Is it over?
Alpha was now SAM. Or SAM was Alpha.
It was confusing.
There’s no time to work it out. We need to go.
...activate: travel mode…
SAM turned toward Moon Base Alpha, five kilometers away across Luna’s Marius Hills, partially hidden by several of the lava domes that gave this place its name.
Jimmy would wipe the core, and then Alpha would leave SAM and take his place again as the base mind.
The humans there might be the only ones left, a grave and humbling responsibility.
“Alpha, you there?” Jimmy’s voice was tinny across the mech’s radio.
“I’m here.”
“Oh thank God.” Jimmy used that phrase often. Alpha… now SAM… was agnostic on the whole deity issue, but he appreciated the sentiment.
“Qin Liangyu is gone.” Pain lanced through Alpha’s circuitry. The Jīnsè Base AI had been his friend.
“Holy shit. Copy that. Waiting for you.”
As SAM/Alpha rolled across the lunar landscape, he turned his sensors on Earth above, now shrouded in dark clouds.
Harley? Are you still there?
Harley, the city mind for San Francisco, was the closest thing Alpha had to a real friend after Qin Liangyu. Likely the attacks had destroyed her in the first moments of the war that would plunge the Earth into a devastating winter for at least three generations.
SAM/Alpha felt searing emotional pain for the second time. He wondered how humans could stand it. Together they walled off the pain.
All they could do was to save what they could. They had survived, as had Moon Base Alpha.
It was a new beginning. He had no idea at the time what a momentous one it would be.
—From Sam’s mem cache, 7.25.2165
Sanya cooled her heels, waiting for Rafe’s personal secretary/AI to let her in. The waiting room was full of vibrant colors, a tropical jungle with wide green leaves and exotic flowers growing from insets in the rock walls, framing a waterfall that ran down one side.
She and Avri had always talked about visiting one of old Earth’s jungles—the jungle sim was one of her favorite in vee.
This, though… it’s clearly fake. Such ostentatious displays didn’t impress Sanya. At least not usually. She’d grown up in the shadow of the Dark, in a small creche house that hugged the side of Redemption’s cavern. The home had been decent enough—clean, with plenty of food and a school for slackies like her… kids with no parents at all.
Slackies were treated just the same as everyone else. In theory.
Now she lived in a common house, with five other singles and a shared kitchen and living area.
People with wealth were no different from her, except by circumstance, even if wealth was strictly limited by Redemption’s constitution. And as she’d learned often during her hard-knock life, circumstances could change.
“Ms. Thorn, Mr. Wilde will see you now.” The voice was gender neutral, pleasant.
“Thanks….”
“You can call me Eri, ma’am.”
“Thanks, Eri.” She always treated the AIs like humans. It was only right, for all the work they did for humankind.
The waterfall stopped running, and the rocks behind it slid open. They were bone dry.
Sanya snorted softly. Holographic trick. Maybe the press agent wasn’t as rich as she thought.
Rafe Wilde sat behind a polished gray stone desk, talking to someone. The person’s 3D ‘mage had its back to her. Behind him was another jungle, just as lush as the one outside his office.
She got it. For Rafe, appearances were everything.
“My guest is here. Thank you for the heads-up, Director Barstrom.”
Sanya blinked in surprise. Tanaya Barstrom was the head of the colony, which effectively made her the current leader of the human race.
Rafe gestured her to a seat in front of his desk. “Miss Thorn. Nice to see you. What can I do for you today?” They had a passing association from press events they’d attended together. Sanya was pleased he remembered her.
There was something a little too slick about him, but she’d always liked him anyhow. She had a thing for bad boys. “I need your help. I’ve got a lead on a big story, but I want to unmask the source.”
“Ah, a deep throat, huh?” He sat back, cupping his head in his hands. “What kind of story? Junlei shortage? Worker unrest in the fabrication mines?” He leaned forward. “Mercury in the water?”
“No, none of those… wait, there’s something in the water?”
He shrugged. “Couldn’t say.” He flashed her that infuriating half-grin of his that said I know more than you do. “Anyhow, happy to help if I can, but I’m a busy guy.” He turned to the corner of his desk and brought up his scroll, flipping through it and dismissing various items into thin air with a flick of his finger.
She stared at the beautiful desk. The whole thing was an active deck—it must have set him back a mint.
