The Luna Deception (23 page)

“Is that why you don’t have a BCI?”

“No. My own views on that question are not absolutist. I just don’t trust their security. Now, if you’ve got a moment, Mendoza—”

“But was it wrong to cut her head off in the first place?”

“Of course it was.”

“Then Elfrida—”

“She’s not a Christian, is she? You can’t hold her to the same standards. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Actually, she’s been baptized into the Faith,” Mendoza said. “It happened before I met her. I don’t think she took it seriously. It was operationally convenient, or something. But … OK, OK.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Go on, Father. Sorry.”

“I need your help with something.
Now.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to break into a corporate database and copy certain relevant portions of their records.”

“A
local
database? Everything down there is a smouldering ruin. The
Crash Test Dummy
fragged all the industrial facilities.”

“Not quite. It didn’t touch any of the facilities belonging to Wrightstuff, Inc.”

xvii.

In the Wrightstuff, Inc. polar habitat of Mt. Gotham, a man named Doug Wright lay on a stretcher cranked up to a sitting position. He was monitoring multiple screens in a situation room full of holographs that morphed and danced but didn’t really tell you anything you could not get from a written report. It had not been his choice of décor.

He had hardly slept since disaster struck Mercury. The other Wrightstuff habs at the north and south poles were holding on. Doug had instructed them to send out EVA teams to search for survivors at the factories in the twilight zone, before the terminator advanced far enough to swallow the sites in lethal daylight. The reports from the EVA teams had now started to come in. They made depressing reading, but Doug was forcing himself to peruse every word.

At least, that was what he’d been doing before the priest called him.

Doug frowned at the figure projected on the virtual comms screen of his retinal implants. The dog-collar said Roman Catholic. The short-sleeved black shirt and slacks said business. The grim, square-jawed visage said trouble.

“Do I know you?”

“No.”

“What do you want?”

“I just need a quick word,” the priest said. “It’s about Yoshikawa Spaceport.”

“The spaceport on the nightside. A few of the Marines made it there. You over there now? Are you hit?”

“No, the spaceport is undamaged, and that’s what I want to ask you about.”

Doug jerked his head at the other men in the room. “Doug. Doug. Out. You too, Doug.”

The priest’s eyes flicked, watching them troop across the background of the comms camera. He did not remark on the fact that they all looked exactly the same, and were all called Doug. But the Doug on the stretcher—Doug #2, to give him his official name—was sensitive about his genetic heritage. He preempted the reaction he expected by saying, “Yes, we’re clones. You wanna make something of it?”

The priest swallowed visibly. A muted reaction, considering.

“I’m guessing you’re from the New Holy Roman Empire,” Doug pressed.

“The NHRE! Throw a stone in Rome and you’ll hit a spy.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I’m a Jesuit. I work with some people you know nothing about, and it’ll stay that way.”

“OK. So what’s this about?””

“You’re injured,” the priest said. “What happened to you?”

Doug saw no point in not telling him. The whole solar system was going to find out, anyway. “I just killed the president of this company. Got shot by one of his bodyguards.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Now, if you’ve got some more bad news, I’d like to hear it.”

“Why did you kill the president, if I may ask?”

Doug shrugged, which sent a twinge through his bandaged torso. The answer was, he’d learnt that President Doug was the one who’d brought disaster to Mercury. Him and some mysterious lady called Lorna, whoever she was, had unleashed the Heidegger program—
the freaking Heidegger program—
on this planet, so that President Doug could look like a hero for stopping it. Then a grateful solar system would have allowed him to declare independence. That had been the theory, anyway.

Doug unconsciously sneered at the memory. Asshole had wanted a
historic victory.

And now Doug #2 had a historic catastrophe on his hands.

He had taken the priest’s call because he hoped the priest
was
calling from the New Holy Roman Empire. Doug was already talking to his own contacts in the NHRE, hoping to enlist their support at the UN when the blowback hit. He had thought this priest might be a back-channel diplomat. But the signal delay said he wasn’t on Earth. He was much closer.

“I’m not telling you anything until you tell me why you want to know,” Doug said.

“All right. Yoshikawa Spaceport. There’s a kind of bunker here. A rock-shielded facility, camouflaged by regolith. What’s in it?”

