Luna: New Moon (23 page)

‘I will,’ said Marina Calzaghe.

‘Here’s the contract.’ Hetty flashed it up on Marina’s lens. A cursory scan – so many clauses referencing accidental death – a yin and back to Carlinhos.

‘Keep with me,’ Carlinhos said on Marina’s private channel. Eleven bikes, four corners. So it would be her and Carlinhos racing Mackenzie Metals and all their spaceships for the furthest, final point of the territory.

Riders mounted up. Marina’s machine was a beast of twisted aluminium and crackling power cells. A chrome-etched Lady Luna regarded her from between the handlebars, her skull hemi-face grinning. The AI meshed with Hetty as Marina settled on to the saddle. The bike came to life. The controls were easy. Forward, back. Twist for speed.

Before the train had even come to a halt Carlinhos gunned his engine and leaped off the flatbed, soaring high and beautiful, glinting in the earthlight, to land beyond the furthest rail track. By the time Marina craned her bike down to the surface and learned how to keep the machine from performing terrifying, deadly wheelies, Carlinhos was over the horizon.

She locked in the bearing, twisted the throttle and steered up the dust-trails. A burst of speed took her into the formation and there, to Carlinhos’s left, was a gap in the arrowhead. Marina kicked into it. Carlinhos turned his blank face and nodded to her.

The bikers plunge down the long shallow crater rim of Eimmart K. Marina veers to avoid a corpse-sized chunk of ejecta. It’s sat there for longer than life has existed on Earth, she thinks. Dumb grey in-the-way rock. Out on to the dead sea-floor.

Carlinhos raises a hand but familiars have already cued the riders. Three bikes peel off from the left trailing edge of the arrows and steer east-south-east. Marina watches their slow-settling dust plumes. They will strike the south-eastern vertex of the quadrangle. Nine bikes now, racing across the dark flatland; a lop-sided wing. The riding is easy and fast and monotonous and full of traps; the worst kind, the kind that come out of yourself, out of boredom and familiarity and monotony. Flat flat flat. Monotony monotony monotony. This can’t be the fun of it. Flat flat flat fast fast fast. Why invent a sport just about going fast in a straight line? Maybe that is it. Men and their sports. Everything can be turned into a pointless competition, even going fast across a lunar sea-bottom. There must be more to it. Stunts, skills. What Marina understands of sports is they are all stunts, scores or speed.

At the designated way point Carlinhos again raises his hand and the trailing right wingtip peels off and cuts a westerly arc across the Mare. The south-east corner of the claim is fifty kilometres distant. The five remaining bikes race on.

‘Do you like Brazilian music?’ Carlinho’s voice startles Marina. She wobbles, recovers.

‘Not really. It all sounds kind of elevator-y. Maybe there’s something I’m just too norte to get.’

‘I don’t get it either. Mamãe adores it. She grew up with it. It’s her link with home.’

‘Home,’ Marina says but it’s not a question.

‘Lucas is a big fan. He tried to explain to me once how it worked – saudade, bitter-sweet, all that, but I didn’t have the ear for it. I’m very simple. I like dance music. Beats. Something physical, with weight.’

‘I like to dance but I’m not a dancer,’ Marina says.

‘When we get back, when we’ve got this, we’ll go dancing.’

At one hundred and ninety-five kilometres per hour across the Mare Anguis, Marina’s heart leaps. ‘Is that a date?’

‘I’m taking everyone else in the squad as well,’ Carlinhos says. ‘You haven’t seen a Corta party.’

‘I was at the one in Boa Vista, remember?’ Marina says, backing away, crestfallen. Flushing hot inside her sasuit.

‘That wasn’t a Corta party,’ Carlinhos says. ‘So, what music do you like, Marina Calzaghe?’

‘I grew up in the Pacific Northwest so it’s guitars all the way down. I’m a rock girl.’

‘Ah. Metal. My squad, it’s all they listen to: metal.’

‘No. Rock.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Big difference. Like your brother says, you have to have the ear for it.’

Forward radar paints an obstruction over the horizon. A detour would cost precious minutes.

‘You know a lot about me Marina Calzaghe – I like dance music, I follow the Long Run, I love my mother but I don’t like my big brothers. I love my kid brother and my sister I don’t understand at all. I hate business suits and having rocks over my head. But I still don’t know anything about you. You rock, you’re from the norte, you saved my brother: that’s it.’