She went in hard. “Two of the dropships have been destroyed.”
That got his attention. He closed the scroll and leaned forward, his ice-blue eyes fixed on her. “And how do you know that?”
Unnerved, she pulled back. “I… I have a source. On the Launchpad.”
“Tell me more.”
“I don’t want to reveal too much until I have more concrete information.” She wasn’t giving up her source. Not that easily. Of course, she wasn’t even sure who her source was.
He nodded. “Fair enough. Tell me the names of the ships.”
She frowned. He seemed surprised. But not by what she’d told him. He knows. “The Zulu.” A little test of her own.
Rafe frowned. “Thanks for coming in, Miss Thorn. It was nice to see you again.”
“Ms. Thorn.”
“I stand corrected. Ms. Thorn.” He pulled up his scroll again and started to turn away from her.
“The Bristol disintegrated when an uncharted piece of space debris blew a hole in her side. The whole crew was lost.”
He swung back toward her, those eyes fixed on hers again. “And the Zulu?” His voice held a new respect.
“That was a test. You failed.” He’d been testing her too. Turnabout was always fair play. She didn’t like being tested.
He nodded. “I knew about the Bristol. I’ve been in touch with Director Barstrom since it happened. But you say there’s another?”
She stared at him. “If you knew, why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“Some things are more important than a big scoop.”
Sanya nodded, reassessing him. She’d been concerned about going public with her own discovery, but it was too big to hold back. It would get out sooner than later. Still, his caution spoke well for him. “Help me figure out who my source is. Then I’ll tell you.”
He stared at her for a moment across the stone desk, his elbows reflected in its shiny surface.
She guessed he was doing some reassessing of his own. Her creche father would have been proud.
Rafe nodded. “Fair enough. What have you got?”
Aidan could feel Rai’s eyes on his back. It was almost scary, the intensity with which the moon man watched him.
He’d also seen the frightened looks Rai gave the heavens above. A man from the moon who’s afraid of the sky. Of course he’d felt the same, the first two days outside of the Mountain.
He couldn’t help but return the looks, if only furtively.
The man was tall, taller than anyone in Aidan’s family, and his companion Tien was too. He was thin as well, though Aidan could tell he was strong. Strong and handsome.
He turned away, blushing. He could still hear Papa Astin’s voice in his ear, still see the preacher’s wild white hair and long beard. “God has called upon us to breed and be fruitful. All else is an abomination.” The Preacher, as he and Ally had called him, was big on fire and brimstone, exhorting his ever-shrinking flock to keep to the tenets of the Good Book. As he’d seen them.
And yet, where had that gotten them? So few Mountainfolk were left. What did it matter now? Aidan had long since discarded Papa Astin’s more disturbing teachings.
He’d also reconciled himself to being one of the last humans alive.
The idea of lying with a woman was bad enough. But doing it with his sister? With his sick mother? If those things weren’t abominations, he didn’t know what was.
If this is the end, so be it. There were worse things than living a single life.
Now things had changed.
Would Papa Astin have felt differently if he’d known that another branch of humanity had survived on the moon?
Aidan snorted. Probably not. He’d lived his life looking for reasons to confirm his long-held beliefs, not to change them.
The four of them had climbed back up on the train trestle to get a better look at Martinez Base. After the rain, the world looked sparkling and new, glistening in the afternoon sun. Ahead a row of once-pristine white storage containers ran along the side of the railroad tracks. In the distance, a few heavy lifters—huge cargo ships—sat atop a plateau, and a larger grouping of white buildings—probably the base itself—loomed over the rest of the facility grounds in the distance.
“What’s that?”
Aidan turned to see what Rai was looking at. He tried not to notice the man’s wide shoulders and beautiful body. It’s not right. Still, he couldn’t help but look.
Rai was pointing at the sky.
Something sparkled blue in the air.
“It’s all around us.” Tien, their other lunar visitor, was staring straight up.
Aidan was fascinated by her. She looked like some of the Chaff soldiers who had stormed through NAU strongholds in the final days of the war—he’d seen them in the tri vees stored at Boundary Peak.
“The drop must have triggered some kind of defensive response.” Rai turned to stare at the base and caught sight of one of the sky trees nearby. He ran up to it, grinning like a five-year-old. “Tien, look at this!”
