The two rovers run silent and swift, west across the southern limb of the Sea of Tranquillity. Before them, beyond the horizon, is Hypatia. Behind them are twenty hunting bots.
Hypatia is a hope, a haven. They may reach it on the dregs of power. There may be something at Hypatia that can deal with a score of killing bots. There may be something between their current position and Hypatia that will save them.
Or their batteries may fail, despite the careful husbanding. Then the bots pounce and annihilate them. Every ten minutes Wagner runs up the radar mast to peep over the horizon. They are always there. They are always closer. No hope of losing them: the two rovers leave indelible fresh tracks, aimed like arrows at Hypatia.
Too many hopes and ifs, too many of which end impaled on a blade, but Wagner’s fears and dreads fall around Robson. Death is nothing; that failure might be his last emotion almost paralyses him with horror. Comms are down all over the quartersphere, the sky is silent. He can’t raise TTC. The moon has turned upside down; all parameters have been exceeded and all Wagner can think of is that thirteen-year-old he left behind in Meridian. He imagines Robson waiting, not knowing, waiting, asking Amal, not knowing, asking wider and wider, no one knowing.
Wagner’s earplugs blast deafening noise into his inner ear. His visor blazes white: Wagner is light-blind. He feels Rover Lucky Eight Ball roll to a halt beneath him. Comms are down. He tries to call up Sombra. Nothing. His vision clears in blotches of glowing black and fluorescent yellow. His ears ring. Wagner tries to blink away one dead patch in the centre of his eye and can’t. His lens is dead.
That can’t happen.
He tries to flick up the HUD. Nothing. No read-out from his suit, his life support, his temperature and vital signs, his crew. Wagner tries to command Lucky Eight Ball to move, to report and, when those orders fail, to open the safety bars and set him down on the surface. Nothing. He is locked out of any and every control. Wagner glances at his crew. No names, no tags, no familiars.
There must be a manual release. Every device used on the surface of the moon carries multiple redundancies. Wagner tries to remember his training sessions on the Taiyang XBT rover. A hand reaches up and slaps a switch. The safety bar lifts, the seat drops ungently to the surface. Zehra presses her helmet to Wagner’s.
‘We’re dead in the dust.’ Zehra’s voice is a distant, indistinct shout, muffled by air and helmet insulation.
‘Those things are behind us,’ Wagner bellows. ‘What happened?’
‘Electromagnetic pulse,’ Zehra shouts. ‘The only thing that could take everything out at once.’
Dust rises above the eastern horizon. Moments later a squadron of rovers arrives, customised in AKA geometrics. Blackstars drop to the surface. They wear long dark strung objects slung across their backs. When Wagner recognises them their incongruity renders them almost comical. Bows. Things from old madrinha stories of Earth and its heroes. Bows and arrows. The lead rover runs up an over-the-horizon radar mast while a dozen archers take up a perimeter, bows unslung, arrows nocked. The bows may be complex, mean devices, all pulleys and stabilising weights, but they are medieval terrestrial weaponry. The arrows are balanced and weighted and armed with a small cylindrical payload. Wagner’s dark intelligence digs into the incongruity. The ballistics of archery are as precise as those of the BALTRAN. More: the effect of solar wind is lessened on a small projectile. Bows are easy to print: the delivery system is simple human muscle. AIs aim accurately: under lunar gravity AKA’s archers can shoot over the horizon. A smart delivery system for electromagnetic pulse warheads.
Clever.
The colours of the archery squad leader’s suit flow into words.
GET BACK.
The suit blanks, forms new words.
IN THE.
ROVERS.
Those of the AKA squad not on guard are already hitching the dead rovers to theirs. Wagner again fumbles for the manual override. Zehra hits it for him: he imagines a grin through her faceplate as he rides up and locks into the chassis and the safety bars drop.
THEY’RE NOT.
ALL DEAD, the suit says.
That’s the weakness, Wagner thinks as the AKA archers run to their vehicles. Emps are effective at range, but inside their envelope, as he and his AKA counterpart had been, you are as vulnerable as your targets.
Wheels spin. Wagner jolts hard in his harness as the tow cables take up the slack and Lucky Eight Ball is jerked into motion. Insulated in his sasuit, isolated from his world, his crew, his familiar, his pack and his loves, his boy, Wagner Corta looks up at the crescent Earth. He lets its small light pour through his visor. Without anyone knowing, without any declaration or draft, he has become a soldier in a dubious war.
* * *
A kiss.
‘Aren’t you coming with us?’ Luna Corta says. Despite the cramp in her old calf muscles, Madrinha Elis crouches, eye to eye with Luna.
‘There aren’t enough places on the train, anjinho.’
‘I want you to come.’
The berçário quakes again. Up there, the machines pile ton after ton after ton of regolith over Twé’s windows, burying it, smothering it. The power has come and gone three times in the same number of hours.
‘Lucasinho is going to look after you.’
‘I will. Luna, I’ll get you there.’
Lousika Asamoah parlayed all the influence of the Golden Stool to book Luna and Lucas on to the train. Madrinha Elis knows that to find those seats, she had bounced two other refugees to a later train. This she will never tell Luna, or even Lucasinho.
‘I’m scared, Elis.’
‘So am I, coracão.’
‘What’s going to happen?’ Luna asks.
‘I don’t know, coracão. But you’ll be safe in Meridian.’
‘Will you be all right?’
‘We should go now,’ Lucasinho says and Elis could kiss him forever for that. She kisses him twice. Love and luck.
‘Go. Lucasinho?’
He is so vulnerable. Here lie the borders of care; a cold land of events and powers impervious to dedication or love.
‘Look after yourself.’
As she closes the berçário door Twé quakes again. The power flickers, comes back in half-light.
‘Lucasinho,’ Luna says. ‘Hold my hand. Please?
* * *
The lights go out. Twé roars. One hundred and twenty-five thousand voices, trapped underground in the dark. Lucasinho snatches Luna to him and holds her tight, cheek to chest, as panicked parents and children push past in the narrow tunnel, trying to find the station, the train, the saving train. The roar does not stop. Bodies large and small crash into him. Why are people moving when the sensible thing is to stay still and wait for the emergency lights? The emergency lights will come on. The emergency lights can only fail if the back-up power fails. He learned that from Madrinha Flavia. And if the backup power fails? He spins Luna to the wall, puts his body between her and the stampede.
‘Lucasinho, what’s happening?’
‘The power’s out again,’ Lucasinho says. He holds Luna to him, buffeted and beaten by bodies, trying not to feel the darkness as a solid, crushing thing. If the power has failed, what about the air supply? His chest tightens, he fights an involuntary gulp of panic. Reaches a decision, in the suffocating dark.
‘Come on…’ He seizes Luna’s hand and draws her behind him, against the flow of people down the pitch-dark tunnel. Voices call the names of missing children, children and parents call for each other. Lucasinho forces a path through the press of blind, confused bodies.
‘Where are we going?’ Luna asks. Her hand is so small and light in his. It could slip free so easily. He firms his grip. Luna yelps with pain.
‘You’re hurting me!’
‘Sorry. We’re going to João de Deus.’
‘But madrinha Elis said we were to get on the train to Lousika.’
‘Anjinho, no one’s getting on a train. No train’s going anywhere. We’re going to take the BALTRAN to João de Deus. The Sisters will look after us. Jinji, go to infrared.’
I’m sorry Lucasinho, but the network is currently unavailable.
Blind in a darkness deeper than dark Twé.
‘Jinji,’ Lucasinho whispers. ‘We need to get to the BALTRAN Station.’
I can navigate from my last location for you based on my internal maps and your average stride length, Jinji said. There will be a margin of error.
‘Help me.’
One hundred and twelve paces ahead. Then stop.
A hand tugs Lucasinho’s, hauls him to a halt mid-stride.
‘I can’t find Luna.’
In the dark and noise and fear, Lucasinho can’t understand what the young voice one pace behind him is saying. How can Luna not find Luna? Then Lucasinho remembers: Luna was also the name of her familiar. Grandmother Adriana always pursed her lips and tutted at the conceit, and that her granddaughter had chosen a blue Luna moth – an animal – to skin her familiar.
‘The network’s down, anjinho. Stay with me. Don’t let go of my hand. I’m going to get us somewhere bright and safe.’
One hundred and twelve paces, then stop. Lucasinho steps into the dark. One step two step three step four. The tunnel seems emptier now – the collisions fewer, the voices more widely spread – but every time Lucasinho brushes against another body he stops in place, silently repeating his last pace count. On the fifth halt, Luna interrupts.
‘Why do we keep stopping?’
The step count flees like carnival butterflies. Lucasinho battles the urge to scream his frustration at his cousin.
‘Luna? I’m counting steps and it’s really important you don’t interrupt me.’ But the numbers are gone. Lucasinho’s skin crawls in fear. Lost in the dark.
Eighty-five, Jinji says.
‘Luna, do you want to help?’ Lucasinho says. He feels Luna nod her head through the minute play of muscles in her arm. ‘We’re going to make this a game. Count with me. Eighty-six, eighty-seven…’
Lucasinho knows he has arrived at the intersection by the movement of air on his face. Sounds move in new paths. He smells mould, water, leaf-rot; the sweat of Twé. The air from deep inside the dark city chills. The heating is down. Lucasinho doesn’t want to think too long about that.
Turn right, ninety degrees, Jinji advises.
‘Don’t let go now,’ Lucasinho says and Luna’s hand tightens on his but there is peril here. Jinji can easily measure steps but turning is a more subtle action. Miss the angle and he could lose the calculated path. Lucasinho pivots his right foot and presses heel to instep. His feet feel at right angles to each other. He turns left foot parallel to right. Breathes deeply.
‘Okay Jinji.’
Two hundred and eight steps, take the second corridor.
Two corridors.
‘We’re going to move in to the wall,’ Lucasinho says and side-shuffles until his outstretched fingers touch smooth sinter. ‘You feel that? Reach out your little arm. Got it?’
