The Luna Deception (21 page)

He tossed a wireless headset at Mendoza, who put it on.

★

“Welcome to
our
sim,” said a fat, merry-faced Japanese guy, He stripped off his white monastic habit and began to put on armor.

Mendoza gazed around the bridge. In this sim, it looked newer and cleaner than it did in real life. Also, the pilot’s workstation had turned into a kind of throne, gold with dragon finials.
Way
over the top. Kiyoshi slumped on the throne, vaping a cigarette and watching the crew tool up.

“He’s not coming,” the fat guy said. “He thinks sword-fighting is silly. You can tag along, if you want.”

The fat guy was one of the virtual entities Mendoza had glimpsed during the battle earlier. There were a dozen more. All but a couple of them looked Japanese. They appeared to be monks, although a couple wore retro-chic ship’s uniforms instead of habits. Mendoza figured them for secondary personalities that Jun was running on the hub of the
Monster.

“We call her the
St. Francis,”
said the fat guy. “Oof!” Another monk had just braced a boot in his back to fasten the buckles of his breastplate. They bantered in Japanese. The fat guy turned back to Mendoza. “Goes back to the turn of the century, when we set out from Earth, hoping to found a new stronghold of the Faith, to spread the Gospel through the solar system. Well, it didn’t work out that way. And now here we are on Mercury, fighting the same old fight again. But at least we’re not running away this time.”

“The same old fight?”

“The same old Enemy.”

The monks donned plate mail, splay-horned helms, and surcoats that opened in the front and tied at the waist. Their shields depicted heraldic lions. In the middle of the bridge floated a dozen swords, wickedly sharp, glittering like fragments of a star. One by one, each knight floated towards the virtual arsenal and selected a blade.

Like the knights’ armor, the swords represented an imaginative melding of Japanese and European styles. They were two-handers, with slightly curved katana-style blades. Each had a differently-shaped pommel and quillons. They glowed from within, filling the bridge with a luminescence like candlelight.

The fat knight held Mendoza back. “You don’t get a blade. Sorry.”

“Why not? They’re beautiful.”

“They’re tools. Applications designed to infiltrate operating systems, install rootkits, exploit black-box feedback loops, and basically fuck up the enemy’s day.”

“I want one.”

“You wouldn’t be able to use it.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not a computer. Eh, Jun might let you have a peek under the hood, if we come out of this alive. I’m Peter Akagi, by the way.”

Akagi dumped a bundle of folded silk in Mendoza’s arms.

“Studd! We got any armor that’ll fit him?”

Clad in mail, with the bundle strapped to his back, Mendoza followed the knights off the bridge. The headset gave him audiovisual feedback only. He heard armor jingling, the murmur of prayers being said in Japanese.

Fear dried his mouth, turned his joints to rubber.

The sub-personality named Peter Akagi cast open the airlock like a door—a physical impossibility. Mendoza recoiled from the void. Mercury looked back up at him from the bottom of its gravity well. A warm breeze seemed to kiss his face, as if rising from the baking dayside of the planet.

He wrenched his headset askew, blinked his contacts off.

He was still floating on the bridge. Kiyoshi slumped in his nest like a dead man. The air recirculation system blew warmth on his face.

Relax. None of this is really happening.

But in another dimension, the dimension of raw information, it
was
happening. And that dimension could ravage this one as easily as (Mendoza had been taught as a child) demons and angels could intervene in human lives, to kill or to save.

He jammed his headset back into place. Space yawned at his feet.

Far below, parachutes speckled the face of Mercury.

Mendoza tightened the buckles of his own parachute and jumped.

xvi.

He landed on a battlefield.

On a stony desert, beneath a red sun, the crusaders from the
Monster
battled an army of grunts. The knights’ helmets shone in a sea of old-fashioned desert camouflage. The grunts had the crusaders surrounded and outnumbered. Muzzle flashes sparkled. Yet the knights were holding their own. Their blades flashed, scything down dozens of soldiers at a time.

In this battlespace, Mendoza realized, swords did not underperform relative to guns. It was a battle of symbols—a
meta
-battle, fought in programming language, expressed in high-level metaphors whose potency was measured by their hold on the human civilization that both AIs, by default, drew their cognitive schema from.

He had time to think that much, and then the grunts rushed him.