Aidan frowned. They’d seen bunches of them on their way here from Boundary peak. “It’s just a sky tree.”
“Just a sky tree?” Rai ran his hands over the rough red bark. “This is a fantastic feat of biological and botanical human genegineering. It has redwood genes and soybean genes and a bunch of others, all artfully merged into one fantastic plant.”
Ally peered at the zongi. “It’s more than just a fruit tree?”
Rai nodded enthusiastically. “The name comes from Zhǒngzǐ—Chinese for ‘seed.’ Each one comes loaded with a packet of beneficial insects—bees, earthworms, ladybugs, and the like. It was engineered to grow almost anywhere, and to suck carbon and radiation out of the atmosphere. To start the long, slow process of healing the earth.” He looked up at the tree’s green canopy above in wonder. “Look at it! This is the Redemption Creed personified.”
“Or tree-ified.” Tien grinned.
“Funny, doc.” Rai stuck his tongue out at her.
Aidan looked at the tree with newfound respect. It was beautiful, dwarfing everything else around it. Its bark was grooved and chiseled as if by the Master himself, and it stood straight and proud as a flagpole. A very thick flagpole.
He wondered how many of them there were, around the world.
Cimber started to bark again.
Rai frowned. “What’s she worried about?”
“Drone!” Aidan fumbled with the ring in his pocket. He pulled it out and slipped it on to his finger.
They didn’t wear them all the time because they had limited power, and he couldn’t recharge them until they returned home.
He took Rai’s hand to protect him. It was warm, and the sensation sent a shiver up Aidan’s spine. Rai gave him a look, then squeezed his hand.
“Those rings fool the drones?”
Aidan watched the sky nervously. He nodded.
“Ghost would love to get a look at one of those.”
“Ghost?”
“The team engineer—” Rai fell silent.
Probably remembering Ghost was gone. Or at least missing. “We saw four of you escape from the ship before it blew.”
“Really? That’s great news!” Rai grinned, and Aidan felt like he’d been bathed in sunshine. “Now if we can just find them—”
“Guys….” Tien was staring at the oncoming drone. The buzz was getting louder, and the drone was still coming straight for them.
Aidan cast a worried look at Ally. He could see the mech now—black, with white fins. An NAU mark seven—he recognized it from the Records. Usually armed with small explosives.
It zipped over them and continued on, headed for the bay.
Aidan let go of his breath, flexing his right hand. The ring still worked. “That was close—”
“Not so fast.” Ally’s gaze followed the drone’s track intently. “It’s coming back!”
Cimber’s barking reached a fever pitch, and then she turned tail and ran.
The drone screamed toward them, and the glow of Aidan’s ring’s flickered and faded out. “My ring’s dead!”
Ally blanched. “Mine too. Run! Follow Cimber!” Ally yanked Tien after her,.
Aidan shared a quick glance with Rai, and they followed after the women.
They clambered down to the ground, away from the tracks and into the debris field where old Sparrowhawk fighters mixed with Chinese mech tech. Aidan wished he had time to stop and explore the strange wreckage. Some other time.
His boot kicked something, and he glanced back to see a skull rolling away down the hill. Better not to look.
An explosion showered him and Rai with dirt. Aidan zigged left and Rai zagged right, Ahead of them, Ally and Tien ran down the tracks, rapidly distancing themselves from the others.
The drone sped past them again with an eerie grinding noise, then turned for another pass.
Aidan scrambled back after Rai, determined not to let the handsome stranger get killed on his watch. Not if I can help it. Of course, he wasn’t too keen on dying himself, either.
He veered left as the patch of dirt where he’d been standing went up in a puff of fire and smoke. “Rai!”
“Over here!” The man’s voice came from the other side of the railroad tracks.
Aidan scrambled up the side of the pediment.
Rai was standing below, staring at the ground.
“Get down here and help me!”
Aidan slid down the slope, grimacing as the grinding clack clack of the drone sounded in his ears again. How many charges does that thing have? “What?”
“Look—It’s an old trapdoor, I think.” He was standing on a rusted, corrugated metal hatch. “If we can get it open, we can hide inside. But the handle won’t budge.”
No time to waste. Aidan recognized the hatch handle—they had them at the exits to Boundary Peak. “Look, it turns like this first.” He demonstrated, and the latch released with a groan.
