The Luna Deception (41 page)

He flattened himself on the ship’s spine. Akagi drifted over him, one foot scraping through his back.

Jun’s voice spoke. “They died under interrogation.”

“You’re sacrificing them.”

“The CTDF knows I’m hiding something. I have to keep them from finding out what.”

“The Ghost. Let them have
it, Jun! It’s not worth this!”

“No.”

“If I take the Superlifter, that’ll be one Ghost they don’t have. We’ll be evens. Would that be such a disaster?”

“Yes,” Jun’s voice said. “World War III, remember? Gonzo’s vision. The Chinese against everyone else. If they get the Ghost, it might give them the confidence to take on the UN. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I were the one to make Gonzo’s dream come true?”

“It won’t come to that. It can’t.”

“No, it won’t,” Jun’s voice agreed. “They know that if they try to search the ship, I’ll self-destruct.”

“Suicide is a sin.”

“What about suicide by butt-fragging?”

“Talk to Father Tom. Please.”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

Tears bulged, distorting Kiyoshi’s vision. He wiped his face with an invisible hand. Spoke through his grief. “All right, but I’m still gonna need a repo for the Superlifter.”

He thought:
It’ll be him. A lite version. Like he was before he got too smart. I can start over, if worse comes to worst. Get it right this time. Keep him safe.

Don’t let him play with guns.

“You can have Studd,” Jun said.

One of the floating corpses sat up and sneezed. “No! I’m not telling you anything!” he squeaked, and then: “Oh.” Blink. “Luna? Again? Will there be any shooting?”

“The way this is going, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Kiyoshi said.

xxxi.

Mendoza had planned to sneak back into Shackleton City without attracting anyone’s attention.

He had not planned on having a winged princess in tow.

Inevitably, stares followed a two-meter beauty with pycnofiber wings. Nadia’s abaya made her even more of a curiosity: there were not many observant Muslims in Shackleton City.

However, no one interfered with Mendoza and Nadia. They were all too busy trying to stay alive.

Verneland was gone. A kinetic missile had reduced the city’s largest dome to a dadaist collage of wreckage. Mendoza parked the Moonhawk in a flat area that might formerly have been part of the park around the dome’s circumference. When he and Nadia got out, their EVA suits screeched radiation warnings. The PLAN’s enhanced warheads had left higher-than-normal levels of residual radiation behind, as well as throwing off massive amounts of neutron and gamma radiation when they hit. A frozen layer of debris covered the regolith, so pulverized you could not even tell what it used to be.

They hurried on foot to Wellsland.

The Wellsland dome had been breached, but repaired in time to save the lives of most people inside. However, survival could be a fate crueller than vaporization, when everyone had been riddled with charged neutrons.

Wellsland was now a giant hospital.

Medical supplies were arriving from Earth, and evacuations were still ongoing. But the majority of Shackleton City’s population had been born on Luna. For them, evacuation to Earth would mean death. The only option was to treat them right here.

In Wellsland, they queued around blocks closed to pedestrian traffic, waiting to receive stem cell transfusions and cancer-fighting drugs. Some streets had been turned into open-air intensive care wards, so that a limited number of medibots could efficiently treat what seemed like an unlimited number of casualties.

Human volunteers were working with the bots. Mendoza spotted Dr. Miller, the doctor he’d met at Farm Eighty-One. Then, she’d been put-together, self-righteous. Now, her hair was falling out of its bun, her face dirty. Blood and puke stained her dress, as if she hadn’t changed it for days.

Mendoza greeted her as she collapsed against a wall for a cigarette break. The mess, the cries, and the stink had upended his priorities. He offered to help.

“Help? No one can help. Oh, hello. Feet all right now?”

“Yes, fine.”

Dr. Miller plucked wearily at the bodice of her dress. “We tried so hard. We dressed up as fucking Victorians to try and pretend we were all the same. It was supposed to hide our differences. Pureblood, mixed-race, no one can tell when you’re trussed up in a corset, or suspenders and a cravat. Right? But it didn’t work. Who were we kidding? They came for the purebloods anyway.”

“They didn’t come for the purebloods,” Mendoza said. “Not this time.”

“Oh yes, they did. I know people are saying it was different this time. Because science. Or something. But if that’s true, how do you explain the fact that the purebloods are dying, and everyone else is recovering?”