A silence, then Luna says, ‘I nodded my head there, but uh huh.’
‘Count with me. One, two three…’
At one hundred and five Luna stops dead and shouts, ‘Lights!’
Lucasinho’s fingertips are so electric-raw he can hardly bear to hold them to the polished wall. They are as sensitive, as tuned, as nipples. He peers into the bottomless dark.
‘What can you see, Luna?’
‘Can’t see,’ Luna said. ‘I can smell lights.’
Now Lucasinho catches a hint of the grassy, mouldy smell of biolights and understands.
‘They’re dead, Luna.’
‘They might just need water.’
Lucasinho feels Luna’s hand tug and slip from his grasp. He follows into the uncounted dark. Take twelve steps to your left and resume your course, Jinji orders. Lucasinho hears a rustle of fabric, feels a downward tug on his hand and, knowing that Luna is squatting down, crouches beside her. He can see nothing. Not a photon.
‘I can make these work,’ Luna declares. ‘Don’t look.’
Lucasinho hears fabric rustle, a thick trickle, smells the warm perfume of piss. A warm green glow spreads from the revived biolights. The light is barely enough to discern shapes, but it grows by the second as the bacteria feed from Luna’s urine. A street shrine to Yemanja; a tiny 3-D printed icon ringed by a halo of biolights stuck to the floor and wall. The light is now strong enough for Lucasinho to see the two junctions Jinji described, and a body lying against the wall between them. He would have fallen over that, sprawling and lost in the dark.
‘Here.’ Luna peels off handfuls of biolights and presents them to Lucasinho. They are wet and warm in his hands. He almost drops them in disgust. Luna purses her lips in displeasure. ‘Like this.’ She sticks the little disc-shaped lights to her forehead, shoulders and wrists.
‘This is a Malihini shirt,’ Lucasinho protests.
‘Designer today, deprinter tomorrow,’ Luna declares.
‘Who taught you that?’
‘Madrinha Elis.’
Hand in hand, they take the long route around the body, then down the indicated corridor. The tunnel shakes to noises overhead, heavy things moving slowly, up on the surface. The trickster winds of Twé carry snatches of voices, clashing metal, cries, a deep rhythmic booming. Left here, up this ramp, around this curving peripheral road. A right turn takes them into the path of a mob of people milling in the dark corridor. Luna spins around.
‘They can see our lights!’ she hisses. Lucasinho turns, hides his glow.
‘They’re between us and the BALTRAN.’
‘Back to 25th, up the steps and there’s an old tunnel to the BALTRAN,’ Luna says. ‘You’re big but you should be able to fit all right.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know all the sneaky ways,’ Luna says.
In daylight Lucasinho would have slipped around and between and under the jutting machinery and old raw rock of Luna’s sneaky way without a thought, but with his own body the only source of light, not knowing how far this tunnel goes or what surprise it might present to him, how much bigger or smaller it grew, panic grips him. The terror of being trapped in the dark, his biolights ebbing, flickering, dying: unable to see, unable to move. Megatons of rock above him, the distant heart of the moon beneath him.
He feels sinter press against his bent back, his shoulders, and freezes. He is wedged. Unable to go forward, unable to move backwards. Future generations might find him, something mummified and desiccated. In a Malihini shirt. He must get out, he must get free. But if he lunges, lurches, body-panics, he will only jam himself tighter. He must turn, slide one shoulder through like this, then the other, then his hips and legs.
‘Come on,’ Luna calls. Her biolights dance before him; soft green stars. Lucasinho dips his left shoulder. Fabric catches and tears. In João de Deus, he will treat himself to a new shirt. A hero’s shirt. Two steps and he’s through. Twenty steps and he emerges from a crevice on 2nd Street he has never noticed before. Hand in hand, Luna and Lucasinho lope down the corridor to the BALTRAN. The BALTRAN station maintains a separate power supply. Twé, feeder of the moon, is well equipped with BALTRAN launchers. They step from the lock out on to a cargo bay wide enough to handle loading trucks.
‘Jinji,’ Lucasinho says. BALTRAN capsules hang before him in ranks and columns, a hundred metres high, far up into the heights of the launch silo.
The local network is available, Jinji says.
‘João de Deus BALTRAN station,’ Lucasinho says.
Jinji brings down a personnel capsule down and racks it in the access chamber. Now it asks for a destination.
I have a routing laid in, Jinji says. The BALTRAN network is in use so it’s not direct.
‘How many jumps?’ Lucasinho asks.
Eight, Jinji says. I’m sending you round the far side of the moon.
‘What’s happening?’ Luna asks as the BALTRAN capsule opens before them. She looks at the padded interior, the straps and crash webbing, the oxygen masks, with apprehension.
‘It’s going to take us eight jumps to get to João de Deus,’ Lucasinho says. ‘But it’ll be all right. It’ll just take a little longer, that’s all. We have to go now. Come on.’
Luna hangs back. Lucasinho reaches out a hand. Luna takes it. He steps into the capsule.
‘You’ve still got your lights on,’ Luna says. Lucasinho peels them from him. The adhesive pads leave grubby, sticky rings on his Malihini shirt. He leaves the little glowing discs on the floor of the capsule. They were good and faithful and he is superstitiously loyal to things. Jinji shows him how to strap Luna in. He seals his own straps and feels the memory foam soften, learn and reform to his body.
‘Good to go, Jinji.’
Pre launch sequence, the familiar says. Once we have launched I will be in offline mode until we arrive at João de Deus.
The door closes. Lucasinho feels pressure locks seal. The air con hums. The capsule is lit soft gold, a comforting, warm, peaceful hue. It looks like sickness to Lucasinho Corta.
‘Hold my hand,’ Lucasinho says, wiggling his fingers free from the webbing. Luna easily slips her hand free and into his. The capsule lurches and drops.
‘Whoa!’ says Lucasinho Corta.
The capsule is in the launch tunnel, Jinji says.
‘Are you getting this?’ Lucasinho shouts over the humming and rattling that now fills the capsule.
Luna nods. ‘It’s fun!’
It is not fun. Lucasinho closes his eyes and fights down the fear as the capsule shuttles out along maglev rails to the launcher. Jolts as Lucasinho and Luna are loaded into the launch chamber.
Prepare for high acceleration, the pod AI warn.
‘Like a ride!’ Lucasinho says without conviction and then the launcher grabs the capsule, accelerates it and every drop of blood and bile and cum in him rushes to his feet and groin. His eyes ache, pushed deep in their sockets, his balls are spheres of lead. He can feel every bone in his body pushing through his skin. The suspension harness is a web of titanium wires, cutting him into quivering chunks and he can’t even scream.
And it stops.
And he has no weight and no direction, no up or down. His stomach heaves. Were there anything in it more than morning tea it would be all floating free in a constellation of bile. His face feels swollen and puffy, his hands unwieldy and bulbous; fat wiggling fingers gripped around Luna’s hand. He can hear the blood rushing around his brain. Some of Abena’s friends rode the BALTRAN for free-fall sex. He can’t imagine anyone having sex in this. He can’t see any kind of fun in this. And he has to do it seven more times.
‘Luna, you okay?’
‘I think so. Are you?’
She looks like Luna always looks; small, self-contained yet insatiably curious about whatever world she is encountering, cosmological, personal. Lucasinho wonders if she realises she is packed into a padded, pressurised can, flying high above the moon, aimed at the distant mitt of a receiving station, unable to change course, trusting absolutely in the accuracy of machines and the precision of ballistics.
Stand by for deceleration, the pod says. So soon? Hardly time to get to pre-foreplay, let alone the free-fall cum all the boys described with such detail and enthusiasm.
‘We’re going in,’ Lucasinho says.
Without warning, something grabs Lucasinho’s head and feet and tries to make him ten centimetres shorter. Deceleration is harsher but briefer than acceleration: red dots dance in Lucasinho’s eyes, then he is hanging upside down in his crash web, gasping. Gasp turns into bark, into laugh. He cannot stop laughing. Heaving, wrenching laughter that tears at every strained muscle and drawn sinew. He could laugh up a lung. Luna catches his laugh. Upside down, they whoop and giggle as the BALTRAN launcher draws them in and turns them upright for the next jump. They arrived. They survived.
‘Ready to do that again?’ Lucasinho asks.
Luna nods.
* * *
The pod door opens. The pod door should not open. Lucasinho and Luna should remain sealed in for the entire sequence of jumps.
Please exit the capsule, Jinji says.
Cold air, heavy with dust, flows into the capsule.
Please exit the capsule, Jinji says again. Lucasinho unclips the crash webbing and steps on to metal mesh. He feels the chill of the mesh through the soles of his loafers. He feels this place was brought to life moments ago. Air-conditioning fans roar but the lights are dim.
‘Where are we?’ Luna asks a split second before Lucasinho.
Lubbock BALTRAN relay, their familiars whisper. Jinji shows Lucasinho a map location. They are on the western shore of the Sea of Fecundity, four hundred kilometres from João de Deus.
‘Jinji, lay in a course for João de Deus,’ Lucasinho commands.
I’m sorry, I am unable to comply, Lucasinho, his familiar replies.
‘Why?’ Lucasinho asks.
I am unable to launch capsules due to energy constraints. The power plant at Gutenberg is offline.
The lurch and drop of acceleration to free fall, free fall to electromagnetic braking, is nothing to the sick vacuum that opens in Lucasinho’s belly.
They’re trapped deep in the badlands.
‘How long before power is restored?’
I am unable to answer that, Lucasinho. Access to the network has been compromised. I’m running on the local architecture.
‘Is something wrong?’ Luna says.
‘The system is updating itself,’ Lucasinho lies, numb and not knowing what to do. Luna is scared, and any answers he gets from Jinji will only scare her more. ‘We might be here for a little while, so why don’t you go see if you can find us anything to eat or drink?’