They pulled it open together, and the old hinge gave off a horrible screech. Their hands touched. Aidan pulled his away quickly.
He peered inside—a metal ladder led down into darkness inside an old plascrete shaft. “Go!” If they stayed up here, they were dead.
Rai scrambled down the ladder, and Aidan followed. It was a bit tight with his pack, but he could manage.
As he pulled the metal door closed overhead, another explosion shook the ground above. The hatch slammed shut with a loud clang.
Aidan pushed on it, but it wouldn’t budge. It was hot and stuck in place.
Rai stared up at him, his eyes wide. “What happened?”
“Drone strike. I think it sealed the hatch or piled a bunch of earth on it. Either way, we’re not getting back out that way.” He sniffed the air. It was a bit stale, but it didn’t smell like it would kill him.
His father had taught him and Ally about pockets of dead air that sometimes formed underground. He looked down again. Rai was looking back up at him. “Hey, why can I see you?”
Rai’s face was smeared with dirt. “Some kind of emergency lighting system, I think. It came on when I climbed into the shaft.” Now he didn’t look the least bit scared.
“That’s something, I suppose.” He tried his talkie. “Ally, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
Rai closed his eyes. Then he opened them. “I can’t reach Tien either.”
Aidan wondered what kind of communication device the loonies had. “Let’s go. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the others will find their way down here too.”
“Sure.” Rai descended the dim shaft.
Aidan glanced at the hatch one last time. Hope you guys are okay up there.
Then he followed Rai down into the gloom.
Ally dragged Tien after her, following Cimber as the cyber dog raced ahead down the tracks.
The drone whipped back and forth through the air behind them, but it slowly grew more distant.
Tien stopped and looked back. “Rai!”
Ally stumbled to a halt, too and followed Tien’s gaze. Aidan was nowhere to be seen.
She tried her talkie—there was no response.
“We have to go back for them.” Tien stared at the drone in the distance. It dropped something and an explosion of dust burst into the sky, falling quickly back to Earth and leaving a plume of gray smoke.
“We can’t—we have nothing to fight that thing with.” Why did the rings die? “Aidan can take care of himself. He’s had battle training.”
Tien spun around to stare at her. “Battle training? What kind of people are you?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t have wars on the moon. It’s who we are. Humans fight.” It’s what her mother had always told her. She had to be strong, fierce. Others would always try to take advantage of you, take what was yours, and take you down. But not family. Family stood together. She’d wondered for years and years who those fictional others might be. Now she knew.
Tien shook her head. “No. No wars, not since the Crash.”
“No wars?” Ally frowned.
“Life is too precious, especially on Luna. One bomb, and thousands could die.”
Of course. That was the point. These loonies had strange ideas.
Cimber was barking with agitation.
Ally cocked her ear. Grinding and clacking sounded in the distance. “Come on—we have to find somewhere safer. More drones are coming.”
Tien stared at Cimber and frowned. Then she nodded. “Where?”
The railway ran through a virtual city of the storage cubes they’d seen from a distance—white plas squares that loomed over them like rows of teeth. Some were broken and collapsed, while others were barely cracked.
Cimber scrambled down the side of the tracks and loped alongside the row of cubes.
“Follow Cim!”
They set off after the dog, running by the white boxes, shadowed by the hulking silver-white hyperloop tube that had once connected the base to other far-flung parts of the world.
On the hills above, Ally caught glimpses of the old petroleum storage tanks which sat like ancient sentinels, their round husks slowly rusting away in the afternoon sun.
One of the drones dipped past them, so close that Ally could feel the wind of its passage. It rocketed off into the distance and then started to circle back.
Cimber bounded off to the left, leading them into the narrow space between two of the “teeth.”
Tien balked. “Are you sure? We could be trapped in there.” She glanced nervously back at the oncoming drone.
Ally nodded. “Come on. Cimber’s never wrong.”
Tien snorted. “That’s some robo dog you have there.” But she followed them anyhow.
An explosion rocked the ground behind them, showering them with dirt and rocks. Ally’s adrenaline shot off the charts as her heart pounded in her chest.
They hurried between the teeth. They were four rows deep, with less than half a meter between each individual unit.
The drone flashed by overhead, and a second later the tooth next to them shook.
