Moonsteed (4 page)

“Indeed it is morning,” said Commodore Smith, his attention drawn to the windows running the span of the outer wall, where a pale glow lightened the horizon.

“For the next four days,” said Verity.

Lloyd rubbed his hands together briskly. “Good Referendum Day. Was there something you wanted to speak to me about?” He glanced rapidly back and forth between Verity and the Commodore.

“Yes.” Smith fidgeted with his fingers. Tall and sable-haired, he looked very different to Lloyd. Verity could see the discomfort written on his face. People feared a man like Lloyd Farron, who could prize open someone’s mind at will. Verity, on the other hand, had from her first encounter with him seen it as something enticing, something dangerously exhilarating.

“I’ll need your report on the spy Verity terminated,” Smith said.

“I don’t have the information yet. It shouldn’t take more than a day. I’ll file a private report on the ANT once I’m sure I’ve extracted everything.”

Verity had been looking round the lab while they spoke, at the computers and the interrogation chair with its thick straps to restrain the arms and heads of Lloyd Farron’s subjects. In the far corner a lot of machinery had been connected to something Verity realized, with a pang of dread, was the head of the spy she had brought back, mounted on a stick like some grisly trophy. The long hair had been hacked off with scissors, and the face was covered with lacerations from Verity’s makeshift ice pack. The wound at the neck she had made with her katana looked unnaturally straight, perfectly horizontal, and thick tubes delivering oxygenated reanimation fluid had been clamped to its blood vessels. Wires trailed over the table around the head and jacks had been plugged into the shunt on its forehead. Saliva dribbled constantly from the mouth, and the left eye was a mess of clotted blood where a shard of ice had punctured it. The right eye swiveled, looked directly at her, and a chill prickling crawled from her scalp right the way down to the back of her knees. She’d done that...he’d
made
her do that. Why hadn’t he stopped when she’d told him?

The Commodore must have noticed the spy’s head also, for a slight noise of disgust escaped him. Verity turned and saw him staring at the head. “You’re not going to leave him like
that
, are you?”

“No.” The Inquisitor dipped his biscuit in his tea. “He’ll be put out of his misery once he divulges the information I need from him.” The biscuit broke as he lifted his hand, plopping into the tea. He made a distasteful face at the stub between his finger and thumb.

The Commodore took a deep breath and straightened his belt. “You see that you do your job and make him. He may be a spy, but...
well
.”

Verity stared at the head. Yes, he’d been a spy. She needed to rise above pitying him, thinking of him as a man, even, because he was a traitor to the Meritocracy, and this was what people who plotted to bring down the Meritocracy deserved.

Commodore Smith cleared his throat and looked conspicuously away from the head. “Do you know anything of Private John Aaron? I don’t know if you will know the name. If you’ve seen him about before, have you ever picked up any...
vibes
from him?”

“Hmm, Aaron.” The Inquisitor dipped another biscuit in his tea and put it in his mouth. He frowned as he chewed, turning away slightly and putting his fingers to his interface. “I think I know the one you mean. He had something he didn’t want others to know. He was very...assured in his convictions on a particular matter, although I’m not sure what it was.”

“That would fit. It turns out he’s some kind of religious extremist. He just made an attempt on Verity’s life and now he’s AWOL.”

“Hmm,” said the Inquisitor again. He glanced up at Verity. “Didn’t hurt you, did he?”

Verity shook her head. Lloyd suddenly grinned. “Didn’t think he could. Ah well,
absit omen
.”

“Well, if you have any information, please put it on the ANT.” The Commodore turned to leave. Something in his manner betrayed an eagerness to be elsewhere. Verity could tell he didn’t like the Inquisitor.

After Smith had left, Lloyd said, “Who was that man you were speaking with in the stables, Verity? Did he come in on the last landing?”

“He is a nearly-a-doctor who sires horses,” said Verity.

Lloyd roared with laughter. He offered her his tin of chocolate biscuits.

Verity didn’t want to eat them in front of the spy’s head, so she put them in her pocket.

“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked.

“He says he’s training to be a genetic engineer.”

“Hmm.” Lloyd tapped his signet ring against his tea mug. It was an odd design, titanium with alternating bands of anodized violet.