Luna looks around her, hugs herself tight against the cold. Lubbock is not Twé with its multiple launchers and loading docks. This is a remote relay, an uncrewed node. It houses a service crew twice a lunar year for a day or two. Lucasinho can view most of it from the platform and sees nowhere to store food or water.
‘This place is scary,’ Luna declares.
‘It’s all right anjinho, we’re the only people here.’
‘I’m not scared of people,’ Luna says but she trots away to explore her small new world.
‘How long have we got?’ Lucasinho whispers.
The relay is operating on reserve power. If main power is not restored within three days you will experience significant environmental degradation.
‘Significant?’
Heating and atmosphere failure, chiefly.
‘Get a call out.’
I have been broadcasting a distress call on the emergency channel since our arrival. I have not yet received an acknowledgement. Communications seems to be down all across Nearside.
‘How can that be?’
We are under attack.
Luna returns with a can of water.
‘No food,’ she says. ‘Sorry. Can you make it warmer? I’m really really cold.’
‘I don’t know how to, anjinho.’
He lies. Jinji could do it in a breath. Lucasinho has finally acknowledged that he will never be an intellectual, but even he can run the numbers: a degree in temperature is an hour less breathing. He takes off his Malihini and slides Luna’s arms into the sleeves. It hangs from her like a cape, like dressing-up day.
‘What else did you find?’
‘There’s a suit. A shell-suit, like the old one at Boa Vista.’
Lucasinho’s joy is a chemical rush. A suit. Simple. Just walk out of here.
‘Show me.’
Luna takes him to the outlock. It’s small, designed for one person at a time. In the lock, a hard-shell survival suit, adjustable to a wide range of body shapes, bright orange. Like the one in which he had walked from Boa Vista to João de Deus. Just a short walk across the surface. One suit. Luna had said: a suit. He hadn’t listened. He needs to listen. He needs every sense and nerve to be sharp, he needs not to rush to assumptions, or wishful thinking. Could-be’s would kill them out here.
The will-be is that in three days the air will run out, and you have one moon suit.
‘Luna, we may need to sleep here. Could you go and see if you can find anything we can cover ourselves with?’
She nods. Lucasinho does not know how convinced Luna is by his diversions but he prefers her gone when he asks Jinji the hard questions.
‘Jinji, where is the nearest settlement?’
The nearest settlement is Messier, one hundred and fifty kilometres east.
‘Shit.’ Well beyond the range of a shell-suit. Walking to find help is dead at his feet.
‘Are there any other surface-capable devices in this station?’ He had heard Carlinhos use that phrase once. Surface-capable. It sounds strong and in-charge. Mão de Ferro.
The emergency shell-suit is the only surface-capable device, Jinji says.
‘Fuck!’ Lucasinho slams his fist into the wall. The explosion of pain almost drops him. He sucks on his bleeding knuckles.
‘Are you all right?’ Luna has returned with a thermal foil blanket. ‘I’m sorry it was all I could find.’
‘We’re in trouble, Luna.’
‘I know. The relay’s not updating itself.’
‘No. The power is out. I don’t know when it will come back on.’
Luna is quick to understand and asks no questions. Lucasinho has no answers. He has three days of air, one suit and the nearest haven is one hundred and fifty kilometres away. A rover could cover one hundred and fifty kilometres in an hour.
There could be a rover parked right outside and he would never see it.
‘Jinji, can you access the log?’
This is very simple.
‘I want every rover movement over the last…’ He makes up a reasonable number. ‘Three lunes.’
Jinji throws an overlay of maintenance visits, prospectors, glass crews up on Lucasinho’s lens. Lucasinho may not read or number well, but he is superlative at interpreting visual information. His skill at picking one person, one object, one narrative thread from a mob of people, a terrain of moving data, always amazed numerate, literate Abena.
An anomaly, a tangent to the orbits and loops of the service rovers.
‘Enhance this one please.’ Jinji isolates the track, a small rover, coming from the badlands, curving off north into the fastnesses of the Taruntius craterlands. ‘Show me this one please.’ Footage now: the rover skims the edge of the external camera’s range, tracking in from the Gutenberg, heading into the badlands. Destination nowhere. There is not a settlement that way for a thousand kilometres. Lucasinho estimates it’s moving at thirty, maybe forty kilometres per hour. ‘Specs please.’ Jinji complies. Once again Lucasinho’s visual sense picks the information he needs from the blur of technical data. Range at optimum speed is three hundred kilometres, plus en-route solar recharging. From the footage, Lucasinho estimates the rover was a touch under its top speed.
The nearest settlement it could have started from, based on its course, is Gutenberg. Lucasinho tries to calculate range. The numbers clang like metal. ‘Jinji, do the math.’ Lucasinho’s familiar has the answer on Lucasinho’s lens before the last syllable of the question is spoken. On Lucasinho’s lens is an arc of possible locations for the rover, based on its range, speed and direction. The minimum distance is ten kilometres. The maximum is twenty-five. ‘Enhance please.’ The little rover carries the linked-MH colophon of Bryce Mackenzie. A figure in a sasuit sits astride the rover. The sun is high, the time code reads ten days.
A rover. A sasuit. Lucasinho has one final question for Lubbock BALTRAN relay. One last chance for all to fall apart in his fingers.
‘How long have I got, Jinji?’
This time the numbers are not displays or clever graphics. They are numbers, cold, unrelenting and impersonal. There is no time for hoping, waiting, pondering decisions, weighing up possibilities. If they are to walk out of Lubbock BALTRAN relay, he must go now. Every second of prevarication is watts of power, sips of air and water. Wait and hope or act and hope.
It is no decision. The numbers make it no decision.
‘Jinji.’
Lucasinho.
‘Power up the suit.’
* * *
The inlock window perfectly frames Luna. She waves. Lucasinho raises a titanium hand. He is a monster, an abandoner. A thief. He has filled his suit with Luna’s air and water and power. What if he fails? What if he doesn’t come back? He imagines Luna shivering on the steel mesh, growing colder, thirstier, hoping he will come back, hoping the power will restore.
He can’t think that. He can’t think of anything except what he needs to do, clearly and precisely.
‘Okay Jinji, I’m ready to go out.’
Lucasinho touches the icon of Lady Luna by the outlock. Luck, and defiance. He beat Lady Luna once, in nothing but his skin. But everyone knows the Dona never forgives a slight. The rush of depressurisation dwindles to silence. The outlock opens. Lucasinho steps out on to the regolith. Jinji guides him to the tracks of the Mackenzie rover. From there he can easily follow the trail north. He won’t know for how far, how long, but he will know where he is going. Muscle memory never forgets and Lucasinho drops into the rhythm of walking in a shell-suit. It’s easy to over-move. The haptics are sensitive, even on this old, cheap VTO model. Let the suit do the work.
Soon all other tracks diverge and only the twin tyre tracks of the Mackenzie rover lead Lucasinho. The sun is high, the surface is bright, Earth is a wan sliver of blue. Lucasinho sings to himself to keep his mind from drifting. The suit is equipped with games, music, old telenovella seasons, but entertainment systems take power. His songs fall into the rhythm of his steps, rattle round and round in his head like hallucinations. He finds he is singing his own lyrics to the tunes.
Lucasinho, time to call in, Jinji says.
‘Ola Luna!’
The link is audio only, for power conservation reasons.
‘Ola Luca!’
Luna’s voice, divorced from her body, her presence, her image, sounds strange to Lucasinho. He is listening to a human being but something higher, rarer, wilder and wiser. Anjinho, he calls her, the old family endearment. Little angel. So she sounds to Lucasinho.
‘How are you? Have you had your water?’ Lucasinho left instructions for Luna to take a drink every twenty minutes. It diverts her from realising that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast in the apartment.
‘I’ve had my water. When are you coming back? I’m bored.’
‘As soon as I can, anjinho. I know you’re bored, but don’t touch anything.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ Luna says.
‘I know you’re not. I’ll call again in an hour.’
Lucasinho trudges on into the badlands of Taruntius. A single marching tune has lodged in his head and it is driving him crazy. He could ask Jinji how far he has walked, how long he might have to continue, but the answer could be dismal. The tracks lead ever onward. In his red and gold shell, Lucasinho tramps ever onward.
Something. The sole advantage of Lucasinho’s boring moonwalk is that he has become acute to the landscape of the Taruntius and any variation in its monotony.
‘Jinji, enhance.’
The visor shows him the aerial and masts of a rover reaching up above the close horizon. Over a handful of minutes the rover appears and suddenly Lucasinho is beside it. The sasuited figure he saw on the relay’s cameras is still upright in the saddle. For an instant he is seized by the fear that the figure will lunge at him and smash a rock through his faceplate. Impossible. No one can survive that long in a sasuit. Certainly not, as he sees as he walks around the rover, a sasuit with a twenty centimetre gash running from right nipple to hip. That’s a problem. Another problem. He will deal with that later.
‘Where’s the hard point?’ Lucasinho asks. Jinji highlights the port and Lucasinho unreels his network cable and plugs it in. As he thought, the rover is as dead as its passenger. He grits his teeth as he runs the power cable from his suit to the rover, feels the transfer of charge from his batteries to the rover’s like supernatural healing leaving him. He needs the rover’s AI awake, even if he cannot spare the power to drive it back to the relay. Data spills across his lens, and he dives deep for what he needs. The brakes are off. The steering is unlocked. There is the tow-cable release. Lucasinho unreels the tow cable, throws it around his shoulder and clips it into a harness.
‘Luna? I’m coming back.’ Lucasinho leans into the harness. The rover resists him for a moment, then the haptic rig feeds power to the motors and overcomes the inertia. Lucasinho tows the rover back along the line of its own tracks.
Tracks stay forever on the moon. The surface is a palimpsest of journeys.
It is never as long coming back as going out.
Lucasinho rolls the rover to a halt. Jinji shows him the relay’s charge point. Recharging the rover’s batteries will drain almost all of the relay’s power but he was committed to this course the moment he stepped out of the airlock on to the surface. The coupling connects, the rover wakes in a dozen tiny operating lights and beacons.
