Two hundred and forty. So many numbers in Luna Corta’s head. Eight. One. Twenty-five. Eight. Thirty. Three. More than any of those small numbers, two hundred and forty.
Two hundred and forty. The number of seconds a human brain can survive without oxygen.
Eight. Per cent battery power remaining in Luna Corta’s shell-suit.
One. Degree Celsius. The temperature to which Jinji dropped Lucasinho Corta’s sasuit environment control as his air reserves ran out.
Twenty-five. Degrees Celsius. The temperature at which both the human diving reflex and hypothermia kick in, substantially buffering the brain against the effects of hypoxia.
Eight. The distance in kilometres to the nearest outlock of João De Deus.
Thirty: the maximum safe run-speed of a Mark 12 VTO shell-suit.
‘Luna: Lucasinho gave me air, how do I give it back to him?’ Luna asks her familiar.
You don’t have enough air to get both of you to João de Deus, other Luna says.
‘I’m not going to João de Deus,’ Luna Corta says.
Three. The final number on Luna Corta’s helmet HUD. The distance in kilometres to the outlock of Boa Vista.
You don’t have enough air to get both of you to Boa Vista, Luna says.
Two hundred and forty. The number of seconds a human brain can survive without oxygen. Three divided by thirty. Luna can’t do that math but it is how long it will take her at full run to get to Boa Vista, and it must be less than two hundred and forty seconds. But she has only eight per cent power, and there will be the extra mass, and will the suit let a nine-year-old girl run it at full speed?
Leave the numbers to me, Luna.
Luna commands her suit to kneel. The shell-suit hands are big and clumsy, Luna is inexperienced in the haptics and she has never picked up an object as precious as the one she tries to lift now.
‘Come on,’ she whispers, terribly afraid of breaking something as she slides the mitts under Lucasinho’s body. ‘Oh please, come on.’
She straightens her legs and scoops Lucasinho up in her arms.
‘Okay suit,’ she commands. ‘Run.’
The acceleration almost knocks her backwards. Luna cries in pain as she feels her joints jerk and rip. Her legs are tearing from their sockets. They can’t move this fast, nothing can move this fast. The suit gyros steady her, snap her back to balance. She almost drops Lucasinho. In her red and gold shell-suit, Luna Corta races across Mare Fecunditatis. She runs from black to grey, hurdling the line between Glassland and raw dirt. Regolith flies from her feet; a trail of slow-settling dust.
One hundred and ninety. That’s a new number Luna her familiar has flashed up on her helmet. The number of seconds it will take her to reach Boa Vista’s main lock. But then she has to get from the lock to the refuge. The lock has to open. The lock has to recognise her. How many seconds will that add to one hundred and ninety?
‘Luna,’ she says, and sings a song she has known all her life; one her paizinho sang over her bed when he came into the madrinhas’ nursery every night. Listen to my song, anjinho. Sing it back to me. The song activates Boa Vista’s emergency protocols.
What if the machines are broken? What if the power is out? What if a hundred different fails means the lock won’t open? What if Boa Vista won’t listen to her song?
In her shell-suit, legs screaming with cramp and joint pain, Luna Corta holds her breath.
I have acknowledgement from Boa Vista, Luna says.
Now she sees the beacons come alive; rotating red lights on pylons, guiding the lost and the moonwrecked home. Her cousin in her arms, Luna runs up the vee of guiding lights. Ahead is the sintered slope to the main lock, and a slot of darkness opening before her.
It hurts it hurts it hurts. Nothing has ever hurt so much. All across her helmet HUD numbers turn white. White for out. White for death. Centimetre by centimetre the line of darkness expands into a rectangle.
‘Luna, show me the refuge.’
A yellow map overlays the grey and black: a schematic of Boa Vista. The refuge is a green cube ten metres beyond the lock. Luna focuses on it and her familiar fills the graphic with numbers. What Luna reads from them is some air, some water, some medical help. Some shelter, for a time.
She races under the still-rising guillotine of the outlock gate into the dark.
I don’t have power for the helmet lights, Luna apologises, but the suit steers true, navigating by memory. There, the green in the dark, the soft green emergency light through the porthole. Kind, lovely green.
Two hundred and ten seconds.
‘Guava juice, Luca,’ Luna says. ‘Guava juice from Café Coelho. Very cold.’
* * *
Helmet lights play across the bore of the tunnel, sweeping down the smooth walls, across the sintered guide-way, bobbing in rhythm with the bodies. Running figures, running as fast as they dare in this dangerous place; swooping, soaring strides covering metres in a step: Geni, Mo, Jamal, Thor and Calyx. Their sasuits are carnivals of colour and pattern: yellow and white chevrons; patches and stickers of sports teams; cartoon figures hand-drawn in red marker. The impassive, comically-beatific face of Vishnu. Luminous spots: this one moves in a disconcerting, alien dance through the dark tunnel. Terse instructions flicker from helmet to helmet. Debris here. Roof-fall. Live cable. Abandoned tram car. They quickly mark each obstacle with AI tags and bound on. This is a race.
Ten metres.
Got the tag.
Here.
