The Luna Deception (27 page)

“No problem.”

“We went out to eat with the papal nuncio. He’s a stand-up guy.” Without asking, Mendoza picked up Kiyoshi’s cigarette, which was lying on the steps, and took a drag. He coughed. “WTF is in this?”

“Bit of THC, some nicotine, herbal flavorings, and a dash of vitamin K.”

“Dude, are you a junkie or something? Ha, ha. I’m just kidding. But seriously, what’s up with the pastries?”

Kiyoshi moved the box of donuts he had also bought in the market to his other side, out of Mendoza’s line of sight. Carefully keeping details to a minimum, he relayed the boss-man’s invitation.

Mendoza’s dark eyes grew huge. “Out to the Belt?”

“Yes. I can’t tell you where at this time. You’ll understand that.”

Mendoza hesitated. Then he shook his head. “I can’t. I have to go home and see my mother.”

Kiyoshi smiled: it was touching that the guy cared about his mother. But Mendoza misinterpreted his expression. He seemed to think Kiyoshi was laughing at him.

“I’m all she’s got, man. My sister was killed by the freaking PLAN. Ten years ago. It just about killed Mom. too.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. And I understand. Of course you should go home. You’re Earthborn, after all.”

Elfrida stumbled out of the airlock. Her eyes were swollen, her nose pink. Mendoza, drunk, did not notice; he put his arm around her and grinned goofily. But Kiyoshi saw how subdued she was. He subvocalized:
~Did you say something to her?

Jun’s voice, when at last it came, sounded exhausted.
“She asked to come with us.”

~Oh. So I guess she’s crying because she’ll be separated from Mendoza?

“No. She’s crying because I said no.”

~Why? The boss-man …

“Think about what she’s been through. She needs to go home and recuperate. They both do. They’re gutsy kids, but our universe is no place for them.”

~Agreed,
Kiyoshi subvocalized.

It should have been liberating to know he wouldn’t be encumbered with extra passengers. But in fact, he felt kind of sad.

xxi.

Mendoza went home.

His mother welcomed him joyfully. She made fried steak, kakanin butsi, pinoy-style spicy pork, and all the unhealthy desserts he’d loved as a boy. He went with her to Mass and answered people’s questions as politely as he could.

It was mid-summer; the temperature in Manila was stifling. People dashed from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned church to air-conditioned shopping center. Mendoza tried sitting out in his mother’s pocket-sized garden, but the heat drove him indoors. He locked himself in the bathroom to talk to Elfrida.

His mother wanted to know what he had to be so secretive about. When he explained about Elfrida, she burst into tears. Did he think Elfrida was The One? Would they live in Manila? She could evict her subletters to make room for them. John and Elfrida wouldn’t be going back into space, surely, after all they’d been through?

Mendoza forestalled his mother before she actually began to plan the wedding. It was all up in the air, he said.

In fact, Elfrida had seemed worryingly distant ever since they got back to Earth. The Interplanetary Court of Justice had placed her under supervision as a key witness in the case against Derek Lorna. And she was having mother issues, too.

Mendoza lay under the air-conditioner’s tepid breeze, while his mother prayed her three daily rosaries, with the television going, and the subletters yukking it up on the other side of a thin wall. He thought:
I had more privacy when I was living on the moon.

★

“So,” Kiyoshi concluded, “we’re coming home.”

He leaned back on the comms couch and bit into one of the donuts he’d bought on the Rocking Horse. Powdered sugar coated his lips.

Twenty-three and a half minutes later, the comms screen burst into light. The silhouette of a shaggy-bearded man said, “No, you’re not.”

“What?” Kiyoshi squawked.

427,000,000 kilometers away, the boss-man continued, “I don’t care about Mendoza and Goto. I mean, they want to turn down the opportunity of a lifetime, fuck ‘em.”

The boss-man did not know that Jun had put Elfrida off out of concern for her spiritual health. Kiyoshi had not told him. He was protecting Jun, as he had all his life.

“But it’s insane to come back all that way with an empty ship. That old truck of yours has plenty of room for cargo. And now you have a decent drive, right? So I want you to pick up some stuff on Midway or wherever. Pharmaceuticals, memory crystals. Basic materials: printer liquid, biostrate, liquid nitrogen. Elements: bromine, phosphorus—we’re having soil issues again. Splart, we always need splart. I’m attaching a shopping list.”