Next the sasuit. That’s the way to think of it: a life-saving device that needs some work to make it operable. Don’t think of the dead human being inside. Lucasinho tries to work out the best way to unhook the corpse from the saddle. She has frozen solid. He unclips the suitpack from the dead woman and opens the outlock.
‘I’m sending something through to you,’ he says to Luna.
‘I can work a lock,’ Luna says. ‘And I’ve had my water.’
Lucasinho rocks the corpse gently on to her back and lifts her, legs bent at the knees, one arm at her side, the other resting on the control panel. He carries her to the lock. They must cycle through together. He can’t ask Luna to haul a frozen corpse out of the airlock. It would still be burn-cold, it would be too heavy. It’s a corpse. Lucasinho backs into the lock until the rear of his suit hits the inlock door. He drags the frozen body into the lock, hissing through his teeth in frustration as he tries to manoeuvre it around him, fitting his head and torso into the geometry of limbs and torso. Lucasinho is on his back, the body on top of him, its knees on his shoulders, his helmet between its knees, its head at the groin plates of his suit. Sixty-nining an ice-corpse. Lucasinho barks out a dark, fearful, private laugh at that. No one else will ever know that joke.
‘Luna, I’m coming in. Stay away from the airlock. Just do what I say.’
Jinji cycles the lock. Lucasinho listens to the rising scream of air and it is the sweetest sound he has ever heard. He pushes himself out of the lock on his back, arms wrapped around the corpse. Lucasinho drags the corpse to the vacant BALTRAN pod and shuts it in. He doesn’t want to think about the mess he will find after the body has thawed, but it’s out of Luna’s sight and there are other pods racked up, when the power – if the power – ever resumes.
He staggers out of the shell-suit. All strength has left him. He has never been so tired: mind, muscle, bones, heart. It’s not over yet. It’s not even completely begun. There is so much to do and only he can do it and all he wants is to lie against the wall and turn his back to all those things that must be done and beg a little sleep from them.
‘Luna, can I have some of your water?’
He does not know where she appears from but she gives him her flask and he tries not to gulp it all at once to wash the taste of the suit out of his mouth. Suit water always knows it was recently piss.
‘Luna, can I snuggle up with you?’
She nods and nuzzles up against him. She is wearing the rest of his clothes, a baggy 80s-style waif. Lucasinho folds his arms around her and tries to find comfort on the steel mesh. He fears he is too tired to sleep. He shivers. The cold has reached deep. You’ve so much to do, an insane amount to do and a thousand things could kill you yet but the start is made.
‘Jinji, don’t let me oversleep,’ he whispers. ‘Wake me when she’s defrosted.’
‘What?’ Luna murmurs. She is a small nugget of warmth, coiled against his belly.
‘Nothing,’ Lucasinho says. ‘Nothing at all.’
* * *
Lucasinho wakes, tries to move. Pain stabs through his ribs, his back, his shoulder and neck. The metal mesh is embossed on his cheek. His head is thick and stupid; his arm is dead and numb where Luna has fallen asleep on it. He slides the arm free without waking her. Luna sleeps like a stone. Lucasinho needs to piss. On the way to the head he has a wiser idea.
‘What are you doing?’ Luna is awake now, watching him empty the scanty contents of his bladder into the shell-suit.
‘The suit will recycle it. You’ll need the water.’ Lucasinho’s piss is dark and cloudy. Piss should not look like that.
‘Okay then,’ she says.
‘Is there anything to eat?’ Lucasinho asks.
‘Some bars.’
‘Eat all of it,’ Lucasinho orders.
‘What about you?’
‘I’m fine,’ Lucasinho lies in the face of the chasm in his belly. He has never known hunger before. So this is how poor people feel. Hungry and thirsty and short of breath. The short breath will come. ‘I’m going to get us another suit and then we drive right out of here.’
‘Is that the dead woman in the capsule?’
‘Yes. Did you look?’
‘I looked.’
He dreads this next part of his plan. Shards of panic at what he would have to do to get the sasuit woke him again and again from the drop into exhausted sleep. Do it fast, do it smart, give yourself no time to think. Lucasinho opens the BALTRAN capsule door, seizes the dead suited woman by the arm and drags her to the deck. She comes awkward, stiff-limbed. Lucasinho feels through the suit that she is not totally thawed. Lucasinho turns her face down. First he unlatches the helmet. He almost gags at the reek. Everyone stinks in a sasuit but this is something he has never experienced before. He fights down retch after retch. Stomach heaving, Lucasinho sets the helmet aside and peels back the webbing. Hands shaking, he opens the seal. Another gale of stench, which he realises is death. Lucasinho has seen death, but he has never smelled it. Zabbaleen take away the dead, in their soft-tyred jitneys, no mess, no dirt, no odour.
Lucasinho holds his breath as he peels the suit away from the flesh. Her skin is so white. He almost touches it, stops as he feels the cold deep within. Tricky now. He must pull an arm from a sleeve. The second should come more easily after he frees the first. The gloves suck at the fingers and the elbow fights him. Cursing, he sits on the deck, turns her face away from him and, one foot braced against the dead woman’s shoulder, tugs the obstinate sleeve free from the body. In fast to pull free the other arm. Now he must roll the body over to work the suit down the torso and release the legs one at a time.
He stands over the dead woman and hauls at the suit. The body jerks. He pulls the suit down over her breasts and belly, smearing blood from the terrible knife wound down over the small convexity of the woman’s stomach. Again, wiggling down over her buttocks. She has a flower tattooed on her left buttock. Lucasinho crumples into a sobbing, howling ball. The tattoo breaks him.
‘I’m sorry I’m so sorry,’ he whispers.
He takes a foot in two hands. The left, then the right leg pull free. The sasuit lies in his hands like a flayed skin. The blood-smeared woman lies on her back staring at the lights.
Now he must wear the suit. He peels off the shell-suit liner. In the deprinter it goes. Legs into legs, quick-smart, a wiggle and the sasuit is up to his chest. Don’t think about the wetness on your skin. One arm, both arms. Lucasinho reaches for the lanyard to pull up the seal. He tightens the tensioning straps. The suit is too short for him. That tension in his shoulders, toes, fingers will become an ache. The plumbing is female. He’ll endure that too. By the time he scoops up the helmet the printer has pinged out a new suit-liner, fresh, pink, Luna-sized. It’s heavy on scant resources, but Luna needs a liner to interact with the shell-suit.
‘Anjinho, I need a hand with this.’
Luna takes the roll of pressure tape from the airlock, seals the rent in the sasuit and walks around Lucasinho, wrapping him three layers deep.
‘Don’t use too much of that, we may need it,’ Lucasinho chides. ‘Now, you put on the liner and I’ll charge our suits.’
‘What’ll I do with the clothes?’
Lucasinho almost tells Luna just to leave them, then realises that he would be throwing away valuable material, organics that might be the difference between life and death out in Pyrenaeus.
‘Throw them in the deprinter and reprint them as pressure tape.’
‘Okay.’
Lucasinho does not think more than a second about that other stash of valuable organic material, lying face up in the capsule dock.
Luna returns in the pink suit liner with a small roll of pressure tape. She peers into the open shell-suit and grimaces. ‘It smells of piss.’ She steps in, the suit reads her smaller body and adjusts the internal haptic skeleton to support her. ‘Oh!’ she says as the suit seals around her.
‘Are you all right?’ Lucasinho asks. Luna has never been in a suit before.
‘It’s like the refuge they took me out of Boa Vista in, but smaller. But better because I can move.’
Luna clanks along the decking.
‘I take two steps and then it catches up with me.’
‘It’s really easy, the suit does all the work,’ Lucasinho says.
Power air and water at full charge, the familiars announce. Every breath, every sip, every step is budgeted now.
‘I’ll go through the lock first,’ Lucasinho says. ‘I’ll wait for you on the other side.’
It feels an age to Lucasinho, standing on the steps waiting for the lock to cycle, trusting and yet failing to trust in the pressure tape wrapped around the tear in his stolen sasuit, imagining the sudden evacuation of air as the tape gives way. It won’t give way. It’s been designed that way. Yet he can’t quite believe it, and already his fingers and toes are cramped from the too-small suit. Lights flash, the lock opens, Luna steps out.
Lucasinho uncoils a data cable from his pack and plugs it into the highlighted socket on Luna’s armour. ‘Can you hear me?’
Silence, then a giggle.
‘Sorry, I nodded.’
‘We use less power if we’re plugged together.’
Lucasinho is proud of the next bit. He thought it out as he was hauling the rover back to Lubbock. One rover, one seat. He positions Luna in her shell-suit on the saddle, then arranges himself in her lap. The shell-suit is slick and his seat is insecure. To come off at speed is to die. He hadn’t foreseen this problem. In the same instant, he has the solution. Lucasinho tears off lengths of pressure tape and binds himself to Luna, calves, thighs, torso. He hears her giggle on the comms link.
‘Good, anjinho?’
‘Good, Lucasinho.’
‘Then let’s drive.’
Jinji is already interfaced with the rover AI. A thought and Luna and Lucasinho, taped and wired together, race away from the upraised horns of the Lubbock relay across the stony regolith of Mare Fecunditatis.
* * *
It is ten years since Duncan Mackenzie last set foot on the surface but he refuses the shell-suit. Once a jackaroo, always a jackaroo. The sasuit is new, printed to the body profile of a middle-aged man with fitness issues, but the rituals of locking the seals, tightening the binding straps, are as familiar as faith. The pre-surface checks are little prayers.
He strides up the ramp. Behind him the great ziggurat of Hadley is a physical pressure, dark and looming. His first few footfalls kick up dust like an amateur but by the time he reaches the firing range he has fallen back into the old jackaroo lope. He missed this. Five suits greet him. The shooting party has set up on one of the service lanes between the ranks of mirrors.
‘Show me.’