The figure in the Vishnu-suit slips a power-jack from its shoulder and wedges it into the crack between the lock doors. Last time they came here they were assiduous in leaving no trace, defiling no memory, resealing every gate and portal. But this is a race. As soon as the crack is wide enough to admit a body, they slip through one by one, Geni, Mo, Jamal, Calyx. Thor wedges the lock open with a fallen strut and slings the power jack across his back. The Urbanistes pour through the inlock, down the steps into the grand desolation of Boa Vista.
Gods alone know what’s out there.
The tag went off.
Those things could be on their way here.
Mo, the tag went off.
The tag went off. After months of silence. After the team’s interest had migrated to industrial archaeology and the intriguing, almost sculptural wrecks of the helium-3 extractors destroyed in the opening BALTRAN bombardment of the Mackenzie-Corta war. After Lucasinho Corta’s spitting rage in the bar drove a spike through the heart of their trust in their love of urbanisme. A tag went off. They had agreed not to go back to Boa Vista: the scale of the devastation was oppressive, the destruction too recent, the faces of the orixas too judging, the guilt of violation too strong. No ghosts on the moon, but stone has a memory. Before they left they sowed the dead palace with motion sensor tags. Assuming pillagers, historians, other Urbanistes. Profaning feet. Or the memories of stone, walking.
Something had moved in the mausoleum of Boa Vista. The tag blinked and sent a notification to Geni.
What if it’s a bot?
Geni sent the images to her team-mate’s familiar. The tag’s power was low, the resolution grainy and the image fleeting, but sufficient. A figure in a shell-suit. A burden in its arms.
That’s not a bot.
Sasuit helmet lights lack the range to illuminate a grand ecosystem like Boa Vista and the interior of the old lava tube is perilous with fallen stonework, strewn debris and ice. Geni, Mo, Jamal, Thor and Calyx steer a course between the collapsed pavilions over the treacherous stones of the flash-frozen river, guided by their net of tags and AR overlays on their lenses but mostly by the pale green glow at the northern end of the habitat, by the main outlock.
Take a rover out to here, then straight down through the lock. Piece of piss.
Uh uh. Those bots you were so worried about, remember?
Fuck.
We go the old way. Through the tram tunnel.
The green glow is the emergency lighting of a refuge, low on power and resources. The Urbanistes race across the dead gardens of Boa Vista, dodging, sprinting, hurdling. Geni, Mo, Jamal, Thor and Calyx push in around the green-glowing porthole in the refuge lock door. Through the condensation streaks they can barely make out the figure in the shell-suit sitting on the floor, back to the door. The helmet is off. A kid. It’s a fucking kid in that thing.
‘Calyx.’
The neutro connects er suitpack to the auxiliary atmosphere supply port and feeds air.
There is another figure in a white sasuit, laid out on the floor.
Geni plugs her comms cable into the socket.
‘Hey, hey. Can you hear me? This is Geni, Mo, Jamal, Thor and Calyx. We’ll have you out of there right soon.’
* * *
They come swooping down through the rigging of the world, leaping, tumbling, soaring, turning somersaults. Electric colours, slogan T-shirts, headbands and wristbands, blue stripes on their cheekbones and bones and lips. A cascade of bodies, running railings, vaulting ducts and conduits, flying from struts, diving between cable runs. Moves and tricks Robson Corta can’t match, only envy. He will, with practice. Endless practice. He unpicks their signature moves like magic tricks. Every move is built from a simple vocabulary. Learn that, you learn the magic. He never saw a trick that he did not try to take apart and appropriate.
They’ve come far, the Meridian traceurs, from each of the city’s three quadras, cutting trails through the architecture of the city’s roof; running for kilometres through the high places, cutting brief silhouettes against the burn of the sunline.
Golden circle.
Network down, trains not running, BALTRAN out, Twé under siege, bots and graders and things dropping from the sky and rumours walking the world on clicking titanium feet but there is a Golden Circle over in Antares Quadra, up in the roof of Tereshkova Prospekt.
The Golden Circle is a contest, a challenge that calls all traceurs to the high places.
The Meridian équipe drop around Robson Corta. They’re older, bigger, stronger. Cooler. They know him. He’s the kid who fell from the sky. The thirteen-year-old who fucked up his first run. Who’s put out a Golden Circle. It stands above him, on the flank of the 112th duct junction in fluorescent tape.
No one speaks. Every eye is fixed on Robson.
‘Have you got anything to eat?’ Robson stammers.
A boy in purple tights throws him an energy bar. Robson crams it down without decorum or shame. It’s been two days since he ran from Denny Mackenzie up into the high city. He hasn’t eaten, has drunk only the condensation he can lick from the water tanks. He can fall three kilometres and walk but he’s shit at running away. It was then he realised that he couldn’t hide out at the top of the city waiting for the Meridian traceurs to turn up and rescue him. They must be summoned.
‘You put up a Golden Circle,’ says a woman in grey marl tights and a blue crop-top that matches her face make-up. Every traceur wears a differed pattern of blue. A Meridian thing. He will have to learn how to do it right. There will be rules about it.
‘I know. I probably shouldn’t…’ He had fretted and fussed for half a day before finding the courage to steal the luminous tape he needed for his Golden Circle.
