behind the Superlifter. A graphical display showed the atmospheric pressure in the chamber sliding towards zero.

“Chief Philosophical Officer of Rocking Horse,”
said the voice.
“Now bugger off. Oh, and consider this a friendly warning: if we ever hear from, of, or about the
Monster
again, we will sue your ass to Jupiter and back.”

The airlock opened and the Superlifter was flung, like a pebble from the rim of a swiftly turning wheel, into the void.

“Well,” Kiyoshi muttered, “that’s one more corner of the solar system we won’t be welcome in anymore. Huh?” he barked, delivering a kick to the mini-fridge beside his couch.

It spoke to him.

“More pastries,” it said.

xv.

70 hours later, the
Monster
orbited in high ellipses around a dead planet.

The ship’s
new drive had come out of a decommissioned Hyperpony. With an exhaust velocity of 8,000,000 m/s, it could burn so hard that the chief constraint on the
Monster’s
velocity was the structural resilience of the ancient Longvoyager. Jun had apologetically stated that he didn’t feel safe above 1.6 gees of acceleration. That was plenty fast enough for Mendoza, who’d spent most of their journey lying flat, relieving himself into a diaper.

Mercury was presently as close to Earth as it ever got. They’d made the journey as fast as humanly possible.

But not fast enough.

Mendoza floated on the bridge, staring at the comms screen. Blue-tinged chemical flames dotted the twilight zone of the rocky little planet.

Mendoza added an infrared filter and zoomed in until the sensor feed broke up into pixels. Heat blotched the nightside plains and the polar craters, marking the graves of the factories that had once pumped out consumer goods for the solar system.

“Look at the polar craters,” Jun said, floating at his shoulder.

“Heat.”

“That’s the normal level of waste heat you’d expect to see. Those are Wrightstuff, Inc.’s underground habs. Looks like they’re intact.”

“Then why can’t we raise them?”

“All the satellites are gone.”

“They should have ground-based relays.”

“Maybe they’re all dead in there,” said Fr. Lynch.

Mendoza looked at Jun’s projection, hoping for reassurance. He had got used to interacting with the phantom as if it were a person. It was astonishing how quickly familiarity pushed existential unease into the background.

“I’m picking up signals,” Jun said slowly. “It’s the Heidegger program, sure enough. But it’s not acting like it did on 4 Vesta. Notably, it’s not trying to spam the solar system with copies of itself.”

“It’s evolved again,” Mendoza guessed.

“It looks like this version is copy-protected.”

“Copy-protected!”

“Yes. UN copyright laws are ironclad. When you copyright something, it’s automatically copy-protected. Modern DRM is one of humanity’s uncontestable triumphs.”

Fr. Lynch laughed out loud. “Lorna doesn’t want anyone else stealing his code.” He sobered. “Or, maybe he’s not a total lunatic. He wanted to conquer Mercury. He did not want to imperil the survival of mankind.”

“He has, though,” Jun said. “If this copy gets off the planet, and we lose track of it, it’ll crack the DRM. It’s an AI, after all. It just needs time …”

Mendoza clenched his fists. Now that they were here, Elfrida seemed further away than ever. She had to be somewhere down there … Alive, or dead?

The
Monster
swooped down from apogee. The dayside came into view, a crescent of dingy pearl.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Jun said in a frozen voice. “You were right, Mendoza. It has evolved again. It
is
evolving …
incorporating data from local sources.
Changing.
”