The obstruction is an outcrop of rough highland terrain marooned when ancient basalts flooded the Mare Anguis basin. The transition is abrupt for the gentle, eroded moon, but Carlinhos shows no hesitation and steers straight for the rocks.

‘I kind of drifted here,’ Marina says.

‘No one drifts to the moon,’ Carlinhos says and his bike hits a ridge and goes flying, ten, twenty metres before splashing down in an explosion of dust. Marina follows him. She is powerless, abandoned; her heart chokes in panic. Hold it steady. Steady. Then the rear wheel touches down, she fights to hold the bike upright, then both wheels. Steer true. Steer true. She gasps with exhilaration.

‘So?’ Carlinhos’s voice on the private channel.

‘My mom got sick. Tubercular meningitis.’

Carlinhos whispers a Portuguese invocation to São Jorge.

‘She lost her right leg from the knee down and the use of both of them. She’s alive, she talks and gets around but it’s not her. Not the mom that I knew. Bits the hospital salvaged.’

‘So you work for the hospital.’

‘I work for Corta Hélio. And my mom.’

There are only two of them now. Carlinhos leads her down off the rocks and the Sea of Serpents is wide and open before them.

‘I was born and grew up in Port Angeles, Washington State,’ Marina says, because there are only two of them, alone on the plain that curves away from them in every direction, she talks about growing up in the house up by the edge of the forest that was full of bird calls and windchimes and the fluttering of flying banners and windsocks. Mother: reiki practitioner and angelic healer and reader of the cards and feng shui arranger, cat sitter and dog walker and horse trainer: all the many jobs of late twenty-first service employment. Father: faithful in gifts at birthdays and holidays and graduations. Sister Kessie, brother Skyler. The dogs, the fogs, the log trucks; the engine-throb of the big ships out in the channel, the parade of RV and motorbikes and trailers passing through to mountains and water; the money that always appeared just as desperation turned its wheels into the front yard. The knowledge that the whole dance was one pay-cheque away from collapse.

‘I had this thing about the ships,’ Marina says, realising as she does that Carlinhos may have no referent for the gigantic carriers that sailed the strait of San Juan de Fuca. ‘When I was real small I imagined that they had giant legs, like spiders, dozens of legs and that they were really walking across the bottom of the sea.’

Thus engineers are built: from walking ships and a loved toy, an improving game for girls where the mission was to rescue imperiled animals using ribbons and pulleys and elevators and gears.

‘I liked to make them really complicated and spectacular,’ Marina says. ‘I videoed them and stuck them up online.’

Her mother was nonplussed and delighted that her eldest daughter showed a flair for problem-solving and engineering. It was an alien philosophy in the ramshackle, last-minute lives of family and friends and associated animals but Ellen-May Calzaghe was fierce in her support even if she did not completely understand what Marina was studying at university. Computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture was a jabber of tech-talk that sounded most like regular pay-cheques.

Then the tuberculosis came. It blew in from the east, from the sick city. People had been moving out from the city for years now, but the house had thought itself immune, protected. The disease blew past charms and chimes and astral warders and into Ellen-May’s lung and from there into the lining of her brain. One by one the antibiotics failed. Phages saved her, but the infection took her legs and twenty per cent of her mind. It left a bill for insane money. More money than any lifetime could earn. More money than any career; except black finance. Or one on the moon.

Marina never intended to go to the moon. She grew up knowing there were people up there, and that they kept the lights burning on the world below. Like every child of her generation she had borrowed a telescope to giggle at King Dong of Imbrium but the moon was as distant as a parallel universe. Not a place you could get to. Not from Port Angeles. Until Marina found that she not only could, but she must, that that world was crying out for her skills and discipline, that it would welcome her and pay her lunatic money.

‘And that skill is serving Blue Moons at Lucasinho’s moon-run party?’ Carlinhos says.

‘They found someone cheaper.’

‘You should have read the contract closer.’

‘It was the only contract on offer.’

‘This is the moon …’

‘Everything is negotiable. I know that. Now.’ Then she had known nothing, only the surge of impressions and experiences, that every sense was yelling
strange, new, frightening.
Her training failed. Nothing could prepare her for the reality of walking out of the tether port into the crush and colour and noise and reek of Meridian. Sensibility rebelled
. Put this lens in your right eye quick. Move like this, walk this way, don’t trip folk up. Set up this account, and this and this and this. This is your familiar: have you got a name, a skin for it? Read that? So: sign here here and here. Is that woman flying?