‘No, you shouldn’t,’ the man in purple says.
‘Why have you brought us here, Robson Corta?’ blue woman says.
‘I need your help,’ Robson says. ‘I’ve nowhere to go.’
‘You’ve got money, Robson Corta,’ purple tights man says. ‘You’re a Corta.’
‘I ran,’ Robson says, as he slowly congeals inside with the realisation that this may not go the way he wants. ‘Denny Mackenzie…’
Purple tights man cuts in.
‘No fucking way, Hahana.’
‘Your équipe, Robson Corta,’ blue woman, Hahana, says. ‘The Queen of the South traceurs. The ones who taught you how to run. Do you ever keep up with them?’
‘I’ve tried, but I can’t reach them…’
‘Do you know why you can’t reach them, Robson Corta? Because they’re dead, Robson Corta.’
Robson’s breath catches. His heart reels. He is very high up and the fall is endless. His mouth makes noises he can’t explain or control.
‘Do you know how they died, Robson Corta? Mackenzie blades took them to Lansberg. They put them out the airlock. All of them.’
Robson shakes his head and tries to say no no no no no but there is no air in his lungs.
‘You’re toxic, Robson Corta. And you say, Denny Mackenzie? Denny Mackenzie? We can’t help you. Even this may be too much. We can’t help you.’
Hahana nods and the traceurs explode away from Robson in vaults and runs, somersaults and straddles, a dozen different motions, a dozen different traces up into the high city.
Baptiste who taught him the shapes and names of the moves. Netsanet who drilled him until those moves became part of him. Rashmi who showed him the feats his body could perform. Lifen who gave him new ways to perceive the physical world. Zaky who made him a traceur.
Dead.
Robert Mackenzie had promised that he would not touch Robson’s équipe. But Robert Mackenzie was dead and the world which had been so certain, guided along rails, was melted, shattered, thrown to vacuum.
He killed them. Baptiste and Netsanet and Rashmi and Lifen and Zaky.
He is utterly alone.
* * *
On the second day Zehra joins Wagner in the repair bay. The damage to the rover is extensive but easily repairable. Pull a module, replace it with another. The work is steady and repetitive and falls into its own pace and rhythm. Wagner and Zehra work without words, without the need for words. Wagner’s focus is intense. Analiese comes to see him in the workshop. Maybe he might want lunch. Maybe a break. She sees the familiar dark concentration, that can focus on one thing for hours on end. She wonders what the light Wagner is like. Would she even know him? The wolf and his shadow. She leaves the workshop without Wagner knowing she was there.
Hypatia is too small for a three-shift calendar and keeps Meridianal Normalised Time. At midnight on the third day the repairs are complete and Wagner and Zehra rest from their labours. The rover gleams under the floods. To the inexpert eye it is the same beaten six-wheeler towed into Hypatia main lock and pushed by its exhausted crew into the repair bay. That eye can’t see the beauty of the new modules and motors; the fresh wiring and routing; the parts custom-designed by Wagner, bespoke-printed, hand-fitted by Zehra.
‘When are you leaving?’ Zehra says.
‘Soon as the batteries are recharged and I’ve completed checks.’ Wagner walks around the rover. His right eye flickers with diagnostics. The replacement lens is adequate but with every moment he resents more and more the dull, flavourless personality of the default familiar. It’s one thing; stubbornly, indivisible.
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘You’re not. Gods know what’s out there.’
‘You won’t get out the lock without me,’ Zehra says.
‘I’m laoda…’
‘And I slipped a line of code into the command chain.’
From the beginning Wagner has understood that his relationship with his junshi depends not on management but respect. When he met her, as junshi of the first glass crew he took out of Meridian Main lock, she sat back, perched on the rover step while older, dirtier hands tried to scare, intimidate, faze, bully the pretty Corta boy. When their ammunition was spent, she swung up into her seat on the opposite side of the rover. Not a word. Crews had been killed by enmity between laoda and junshi. As the machine drove slowly up the ramp into the outlock, Zehra said on the private channel, You don’t know what you don’t know, Corta boy. But I’m with you.
The batteries are full. The rover checks twenty different flavours of clean. Its crew is suited and booted, suit packs full. Wagner files a departure plan. As the seat descends and the bar lifts, Zehra touches his arm.
‘You’ve got a ten-minute window. Go and say goodbye to her.’
Wagner does not need his cheap and nasty little familiar to tell him that Analiese is in the pod. From the end of the catwalk he hears the buzzing, resonant harmony and seething drone of the setar. She’s improvising: his dark self runs along the notes, finding his own progressions and sequences. He has no appreciation of music, he never has, but he understands and fears its power to enchant and direct the mind, its mastery of time and rhythm. Lucas used to lose himself in the subtle complexities of bossa nova, a chord for every note. Wagner saw in his brother’s rapture something of the ekata of the pack, but it was singular, atomised joy. A private communion.
The music ends mid beat. Her familiar has told her he is at her door.
He loves the way she carefully places the setar in its case before anything else.
‘You fill that suit well, jackaroo.’
‘Better than when I came here.’
‘Much better.’
When they disembrace, she slips a package into his gloved hand.
‘I printed out your meds.’