“They are?”

“Oh, yes. Look at me, I’m fine. Most of these people will be fine. They’ll feel like shit for a while, then the stem cells will kick in and they’ll recover. But the purebloods? They’ll just slink away and die. They get their first treatment, or their second, or whatever, and then they just don’t come back.”

“That’s impossible,” Nadia said. “A neutron bomb can’t be genetically targeted.”

“Who the fuck knows what the PLAN can do? All I know is I’m losing patients.” Dr. Miller looked properly at Nadia for the first time. “You’ve got wings.”

“They don’t get in my way. I can help. I know about nursing. I’ve nursed my father my whole life. I can program Aesculapius-class medibots, and even Hippocrates-class ones.”

“We’ve already got enough clueless volunteers getting underfoot … what? You can program medibots? All righty, let’s see about getting you a volunteer pass.” Dr. Miller hesitated. “I’m afraid those wings
will
get in your way.”

“Then I’ll cut them off,” Nadia said, staring proudly at the doctor. “I was getting tired of them, anyway.”

Mendoza said, “Nadia, wait. You can’t just …”

“You
can’t program medibots, can you?” Dr. Miller said.

The reek of urine and vomit coated Mendoza’s tonsils. “No. But I’m good with data. I might be able to track down some of your missing patients.”

“Oh, that would be great. We haven’t got the manpower to chase after them, as you see.”

“Just give me a list of IDs and a network connection.”

The sky was bruise-purple. The diurnal cycle had broken down, leaving the artificial sky stuck on twilight. Scattered blocks of hexagons lit up noon-bright for a few seconds, giving an effect like pixelated lightning. The moans of the sick mingled with the chirping of birds, which had somehow survived.

★

Mendoza settled into a saggy ergoform in the basement of the Bob Q. Hope Convention Center, where Shackleton City’s municipal services had migrated after Verneland was flattened. He popped a pouch of coffee with his teeth, never taking his eyes off the sheaf of screens propped in front of him.

He’d been given access to the back-end of Shackleton City’s legendary surveillance network. Data bubbled up in real time from a million cameras, eavesdropping devices, robotic bats, and the camera-enabled retinal implants of human informers. He’d never known about
those.
There was always something new to learn in Shackleton City.

He ran location searches on the list of 548 pureblood victims Dr. Miller had given him. They came up blank, suggesting that the poor souls
were
dead. Next, he tried facial recognition searches. But the results were garbage. So many cameras down or damaged. So many people injured beyond recognition. When the MI analyst had done its best, Mendoza was left with batches of possible hits that he’d have to go through manually.

He stretched his legs. All around him, people chattered, laughed, snacked. The basement was cluttered with exhibits for upcoming trade shows. People were using booths as desks. They were joking around while they surveilled the dead and the dying. Mendoza had only been back in Shackleton City for a few hours, and already he was losing faith in humanity again.

He spread one of his screens flat and opened a new search window.

FIND: Derek Lorna.

He chewed the nipple of his now-empty coffee pouch.

SUBJECT LOCATED.

There was a surveillance camera in Lorna’s bedroom. Evidently, the Bloomsbury dome had not been damaged in the PLAN attack. Lorna sat in a high-end ergoform shaped like an overblown rose, working on a computer—what else?

Holding his breath, Mendoza watched Lorna mouth at the screen. There was no audio feed, but Mendoza imagined that Lorna was talking to his controllers back on Earth, discussing how they could finish D.I.E. off once and for all.

Man watching screen on screen watched by man. And Mendoza himself was probably being watched by someone—man, woman, or bot.

He reached out to wipe the surveillance feed away. Just before it vanished, someone else walked into Lorna’s bedroom. Springy salt-and-pepper hair, broad-shouldered Earthborn physique. Bare-ass naked. The man had his back to the camera, so Mendoza couldn’t see his face.

The feed vanished.

So Lorna wasn’t alone. That would make Mendoza’s job more difficult. But he hadn’t expected it to be easy.

He went back to combing through pictures that
might
be of Dr. Miller’s missing patients. Done at last, he checked the time. Midnight! He napped for a few hours in his ergoform, knowing he’d be good for nothing if he didn’t get some rest.