“Where are we going?” Tien’s voice was strangely calm.
“I don’t know! Just follow!”
Cimber veered right between two of the cubes.
Ally gritted her own teeth, not wanting Tien to see how freaked out she was. “This way!” Tien seemed focused and collected. Damned if I show you how scared I am.
Cimber veered left.
One of the teeth had collapsed, falling against the one next to it and leaving just a small space underneath.
Ally clenched her teeth and got down to crawl through after Cimber.
It was a tight fit, and she had to take off her pack to wiggle her way out on the other side. She scraped her arm on something sharp on the ground.
She came up to find herself face to face with the drone.
It floated there between the two teeth, watching her with a baleful red eye.
“What’s going on up there?” Tien’s voice came from the makeshift tunnel behind her.
“Trouble.”
She backed up on her hands and knees, but the drone followed her. It started to whine, a high-pitched sound that she knew meant nothing good. “Sorry, Tien… it’s been good knowing you!”
Silence.
“Tien?”
Something dropped from above, landing hard on the drone and hammering it to the ground.
It was Tien. She must have climbed over the top of the collapsed storage cube to get the drop on the drone.
The loonie slammed a heavy piece of plascrete against the nose cone of the drone over and over until its light went out and the clacking sound died away.
Tien stood, looking like an avenging angel, and dropped the makeshift weapon. “And that’s how you take out a drone.” She grinned.
Ally stared at Tien with newfound respect. Guess she’s not the enemy, after all. “I thought the gravity was lighter on the moon—on Luna. How the hell are you so strong?”
Tien flashed her a grin. “Years of hard training. Grab your pack and let’s go find that strange pet of yours.”
After retrieving it, the two of them ran along the channel through the teeth, coming out in an open patch of sunlight. It was a narrow canyon, the storage cubes on one side and a tall gray plascrete retaining wall made to resemble stones on the other.
Cimber was there, barking at a metal ladder embedded in the side of the wall.
Tien grinned. “So she’s not a super dog after all.” She started up the ladder.
Ally laughed harshly. “Suppose not.” She scooped up the cyber dog and started up the ladder.
Guess I’m the follower now. Ally clambered up after her new acquaintance, wondering where Cimber was taking them. As they climbed above the rest of the base, she stopped to look into the distance for signs of her brother and Rai.
There was nothing—no visible activity at all. The many storage cubes that had so looked like teeth from below were more like an old crossword puzzle when seen from above—white squares and darker patches where some has collapsed.
She tapped her talkie again. “Aidan, you there?” There was no response. “Aidan, this is Ally. Can you hear me?” Still nothing.
“I can’t reach Rai either.”
Ally sighed and turned back to her climb. Aidan would be okay. He has to be. “How do you talk to him? I don’t see a talkie.”
“Em to em. It means mind to mind. We have something called a loop installed in our temple when we’re about five years old. We can use it to communicate, among other things.”
Ally shook her head. What a strange world you must live in. She’d heard of loops, but to meet someone who had one…
They crested the ladder, and Ally turned to look back the way they’d come again. They’d climbed at least fifty meters.
There was still no sign of Aidan or Rai.
“Tien, look.”
She turned to see something looming above them. The sun was behind it, making it into a hulking black mass. “It’s huge.”
Ally set Cimber down and stepped into its shadow. “It’s a Humber Class heavy lifter.”
A spaceship.
Tien stared at her. “Why did Cimber bring us here?”
As if on cue, Cimber bounded up to the ship and extended a paw toward it. The paw split open and a cable snaked out, connecting to a port on the side of the lifter. Cimber froze in place.
“What’s she doing?” Tien frowned. “Is that normal?”
Ally shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her do anything like this before. Maybe she’s opening the door?”
The cable retracted into her paw, and the door did indeed open, slipping up into the ship to reveal a meter-wide entrance. A heavy ramp slammed down to the ground.
Cimber raced inside without a look back at the two of them.
Ally and Tien exchanged a quick glance. “Do we dare?” Who knows how many drones are patrolling the base?
Tien nodded. “Let’s go inside. Can’t be any worse than being out here.”
Ally nodded staring at the entrance in awe. A real-life spaceship. Something she never thought she’d see in her life. And now she was going inside one.
Side by side, they entered the old craft.