Analiese’s hand arrests Wagner as he tries to slip the bubble pack into a suit pocket.
‘I can see it, Lobinho. Take some now.’
They hit so hard, so precisely that Wagner almost reels. He had confused a depressive state with combat fatigue and the intense focus of his need to reach Robson in Meridian. He has not made that mistake in years. Out on the surface it could kill him and Zehra.
‘Thank you. No, that’s, that’s inadequate.’
‘Come back. When it’s over – whatever happens.’
‘I’ll try.’
Walking down to the vehicle bay, he hears again the sparkling of the setar. He has three minutes remaining in his departure window.
‘I’ll need that code,’ he says to Zehra, back to back with her in the junshi seat.
‘What code?’
Zehra shuts herself in with her music for the first twenty kilometres and Wagner is glad to be left alone with the experience of drop-back into full medication. It’s a ride through an interior war zone. The physical world zooms in and out of focus. Attention flies to one subject, then veers to another fascination. He visualises Analiese’s mutilated ear. It was not an accident. Accidents are never so neat. She paid for her betrayal. The hand behind the knife was kind. The customary Mackenzie price for betrayal is a finger. That would have silenced the bright joy of the setar forever.
How long has Zehra been talking to him?
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I said, I would have liked you to ask me.’
It’s an easy run to Meridian, along the line of Equatorial One, on the glass. The rover’s radar mast is up. Wagner’s helmet shows no hostiles between him and the cache at Silberschlag. Comms with Hypatia are good, Taiyang engineers are restoring the network by rags and patches. The rail network is operating: at least one line, one train: from St Olga to Meridian. The war is over, the war is lost, the war is won, the war continues, the war has changed to something different; Wagner and Zehra drive through uncertainties and rumours. You can be in the middle of a war and not know it, Wagner thinks. And again his focus strays and again he must apologise.
‘Ask you what?’
‘You’re going to Meridian for Robson. Did you think to ask me why I want to go with you?’
Wagner has assumed that Zehra journeys with him out of personal loyalty and, realising that, discovers he knows nothing about his junshi.
‘No, I didn’t. That was wrong.’
‘I have someone back there.’
He never knew. He never thought.
‘My mother,’ Zehra says. ‘She’s old, she’s alone and the moon is falling down around her.’
‘Oh,’ says Wagner Corta.
‘Yes,’ says Zehra Aslan.
They drive out along the pure and perfect glass.
* * *
Wagner opens the throttle and runs the rover at full speed. The solar belt is his terrain: smooth, safe, sane and boring boring boring.
Boring is good. Boring is no shocks and no surprises. Boring gets you back to the people you love.
Boring is the landscape of talk. In one hundred and fifty kilometres Wagner learns more about his junshi than he has in ten contracts. Zehra carries a third name: Altair. Aslan is her biological name, her contract name. Altair is her family name, her true family. Nomathemba, a Jo Moonbeam from Johannesburg, is her true mother. The Altairs are a nurture stream. No one has ever been born into the Altairs. All its members enter by adoption, fostering or partnership. Nomathemba adopted Zehra at the age of three months. She has three siblings and two co-mothers. Nomathemba has been dying slowly of silicosis for a year now, her lungs hardening, turning to moon rock. Zehra is in the process of adopting a little boy from Farside: Adam Karl Jesperson. It’s scaring the living shit out of her, but the Altairs are strong. Zehra needs to complete the process and present Nomathemba with the latest bubble in the stream before her breath turns to stone.
Alarms flash all over Wagner’s HUD. He skids the rover to a halt. Zehra is in his ear immediately. He stops. An hour west of Hypatia. He flicks the anomaly on to her visor. Together they climb up on to the top of the rover, each gripping the comms mast, to eyeball the shock and surprise. There is a concavity in the smooth black horizon.
‘Something hit,’ Wagner says.
‘Hard,’ Zehra agrees.
They edge toward the impact though the radar indicates no activity. For three kilometres Wagner nudges the rover through a debris field of black-glass teardrops. The teardrops shatter between his wheels and the black solar array. The final dozen metres are up a low ridge of shattered glass shards. Wagner thinks he see pieces of machinery among the glass. Machinery and other fragments. From the top of the ridge the rover looks down over the moon’s freshest crater. Wagner and Zehra walk down the few metres to the crater lip. The suit visors give them the dimension: two hundred metres across, twenty deep. Not on the most recent satellite map of Flammarion.
‘I’m getting a big heat signature off this,’ Zehra says. ‘Seismology says the place is still ringing like a temple gong.’
‘It must have been something significant for VTO to risk a strike so close to Equatorial One,’ Wagner says. ‘Any chance?’
‘No chance at all,’ Zehra says.
‘Mackenzies, Asamoahs?’ Wagner asks.
‘People with contracts and debts.’
They died, their elements fused with the molten silicon still radiating in the infra-red, but what affronts Wagner most, the offence that touches him, is the hole in the pure and perfect glass.