“Lloyd,” said Verity, admiring the strong shape of his brow and nose, and his broad shoulders. She never could think of what to say to him on that front. It wasn’t that he was older, because he couldn’t be more than ten years away from her, but because he was so much more
senior
. It always felt inappropriate somehow. “When you get the data off the spy, I know you can’t tell me what it is, but if there’s anything I need to know...” Verity found her gaze once more drawn to the head on the bench, where it watched her with an eye that looked somehow furious. “You will tell me? There’s something going on here, something to do with John Aaron. I tried to tell the Commodore, but I don’t think he really understood.”

She didn’t want to reveal any more of her thoughts in front of the spy’s head. He couldn’t speak, but he must still be able to hear.

“Of course,” said Lloyd.

* * * *

In the refectory she found Vladimir, sitting at a table by himself.

She sat unceremoniously on a chair opposite him. “I think you’re a waste of my time, but the Commodore says I’ve to help you.”

“Thanks...” said Vladimir. “I think.”

Verity ripped open the top of her carton of food and stuck her spoon in. “I’ll show you the exercise centrifuge tomorrow. We can’t use it this afternoon because it’s Referendum Day today.”

Vladimir made a pious face. “I don’t care about things like that. There’s work and more important things to be getting on with.”

Verity stared at him across the table. He had a very fair complexion with light brown hair and eyes of that genuine blue resulting from no iris pigmentation. It occurred to her that with his broad shoulders, he would have been conventionally very attractive if he’d bothered to care about such things. “Ya. Right. Well, if you don’t exercise here, you’ll waste away in the low gravity. And you’ll have to exercise your horse too. I’ve never put a horse that’s not fearless in a centrifuge before. Should be interesting, at any rate.”

Vladimir looked alarmed. “
I
have to handle him? There’s not staff here trained in it?”

“The staff here look after the working horses. He’s your project. You are in charge of him.”

He looked out the panoramic window at the sun on the horizon, and Jupiter in the sky. “When you say tomorrow, do you mean twenty-four hours-ish from now, or the next time the sun rises?”

“I mean Terran standard time.”

“It might have to wait longer than that. I think I caught some sort of cold on the transport ship, and now I don’t feel at all well.”

“It’s like snot and crap and you feel like shit?” Verity stirred her food. “It’s a reaction to no gravity. All the fluid in your lungs and sinuses comes out of place and it feels like a cold. The other thing’s breathlessness and feeling tired? That’s because the air out here is less oxygenated. It’s like high-altitude air when you go up Olympus Mons.”

“I’ve never been up Olympus Mons,” said Vladimir. He stirred his soup, looking away from Verity in an embarrassed sort of way. When he put his spoon in his mouth, his face crumpled. “This soup is awful! It’s like something I’d use in the lab! What is this stuff?” Vladimir rotated the container in his hands and frowned as he read the label printed on the white carton in plain black font. “
Levigated esculents
? It even
sounds
like something that belongs in a lab!”

“It’s made out of genetically modified plants grown on sewage,” said Verity.

“Tastes it.”

“We have to have sustainable food. It would cost a fortune to keep shipping in proper food from Earth or Mars. Well, although they make an exception for the Inquisitor. He gets tea and complimentary biscuits.” Verity remembered the biscuits and put her hand in her pocket to find it full of melted chocolate, much to her annoyance. She held up her hand, spreading brown-smeared fingers. Vladimir glanced at her and made a face of mock disgust.

“Don’t you ever miss proper food?” he asked as Verity licked her hand.

“What, like bloody steaks, sheep’s hearts and liver? Ya, I miss those.”

Vladimir shrugged. “The kebabs on Mars are the best. Don’t think they deliver out here, though.”

Verity hadn’t expected him to say that. He looked like the sort of person who didn’t eat meat. “Kebabs aren’t proper meat. It’s just processed rubbish.”

Vladimir leaned back on his chair and said, “What other animals have you eaten--I mean, worked with? Besides horses.”

Verity tilted her food carton and scraped the remainder into her spoon. “Birds.”

“Birds?”

“Hawks. The Meritocracy uses them for surveillance. They can see in much more detail than people or computers can, and they’re tetrachromats, so they can see into the ultraviolet region.”

Vladimir tore his bread open and poked at a packet of synthetic butter with his knife. “What things are ultraviolet?”