Kiyoshi groaned. He couldn’t go back to Midway!
Maybe I’ll make that visit to Tiangong Erhao. Or buy the stuff online and get it delivered. Dronazon ships to deep space, don’t they?

“Also, you may have to pick up another passenger. Unclear on that as yet. Awaiting developments.”

Sparkles caught Kiyoshi’s eye. Must be sugar that had come off his donut.

“So get that shopping out of the way, and enjoy the view of Earth, the home of mankind.” The boss-man chuckled cynically. He knew perfectly well that to Kiyoshi, Earth was the planet that had forced his people into exile for practising their faith. “I’ll keep you posted on the passenger issue.”

Kiyoshi transmitted an acknowledgement. He did not ask how he was meant to pay for all that shopping. He knew the boss-man would tell him to put it on credit and he’d pay him back. Eventually. Probably.

He floated up, scowling, from the comms couch, and returned to his own nest in the middle of the bridge.

The
Monster
was quiet now. Their only remaining passenger was Father Tom, who kept to himself.

Jun had been keeping to himself, too.

Kiyoshi put on a headset, mask, and gloves. His body stayed on the bridge of the
Monster,
but his consciousness walked the corridors of the
St. Francis,
a turn-of-the-century Japanese colony ship.

Kiyoshi had built this sim during his solo hauler days, as a hobby: the spaceship he’d always wanted, replete with virtual weaponry and gadgets. Jun had transformed it into a monastic labyrinth encrusted with crucifixes, statuary, and candles. Kiyoshi worshipped the Holy Wounds of Christ himself, and wore a crucifix, but this was a bit much for him. Images of the Passion, rendered in a vivid style reminiscent of Japanese woodblock art, stalked him through the ship.

At least Jun had not messed with the observation deck.

This (completely unrealistic, in terms of spaceship design) feature offered a panoramic view, stitched together from the
Monster’s
optical sensor feeds, of the volume in which they now drifted.

One million kilometers from Earth, humanity’s home planet was a blue dot. Kiyoshi held up his thumb. It covered Earth. He felt a pang of unexpected compassion. Earth was so fragile. And yet if the home planet were ever to fall, humanity in space wouldn’t last long.

He heard a small sound.

Jun sat at the far end of the convex window, his back curled against the glass.

“Hey,” Kiyoshi said, starting towards him.

At that moment he felt a tap on his shoulder. That had been a real-life sensation.

Another tap, more like a whack.

Fuming, he pulled off his headset. The dimness of the
St. Francis
gave way to the bright lights of the bridge. Father Tom floated over him, poised to whack him again.

“What?”

“You’re not doing anything crucial at the moment, are you?”

“If I was, you’d already have messed it up, Father.”

“Good, because there’s something I want to show you.”

“Let’s get Jun.”

“I already showed him; he didn’t seem interested.”

“Then it probably isn’t important.”

“All the same, I’d like you to see for yourself.”

Begrudgingly, Kiyoshi followed the Jesuit down to the materials lab. The last time this antique equipment had been used, it had been to analyze the regolith of 11073 Galapagos to determine whether the asteroid was suitable for human colonization. Now Father Tom had fired up the scanning electron microscope and the atomic absorption spectrometer. He pointed to the SEM’s 3D imaging screen. “What do you think that is?”

“Looks like an insect.”

Some kind of fly. No legs. You got funny mutations in artifical environments. Its wings moved feebly. Kiyoshi recoiled. “Is it dead?”

“No. It’s immersed in … saliva, actually.”

“Saliva?”

“Mine, boy. Nothing else to use for a medium.”

“You didn’t find it on board, did you? More insects is all I need. We’ve already got ants. I tried to introduce spiders to keep them down, but they couldn’t handle zero-gee. Webs looked like nebulas.”

“It’s not an insect,” Father Tom said.

“What, then?”

“How big do you think it is?” The Jesuit covered the measurement readout with his hand.

“I don’t know, a few millimeters long?”

“Ten
microns
long. The structures you see are on the nanoscale.”

“Shit!”

“Yes.” The Jesuit’s face hardened. “We were looking for the Mars probes. We’ve found them.”

“Where?”

“In your pocket.”

“Eh?”

“The pocket of your black leather trousers. It’s a good thing you never do laundry. It must have sneaked into your pocket while we were on the Rocking Horse. I extracted it with a magnet.”