They meet the first overturned grader fifty kilometres westward. The moon is profligate with junk; obsolete and damaged equipment has always been abandoned in place. The helium fields of Fecunditatis and Crisium, the mines of Procellarum where the regolith has been stripped two hundred metres deep, are littered with extractors and sinterers, solar plants and graders. Metal is ubiquitous, metal is cheap. It’s the elements of life that are precious. It is not unexpected to find a discarded grader. The surprise is to find one so comprehensively trashed. It looks as if it has been dropped from orbit. It lies on its side, panels stoved in, innards strewn in pieces around the corpse, suspension snapped, wheels at crazy angles. The dozer blade is snapped in two.
Five kilometres further on Wagner and Zehra come across two more graders; dead, smashed, one overturned, the other with its blade deeply embedded in the first grader’s flank.
‘Anything we can salvage?’ Wagner asks.
‘Yes, but I’m not going near that,’ Zehra says.
‘There are a lot of tracks,’ Wagner says.
‘All heading to Meridian,’ Zehra says.
Over the horizon they enter the carnage; a wrecking yard, the graveyard of graders. Metal hulks capsized, upended, embedded in each other like monstrous machines fucking. Thirty-five graders. Wagner imagines the divine judgement of some heavy metal deity. The dead machines are powerfully sculptural and pathetic.
‘They’re not all dead,’ Zehra warns. A grader, blade wedged deep in the engines of its rival, strains and heaves to dislodge itself. Its wheels spin on the black glass.
The grader comes out from behind a pile of scrap so tangled, so smashed Wagner can’t recognise it as once-working machinery. It stops dead in front of Lucky Eight Ball and lowers its blade.
‘Zehra,’ Wagner shouts. She’s already opening up the engines, reversing as fast as she can. But the same traitor glass that frustrated the dying grader betrays Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. Wheels spin, the rover crabs sideways. The live grader charges.
Zehra slews the rover; it waltzes across slick glass. The blade misses by a scant metre. The rover power-slides. Zehra fights for control. A jarring impact as Lucky Eight Ball side-swipes a dead grader.
‘It’s coming round again,’ Wagner cries.
‘I know that!’ Zehra shouts. ‘I fucking know that!’
The grader lines up. Attacks. Dies. Wagner sees the warning lights go dark on its steel skeleton. Power out. But it has momentum: an unguided, unthinking, unstoppable hulk. It bears down on Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball. Zehra threads the rover through the narrow gap between blade and wreckage. And they are clear of the machine graveyard, out on clear and perfect glass.
‘The Suns must have counter-hacked some of them,’ Wagner says. ‘Grader civil war. It must have been a hell of a spectacle.’
‘You go ahead and sell court-side seats,’ Zehra says. ‘Tell you what though, those Suns may have saved Meridian.’
‘I’m getting a rough ride here on the right,’ Wagner says.
‘I’ve got a dead wheel and motor rear right,’ Zehra says. ‘We must have wrecked it when we slid into the wreckage.’
‘Will that affect us?’
‘Not unless we run into more of that. I’ll take it offline anyway. Let it free-run.’
After the battlefield, the run into Meridian is clear, quick and untroubled. Wagner raises Meridian control on his cheap and nasty little generic familiar.
‘This is Taiyang Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball, Lucky Eight Ball, tag TTC1128, requesting immediate ingress to Orion Quadra main lock.’
‘Lucky Eight Ball, hold your position.’
‘Meridian, we are damaged and low on air and water.’
Nice lying, laoda, Zehra says on the private channel.
Just an amplification of the facts, Wagner says. But he is angry. A thousand kilometres, through massacre, siege, war; attack and retreat, victory and flight, death and terror and he must wait for Meridian traffic control. You’re keeping me from my pack, my loves, my boy.
‘Line her up,’ he orders Zehra. She takes the rover between the beacons to the lip of the ramp, facing the massive grey lock door.
‘Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball, clear the ramp area,’ Meridian control orders.
‘Requesting emergency ingress. I repeat, we are low on O2.’
‘Your emergency ingress request is denied, Lucky Eight Ball. Clear the ramp area.’
‘Laoda,’ Zehra says and the same instant Wagner feels the shadow fall across him. He looks up into the belly lights of a VTO moonship hovering fifty metres above Lucky Eight Ball. Around it, station-keeping, seven more moonships hover on their thrusters. ‘I’m moving.’
The rover scuttles away, the moonship settles on to the ramp. Wagner notes a personnel pod. Hatches open, steps unfold. Figures in shell-suits step down and walk down to the lock gate. The moonship lifts, another darts in, lands, disembarks armoured personnel. Each of the ships in turn follows.
‘That’s the entire moonship fleet,’ Zehra says.
‘That’s seven hundred people,’ Wagner says. The lock gate lifts, the hard-shell figures walk into the darkness. The gate descends.
‘Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball, clear to ramp,’ Meridian control says.
‘What happened there?’ Zehra asks.
‘I think that while we were out there, we lost the war,’ Wagner says.
* * *
First come the drones. A swarm of them, a biblical plague, storming up from Meridian hub in a fizzing black plume. At first Marina thinks it is smoke – that great fear of the moon-dwellers: smoke: fire! Then she sees the plume divide into smaller streams, each aimed at a level. She freezes; her classmates, just released from the returnees group, freeze; Meridian freezes.
What are these things?