A jackaroo in a shell-suit customised with a space-orc paint job slips a long device from her back. She levels and aims at the target. Duncan Mackenzie zooms in to make out the object far down the lane.
‘If she takes out one of my mirrors…’ he jokes.
‘She won’t,’ Yuri Mackenzie says. The shooter fires. The target explodes. The rifle ejects a heat sink pellet. The shooter turns to Duncan Mackenzie, awaiting instructions.
‘It’s essentially the same gauss rifle we used in the Mare Anguis war, but we’ve increased the acceleration. You can shoot it line of sight or engage the AI assist and fire over the horizon.’
‘I’m not happy with the shell-suit,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.
‘The recoil from the more powerful accelerator is pretty savage,’ Yuri says. ‘The shell-suit has more stability. And it offers some protection, should the worst happen.’
‘You’ve got twenty seconds rather than ten seconds,’ Vassos Palaeologos says. Duncan Mackenzie rounds on him.
‘No Mackenzie ever ran from a fight.’
‘Boss, he has a point,’ Yuri says. ‘This is not our fight. The Asamoahs have never been our allies.’
‘And we thought the Vorontsovs were,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.
‘With respect,’ Yuri presses, ‘we are uniquely vulnerable. VTO is taking out power plants all over the eastern quartersphere. Hadley could not sustain an orbital strike. Even an attack on the mirror array would effectively put us out of business. I can show you simulations.’
‘Print up fifty,’ Duncan Mackenzie orders on the common channel. ‘Contract any Jo Moonbeam ex-military. And I’ll need shell-suits. Not with that shit on them.’ He flicks a gloved finger at the shooter’s fangs, flames and skulls design. ‘Something that will tell everyone who we are and what we stand for.’
He turns and strides back down the corridor between the brilliant mirrors to the dark slot of the outlock. Above him the pinnacle of Hadley blazes with the light of ten thousand suns.
* * *
‘Cake,’ says Lucasinho Corta, ‘is the perfect gift for anyone who has everything.’
Coelhinho is one hour out from Lubbock, reaching down the gentle slope of Messier E’s north-western wall. Luna gave the rover its name. Rovers, she insisted, should have names. To make the kilometres pass, Lucasinho argued that names were silly. Machines were machines. Familiars have names, Luna argued. And the rover remained Coelhinho. So Lucasinho suggested they sing shared songs and after that Lucasinho tried to remember a bedtime story Madrinha Flavia had told him, which Luna knew better. They told riddles, but Luna was better at those as well. Now Lucasinho is delivering a discourse on cake.
‘Stuff is easy. If you want something, if you’ve got the carbon allowance, you print it out. Things aren’t really so special at all. Why give someone something they could print themselves? The only special thing about gifts is the thought you put into them. The real gift is the idea behind the object. To be special, it has to be rare, expensive, or have a lot of you invested in it. Pai once gave Vo Adriana some coffee, because she hadn’t had coffee in fifty years. That was rare and expensive, so that’s two out of three – rare and expensive – but it’s not as good as cake.
‘To make cake you take raw, unprinted materials like bird eggs and fat and wheat flour, and you put your time and heart into them. You plan every cake – is it going to be a sponge or a kilo-cake, is it going to be layers or lots of little cakes, is it a personal cake or an occasion cake? Is it orange or bergamot or chai or even coffee; is it going to be frosted or meringue? Is it going to be in a box or tied up with ribbons, are you going to fly it in by bot, does it have a surprise in the middle, will it light up or sing? Should you be serious or joky, are there allergies or intolerances or cultural or faith issues? Who else will be there when they cut it? Who’s going to get a piece and who isn’t? Is it even for sharing at all, or is it private, passionate cake?
‘Cake is subtle. Just one cupcake in the right place, at the right time, can say, There is no one but you in the whole universe right now, and I give you this moment of sweetness, texture, flavour, sensation. And then there are times when only something huge and stupid will do, like something I’d jump out of in full make-up, with icing butterflies and birds and little bots singing soap-opera songs, and it heals hearts and finishes feuds.
‘Cakes have a language. Lemon drizzle says, This relationship tastes sour to me. Orange is the same, but hopeful. Kilo-cake says that all is well with the world, everything is good and centred, the Four Elementals are in harmony. Vanilla says: careful, boredom; lavender is hoping or regretting. Sometimes both. Candied rose petals say, I think you’re cheating, but rose frosting says, Let’s make a contract here. Blue fruits are for blue days, when you really feel the vacuum over you and you need friends or just a friendly body. Red and pink fruits are sex. Everyone knows that. Cream can never be eaten alone. That’s the rule. Cinnamon is expecting, ginger is memory, cloves are for hurt; real or in the heart. Rosemary is regret, basil is being right. See, I told you so: that’s basil. Mint is a horror. Mint is bad cake. Coffee is the hardest and it says, I would move the Earth in the sky to make you happy.
‘That’s social cake. Then there’s the science of cake. Did you know cake tastes better on the moon? If you went to Earth and had cake you’d be so disappointed. It’d be flat and heavy and solid. It’s to do with pore size and crumb structure, and crumb structure is so much better on the moon. Every cake you make is three kinds of science: chemistry, physics and architecture. The physics is about heat, gas expansion and gravity. Your raising agents push up against gravity. The less gravity, the higher it raises. You might think, so, if lower gravity makes for better crumb structure, wouldn’t the perfect cake be one you made in zero gee? Actually, no. It would expand in all directions and you’d end up with a big ball of fizzing cake mix. When you came to bake it, it would be very difficult to get heat to the centre of the cake. You would end up with a soggy heart.
‘Then there is the chemistry. We have our Four Elementals, and cake has them too. For us it’s air, water, data, carbon. With cake it’s flour, sugar, fat, eggs or some other kind of liquid. Take two-fifty grams flour, two-fifty grams sugar, two-fifty grams butter, two-fifty grams eggs, which is about five. That’s your basic kilo-cake. You cream the sugar and butter. I do it by hand. It makes it personal. The fat encases the air bubbles and creates a foam. Now you beat the eggs in. Eggs have proteins that wrap around your air bubbles and stop them exploding and collapsing when they’re heated. Then you fold in the flour. You fold it in because if you beat flour too hard you’ll stretch the gluten.
‘Gluten is a protein in wheat, and it’s elastic. Without it, everything you bake would be flat. Stretch it too much and you end up with bread. Bread and cake are totally opposite ways wheat can go. I use special soft self-raising flours from wheat with low protein content. That means they have an agent built in that reacts and creates gas that blows up the gluten bubbles. That’s why my cakes are sweet and short and crumbly.
‘Baking is like building a city: it’s all about trapping and holding on to air. The gluten forms pillars and cells that support the weight of the sugar and the fat. It has to stand up, it has to stay up and it has to keep everything inside safe, aired and watered. You have to create a shell that keeps the cake moist and light. The sugar does that; it allows the crust to colour and set at a lower temperature than the inside of the cake. It’s all to do with caramelising. It’s like the gas seal that keeps our air from escaping through the rock.
‘Now, after all that, the baking. Baking is a three-part process: rising, setting and browning. As the temperature of the cake rises, all the air you’ve beaten in expands and stretches the gluten. Then at about sixty Celsius your leavening agents kick in and release CO2 and water vapour from your eggs and whoosh, your cakes rises to its final height. At about eighty Celsius the egg proteins come together and gluten loses its stretch. Finally, the Maillard reaction takes over – that’s the browning I told you about – and seals the surface. It locks the moisture in – if you’ve done it right.
‘Now comes the most difficult bit – deciding if it’s ready to come out of the oven. It’s dependent on many tiny things – humidity, draughts, air-pressure, ambient temperature. This is the art. When you think it’s ready, take it out, let it stand for about ten minutes to come loose from the baking tin, turn it on to a rack and let it cool. Try not to have a piece as soon as it comes out of the oven.
‘Then we get into the economics of cake. Take it out of the oven. We don’t have ovens. Most of us don’t have kitchens: we eat out from the hot-shop. Hot-shop ovens are totally different from the kind you use to bake cakes. You have to get one customer built and there are maybe twenty people on the entire moon know how to build an eye-level cake oven.
‘So: the Four Elementals: flour, sugar, butter, eggs. Flour is the ground-up seeds of the wheat plant. It’s a kind of grass. Down on Earth it’s one of the big carb sources but up here in the moon we don’t use it very much because it doesn’t give very much energy for the space and resources it uses. It takes fifteen hundred litres of water to grow one hundred grams of wheat. We get our carbs from potatoes and yams and maize because they’re much more efficient at turning water into food. So to make flour, we have to grow wheat specially, then harvest the seeds and grind them into fine dust. Grinding flour is even harder than building a cake oven – there are maybe five people in the whole world know how to build a flour mill.
‘Butter is a solid fat derived from milk. I only use butter from cow milk. We have cows, mostly for people who like to eat meat. And if you thought growing wheat drank up water, for one kilo of dairy produce, it takes a hundred times that.
‘Eggs. They’re not so hard; eggs are a big part of our diet. But our eggs are smaller than eggs on Earth because we’ve bred smaller birds, so you have to experiment to get the number right.
‘Sugar is easy – we can grow it or manufacture it, but a cake-baker uses many kinds of sugar. There’s unrefined, pure cane, general sugar, confectioner’s sugar, caster sugar, icing sugar – sometimes you need all of these for just one cake. So, you see, even to make a simple kilo-cake, you’re using things and skills that are rarer and more precious than jewels. When you taste cake, you’re tasting all of our lives.
‘And that’s why, when anyone can print anything; cake is the perfect gift.’
‘Luca,’ Luna says.
‘What is it, anjinho?’
‘Are we there yet?’
‘Not this crater, but the next one,’ Lucasinho says.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
Coelhinho climbs the low wall of Messier A crater.
‘Okay,’ Luna declares. ‘But enough cake.’
