The Luna Deception (47 page)

Ron Studd had stolen these rockets from the
Monster
before they left Tiangong Erhao. During their journey to Luna, he had used the Superlifter’s repair and handling (R&H) bot to jury-rig a dorsal launcher for them. He had done all of this in secret, behind Kiyoshi’s back. Kiyoshi had only found out when he missed the R&H bot. He’d been furious, but it had struck him that he could repurpose one of the tubes from the dorsal launcher as a man-portable system.

He pushed the button that ignited the fuse, and blew the dome away.

★

Elfrida saw the explosion of fire on the horizon.
The PLAN!
she thought.
They’ve come back to kick us when we’re down.

She was running with hundreds of people. Something bad was happening in the domes. People had come outside to escape it. And yet now they were running
towards
the explosion, instead of away. Pity and admiration thrilled through her.

The dome that got destroyed had been Bloomsbury, where Derek Lorna lived.

Saw-edges of roof caught the low-angled sunlight. “Bloomsbury,” people said on the public channel. “Bloomsbury. Thought those one-percenters would be OK, no matter what. Ha ha; shit.”

The confirmation robbed Elfrida of energy. She would never get her revenge now. Someone else had got there first. Houses and trees stood exposed to the vacuum, flame-blackened. The fire had gone out when the air went away.

Hundreds of people had escaped from Bloomsbury. You could tell them from the plebs by their custom spacesuits. They lay on the ground. They were dying, alone in this crowd.

“It’s safe out here,” said other people.

“The stuff can’t survive in vacuum.”

“Oh yes, it can.”

“You’re safe in a suit.”

“Unless it got into your suit with you.”

“Out here is safe.”

This was the same babble Elfrida had been hearing all the way across the plateau. She couldn’t imagine what it meant.

“Hey, you in the UNVRP suit!”

She froze, startled.

“Who are you?”

She spun in a slow circle.

A person in a BLOOMSBURY PRIMARY SCHOOL suit stood a short distance away. He was behaving oddly for a teacher. To wit, he was pointing a pistol at her.

“Say something,” he begged. She shook her head. This made no sense. He was supposed to be in the Belt, millions of klicks from here.

“… Mendoza?”

His pistol wavered.

“It’s me. Elfrida.”

“Is it really you?
Really?”

“Yes, who else would it be?”

“No one.” He caught his breath in a sound like a sob. “Never mind.”

Then they were embracing, faceplates bumping, servo-powered gloves gripping each other’s backs.

“What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?”

“You first,” Elfrida teased. Mendoza was here. Everything would be all right.

“OK. Well, I didn’t go out to the Belt.”

“I can see that.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you. I didn’t want to drag you into … I’ve been working for D.I.E all along. We had the funding, the technology, everything, it could have worked. But our nanoprobes, the Dust, the PLAN copied the concept and turned it against us. That’s what this is.” He gestured at the destruction around them. “It infiltrated Shackleton City on 9/29. But it went undetected, because the Dust can camouflage itself. The probes have the ability to collectively replicate images they acquire in camera mode, by changing color. That was so they could carry out … the mission that was originally envisioned for them. But the PLAN used that functionality to make devils in the likeness of people it killed. That’s why I wasn’t sure you were …” He gripped her upper arms tightly, as if to convince himself that she was solid.

“It impersonated
me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it must have just grabbed my image off the Space Corps website. Because I’m not dead.”

Mendoza bumped his faceplate against hers. She could just see his face in there, gleaming with sweat or tears. “I thought I’d lost you, like I lost Connie.”

She remembered that Connie was the name of his sister, the one the PLAN had killed. She wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or not that he had her in the same category as his sister. “Well, I came to kill Derek Lorna,” she said. “But I guess the PLAN did it for me. Dammit; foiled again.”

Mendoza twitched.

“What?”

“Ellie …” He pulled away from her. Stooping, he gathered up a man in an EVA suit with antenna dangling from its helmet. She hadn’t even taken notice of the guy. Had assumed he was just another of the Bloomsbury victims. “This is Derek Lorna. I dunno, he might be dead, but if he’s alive, we have to keep him that way.”

“What? No!”

“He knows about the Dust. When it comes time to figure out how this happened, we’re going to need his expertise. Everyone else who was involved with D.I.E. is dead.”