The streams form into smaller clouds, each following one of the quadra levels. The cloud engulfs Marina and her returnees. She finds herself eye to lens with a tiny, insect-sized drone. It hovers on invisible wings; she sees a prickle of laser light in her right eye. Her familiar has been interrogated. Then it zips away, with all its swarm, rolling up 27th.
Are you all right? The returnees ask each other. Are you all right. Are you all right?
The drone clouds bowl into the quadra hub, wheeling like a flock to take a new prospekt.
The returnee group has been confused, nervous. Its article of faith – that they will all go back to Earth – has been cracked by the inexplicable news breaking on their news feeds and Gupshup channels. Rogue graders. Killer bots. Twé besieged. Foods shortages no food shortages, food rationing no food rationing. Food riots, food protests. On her way to the meeting, Marina skirted a small, well-behaved protest beneath the old LDC chambers. Protesting about something that hasn’t happened, to something that doesn’t exist. The trains are shut down, the BALTRAN is shut down. The Moonloop is shut down. Luna is closed to the universe. Some of the previous intake are stranded, panicking that they have overstayed their physiological visas. A day or two won’t make any difference, Preeda the facilitator says. What if that day or two becomes a week or two, a month or two? And what about the backlog? The Moonloop has only so many capsules. The cyclers are on fixed orbits.
The bone clocks keep ticking.
After the drones come the bots. Marina sees the pulse of movement sweep towards her down 26th East even as the word sweeps the network. Citizens trying to get off the streets. Diving into shops and bars, dashing for home, finding any cranny or sheltering crevice, taking a staircase or an elevator away from the rumours. They’re in the city. They’re on the streets. You’ll be all right if you’re indoors. Get indoors they’re knifing anyone on the streets. Children swept up and carried in arms, frantic parents trying to contact teenagers, apartments closing street doors, shuttering windows.
I’m going back, Aurelia says.
I can make it home from here, Marina says. Home is in the opposite direction to the flow of the people. She takes the 25th Street ladeira at a trot. Marina runs straight into the bot at the bottom of the staircase, picking a slow, intricate minuet along 24th right. It’s a jagged tripod of switchblade legs and flick-knife arms. Every part of it is edged and sharp. Every part of it can transform into a blade. Its many eyes register. Its head snaps to contemplate her.
There exist shocks so profound that the body’s only response is paralysis. Not fear, though fear is right: this is the shock of the uncanny. The thing before her is so alien, so unsightly, so different from anything Marina has ever seen before that she cannot understand what she sees. The shock of the strange stuns her. Every part of it offends human sensibilities. She cannot move or think or act. But it moves, thinks, acts. Marina sees intelligence and intention in the eyes that scan her head to toe, then its attention snaps away. It dances on its three clicking stiletto feet. Now the fear comes. Marina sits shaking on the bottom step of the 24th Street ladeira. The God of Death looked at her and passed by. The new gossip wafts through the network: It’s all right, they won’t touch you.
Then what were they made for? Marina thinks.
The last wave is the suits.
Ariel and Abena, with most of the population of Orion Hub, are on their balconies or at the street handrail. Marina finds them. One detachment of suits comes up from the train station. They wear shell-suit armour decorated with Heavy Metal motifs: flaming skulls, fangs, demons, large-breasted women, big-cocked men, demons and angels and chains. Vorontsovs. Another detachment advances up Gargarin Prospekt from the outlock. They are dressed in black impact armour and carry small, black, projectile weapons. They advance in line and step. In the stunned silence of Orion Quadra their boots sound loud and intimidating.
‘They’re marching,’ Marina says.
‘They’re terrestrial,’ Ariel says.
‘Are those guns?’ Abena says.
‘They’re in for a big surprise when they try and shoot those things,’ Marina says.
‘Forgive me if recoil isn’t at the top of my list of concerns,’ Ariel says.
A third detachment emerges from offices and print-shops; not armoured, not armed and drilled, just people – moon folk – in everyday clothes and orange vests. They gather into groups of three and move up and out to every prospekt and street in Orion Quadra. Marina orders Hetty to zoom in on the vests: each carries a logo of the moon overflown by a bird carrying a twig in its beak. Marina is unfamiliar with the symbolism. Above are the words ‘Lunar Mandate Authority’.
‘Peace, Productivity, Prosperity,’ Marina says, reading the motto beneath the world and bird motif. ‘We’ve been invaded by middle management.’
* * *
Two boxes of guava juice and an empanada. They swing in Robson Corta’s waist bag as he climbs up through the high fifties to the West Antares power conduit. He lost the bot ten levels ago – they have restricted battery life and can’t climb. All they can do is try and follow him up by staircase and street and tag him for a writ. Good luck serving that, up above Bairro Alto. The danger is the human attention they attract, and the little machines are everywhere now, guarding every crumb and cup.
Robson’s thieved from hot-shops in every quadra – it’s always night somewhere in Meridian – but never Eleventh Gate. Thieving from your own hot-shop is shitting on your doorstep.