‘Word from the south-east squad,’ Carlinhos interrupts. ‘The Mackenzies have arrived.’

‘How far are we?’

‘Open her up.’

Marina has been hoping he would say that. She feels the engine leap between her thighs. The dustbike answers with a surge of speed. Marina bends low. She doesn’t need to; there is no wind resistance to cut on the moon. It’s what you do on a fast bike. She and Carlinhos race side by side across the Mare Anguis.

‘And what about you?’ Marina asks.

‘Rafa’s the charmer, Lucas the schemer, Ariel’s the talker; I’m the fighter.’

‘What about Wagner?’

‘The wolf.’

‘I mean, Lucas can’t tolerate him. What’s that about?’

‘Our lives aren’t simple. We do things differently here.’ In those few words, Carlinhos says, we are still contractor and contractee.

‘I’m at about twelve per cent O2,’ Marina announces.

‘We’re here,’ Carlinhos says, brakes and swings the tail of the bike round in a doughnut of flying dust. Marina loops wide and slows to park up beside him. The dust settles gently around her.

‘Here.’ Dark, flat sea-bottom, as featureless as a wok.

‘North-east vertex of the Mare Anguis quadrangle,’ Carlinhos says. He unstraps the beacon from the back of the dustbike.

‘Carlinhos,’ Marina says. ‘Boss …’

The horizon is so close, the Vorontsov ship so fast it is as if it has materialised in the sky above her, like an angel. It’s big, it’s half the sky; it’s low and descending on flickers of rocket thrust from its engine pods.

Carlinhos swears in Portuguese. He is still snapping out the legs of the Corta beacon.

‘Those things have built-in positioning. If it touches the ground …’

‘I’ve an idea.’ A bad mad idea, a clause not even a lunar contract would cover. Marina guns the dustbike. The Vorontsov ship pivots on its central axis. Its thrusters throw up pillars of dust. Marina accelerates through the dust and brakes directly under the belly of the ship. She looks up. Warning lights splash across her helmet visor. They wouldn’t land on an employee of Corta Hélio. They wouldn’t mash her and burn her, not in front of a Corta. They wouldn’t. The ship hovers, then the thrusters glow and the transporter veers away from its landing zone.

‘No you fucking don’t!’ Marina kicks the dustbike again and dashes in underneath the descending ship. Rocket thrust buffets her, threatens to tumble her. Lower this time. Belly cameras swivel to lock on to her. What arguments are going on in the cockpit of that ship? This is the moon. They do things differently here. Everything is negotiable. Everything has a price: dust, lives. Corporate war with the Cortas. The transporter hangs in the air.

‘Carlinhos …’

The transporter darts sideways. It can’t drift too far from the co-ordinates of the vertex which neutralises its advantage in speed. Marina can always catch up. But it’s low; dear gods it’s low. Too low. With a cry Marina throws the bike into a skid. The rear wheel goes out, bike and rider hit the dust and slide slide slide. Marina grabs dust to try and brake her speed. Winded, she comes to a halt under the landing pad. Engine-blast wraps her in blinding dust. The landing pad is crushing death bearing down inexorably on her. They’ve made the calculation.

‘Marina! Out of there!’

With the last of her strength Marina rolls out from under the landing gear. The Vorontsov ship touches down. Pad and strut and shock absorbers are two metees from her face.

‘I’ve got it, Marina.’

She rolls on to her other side and there is Carlinhos crouched, hand extended to help her up. Behind him the transponder beacon blinks. Those blinks are life. Those blinks are victory.

‘We’ve got it.’

Marina struggles to her feet. Her ribs ache, her heart flutters, every muscle groans with exertion, she might throw up in her helmet, a dozen hud alerts are flashing from yellow to red and she can’t feel her fingers or toes from the cold. But those lights, those little blinking lights. She puts an arm around Carlinhos and lets him help her hobble away from the ship. The transporter is beautiful and alien, a thing out of place, a child’s toy, abandoned in the Sea of Serpents. Figures in the brightly lit cockpit; one of them raises a hand in salute. Carlinhos returns the gesture. Then the thrusters fire, blinding Marina and Carlinhos in dust and the transporter is gone. They are alone. Marina sags against Carlinhos.