Luna: New Moon (46 page)

Still it is not over.

‘Corcovado, Dorolice, Desafinado.’ Lucas croaks the code.

Welcome Lucas Corta,
the terminal says.
Your capsule is ready for you. Moonloop rendezvous and orbital transfer in sixty seconds.

With the last of his strength Lucas staggers to the capsule.

Please be informed that maximum acceleration will momentarily peak at six lunar gravities,
the capsule says as it lowers safety bars over his chest and clasps his waist in a padded hug. The locks seal.
Terminal ascent.
A different jolt shakes Lucas in his capsule and he almost weeps with relief: the capsule undocking and climbing the terminal tower to the tether platform.
At ascent. Moonloop lift in twenty seconds.

He imagines the moonloop wheeling towards him along the equator, sending counterweights climbing up and down its length to dip lower into the moon’s gravity well to snatch this parcel of life. Then Lucas cries out as the grapple connects. The capsule with the screaming Lucas Corta huddled inside it is snatched up into the sky, and flung away from the moon, into the big dark.

Bodies lie strewn like surface scrap along the platform of Boa Vista tram station. An entire Mackenzie blade squad taken down. Dart throwers swivel and lock on Rafa with a speed and accuracy that makes the breath catch in his throat. The guns hesitate. If the Mackenzies have hacked security, Rafa will be dead before he can reach the gate. The dart throwers snap up and away. Pass friend.

Socrates tried to raise Robson and Luna but Boa Vista’s network is down.

Rafa steps out of the station expecting horrors. The long valley is deserted. Water cascades between the impassive faces of the orixas, gurgles through streams and pools and falls. Bamboo stirs, leaves flicker in the subtle breezes. The sunline stands at early afternoon.

‘Ola Boa Vista!’

His voice returns in a dozen echoes.

They might have made it out. They might be dead in their own blood among the columns and in the chambers.

‘Ola!’

Room after empty room. Boa Vista has never felt less his palace. His mother’s apartment, spacious rooms open to the gardens. The reception rooms, the board room. Staff quarters. The old apartment he shared with Lousika, the crawlspace where Luna used to hide and spy and thought no one knew. Deserted. He steps through the door to the service area and an arm grabs him, swings him, slams him into the wall and throws him to the ground. Madrinha Elis stands over him, a knife-tip a centimetre from his left eyeball. She snatches the blade away.

‘Sorry, Senhor Rafa.’

‘Where are they?’

‘In the refuge.’

Boa Vista shakes. Dust drops from the ceiling. There is no mistaking the flat thud of breaching charges.

‘Come with me.’

Madrinha Elis takes Rafa’s hand. Room after room, through the labyrinth of Boa Vista’s ever-growing corridors. The refuge is a tank of steel and aluminium and pressure-glass; striped yellow and black, the universal dress of danger. Madrinhas and Boa Vista staff huddle nervously on the benches; Robson and Luna rush to the window, press their hands against the glass. Familiars can speak through the local network, Rafa goes down on his knees and presses his head to the pane.

‘Thank gods thank gods thank gods, I was so scared.’

‘Papai, are you coming in?’ Luna says.

‘In a minute. I need to see if there’s anyone else out there.’

Boa Vista rattles again. The refuge creaks on its vibration-damping springs. It is designed to keep twenty people safe and breathing against the worst the moon can drop on it.

‘I can do that, Senhor Rafa,’ Madrinha Elis says.

‘You’ve done enough. You get in. Go.’

The lock cycles open. Madrinha Elis gives Rafa a last questioning look; he shakes his head.

‘I’ll be back before you know it,’ Rafa says to Luna. They touch hands to the glass.

He’s checked the south wing but the company offices and ancillary areas are on the north side of the gardens.

‘Ola!’

Another blast. He needs to hurry. The air plant, water recycling, power, thermal. Clear. A fresh explosion, the most powerful yet, shakes leaves from the trees. Masonry falls from the São Sebastião Pavilion. A crack runs down the face of Oxossi the hunter.

Clear.

Utterly clear. He was a fool to have come here. Luna and Robson didn’t need him to save that. The madrinhas looked after them, calmly, efficiently. He is the liability, he’s the danger. If he goes to the refuge, the Mackenzies will cut it apart to get him. They’re up there blasting a path down to him. Boa Vista is a trap. Another explosion, the heaviest yet. The crack down Oxossi’s face widens into a fissure. The dome of the São Sebastião Pavilion collapses into the water. Rafa runs.