Two boxes of guava juice and an empanada – tilapia, he hates tilapia – is poor reward for a daring, dark-time descent of the West Antares conduit. Robson spent days navigating a safe path between the high voltage cables and the relays, marking it with luminous tape he filched from an off-shift duster’s pack at a busy tea-stand. His ascent follows a trail of shining arrows and dashes. An arrow: a gap jump in the direction of the arrow. A greater-than sign: wall pass. A less-than sign, precision jump to a narrow location. An equals sign: cat jump. A vertical equals: wall run. A cross: dash vault or lash vault, depending on the orientation of the long axis of the vault. Downward slash right: under bar. Downward slash left: reverse under bar. An X: Do not touch. An asterisk: Danger of death.
Robson drinks the first juice on the level seventy traverse. He tucks the empty carton into his pilfer bag. Trash can fall, trash can get into the machinery, trash can be a treachery waiting at the far end of a jump. He saves the empanada for the nest. Robson searched for days across the high places before he found a sleeping place that was warm, protected, had access to water without damp and condensation, was secure so he would not roll over in his sleep and fall to his death. He lined it with filched packing and went down to the bars where the surface workers drank to steal thermal sheeting.
Every magician is a thief. Time, attention, belief; thermal sheeting.
Robson burrows into his nest of impact foam and bubble wrap and eats his empanada. He will save the last juice for later. He has learned to ration his treats. It will be a thing to look forward to. Boredom is the dark enemy of the refugee. Wanking is an enemy in a different mask; the mask of a friend.
Robson likes to believe that his high nest gives him a philosophical eyrie over the world. High above every other human, he can look down and contemplate. If food is guarded, it must have a value beyond the everyday. On his thieving missions he hears tea-shop talk. The trains are out, the BALTRAN too. The Vorontsovs are in charge of those: why would they shut them down? Twé has been buried in regolith. That would cut back on the growing season. The crops would dwindle, they might fail. The Asamoahs could be weird – every one he’s ever known is – but they would never do that to their own capital. But if no one knows when there will be another harvest, that would explain bots guarding every empanada and bento box.
Then there are the most intriguing stories of all, the ones that make him linger a moment too long, his fingers a moment too slow on the object he means to steal. There are things out on the seas, in the highlands. Whole squads have been lost – killing things, with blades for fingers and swords for feet. Killer bots. Who would make a thing like that? The Suns could, but why would they? Why would anyone build a thing with no other purpose than to frighten, to intimidate, to threaten and control?
No one on this world, Robson decides. Huddled in his nest, warmed by the hum of a heat exchanger, his stolen blanket pulled around him, Robson concludes that, without any notice or declaration, without anyone actually knowing, the moon has been invaded. By Earth. By high blue Earth. But they couldn’t do that on their own; they would need someone to transport their machines, their people. The only ones with the capacity to do that are the Vorontsovs. The Vorontsovs are in league with Earth to take control of the moon.
‘Whoa,’ says Robson Corta.
And he hears a click. A tap, a click-click tap. A leg, elegant and precise as a surgical tool, appears around the corner of the heat exchanger. The steel hoof draws a click from the catwalk. Robson freezes. An arm like a blossom of blades comes around the corner of Robson’s nest, then a head. Robson thinks it’s a head. It has six eyes and is articulated like no limb he has ever seen but he’s sure it’s a head by the way it snaps from side to side to study him.
Click. Another step, another leg. Another arm.
He pushes slowly away from it.
The bot is interested now. Click click click. It steps after him. Robson is on his feet. The bot lunges forward. Gods it’s fast. Click click snap.
The bot freezes, looks down. One of its delicate hoofs is trapped in the wider mesh of Robson’s nest. Its head flicks side to side as it studies the trapped hoof. In a second it will work out what to do. That second is all Robson needs. Only a practitioner of sleight of hand has the speed and skill. Only a traceur, a city-runner who fell from the top of Queen of the South to the bottom has the daring.
Robson snatches up his thermal blanket and throws a loop under the body of the bot. As it turns he steps past it, ducking under the bladed arms. He throws the ends of the blanket over the rail, heaves. Unbalanced, the bot totters. Robson ducks low, puts shoulder where legs meet body and heaves. Levers do the rest. The bot topples as it works its foot free; legs and arms wave, unfold into an atrocity of blades. Its weight and speed carry it over the low rail. It falls, blades snapping at air, impacts a crosswalk five levels down and comes apart. Junk rains down on Tereshkova Prospekt far below.
Robson slams back into the security of his nest. The blanket is wrapped around him and the heat exchanger is blood warm but Robson shivers. He can’t believe what he did, what he dared. Would the bot have hurt him? It might have left him alone, but he couldn’t risk that. He did what he had to do. He got away with it. He might not have got away with it. He can’t think about that. He is shaking now. He feel sick. That empanada must have been bad. Tilapia: poisonous stuff. Liquid. He needs liquid. He’s crying. He shouldn’t be crying. Robson hugs his blanket more closely around him and sucks at the box of guava juice.
* * *
Luna arranges more tiny lights around the bed. Guardian lights at the cardinal points become a defending circle which she filled in with smaller circles. Circles of circles around the medical bed. She has a new idea about wiggling lines radiating from the big circle. Like sun rays or something. Luna likes symmetry, so she begins by laying out six sun-ray wiggles, each sixty degrees apart. She does not have enough to complete her pattern; she hisses in frustration. She will have to forage more lights. The Sisterhouse is generous with biolights.