Cake, and talk of it, is keeping Lucasinho Corta awake and alert against the cold creeping from the patched gash in the sasuit. He can seal the suit for atmosphere but there is nothing he could do about damaged heating elements. Lucasinho knows from his Moonrun training that human bodies radiate little heat in vacuum, but he feels the persistent chill draw the heat from his blood and heart. Cold creeps up on you, makes you comfortable and numb and disconnected. It had taken all Lucasinho’s strength to keep his teeth from chattering as he talked cake.
Coelhinho tips over the outer rim of Messier A double crater and a big six-seat rover flies up over the inner rim, bounces twice, races across the crater floor and slides to a stop in front of Lucasinho. He hits the brakes and prays Ogun he doesn’t roll the top-heavy rover.
One rover, three crew. Safety bars lift, the crew drops down from their seats. Each carries the logo of Mackenzie Helium on their sasuit, each lifts a device from the equipment rack; a thing Lucasinho knows but has never seen before. A gun.
A jackaroo approaches Lucasinho and Luna, gun cradled, walks all the way around Coelhinho, steps in close to Lucasinho. Faceplate to faceplate.
‘What’s happening?’ Luna says.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Lucasinho says, then jumps in his skin as the Mackenzie jackaroo jams their faceplate against Lucasinho’s.
‘Turn your comms on, you fucking galah.’ The voice is a muffled yell, conducted by physical contact.
Jinji opens the common channel.
‘Sorry, I’m short on power,’ Lucasinho says in Globo.
‘It’s not just power you’re short on,’ says the jackaroo. Now that comms are up each jackaroo’s identifier appears above their shoulder: Malcolm Hutchinson, Charlene Owens-Clarke, Efron Batmanglij.
‘We need power, water and food. I’m very very cold.’
‘Couple of small questions first.’ Malcolm swings his gun to point at Lucasinho. It is a long, hastily-engineered device, all struts and stabilisers, magazines and electromagnetic cartridge racks, quickly printed out and assembled. ‘We live in the most gender-fluid society in human history so it’s possible that Nadia has reassigned, but I’ve never heard of a reassignment that made you ten centimetres taller.’
As soon as comms went up, the suit would have flashed up the identifier of its owner, Lucasinho realises. The other two guns swivel on to him.
‘Lucasinho, I’m scared,’ Luna says on the private link.
‘It’s all right, anjinho. I’ll get us out.’
‘Nadia’s suit, Nadia’s rover. Judging by the amount of tape on that suit, something hit her a killing blow.’
‘If I wanted to take her suit, do you think I would have done that much damage to it?’ Lucasinho says.
‘Are you sure that’s the kind of answer you want to give me?’
Bars hover on the edge of the red on all vital read-outs on Lucasinho’s helmet display.
‘I didn’t kill her, I swear. We were trapped at Lubbock BALTRAN. I tracked her and brought the rover and the suit back and patched them up.’
‘What the fuck were you doing at Lubbock BALTRAN?’
‘We were trying to get out of Twé.’
‘By BALTRAN.’ Lucasinho hates that way that this Malcolm Hutchinson turns Lucasinho’s every answer into the most stupid thing he has ever heard. ‘Mate, the BALTRAN is dead. The whole eastern quartersphere is dead. Gods know what’s going on at Twé. The Vorontsovs have shut down the railroads and they’re blasting every power plant they see into a hole in the regolith. I’ve had half my squad wiped out by fucking nightmares with fucking knives for fucking hands so you’ll understand if I’m a bit twitchy. So, where are you going and who the fuck are you?’
Lucasinho’s belly is painfully empty but he could heave acid into his helmet.
‘Let me talk,’ Luna says.
‘Luna, shut up. Let me handle this.’
‘Don’t tell me to shut up. Let me tell him. Please.’
The Mackenzie jackaroos are edgy. Lucasinho is about to talk himself into a bullet. A child’s voice might talk down the guns.
‘Okay.’
Luna’s familiar opens the common channel.
‘We’re trying to get to João de Deus,’ Luna says. The Mackenzie jackaroos flinch in their sasuits.
‘You’ve got a kid in that thing,’ Malcolm says.
‘There was only one shell-suit at Lubbock,’ Lucasinho says. ‘I tracked down the rover and, yes, I stole the suit.’ He remembers the name. ‘Nadia’s suit. I didn’t kill her.’
‘You’re taking a kid across Fecunditatis in a shell-suit.’
‘I didn’t know what else to do. We had to get out of Lubbock.’
‘You’re a long way from João de Deus,’ says the jackaroo with the Charlene identifier.
‘Right now we need to get to Messier,’ Lucasinho says.
‘We’ve just come from Messier,’ says the third jackaroo, Efron. ‘We left three dead back there. The bots will cut you to pieces.’
‘Hey Efron, kid present,’ Charlene says.
‘No point hiding the truth,’ Efron says.
‘We need air and water,’ Lucasinho says. ‘The rover is about out of power and we haven’t eaten since I don’t know when.’
‘I’m really hungry,’ Luna says.
Lucasinho hears Malcolm swear under his breath.
‘There’s an old Corta Hélio bivvie at Secchi. It’s the nearest resupply point now. We’ll get you there.’
‘That’s halfway back to Taruntius,’ Lucasinho says.
‘Okay then, starve or suffocate,’ Malcolm says. ‘Or, in your case, freeze. Efron.’ Efron detaches a small packet from his suitpack and tosses it to Lucasinho. It’s a heat pack: slow-release exothermic gel in a glass container. ‘That’ll keep you warm. There’s only one problem.’ He prods Lucasinho’s p-taped torso with the muzzle of his gun. ‘It has to go inside your suit.’
‘What?’
‘How long can you hold your breath, mate?’
Lucasinho’s head is reeling. Hunger, exhaustion, cold. Now he has to bare his skin to the cold surface of Lady Luna again.
‘I’ve got a Moonrun pin,’ he stammers.
‘Well fuck-a-dee-fuck for you, rich boy. Moonrun is ten, fifteen seconds. We have to get the old tape off, get the pack in and tape you up again. Forty, maybe sixty seconds?’
That could kill him. The cold will kill him. Could, will. Again, Lady Luna makes the decisions for him.
‘I can do that,’ Lucasinho says.
‘Good boy. Hyperventilate for one minute and then dee-pee the helmet. I’ll need to link to your suit AI.’
‘I have tape,’ Luna says as Lucasinho peels himself from her shell-suit.
‘Good girl. Charlene, Efron.’
Jinji switches the suit supply over to pure O2. It hits Lucasinho like an axe. He wavers, hands move to hold him up. He breathes deep, deeper, supercharging brain and blood with oxygen. He’s done the Moonrun. He’s run fifteen metres across the surface in only his skin. This is easy. Easy. But on the Moonrun he was brought down to micro-pressure over an hour. This will be instantaneous. The human skin is a robust pressure containment surface … Sasuit lesson one. All you need is something tight to maintain that pressure, hold water and retain warmth.
De-pressuring the suit in five …
Lucasinho empties his lungs. In vacuum you breathe out to stop your lungs rupturing.
… Two, one …
‘Stand by,’ Malcolm commands.
Evacuating. Air shrieks to silence as Jinji empties the suit. Lucasinho screams silently at the sudden pain stabbing through each ear. Charlene moves in with her blade, carefully cutting the tape and peeling it back.
‘Keep still kid, hold him still.’
‘Clear.’
Then burning heat as Malcolm tucks the pack inside the tight weave. Lucasinho has to breathe. He has to breathe. His brain is winking out cell by cell. He thrashes. A woman’s voice, faint and high as a saint, shouts, Hold him still. Lucasinho opens his mouth. Nothing there. Expands his lungs. Nothing there. This is how you die in vacuum, everything closing down, narrowing in, throbbing. The tiny, distant voices, the iron hands holding him, everything burning.
Tiny distant voices …
And he’s back. Lucasinho lunges forward. Safety bars hold him in. He’s safe in a seat on the Mackenzie rover. Air. Air is wonderful. Air is magic. He takes ten deep breaths, in fast, out slow; in slow, out fast. Mouth, nose; nose, mouth. Nose. Mouth. Glorious breathing. Warm. Heat. He feels pain beneath his bottom left rib: the heat pack, tightly compressed by the sasuit and the p-tape. He’ll bruise there, but Lucasinho appreciates the ache. It means he doesn’t have frostbite.
‘Luna?’ he croaks.
‘You’re back then,’ Malcolm says on the common channel.
‘Over here,’ Luna says. ‘Are you all right?’
‘If he’s talking, he’s all right,’ Malcolm says. Lucasinho looks around him, at the cables and tubes plugging him into the rover. He thinks water and is rewarded with cold, pure refreshment from the nipple. Lucasinho’s gasp of pleasure over the common channel makes the jackaroos laugh. ‘It’s still recycled piss, but at least it’s someone else’s piss,’ Malcolm says. ‘There’s even some nutrient shit. I reckon you’re starving enough to eat it.’ Efron tethers Lucasinho’s appropriated single-seater behind the big rover and swings up into his seat.
‘So if you haven’t any objections, Lucasinho Corta,’ Malcolm says, ‘we’re going to Secchi.’
* * *
There is something in front of his face. Lucasinho wakes with a cry of claustrophobic panic. He’s in the suit, the same fucking suit. Sleep-drool has dried on his cheek to a crystalline crust. He can smell his own face inside the helmet.
‘You’re awake.’ Malcolm’s voice. ‘Good. We have a problem.’
Jinji resolves a map: the convoy and the Corta Hélio cache are obvious, as is the line of contacts between rovers and safety.
‘Those are…’
‘I know what they are, kid.’
‘Can you circle round?’
‘I can, but the moment they catch sight of us, they’ll run us down. We’re big and we’re heavy and I’ve seen those fuckers move.’
‘What do we do?’
‘We’re going to drop you and the girl. You take the other rover – there’s enough charge to make it – and run straight for the bivvie. We’ll try and draw the bots off.’
‘But you said you couldn’t outrun them.’