“Ah, crap on it, John! The guy is guilty of genocide!”

“And how,” Mendoza muttered. But he shook his head, facing her, his faceplate reflecting the sunlight. “Ellie, is this who you are? You used to help people. Helping people was your life. What happened?”

She broke down. “I don’t know, John. I don’t know. I hate myself these days.”

“Is that why you couldn’t let yourself be with me?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I need to deal with my issues. But I want to be with you.”

“I want to be with you, too. But—”

Mendoza broke off. A quadrupedal bot bounced over their heads, in a big hurry to get somewhere. It looked like one of the multi-purpose R&H bots that came with spaceships. It was carrying a person—or maybe a corpse, judging by the lack of movement—in a black EVA suit.

It headed for a Superlifter parked on the regolith, beyond the blast ring of destruction.

“That’s not Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s Superlifter, is it?” Elfrida said.

“Yes. Ellie, I have to go.”

“No!”

“Do you see anywhere else I can get medical attention for him?” He jounced Lorna in his arms. “Come on.”

It was too sudden. She hesitated. “There won’t be room …”

“No, crap, you’re right, there wouldn’t be. I hate this. Tell me you’ll come when you can.
Promise.”

“I promise,” she said, stunned. “I’ll come when I can. But where to?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll be in touch.” He leaned in to bump her faceplate once more—the closest they could get to a kiss. Then he leapt away, following the bot.

Elfrida watched him go. When he had reached the Superlifter, she drew a deep breath and looked around her. Aid workers had arrived. They were triaging the victims, loading them into Grasshoppers and other flying cars. A couple of the workers wore EVA suits emblazoned with the Space Corps logo.

She glanced self-consciously down at her own UNVRP suit. Then she scooped up a handful of moondust and ash and rubbed it on her chest, obscuring the logo. She’d change when she could. Throw this old suit away.

She bounded over to the Space Corps group. “Hey, guys. How can I help?”

★

Kiyoshi dangled from the grippers of the
Wakizashi’s
R&H bot, half-alive, half-dead.

The bot raced through the wreckage of the dome. It carried him out to the Superlifter and dumped him into the crew airlock.

“The medibot will inject you with a high dose of anti-microbials,” Studd’s voice said in his helmet. ”Those will fight the Dust, and also give you a drug fever.”

“Good. I like drugs.”

“We have to get you as hot as possible, so about 41.5 degrees. Any higher, and you’d wind up with brain damage. Not that anyone would notice the difference.”

Kiyoshi dragged himself to the lip of the airlock. The heights of Shackleton Crater wheeled. The sunlight hurt his eyes.

“Did I do that?” he said, surveying the ruin of the dome. The roof was gone. Most of the buildings still stood, burned out.

“I
wanted to do it,” Studd complained, anger in his voice.

And finally it clicked. From the haze of pain in Kiyoshi’s brain, a memory emerged: Jun at the age of five, staring at the hole Kiyoshi had just dug with their father’s power drill. They’d been planting trees or some shit.
I wanted to do it!

“Too fucking bad. I’m the captain.”

He surrendered to a coughing fit. Didn’t feel much like the captain. Didn’t feel much like anything.

Mendoza leapt up the steps, carrying Derek Lorna’s limp body in his arms. “Is there room for two more?”

“Oh hell yes.”

On Mendoza’s heels, the R&H bot plonked two
more
people in the airlock. The same guy who’d been in Bloomsbury, and his kid. They were not purebloods. Not hurting. The father immediately started trying to cycle the airlock. “I’m an important person!” he shouted. “My name is Abdullah Hasselblatter! I’ve got a Ph.D!”

Kiyoshi started to laugh. It hurt so much that he passed out.

xxxviii.

“I can’t walk any further.”

“Yes, you can,” Elfrida said. “I’ll help you.”

She shifted the two-year-old onto her hip and stretched out an arm for the baby. So light. She tied the arms of its adult-sized sharesuit around her neck like a sling. EVAs with babies were a nightmare. The poor little soul could hardly reach the rehydration nipple to suck on it.

This whole journey had been a nightmare.

Two thousand kilometers. All the way from Shackleton City, to Luna’s northern hemisphere.