“Where are you?” Doug said.

“Will you answer the bloody question?”

“If you can see that bunker, I’m guessing you’re in orbit. You’d better watch your back. Whoever whacked the
Crash Test Dummy,
they’re still out there.”

The priest laughed. “That was us.”

Tension drained from Doug’s body. Maybe the priest
was
a friend. But he remained wary enough to say, “And who are you, again?”

“Never mind that. The point is, you owe us.”

“I guess I do.”

“So tell me about that camouflaged bunker at Yoshikawa Spaceport.”

A ping flashed up in Doug’s HUD area. One of his EVA teams had just reported that the GESiemens consumer electronics factory looked to be only superficially damaged. It was still moving, crawling away from the oncoming terminator.
~Survivors?
Doug subvocalized.

“Doug,” said the priest. “I know you’re having a tough day. And I’ve no wish to make your life any harder. But I need this information. Perhaps this’ll convince you that I mean it.”

All the holographic displays around Doug vanished. The bare walls of the situation room were exposed—for an instant. Then the lights went off. With a gentle whine, all the systems in the room powered down.

In the silence, Doug heard the thunk-thunk of deadbolts shooting home, locking the pressure doors. The room suddenly felt cramped, airless.

He heard his brothers whaling on the doors. The muffled thuds might as well have been klicks away. The situation room was nuke-proof, blast-proof. And it
should
have been hack-proof, too.

“That IV line going into your arm,” the priest said quietly, “is delivering a low-dose cocktail of painkillers. Now look.” The dosometer display ticked up from 25 mcg/hour to 35. “It wouldn’t take very much more to kill you.”

“H-h-how are you doing this?”

“Suffice it to say I’ve an associate with expertise in this area. Truthfully, we were planning to just lift the information we need from your corporate records. But there’s nothing there about this bunker, or any expenditures associated with it.”

Doug nodded jerkily. “The customer insisted on total information security. KIIYH.”

“KIIYH? That’s a new one on me.”

“Keep It In Your Head.” Doug touched the bristles above his left ear, where his BCI snuggled inside his skull.

“I see. Well, I don’t believe you know what this is all about. I’m not the one to judge your actions, anyway. But I will have to insist that you give me what information you’ve got.”

Doug raised one hand and gazed at the IV line taped to its back, the pink tinge of his own genetically tailored blood backing up in the tube. He had almost died today. Hundreds of purebloods had been brutally slaughtered. Mercury had suffered a blow that would set the planet’s development back a generation. Though he disavowed President Doug’s filthy tricks, he was instinctually averse to giving up any more of the competitive edge that Wrightstuff, Inc. would need to get back on its feet.

He suspected the priest
did
come from the New Holy Roman Empire, though the man denied it. The NHRE were interested in the same thing everyone else was. The same thing that President Doug had killed, lied, and ultimately died for. Mercury’s untapped stocks of helium-3.

And now they wanted a piece of the Hope business, too?

Fine. Let them have it.

At the end of the day, Doug might be a clone, but his mind was his own, and he chose not to follow in President Doug’s footsteps by gambling with his people’s lives.

“All right. The bunker at Yoshikawa Spaceport is ours, as you guessed. We have a joint venture with GESiemens, building medium-haul shuttles, and the customer is looking to scale up in the near future. The bunker’s a final assembly facility. It’s right next to the spaceport, so we can do test launches using the runway there.” He shrugged. “Here’s the project file.” He sent it from his BCI’s memory crystal to the priest’s ID.

“Got that, thanks. And the customer that ordered these shuttles?”

“Hope Space Industries, on Luna.”

“I had a feeling it might be.”

The doors unlocked. Doug’s brothers piled into the room. The lights came back on. The priest was gone.

xviii.

“That didn’t go too badly,” Mendoza said. “Jeez, though, Father. You can be intimidating. If I was that guy, I would have been shitting myself.”

Fr. Lynch flicked at his tablet, skimming the file that Doug Wright—or rather, one of Doug Wright’s surviving clones—had sent him.

“He really believed we were screwing with his medibot. It never occurred to him that we might just be hacking the display,” Mendoza recalled. “That says something about
him,
that he would believe that of a priest.”