When he awoke, the morning shift had begun. An automated breakfast buffet wound its way through the basement. Mendoza grabbed some kedgeree and toast. Amid shortages, the municipal workforce were still doing themselves proud.

While he ate, he reviewed his work. He had forty-odd matches that looked good. He ran another search on those, which gave him their last known locations. He selected the closest: Mockingbird Village.

“Nadia?”

“Oh, hello.”

It sounded like she’d forgotten all about him. He felt guilty at the thought that she’d spent the night caring for people with severe radiation poisoning, while he’d been dicking around on the computer.

“I’ve
probably
found some of Dr. Miller’s missing patients. I just have to confirm their locations.” Guilt pinched. “Uh, are you OK where you are?”

“Yes. I’m about to have my wings removed. First I was a nurse, now I’m a patient.”

“That’s the way life goes.”

“May Allah go with you, Mendoza.”

“And with you,” Mendoza responded.

As he trudged back to the Moonhawk, he reflected on the many names of God. YHWH of the Israelites, Abba, Father … and, yes, Allah, from the Aramaic
Alaha
that Jesus Himself had spoken. In Tagalog,
Diyos.
One God, almighty. Scuffling through the debris of Verneland, he wondered if the day of judgement was upon humanity now.

The Moonhawk stood where he’d left it. Auto theft wasn’t a thing in Shackleton City. Still wasn’t, even in the wake of catastrophe. Where would you go?

He got in. Didn’t bother to take off his helmet, let alone his EVA suit. It was only a short hop to Mockingbird Village.

He landed in the foothills of Mt. Malapert, near where he used to live. Boxy, modular villages dotted the slope. In the dim Earthlight, they looked undamaged. He hadn’t been able to find much information on the status of these domes. But most of his possible matches were in this area, so presumably the inhabitants were hanging on.

Mockingbird Village was on the funicular, but the trains weren’t running. The village’s big, tunnel-shaped airlock, which the funicular would pass through, was out of service. Mendoza entered the human-sized airlock next to it.

He stepped into a typical Lunar slum. A single sun-lamp shone above the station entrance, but further away the roof was dark. The PLAN had hit one of Shackleton City’s reactors, so the whole city was short of energy.

He knew this scenery: a small open space in front of the station, walled in by tenements of brick-look fabric.

But something was very wrong.

He was completely alone.

Where were all the people?

Hiding in their coffin-sized apartments, maybe.

Scared. Sick. Dying.

Mendoza started down the high street, a gash in the buildings about three meters wide. His shadow stretched long and thin ahead of him. Empty shops displayed signs in French. These slums tended to self-segregate by ethnicity.

He carried his helmet in one hand, a tablet in the other. The tablet showed a map of the village with six of his possibles marked.

Emmeline Diouf (85% probability).

He turned down an alley, following the map. The buildings cut off the light from the station. His footsteps sounded loud in the utter silence. Fear tightened his scalp.

Where the hell is everyone?

He wrenched open a door at random. Peered up a dark zipshaft. “Hello? Um,
bonjour?”

Something flew over his head and out into the alley. A robot bat.

“Diyos ko po!”

The zipshaft smelled bad. Like the open-air hospital in Wellsland, but fruitier.

Mendoza closed the door. Breathing shallowly, he walked on down the alley.

“Emmeline? Ms. Diouf?”

He could hardly see, so he switched on his helmet lamp, carrying it like a flashlight. Rubber cobbles, stiffened-cloth walls …

A woman drifted into his beam. Spaceborn, gazelle-boned, honey-colored skin. Her dress was black, and showed more cleavage than the dress code allowed. She smiled at him dazedly.

“Ms. Diouf? Are you all right?
Comment ça va?”

She came closer.

“I’m from Municipal Services. I’m just here to follow up, as you missed your last radiation treatment. If you’d like to come with me, I can give you a ride into Wellsland.”

She nodded.

“OK,” Mendoza muttered. “OK.” He started back the way he’d come. The alley was too narrow for them to walk side by side. He checked behind him to make sure Emmeline Diouf (85% probability) was following. Her gait seemed unnaturally smooth. That was the spaceborn for you. They could make micro-gee seem like a birthright.

“So where is everyone?” Mendoza said. “I hope they’re not all too sick to move.”