Now it is time to water them. Squatting, Luna waddles around the ring of biolights with her little jug. A drop and a drop. The green glow brightens.
The noise is Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade entering the room. She thinks she’s as quiet and mysterious as a miracle but to Luna her heavy feet and heavy breath and the small mutters that she doesn’t know she makes are as noisy as a tunnel digger.
‘Luna, we do have to get in to tend him,’ says Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade Abosede Adekola. She is a round, old Yoruba woman in the whites of the Sisterhood of the Lords of Now. She clicks and rattles with beads and charms and saints. She smells a bit.
‘You can step over them,’ Luna says defiantly. The Mãe-de-Santo lifts the hem of her robes and steps into the circles of protecting light. She does not disturb a single lamp. Her feet are bare. Luna has never seen the Holy Mother’s feet before.
‘We’ve contacted your mother,’ Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade says.
‘Maame!’ Luna cries, standing up and knocking over her jug of water. She summons her familiar, though the Sisters don’t approve of them in the Sisterhouse. ‘Luna, get my Maame!’
‘Oh, not so fast not so fast,’ the Holy Mother says. ‘The network is still coming and going. We have our own channels. Your mother knows you’re here in João de Deus, and that you’re well, and she sends her love and says as soon as she can she will come and bring you home.’
Luna’s mouth is an ‘o’ of deflated excitement. Luna the familiar unravels in sprays of pixels.
‘What about Lucasinho?’ she asks.
‘It will take time,’ Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade says. ‘He is very badly hurt. A very sick young man.’
She leans over the body on the bed. So many tubes going in and out of it. Tubes to his wrists, his arms, his side. A big tube in his throat. Luna can only look at that one for the glance it takes to make sure he still breathes. A small thin tube coming out of his pee-hole. That makes her squirm. Wires and needles. Bags and sensor arms. He’s naked, uncovered, palms turned up like a Catholic saint. He’s in a place deeper than sleep. Medically induced coma, the Sisters say. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t dream, he doesn’t wake. He is a long way away, journeying through the borderlands of death.
If the Sisterhood hadn’t such good medical facilities. If the Urbanistes hadn’t been so curious. If she had been thirty seconds slower opening the lock to the Boa Vista refuge.
If if if-ity if.
Luna is still not sure that Mother Odunlade’s smell might not in fact be her smell. Suit-stink gets deep into the skin like a tattoo.
Different parts of Lucasinho’s body gently rise and fall as the bed inflates and deflates to prevent pressure sores. He breathes, but that’s the machine. Stubble is growing on his face, his stomach and his groin. He has a fine line of dark hair from his belly-button to his balls.
‘Will you shave him?’ Luna asks. He is fascinating and horrible.
‘We’ll care for him to the very best of our ability,’ Mother Odunlade says.
‘Do you think maame could come and we could all stay here with you?’
‘Your maame is a very important and busy woman, my love. She has a lot to do.’
‘I want him to wake up.’
‘We all want him to wake up.’
The Sisters have said that it could be days before Lucasinho wakes up, or it could be weeks. It could be years. That’s a thing from Madrinha Elis’s berçário stories. The cute prince cursed to sleep forever in a deep secret cave. A kiss usually wakes them. She tries that every day, when the Sisters are all gone. Some day it will work.
Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade’s lips move silently as she reads the screens around Lucasinho’s head. Sometimes a word slips out and Luna realises that they are not numbers but prayers.
‘Oh!I almost forgot,’ says Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade and rummages inside her white gowns, a thing Luna’s quite sure she should not see. She produces a wooden box, a big, flat wooden box, carved with flower patterns so fine and detailed they strain even Luna’s eyesight.
‘What is it?’ Luna is ever-open to the possibility of presents.
‘Open it.’
The box is lined with silky, shiny fabric. Luna loves the feel of it under her fingers. The Sisterhouse does not have a very good printer, but it is enough to print out lovely frocks. Goodbye! she shouted at the hated hated hated suit liner as she stuffed it into the deprinter. She never wants to wear anything clingy ever again.
Then she notices the knives. Two, nuzzled against each other like twins. Dark and hard and gleaming. Edges so sharp they cut the sight that beholds them. Luna touches fingertip to blade. It is as smooth and silky as the lining in which the knives rest.
‘They are made of lunar steel,’ Mother Odunlade says. ‘Forged from billion-year-old meteoric iron mined deep beneath Langrenus crater.’
‘They feel beautiful and scary at the same time,’ Luna says.
‘These are the battle knives of the Cortas. They belonged to your uncle Carlinhos. With these he killed Hadley Mackenzie in the Court of Clavius. With these Denny Mackenzie killed Carlinhos when João de Deus fell. They passed into our safekeeping. We aren’t comfortable having them in this special place – there is too much blood on them – but for the love and respect we bear for your grandmother, we have protected them. Until a Corta comes who is bold, great-hearted, without avarice or cowardice, who will fight for the family and defend it bravely. A Corta who is worthy of these blades.’
‘Lucasinho should have them,’ Luna declares.
‘No, my love,’ Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade says. ‘These are for you.’