It also said something about Mendoza, that he had helped Fr. Lynch with the deception. He wasn’t sure he liked what it said. But he accepted that he would have to be harder in future.

If nothing else, he didn’t want to lose the tenuous respect he had won from Kiyoshi Yonezawa.

Kiyoshi had been listening in on their conversation, and now he drifted towards Fr. Lynch to get a look at his tablet. The Jesuit tossed it to him. “There’s nothing there. It’s all price negotiations and corporate doublespeak.”

“What’s this? An email thread discussing ship specs?”

“Yes, but they don’t say what the final specs were, much less whether they achieved them in production. I’d like to call back, but I’m fairly sure this is all your man had.”

Fr. Lynch faced Kiyoshi across the bridge.

“We’ll have to land at Yoshikawa and take a look for ourselves.”

“I have a question,” Mendoza said. “Are we assuming these shuttles are connected with Lorna’s scheme? Are they for use against the PLAN?”

“I’d be very surprised if they were not,” Fr. Lynch answered. “All the same players are involved.”

“Then it was true.”
Every last word.

“That we don’t know. And we never will, unless we land at Yoshikawa and find out.”

Kiyoshi floated gracefully over to the fridge. He took out one of his pastries and bit into it. “No can do, Father. The
Wakizashi
is practically out of propellant. The
Monster’s
got none to spare, either.”

“According to these documents, Mercury has untapped stocks of helium-3,” Fr. Lynch said.

“That’s nice to know.”

“And the
Monster’s
new drive runs on He3, does it not?”

“I can’t put
rocks
in the tank,” Kiyoshi spluttered. “Anyway, we’re OK for fuel pellets. The issue is propellant. You do know the difference, Father? Propellant is what you throw out the back of the ship, to make it go. Fuel is what you put in the reactor, to heat up the propellant. Our old engine was a D-D fusion drive. This one uses He3 and D. Propellant’s the same: liquid hydrogen. And that’s what we’re short of. We had enough for
one
trip down to the surface. We used that up, rescuing Mendoza’s girlfriend.” He gave Mendoza a slight smile, indicating that he didn’t blame him for that.

Elfrida was still out cold in sickbay. Mendoza felt responsible for getting her home safely. He also felt responsible for safeguarding the evidence in Gloria dos Santos’s head. “I don’t get why we need to land,” he said, taking Kiyoshi’s side. “Can’t we find out about the ships some other way?”

Fr. Lynch ignored him. “There’ll be fuel at the spaceport, Yonezawa!”

“Propellant.
There are also people there. Civilian staffers and a bunch of Marines, according to their Mayday broadcasts.”

“They’ll be glad to see us—”

“They’ll be glad to see my
ship!”
Kiyoshi took another bite of his pastry. Indistinctly, he said, “They want off this planet. If I was them, I’d try to commandeer the
Monster,
so I have to assume that’s a possibility. And I am
not
getting into a fight with Star Force, Father!”

Fr. Lynch blew out air noisily. He raised his gaze to the ceiling. “Jun? Jun, are you there?”

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Jun’s disembodied voice said.

“Don’t bother, bro,” Kiyoshi said. “I’ve calculated this thing to the nearest cubic milliliter. Do you know how much delta-V it takes to escape the sun’s gravity well? A shit-ton. And—huh?”

Kiyoshi broke off, staring at someone behind Mendoza. Mendoza spun. A tall, grey-haired man with bloodshot eyes drifted past him, onto the bridge.

Mendoza gasped. Blinked his contacts off. The man was still there. Was
real,
not a phantom.

“Aaargh!” Kiyoshi said.

“You’re talking about Doug Wright’s JV with GESiemens, aren’t you?” the elderly man said. “I can tell you whatever you need to know about that. It seems wrong to speak this way of the dead, but Mr. Bankasuprapa—the regional manager of GESiemens—had a taste for bourbon, and was lonely. We often used to talk.”

Jun’s projection came through the door. He looked tired, but was smiling. “This is Kip Rensselaer, the regional CEO of Danggood Universal. He and his staff escaped the destruction of their factory. I picked them up with the Wetblanket system while you guys were putting the frighteners on the clones.”

“I didn’t even notice,” Kiyoshi said crossly.