The tram service is not currently available,
the lock AI says.
The tunnel is blocked by a roof fall at kilometre three.

Rafa stares dumb at the lock, as if it has committed some personal affront. All ideas have fled. The surface lock. He can steal out the way Lucasinho did, in a hard-shell emergency suit. João de Deus is lost, but there’s a depot at Rurik; two hours run at full shell-suit speed. Pick up a rover, get out to Twé. Regroup and recover. Gather the family, strike back.

He runs for the surface lock elevator. Is blown off his feet by a staggering detonation that lifts Boa Vista and drops it like a fighter breaking an enemy’s spine. The front of the elevator lobby disintegrates in a wall of debris. Deafened, stunned by the pressure wave, Rafa understands the meaning of the flying debris. They’ve blown the surface lock. Boa Vista is open to vacuum.

The pressure wave reverses. Boa Vista vents its atmosphere. The gardens explode. Every leaf is stripped from every tree, every loose object is syphoned towards the surface lock shaft and blasted out in a fountain of litter, leaf, garden furniture, tea glasses, petals, grass clippings, lost jewellery, debris from the explosion. Doors and windows buckle and shatter. Boa Vista is a tornado of glass splinters and shredded metal. Depressurisation alarms shriek, their voices weakening as the air pressure drops. Rafa clings to a pillar of the São Sebastião Pavilion. The killing wind tears at him. His clothes, his skin are lacerated by a thousand cuts of flying glass. His lungs blaze, his brain burns, his vision turns red as he draws the last oxygen from his bloodstream. He gasps in a shallow, airless final breath. He dies here but he won’t let go. But his vision is darkening, his strength failing. Synapses fuse and die one by one. His grip is weakening. He can’t hold on any longer. There is no point, no hope. With a final silent cry Rafa slips from the pillar into the storm.

The moonloop capsule flies out beyond the far side of the moon. If he had cameras or windows Lucas Corta could have gazed on the wonder of a half-Farside, diamond-bright, filling his sky. He has no windows, no cameras, little in the way of communications or entertainment or light. Toquinho is offline: everything is sacrificed to keeping Lucas breathing. There is not even enough power for a call to Lucasinho, to let the boy know Lucas is alive. The calculations are tight but they are accurate. They require no faith; they are equations.

Lucas’s tie has worked loose from his jacket and floats in free-fall.

The Taiyang plan is child-like in its straightforwardness. Lucas has time to think about it in his capsule and he deduced it in instants from Amanda’s confession. Never confess. That’s a mistake he will repay three times. She never esteemed him. The Suns always treated the Cortas as a lesser, dirty class. Ludicrous gauchos. Jumped-up favelados. Mackenzie Metals destroys Corta Hélio. Planet Earth watches and fears for its helium fusion plants. Mackenzie Metals has a helium-3 stockpile from its attempts to muscle into Corta Hélio’s market but the long game lies in Taiyang’s exercising its long-bet options on the equatorial belt. Pave the moon’s equator sixty kilometres on either side of Equatorial One with solar panels sintered from lunar regolith and beam the power to Earth by microwave. Taiyang has always been information and power. The moon as non-depletable permanent orbital power station. It is humanity’s most expensive and largest infrastructure program but in the paranoia following the fall of Corta Hélio and the shrinking of the lunar helium-3 supply, investors will stab each other in the throat to bang cash on Taiyang’s table. It will be the Sun’s final victory in their long war with the PRC. It’s a magnificent plan. Lucas admires it nakedly.

Its magnificence is its simplicity. Set a few simple motivators working and human pride will do the rest. The assassin fly was brilliant; a simple obfuscation that cast shadows between the Cortas and Asamoahs but pointed to the Mackenzies. Lucas has no doubt that the software malfunction that killed Rachel Mackenzie was sourced in a Taiyang server; or that the knife attack that disabled Ariel came out of the Palace of Eternal Light. Little triggers. Feedback loops. Cycles of violence. Conspire for your enemies to destroy each other. How long had the Suns been scheming? They worked in decades, planned for centuries.

It’s far too easy when you can predict your enemy’s next move,
Amanda had said. Wagner had mentioned, Ariel had confirmed, that Taiyang had designed a quantum computing system for Whitacre Goddard. The Three August Ones. Highly accurate predictions from detailed real-world modelling. What serves Whitacre Goddard serves the Suns better.