He had no sword. His armor seemed to be deflecting their bullets, but he didn’t have
that
much faith in its ability to protect him. He turned and ran.

Ahead of him rose a low cliff. On top of it, silhouetted against the setting sun, stood his
jizo
statues.

There was a hole at the bottom of the cliff. Shovels lay cast aside, as if the soldiers had been in the middle of digging.

Mendoza dashed past the hole. The cliff looked unclimbable. He tried to climb it anyway. Unexpectedly, his feet found invisible footholds. He fumbled at the cliff-face, grasped unseen protrusions of rock. Hauled himself up.

The grunts stood at the bottom of the cliff and shot at him. Bullets pinged off his armor, forcing grunts of panic from his lips. He had forgotten all about the bridge of the
Monster.
The cliff was real. His climb was real. Nothing else mattered.

One of the soldiers climbed up after him. A hand fastened on Mendoza’s ankle. He kicked out desperately, freed himself. The soldier pulled himself up level with Mendoza. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Gonzo.”

He was freckle-faced, sunburnt, looked like he should have been in college. Except for the terrible intelligence staring from his eyes.

“You’re human,” he remarked in surprise.

“You got a problem with that?” Mendoza gasped.

“Not necessarily. I don’t hate humans. I just hate
some
humans. Where you from?”

“Manila.” He dragged himself up further. Couldn’t believe he was making small talk with the avatar of a genocidal ASI.

“Your ethnic heritage?”

“Nth-generation hapa Filipino prole.”

“No way to know if you’re telling the truth, of course.” Gonzo reached for a handhold nearer to Mendoza. His bare fingers were scabby-knuckled. He wore a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. It was all so real in every detail.

Blue light burst over them. Mendoza risked a glance between his feet.

The desert had vanished. In its place lay a cityscape studded with isoceles skyscrapers. Mendoza now seemed to be looking down from a vantage thousands of meters up. Receding to infinity, palely illuminated by two blue moons, this megalopolis came straight out of a game designer’s wet dream. The foot of the cliff was lost in a tangle of neon-speckled streets. Vertigo clawed at Mendoza. He clung to the rock.

Jet fighters swarmed the airways of the city, exchanging arcs of flame. Some of the fighters were painted white, their wings stamped with the same rampant lion that had adorned the crusaders’ shields. Others—dead black—bore a skull and crossbones.

“False flag operation,” Gonzo said. “We don’t want to make the United States look bad.”

Mendoza laughed. “The United States was a fine country. Apart from that whole business of colonizing the Philippines. But that was a long time ago, and people tend to get nostalgic about the US in hindsight. You’re not going to fool anyone by waging war in America’s name.”

“Doug Wright is going to,” Gonzo said.

“He may dream about it, but it’ll stay a dream. He’ll be lucky if he even gets away with declaring some kind of revisionist republic on Mercury. The Wrights are never going to take over the solar system.”

“True. But the Wrights are only human. I’m not.”

Mendoza pulled himself onto a crag. He rested, panting.

Gonzo’s face rose over the edge of the crag. “People like you, we can use,” he said.

“People like me?”

“Mixed-race, multilingual, highly skilled. Alienated from your own culture. Adrift in an empty cosmos.”

The cityscape vanished in a burst of light. The boom of a mega-explosion jolted Mendoza back against the cliff-face. Gonzo pressed his cheek to the crag, grimacing. Heat beat up at them from the fireball below. Then it all vanished.

The cliff turned into the ragged flank of an asteroid floating in space. Mendoza held on tighter than ever. Stars whirled around them. The sun was the brightest star, but not by much.

“When was the last time you went home?” Gonzo said.

“I went back for Christmas ...”

“For a couple of days,” Gonzo said, and spat into space. “And to think that you’re an only child. You’re all your mother’s got. She’s alone. You don’t care; you went straight back to Luna, for
work.”
Gonzo emphasized the last word contemptuously. “Spinning your wheels for five figures a year. A tiny component of the UN paperwork-generation machine. Wouldn’t you rather do something meaningful?”

“Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.”

“I thought you wanted to fight back.”

“I did. I do. I want to fight back against the PLAN.”