“Stuff like flowers. People’s hair and fingernails, that greasy area on people’s foreheads and noses. Urine.”

“Urine?”

“When buzzards and things are flying around, they can see places mice have piddled. That’s how they know where to look.”

“What does ultraviolet look like?”

“I dunno.” Verity shrugged. “Can’t explain it.”

Vladimir frowned. “Does it look like blue?”

“No. It sort of merges into it, though. Like how green merges into blue going the other way. You see it with the bird’s eyes, not your own. I can’t explain it in terms of how humans see. Same as you can’t explain to a horse what red looks like.”

“Are hawks better than horses to interface with, then?”

Verity sniffed. “When they first give you it, you think it’s really ace, but after you’ve had it for a bit you realize it doesn’t do anything else, and you can’t really train it much. All you can do is tell it where to go and analyze what it sees. Dogs are kind of annoying too.”

“I like dogs.”

“Thing with dogs is, they always think they’re starving even when they’re not. And then you’re always having to factor in smells. If you’re working with dogs and something smells, it hijacks their attention and they won’t stop thinking about it, and the worst thing is you get bleed-back.”

“Bleed-back?”

“The dogs’ impatience and distractedness get transmitted to you through the interface.” Verity tapped the implant on her forehead. “One time a fox or something had shat in the grass and my dog smelled it and tried to eat it, and for a moment I felt like I wanted to eat it too. Was disgusting.”

Vladimir grimaced and touched his own implant.

“And then there were cephalopods,” Verity said. “They were experimental. Didn’t work so well.”

“Cephalopods? How don’t they work?”

“They
might
work, eventually. They’re useful underwater because they’re intelligent and dexterous.” Verity opened and closed her fingers in a way suggesting tentacles. “I think it was just because they’re so different to us in terms of how their brains work. They’re a long way from us on those evolutionary diagrams biologists do.”

“They’re in a different phylum.”

Verity frowned. “Whatever they are.” She drained her glass of water, and rose. Vladimir pushed back his chair and stood too.

“I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He followed Verity as she headed for the main doors.

“At the centrifuge, at eight.”

Sheets of paper and graffiti covered the wall of the mezzanine. One poster showed a holograph of a middle-aged man with spectacles and a ginger beard. That was Sidney Worrall, formerly something in finance and currently a Spokesman for the Meritocracy. Verity took a marker pen out of her pocket and drew balls and a phallus on Sidney Worrall’s forehead.

“That’s not very constructive,” said Vladimir.

“It’s a public expression space,” Verity replied. “Anyone can write what they like on it. I guess you don’t have those in Russia.”

Vladimir raised his palms and made an exasperated face. “You have the liberty of free speech and you abuse it doing things like
that
? In some countries, they don’t have that privilege.”

“His opinions stink.”

Vladimir sighed. He held out his hand. “Can I borrow your pen?”

“Not if you’re going to use it to write Sidney Worrall’s opinions.”

“I’m not. I’m going to write my own opinions.”

Verity put the marker in his hand. He snapped off the cap, and wrote “More funding for horse gengineers” on Sidney Worrall’s lapel, then continued to write something else in small letters on the man’s jacket.

“I’m not standing about while you write
War and Peace
. I’m going to vote. You can gimme my pen back tomorrow.” Verity went to the door, shouting over her shoulder as she left the room, “In Soviet Russia, wall writes on you.”

* * * *

Back in her quarters, Verity took up her seat at her computer and began to look through the points of law and regulations that had been nominated for referendum by the Electorate. About a month after she’d arrived on Callisto, the moon had been declared an official province and, with the base having only a few hundred inhabitants, that surely made it the smallest province in the entire Meritocracy. It also meant its electorate was entitled to nominate and cast prerogative votes on matters that only affected Callisto and its denizens. One of the first such matters to be nominated and voted in was that Referendum Day on Callisto would be the afternoon of the twenty-four-hour day on which the sun rose.

Referendum Day this time around didn’t coincide with the Meritocracy’s universal referenda, which occurred once every Martian month, so there were only these provincial prerogative votes and nominations to be dealt with. As a tier-two meritocrat, Verity was entitled to nominate two matters per referendum day, and to cast votes with a weighting of two on each of the nominations with the highest vote from the previous referendum day.