They had not predicted Lucas would survive.

Toquinho powers up, a low-rez basic interface that allows Lucas to mesh with the capsule’s sensors and control systems. The capsule has pinged, and the destination has pinged back. It was all calculation. Out there, close to the far end of its loop around the back of the moon into its return orbit to Earth, VTO cycler
Saints Peter and Paul
has locked on to the capsule and assumed control. Lucas’s tie falls as the capsule jerks to micro-accelerations; thrusters burping to push it into a rendezvous orbit. Now the cycler is within range of the capsules’ cameras and Toquinho shows him the breath-taking sight of the sun-lit ship: five habitat rings arranged up and down the central drive and life support axle, a crown of soar panels.

Ten million in Zurich gold will buy Lucas sanctuary here, for as long as he needs to calculate out his return and revenge.

Thrusters pop and belch, docking arms reach out to grasp the capsule and draw Lucas Corta in.

The moonship comes in low over the debris field. The ejecta of Boa Vista has fallen in a rough disc five kilometres across, graded by size and weight. The lighter material – the leaves, the grass clippings – forms the outer rings; then the glass shards, the pieces of metal and stone and sinter. The largest and heaviest items, the most intact ones, lie closest to the wreckage of the lock. The pilot brings her ship in manually, hunting for a safe landing zone. She plays the manoeuvring thrusters like a musical instrument: ship-dancing.

In the surface activity pod, Lucasinho Corta, Abena and Lousika Asamoah suit up with the VTO rescue team and the AKA security squad. There has been no sign of activity from Boa Vista for two hours now, except the pulse of the refuge beacon. Refuges are tough but the destruction of Boa Vista is well beyond design parameters. Green lights. The ship is down. The pod depressurises. Lucasinho and Abena bump helmets, a recognition of friendship and the anticipation of fear. Familiars collapse down into name tags over their left shoulders.

VTO had protested that diverting to Twé to pick up Lousika Asamoah would add perilous minutes to their rescue mission. ‘My girl is down there.’ VTO had still demurred. ‘AKA will pay for your extra fuel, time and air.’ That had settled it. ‘There will be three of us.’

Pod depressurised,
Jinji says.
Doors opening.

Abena squeezes Lucasinho’s hand.

Lucasinho has never flown in a moonship. He anticipated excitement: rushing over the surface faster than he ever travelled before, rocket-powered, riding to the rescue. His experience was a seat in a windowless pod, a series of unpredictable jolts and thumps and accelerations that threw him against his restraint harness and much time to imagine what he would find down there.

The VTO rescue squad strike through the debris field to the lock. They rig winch tripods and lights. Lousika, with Abena and Lucasinho and her guards, descend the ramp to the surface. The moonship’s searchlights cast long, slow-moving shadows of warped garden furniture, twisted construction beams, shards of reinforced glass stabbed into the regolith, smashed machinery. Lucasinho and Abena pick a path through the wreckage.

‘Nana.’

Lousika’s guards have found something. Their helmet lights play across tweed, the curve of a shoulder, a hank of hair.

‘Stay there, Lucasinho,’ Lousika orders.

‘I want to see him,’ Lucasinho says.

‘Stay there!’

Two guards seize him, turn him away. Lucasinho tries to wrench free but these are fresh workers six months up from Accra and they outmuscle any third gen moon-boy. Abena stands in front of him.

‘Look at me.’

‘I want to see him!’

‘Look at me!’

Lucasinho turns his head. He glimpses Lousika on her knees on the regolith. Her hands are pressed to her faceplate, she rocks back and forth. He glimpses something smashed and distorted, burst open and freeze-dried to leather. Then Abena claps her hands on either side of his helmet and turns his head to her. Lucasinho returns the gesture. He pulls Abena’s helmet to touch his, a duster kiss.

‘I will never ever forgive the people who did this,’ Lucasinho swears on a private channel. ‘Robert Mackenzie, Duncan Mackenzie, Bryce MacKenzie, I name you and claim you. I put down a marker. You’re mine.’

‘Lucasinho, don’t say this.’

‘You don’t tell me that, Abena. This is mine, you don’t have a say in it.’

‘Lucasinho …’

‘This is mine.’

‘Ms Asamoah-Corta.’

Lousika starts at the call on the common channel from the VTO rescue squad.