‘Where’s your fucking faith, kid? Without you, we might lose them. We might even take a few of them. These guns are pretty good at taking out the fuckers. What I know for certain is that if we stick together, we die together.’
Suitpacks are loaded with water and air, power cells charged. Luna positions herself in the saddle, Lucasinho carefully tapes her to the rover; then himself to her. Lucasinho has explained their danger simply and honestly and she knows what to do without question or instruction. The single-seater rover powers up at Jinji’s touch. Malcolm touches forefinger to helmet: a salute before battle. He guns the big rover, circles and in moments he is over the horizon. Lucasinho waits for his dust plume to settle before opening up the single-seater.
No comms, Malcolm said. See you at Secchi; or in the next one.
You know who we are, Lucasinho said on a private channel. Why are you helping us?
Whatever comes out of this, it’ll never be the same old moon again, Malcolm said.
‘Luna,’ Lucasinho says. They are plugged together again, for radio quiet and intimacy.
‘What?’
‘Have you had some water?’
‘I’ve had my water.’
‘We’ll be there soon.’
* * *
Analiese Mackenzie waits at the inlock. The doors take forever to open, but here they come; dust-darkened despite the airblades, helmets and suitpacks hooked in their hands. Their boots are stone, their suits lead. Cold exhaustion in every sinew. The fighters shuffle past her, eyes downcast. They fought a battle at the gates of Hypatia. Demolition charges had destroyed the three bots that had survived AKA’s arrow storm, but at the price of seven blackstars.
Suicide missions. And the rumours say that reinforcements are already dropping over Eastern Tranquillity, braking thrusters stuttering in the sky.
Reinforcements. How does she know a word like that?
He comes shuffling.
‘Wagner.’
He turns to the sound of his name. He knows her. He cannot forget her, not in his dark aspect, the only Wagner Corta she has ever known. That doubt, that reticence that hesitates over the first step towards her isn’t from fear of misrecognition but from guilt. He ran to Meridian. She told him not to come back to their home in Theophilus, but he knows he left her to face her own family alone. The Mackenzies have never forgiven traitors. She paid a price. He survived when her family destroyed his. He kept his head down and lived. He looks like death now. He looks defeated.
He looks at his crew. A handsome, strong-featured woman nods to him. I’ll take it from here, laoda.
‘Analiese.’
He can’t understand what he’s seeing. Theophilus is her home, what is she doing in Hypatia?
‘Come on, little wolf.’
The bed fills the cubicle. Wagner fills the bed, spread and sprawled, somewhere deeper than sleep. Analiese was lucky to get even this tiny capsule. When the rail network went down, Hypatia, as the quartersphere’s busiest interchange, became a refugee camp of street sleepers and hot-bunkers, stranded passengers lying in the warmth from the heat exchange ducts.
She leans against the corridor wall and watches the wolf. He is a mess. His skin is bruised and seamed from the creases of a too-long-worn sasuit. The soft brown she loved to touch is grey and dull with fatigue. He was never mass and muscle but he’s bones and wire now. He can’t have eaten for two, three days. He’s terribly dehydrated. He reeks.
She traces back the path from bed to first sight; a touch of eyes at the University of Farside’s 15th Paralogics Symposium workshop on doxastic and other belief logics. He glanced away first. She leaned to her colleague Nang Aein, still hung-over from first-night drinking, and asked, Who is that? Her familiar could have given her the name in a thought from the attendee list but this was conspiracy, she wanted him to see her ask about him.
‘That’s Wagner Corta,’ Nang Aein said.
‘Corta? As in?’
‘The Cortas.’
‘He has eyelashes to die for.’
‘He’s strange. Even for a Corta.’
‘I like strange.’
‘How are you with scary?’
‘I’m not scared of Cortas.’
‘Are you scared of wolves?’
Then the session broke up and everyone headed for tea and she kept her eyes on the scary Corta so she wouldn’t miss whatever moment he chose to look back at her. Which he did, at the double doors of the colloquium hall. He had the darkest, saddest eyes she had ever seen. Dark ice from the birth of the world, held in the permanent shadow. As a child she had wounded all her toys, the better to nurse and heal them. She found him at the point of gravitational stability between three conversation clusters, tea-glass between fingers.
‘I’ve never liked it either.’ She had always been astute at the tiny observations that cued social openings. His tea was untouched. ‘It’s not a proper drink.’
‘So what do you call a proper drink?’
‘I could show you.’
On the third moccatini he told her about the wolf.
On the fifth she said, All right.
* * *
The little wolf sleeps for a night and a day and a night and wakes instantly, every sense glowing. His first words: My crew.
They’re all right, Analiese says but he won’t take her word for it, not until he’s called through to Taiyang’s Hypatia office. Zehra took care of the debrief and put Glass Crew Lucky Eight Ball on furlough. Taiyang can provide him with a basic access familiar but the full restore back-ups of Dr Luz and Sombra are at Meridian and communications across Nearside are still down. The sight of Wagner, familiar-less, digitally naked, arouses Analiese Mackenzie.
A night and a day and a night is an age in war. Where information fails, rumours thrive. Twé remains besieged, buried, silenced, while its agraria die in the gloaming, light-starved. Queen of the South has five days of food left, Meridian three. Hot-shops have been attacked; 3D-printers hacked. Taiyang coders have successfully reverse-hacked some of the possessed graders but any attempt to marshal them into siege-busting squadrons draws fire from orbit. Ice. VTO is firing ice from its mass driver. The Vorontsovs have a cometary head moored up there; enough ammunition to stage a new Late Heavy Bombardment. And the trains sit idle in the stations and the BALTRAN is down and any rover venturing up on to surface draws bots with blades on their feet. There’s an entire Equatorial express stranded on the rails in the middle of the Mare Smythii. They ran out of water a day ago. They’re drinking their own piss. Their air supply has failed. They’re eating each other.
Rumours and whispers. Duncan Mackenzie has sent twenty fifty a hundred five hundred shooters – Jo Moonbeam soldiers one and all – to break the siege of Twé. Supported by AKA archers, they’re going to assault Twé’s outlocks and liberate the city. The Asamoah-Mackenzie army has been cut to pieces, their body parts scattered across the Sea of Tranquillity. Meridian is under siege. Meridian’s power has failed and the entire city is in darkness. Meridian has been occupied. Meridian has already surrendered.
I have to get to Meridian, Wagner says.
You need to heal, Lobinho.
She hires a private cabin in a banya. Three hours should do it. There is a steam cell and a slab and a small plunge pool. Wagner lies prone on the sintered stone slab, glossy with sweat. With a curved strigil Analiese scrapes dirt and dust and caked perspiration from his skin.
‘You were waiting for me,’ Wagner says, cheek pressed on the smooth warm stone, head turned to one side.
‘I was coming back from a concert in Twé,’ Analiese says. ‘I got stuck when the trains went down.’
‘You helped me escape and I abandoned you.’
Analiese straddles Wagner’s back and slowly scrapes the perspiration-glued dirt from his neck.
‘Don’t talk,’ Analiese says. ‘Give me your arm.’ It hurts still, a sudden tearing of a scab she thought long grown-over. Fresh blood.
‘I’m sorry,’ Wagner says.
Analiese slaps his lean little ass.
‘Come here.’
She slips his cleansed, glowing skin into the hot water of the plunge pool. Wagner gasps, skin tingling. Analiese slips in beside him. They lean against each other. Analiese scoops wet hair away from her face. Wagner sweeps her hair behind her ear and runs his finger down the edge of her ear to the line of pale scar tissue that is all that remains of her left lobe.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘An accident,’ she lies.
‘I have to get to Meridian.’
‘You’re safe here.’
‘There’s a boy. He’s thirteen. Robson.’
Analiese knows the name.
‘You’re still not strong enough, Lobinho.’
She can’t persuade him. She never could. She contends against forces beyond human strength: the light and the dark, Wagner’s two natures, the pack. Family. Neck deep in warm, healing water, in the middle of a war, she shivers.
* * *
Secchi is a survival-scrape, a sinter tube no wider than the airlock at each end, bermed over with regolith. Lucasinho and Luna fit into it like twins in a womb. Lucasinho can’t imagine the jackaroos in here as well. But there is air and water, food and regolith overhead, a place for Luna to slip out of the shell-suit. Lucasinho is swathed in so much p-tape the only way to remove his sasuit is to cut it off. The heat pack is a rectangle of dull, warm pain hard under his low left rib. The only comfortable way to lie is on his right side facing the wall. He lies on the pad that still smells print-fresh, drained in every joint and muscle but unable to relax for the drop into sleep. He lies in his dusty, too-small sasuit staring at the curving sinter wall, imaging the depth of dirt smeared over, the vacuum beyond, the tick of radiation through space, soil, sinter, Lucasinho Corta: listening for the sound of the lock cycle that mean Malcolm’s jackaroos have returned, or the bots – which he has never seen but has imagined in every bladed, spiked, stabbing detail – cycling through to kill them in their cots.
‘Luca. Are you asleep?’
‘No. Can’t you sleep?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Can I come in with you?’
‘I’m real dusty, anjinho. And stinky.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Come on.’
Lucasinho feels the small, tight heat of Luna’s body curl in around the curve of his back.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’
‘This is all right, isn’t it?’
‘That meal was good, wasn’t it?’
The bivvie’s cached meals come in two varieties: tomato-based or soy-based. Tomato, Luna decided. She was a bit soy-intolerant. Lucasinho did not want any digestive irregularity in a six by two metre shelter. They prepared the self-heating meals one at a time, because the container popping open when the contents were heated was so more-ish. Lucasinho’s saliva glands ached at the odour of tomato sauce on potato gnocchi.
‘No it wasn’t,’ Luna says in her cousin’s ear. ‘It tasted of dust.’ Then she laughs, a small private giggle that feeds on its privacy until she can’t hold it in and Lucasinho catches it and together on the cot they laugh like they laughed after their first BALTRAN jump, until their breaths are short and their muscles ache and tears run down their faces.