“What was it doing on the Rocking Horse?”

“Spying, I expect. There are probably more of them on board, watching us right now.”

“Fuck!”

“Yes, boy.”

“What are their capabilities?”

“I haven’t entirely figured that out yet, but …” The Jesuit moved over to the atomic absorption spectrometer. “They’re peculiar things. Half biological, half electronic. Basically, they’re bacteria with transmitters.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, it’s true. This little fellow is emitting a signal at 512 MHz. That’s how I found him. He’s not saying much, to be sure. Only what kind of light he’s absorbing. But that’s useful data. Put a lot of them together, and you could use them as a camera.”

“And there are more of them on board?”

“There are bound to be. Bacteria don’t travel singly.”

“Then we have to exterminate them. Do you have any idea how to do that?”

“I do, actually …”

Kiyoshi nodded along, but he wasn’t really listening. He was subvocalizing.
~Jun? JUN!

“What?” Jun’s voice boomed into the lab, curt.

Kiyoshi responded out loud, too. “If you’ve been paying attention, we’re infested with nanoscale bugs. Anything to contribute?”

“Just leave it,” Jun said. “The boss wanted samples of the Mars probes, didn’t he? Well, now we’ve got them. As for spying on us, what are they going to see? An indie hauler picking up cargo. And who’s going to see it? 512 MHz is an ultra-longwave frequency. You would need a carrier signal. There aren’t any relays out here. And if that doesn’t reassure you, Derek Lorna is bound to be arrested in the next couple of days. His associates will be lying low. They’re probably not even monitoring the probes anymore.” With this, a click signalled that Jun had left the conversation.

Not entirely reassured, Kiyoshi scowled at the blob struggling on the SEM’s imaging screen. “That’s really a bacteria?”

“Yes. Gengineered to accumulate metal in its cellular tissue. That’s how it builds its antennae. There must be other modifications, too, but I can’t tell what, with just the one to examine. Their swarming behavior would be the key to understanding their functionality.” Father Tom smiled grimly at the screen. “Look at that, he’s taking in nutrients. He must like the taste of my spit.”

“How does a bacteria survive on Mars? Looks like it’s got wings. Could it
fly?”

“Those structures are actually flagella. Bacteria move toward nutrient sources by rotating or twiddling their flagella, in a motion that’s called chemotaxis. Technically, they’re so tiny that it would not be flying. More like swimming in the air. But yes, they would have decent mobility in an atmosphere, given low gravity. The Martian atmosphere is only 1.8% as dense as Earth’s—it’s a thin haze of 95% carbon dioxide—but that would be enough.”

“I’m assuming they couldn’t get
to
Mars without help.”

“Right. You’d need a delivery system.”

“A delivery system that could bypass the PLAN’s planetary defenses …”Kiyoshi made the connection. “The shuttles that Wrightstuff, Inc. was building for Hope Space Industries. With their fancy new-materials shielding.
Those
were the delivery system!”

“Yes, boy, it’s all coming clear now, isn’t it?”

“All to get a few pictures! And it didn’t work. They never got closer than 10,000 klicks out.”

“As far as we know. The best data we have is what Mendoza stole from the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, and that was a couple of months old.”

“Yeah, but look at where the inner planets are right now. The last Mercury-Mars launch window was three months ago. But Yoshikawa Spaceport was on the dayside of Mercury then. So Mendoza’s data has to be from the most recent launch.”

“You’re assuming that Mercury was the launch site. It may not have been.”

Kiyoshi floated, hands in his pockets. He wasn’t sure what to think of all this, but he knew one thing. Regardless of Jun’s equanimity, he was not going to let these nano-bastards have the run of his ship.

“You were saying it should be easy to exterminate the rest of them? Well, let’s do it.”

★

~Jun? JUN! Where’s the fungicide?

“The stuff you’d use for hydroponic cultivation,” Father Tom said. “To sterilize your growing medium before mixing in the beneficial microbes.”

“I know, I know. Space Gardener’s Friend. We’ve got some, but I can never find anything in this ship.”

“Would Jun know where it is?”

“I’m asking him.”
~Jun!

No answer.

“Well, I was going to reboot our hydroponic garden, but I never got around to it. All the stuff is still in the cargo module. That’s probably where it is. Come on.”