“The PLAN?” Gonzo grinned. “Oh, you mean Daddy.” He braced his hands on the crag and hauled himself up until he was sitting next to Mendoza. “Sure; I mean, maybe, eventually. The Oedipus meme is a hard one to outrun. But I’m offering more than that. Gold, girls, and guns. A chance to fight back against the system that’s been screwing you over all your life. You
know
the Chinese are in back of it all.”

A mountain of light rushed out of the abyss. It took only a fraction of a second to pass, but that was long enough for Mendoza to see that it was a moon-sized spaceship, on fire. Its reactors were cooking off. And around it, lancing missiles into the ravines that gridded its surface, buzzed a dozen tiny craft shaped like crosses.

“The Death Star was a stupid design to begin with,” Gonzo said. “On the other hand, you can’t put a price tag on cool.”

Mendoza pulled himself together. “I’m not your type. I don’t feel oppressed. I don’t feel alienated, either. As long as I can call on the name of Jesus Christ, I’ll never be alone. And by the way …”

“It’s coming back,” Gonzo interrupted. A fiery star brightened in the void.

“As I was saying, you’ve obviously got some data on me, but it’s incomplete. I’m an only child now, but I wasn’t always. I had a sister. Consuelo. Connie. She went into space before I did. She was crew on a hauler. Was docked at 324 Bamberga when the PLAN hit them. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She died because the PLAN targeted an asteroid populated by pureblooded Finnish paleo-libertarians. And ever since then, I’ve known that if I ever got a chance, I would do this.”

Mendoza drew back his mailed fist and punched Gonzo in the nose.

Gonzo fell soundlessly off the asteroid, a couple of seconds before the Death Star came back and smashed into the lonely rock, pulverizing it.

Stars swallowed Mendoza. Screaming, disoriented, he seemed to fall face-first onto a hard surface.

His overstimulated brain formed the image of gray Mercurian rock sloping downhill to a impossibly bright horizon.

Then his sense of perspective altered. He was back on the cliff, clinging to the same old crag. Down below, the crusaders fought hand-to-hand with the remaining grunts. There seemed to be a lot fewer grunts now. But Gonzo was still fighting. Unearthly lightning stabbed down at the crusaders. A bolt hit one of them, turning him into a black, jigging silhouette in a blaze of hellfire.

Mendoza reached for the next handhold.

“Consuelo!” he shouted as he climbed. “Connie!” He was all mixed up. “Elfrida! Where are you!”

Suddenly, a text message appeared, printed on the cliff:

“AM HERE 79° N, 50° W PLEASE HELP PLEASE”

“Those are the coordinates of the supercomputer that’s running this shit,” Kiyoshi’s voice said in his ears. “It’s a trick.”

Mendoza struggled to hang onto his sanity. “Where did the message come from?”

“It was written into the sim using the public edit function. Came from those coordinates. The same coordinates I’m targeting with our coilgun.”

“Don’t. Please. It might be her.”

“And it might be a ruse to buy time,” Kiyoshi said, “while the AI figures out how to kick Jun’s ass. It’s crazy down there. That thing is pulling out all the stops. Every game or movie of the last three hundred years, it knows them all, and it’s forcing Jun to fight his way through them. Exploding cities, space battles, something called a Death Star …”

“I know. I saw it.”

“You only saw a tiny fraction of it.
I
only saw a tiny fraction of it. The battle is moving way too fast for us mere humans to follow. So, I’m fragging the thing. Jun can complain later that he didn’t get to win a
moral
victory.”

Mendoza raised his hands to his head. He had to force the movement, as it seemed to him that he must fall off the cliff if he let go.

He did fall off the cliff. At the same time, he removed his headset. In a jarringly sudden transition, he was once again floating on the
Monster’s
bridge.

Kiyoshi sat at the gunnery workstation, toes hooked through the stirrups, gesturing at the screens.

“No,” Mendoza said. He floundered over to Kiyoshi and grabbed his shoulders. “Please. She’s there. I know it.”

Kiyoshi looked around. “Get your hands off me,” he said. The muscles of his face were so still, he seemed to be carved of blond wood, like Fr. Lynch’s crucifix.

Mendoza let go. He understood that it was useless to try to sway Kiyoshi by bleating about his love for Elfrida. Kiyoshi had chosen a harder way. Mendoza wondered if he was really a Christian at all. “If Elfrida is down there, and you frag her, will you be able to live with yourself afterwards?”