* * *
Lucasinho.
Lucasinho, wake up.
You have to wake up.
He surges awake, bangs his head on the low ceiling. The bivvie. He’s in the bivvie. He’s been asleep two hours. Two hours. That’s Luna beside him. She’s already awake. Both familiars have woken them. That’s bad news.
Multiple contacts are approaching.
‘Shit. How many?’
Fifteen.
Not the Mackenzie Metals jackaroos, then.
‘Can you identify them?’
They’re maintaining communications silence.
‘How long until they get here?’
At their current rate, ten minutes.
Get suited up, get Luna suited up, get out, get the rover running. Gods.
‘Luna, you need to get into your suit.’
She’s thick and dazed from broken sleep. He scoops her up and slots her into the shell-suit. She fully wakes as the infraskeleton closes around her.
‘Luca, what’s happening?’
‘Luna, Luna, we need to get out of here.’
They need to get out quick and dirty. There’s a trick; he saw it in a telenovella and had Jinji look it up to check if it was possible. It is. It’ll buy them the precious minute it takes the lock to cycle. A minute is life.
Helmets lock, suit checks cycle and light green.
‘Luna, hang on to me.’
Her suit-arms are long enough to wrap around Lucasinho’s skinny frame. Gloves click on to the frame of his suitpack.
‘In three, two, one…’
Jinji blows the lock. The shelter explosively decompresses. Lucasinho and Luna are blown from Secchi in a jet of bedding, soya and tomato meals, chopsticks, toiletries, ice-crystals. They hit. Impact drives the air from Lucasinho’s lungs. Things crack. The heat pack is a steel fist. That never happened in the telenovella. They roll. Luna slams into the parked rover, Lucasinho into Luna.
‘Okay?’ he gasps.
‘Okay.’
‘Let’s go.’
Lucasinho gasps in pain as he tapes himself and Luna to Coelhinho. He’s damaged. What has he done to the suit?
‘Hold tight.’
Luna’s gloves lock into the rover’s frame. Lucasinho kicks in maximum acceleration. The front wheels lift. If they go head-over-ass here, they’re dead. Luna instinctively leans forward. Lucasinho gasps again as ribs and muscles grate. Coelhinho blasts away from Secchi. Its dust plume will be visible over most of West Fecundity. As long as Lucasinho can stay ahead of the bots. What had Malcolm called them? The fuckers. Fuckers they are. As long as the fuckers run out of power before him. He’s had hours charging. The fuckers won’t have had that. He assumes. Their batteries will be low. He assumes. Their battery capacity will be about the same as a Mackenzie Metals single-seat rover. He assumes. So many assumes. Fuckers.
‘Jinji, are they there?’
They’re there, Lucasinho.
‘Are they close?’
They’re closing.
‘Shit,’ Lucasinho swears under his breath. ‘How fast?’
At our current speed, our courses will intersect in fifty-three minutes.
Courses will intersect. Familiar-talk for blades and blood.
‘Jinji, if we shut down the sensors, external comms, beacons and tags, how much extra battery life will that give us?’
At our current speed, thirty-eight minutes.
‘How far will that take us?’
Jinji rezzes a map, the rover’s final resting place a flag twenty kilometres short of João de Deus.
‘And if we match their speed?’
The destination flag shifts ten kilometres closer to the southern edge of the equatorial solar strip. Too far to walk. The decision is made.
‘Take us as close as you can to João de Deus.’
Coelhinho speeds over the regolith and Lucasinho tries not to imagine blades at the back of his neck. He’s tired of being afraid, so very very tired.
The line of black across the edge of the world is so total, so abrupt that Lucasinho almost stops the rover. Part of the world is missing. The black grows by the second, the metre, swallowing the world.
‘It’s Glassland,’ Luna says. They have come to the border of the equatorial solar farm, the belt of black which the Suns are wrapping around the world. Perspective shifts with Lucasinho’s understanding: the black is much closer than he thought. Will it take his speed? Will he crack it, will it shatter under him and collapse? Fuck it. There are fifteen killer bots behind him.
‘Yay!’ he shouts, and Luna echoes him and they roar full speed on to the glass.
* * *
When Lucasinho looks over his shoulder he can no longer see Coelhinho. Not even the tip of its aerial. There has been no report of the pursuing bots for twenty minutes now. Lucasinho and Luna are alone on the glass, the lithe white sasuit, the lumbering red and gold shell-suit. Glass: smooth, featureless, perfect black in every direction. Black above, black beneath; the heavens reflected in the dark mirror. You could grow crazy looking down at your own patiently marching image. You could walk in circles forever. Jinji steers them by offline mapping. A ghostly shape inside the glass is João De Deus, down beyond the horizon, never seeming to grow closer. Horizon: it is impossible to tell where sky ends and earth begins.
Lucasinho imagines he feels the warmth of the energy stored in the glass through the soles of his boots. He imagines he feels the tic-tic of fine pointed bot feet through the reflecting glass. Paces pass into kilometres, moments into hours.
‘The first thing I’m going to do, when I get to João de Deus, is make a special cake, and we’ll eat it all just ourselves,’ Lucasinho says.
‘No no, the first thing you’re going to do is have a bath,’ Luna says. ‘I smelled you at Secchi.’
‘Right then, a bath.’ Lucasinho pictures himself sliding into bubbling warm water, chin-deep. Water. Warm. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to have guava juice from the Café Coelho,’ Luna says. ‘Madrinha Elis used to take me and it’s the best.’
‘Can I have one with you?’
‘Of course,’ Luna says. ‘Very cold.’ And a dozen alarms light up red inside Lucasinho’s helmet.
Luna has a suit breach, Jinji says in its ever-calm, ever reasonable voice.
‘Luca!’
‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ But he can see the water vapour jet in sparkling ice crystals from the shell-suit’s left knee joint. The corrugated jointing has failed under the constant rub of dust. The suit is open to vacuum.
‘Hold your breath!’ Lucasinho shouts. The tape. The tape. The extra roll of tape he insisted Luna print out and bring with them. The one they might need: did need. Where is it where is it where is it? He closes his eyes, visualises it in Luna’s hand. Where do her hands go? To the shell-suit’s left thigh pocket. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’
Luna’s air supply is at three per cent, Jinji says.
‘Shut the fuck up, Jinji!’ Lucasinho roars. He snaps the roll of tape from the pocket and tears free the end, wraps it around the leg joint. Dust flies from his fingers: treacherous, abrading lunar dust. He wraps until the tape runs out. ‘How much has she got, Jinji.’
I thought you wanted me to shut the fuck up, Jinji says.
‘Tell me, then shut the fuck up.’
Internal pressure is stabilised. However, Luna has insufficient oxygen to reach João de Deus.
‘Show me how to transfer air over,’ Lucasinho shouts. Graphics light up all over Luna’s suit. ‘Are you all right?’ Lucasinho asks as he locks the supply hose from his suitpack to Luna’s. ‘Talk to me.’
Silence.
‘Luna?’
‘Lucasinho, will you hold my hand?’ The voice is small and afraid but it’s a voice, rich on oxygen.
‘Sure.’ He slips his gloved hand into the shell-suit’s gauntlet. ‘Jinji, has she enough?’
Lucasinho, I have bad news. There is insufficient oxygen for you both to make it to João de Deus.
‘Good to go, Luna?’ A slight tremor in the shell-suit. ‘Did you nod your head again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s go then. It’s not far.’ Hand in hand they walk across the black glass, treading on stars.
Did you hear what I said, Lucasinho?
‘I heard what you said,’ Lucasinho says. The shell-suit’s stride is half a metre longer than his. He half-runs across the glasslands. His muscles ache; there is no strength left in his legs. He wants more than anything to lie down on the black glass and pull the stars over him. ‘We’re going because we have to go. What are my options?’
You don’t have any options, Lucasinho. I have solved the equations and you will run out of oxygen a minimum of ten minutes before the lock.
‘Dial me down.’
That is with me dialling you down.
‘Do it.’
I did it two minutes ago. You could reclaim some of Luna’s O2 …
‘Absolutely not.’ Already the words are like lead in his lungs. Every step burns. ‘Don’t tell Luna.’
I won’t.
‘She has to go on. She has to get to João de Deus. You have to do that for me.’
Her familiar is preparing a script for that.
‘You never know, though,’ says Lucasinho Corta. ‘Something will come up.’
I assure you it will not, Jinji says. I really cannot understand this optimism in the face of sure and certain facts. And I am bound to advise you not to literally waste what little breath you have by contradicting me.
‘Whose breath is it anyway?’ Lucasinho says.
You are going to die, Lucasinho Corta.
The certainty hits him, darts around his every obfuscation and denial and plunges its blade into his heart. This is where Lucasinho Alves Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta dies. In this too-small, patched-up, dusty sasuit. Mackenzies couldn’t kill him, bots couldn’t kill him. Lady Luna has saved him for her most intimate death: the kiss that draws the last breath from the lungs. That red and gold suit, the stars and glass full of their reflections, that blue crescent Earth, these too-small gloves –these are his last sensations, his last sights; the hiss of the respirator and the half-felt thud of his heart the last sounds.
And it’s not so bad, now it is close and inescapable. It always was. That’s the lesson of Our Lady of the Thousand Deaths. The only important thing now is how he meets it, walking towards it, with will and dignity. His lungs strain. He can’t catch enough air. Walk on. His legs are stone. He can’t put one in front of the other. His helmet read-outs are all red. His vision is narrowing. He can see Luna’s helmet, his hand in her hand. The circle tightens. He can’t breathe. He has to get out. There is no dignity at the end. He tears free from Luna’s hand, wrestles with his helmet, his suit, trying to get out of it. His brain is on fire. Red fades into white. An all-consuming whine fills his ears. He can’t see, can’t hear, can’t breathe. Can’t live. Lucasinho Corta falls into the white embrace of Lady Luna.