The Dust had made Shackleton City uninhabitable. The whole area would have to be sterilized. So the survivors—about a third of the population—were on the move, making for Luna’s other cities and settlements. Anywhere the Dust was not. Anywhere that had room to take them in.

It was the biggest evacuation in the history of space colonization.

Thousands of surface transport vehicles borrowed from He3 mining operations, flown out from Earth, and salvaged from the stricken cities, darted through this slow-moving river of humanity. They picked up the old, weak, and sick, roared off with them, and then came back for more. But the evacuees numbered well over one million. There simply was not enough transport.

So those who could walk, had to.

And Elfrida walked with them.

The Space Corps, Médecins Sans Frontières, and other aid agencies dropped inflatable habs in the path of the evacuees, so they could rest, eat, and replenish their suits’ reservoirs of oxygen and fluids. But access to the inflatables had to be strictly controlled, to avoid contaminating them with Dust. It had come with the evacuation, in people’s suits. If they weren’t pureblooded, you might never know they were carrying it … until it built up in their lungs and doomed them to slow asphyxiation. Hundreds of people died like this every day.

One of Elfrida’s tasks was to gather up the dead.

Another was to staff the decontamination facilities.

She also helped to pass out emergency food aid.

But mostly she just walked with the evacuees, helping up the fallen, pep-talking the weary, and making sure no one got lost.

Spirits stayed high, in general. The evacuees said, “They attacked us because we have a culture.
Shackleton
culture.” This formerly recondite theory of the PLAN’s war aims had come to be accepted as fact. It united the pureblooded and ‘normal’ survivors of Shackleton City, instead of dividing them. “The bastards tried to kill what’s unique in us. Pfft! We’re still here!”

Shackleton values—resilience, stoicism, a tolerance for uncomfortable clothes, and above all, the spaceborn trait of making bad jokes about the unthinkable—kept the evacuees on the march, and Elfrida with them.

A month after they left the south pole, they entered the lava tube of Marius Hills.

Riders came out of the dark to greet them: men on camels. The animals wore their own spacesuits, equipped with directional time domain radar for navigating in the lava tube.

That evening, Elfrida sat with a group of evacuees in an oasis in the desert. The desert had a roof. It was a dome, six kilometers long. The House of Saud had thrown New Riyadh open, for the first time in history, to accommodate the evacuees. Exhausted people carpeted the floor of the habitat, stretching all the way to the walls of the citadel where the King lived.

Elfrida let a handful of sand trickle through her fingers. It felt so good to be out of her spacesuit. She was tireder than she’d ever been in her life.

Her last job had been helping to distribute the Meal Wizards that the House of Saud had donated. When she ran out, she’d sat down with the group who got the last one. It was now cooking up bowls of so-called lamb stew. The evacuees huddled around it as if it were a campfire.

“Feels great to be clean,” someone sighed.

Clean
was an understatement. Before they were allowed into New Riyadh, they’d had to go through a decontamination process even more thorough than the fungicide showers at the waystations. It had left them smelling like freshly scrubbed toilets.

They’d also been warned to keep their shoes on, or the foxes would steal them. Elfrida had not seen any foxes yet. They were probably hiding in their dens, spooked by this invasion.

The man next to her flopped on his back. “Stars,” he said. “Ain’t never seen ‘em before.”

On the roof sparkled copies of the million and one stars you could not actually see from Luna’s tidally locked dayside.

“Look,” Elfrida said. “There’s Mars.”

“One day,” the man said flatly. Others murmured agreement. “One day.”

xxxix.

Kiyoshi floated above the pilot’s console of the Superlifter, curled in a fetal posture. It hurt to touch anything. The air was his bed. He slept, woke, slept, woke, as if the drug fever were a gravity well he struggled to escape, only to fall back in.

The third or fourth time he woke, Mendoza was shaking his shoulder.

“G’way.”

“Lorna.”

“Wha’ ‘bout him?”

“He looks bad. I think he’s dying.”

Kiyoshi clamped a weak hand on Mendoza’s shoulder and let himself be towed across the cockpit. Dr. Hasselblatter was self-googling, as usual. Junior Hasselblatter was taking the sushi machine apart. If it kept him quiet ...