part0008

Richard Strunk laid Tony on the gray-dust ground inside Point Bravo sounding station. Ruben spun the wheel of the access door’s locking mechanism clockwise, sealing out the airless surface, then wiped the thick lunar powder off the atmo gauge. Slowly, like mercury in an old-fashioned thermometer, the digital level began to rise again.

Strunk was watching the gauge too. Through the visor of the enforcer’s snug vac-suit, Ruben could see the uncertainty on Strunk’s face. Even after the indicator phased to green. Strunk tapped the side of his helmet with an index finger, then engaged comms.

Ruben decided the situation presented them both with a perfect teaching moment. Richard Strunk liked to lean on his bulk and baritone voice for authority—even when talking to Ruben, a regent who was every bit his boss Tony Taulke was. Ruben verified his own suit’s readings, then double-checked the digital display next to the bulkhead’s door. Unsnapping his helmet, he removed it and took a deep, dramatic breath. The air was there, but it tasted like dust feels—coarse and dirty. Ruben kept that off his face, offering Strunk a smile instead.

As he slowly unfastened his helmet, Strunk mumbled something he wasn’t sharing over comms. He took a tentative breath and set the helmet aside.

“Lucky the damned seals still work,” he said. “Why would they keep air in this place, anyway? Ain’t it abandoned?”

Ruben stared out the porthole of Point Bravo’s access door. The Roadrunner rested, half buried by lunar sand. Between her rough landing and her unreliable engines, he couldn’t see how she’d ever be spaceworthy again. In losing the Roadrunner , Ruben realized he was losing one more thing that tied him to his sister Ming’s memory. The small ship with a big heart had helped him shoot a middle finger at Cassandra’s attempted assassination of Tony. It had provided a way around the Company’s tracking system controlled by the enemy. Now the wreck outside was just another footnote in SynCorp history.

A history that might soon come to a bloody end.

“Hey, Qinlao, did you hear me? Why’s there even air down—”

Ruben turned away from the window. “It’s Regent Qinlao.” Ruben set his sentimentality aside and gave Tony Taulke’s bodyguard his full attention. “We should get something straight. In the shuttle I indulged a certain familiarity warranted by circumstance. Now is different. Now you need to understand something: as long as Tony’s unconscious, you work for me. Am I clear?”

Strunk stared, nonplussed. Was he about to pull his stunner and shoot, or did the old ways hold? Ruben imagined him considering Cassandra’s need for an oversized enforcer and the compensation for providing such services. But when he spoke, Strunk’s voice was contrite: “Yes, Regent.”

Nodding and hoping his relief wasn’t obvious, Ruben advanced across the small space between them. He took a little satisfaction in seeing Strunk, a man twice his size, fall back a few inches, allowing him access to Tony. Ruben didn’t care much for the hierarchy demanded by SynCorp’s leadership, but in Strunk’s case he’d needed to reaffirm who was in charge. Ruben cringed at how elitist his own thoughts sounded in his head.

“To answer your question, when the United Nations built LUNa City, they embraced the ‘waste not, want not’ philosophy.” He knelt to unfasten Tony’s helmet. With a phish , suit atmo mingled with the musty air. “Since Point Bravo was tied to Point Charlie, where the city was finally founded, they used the tunnel connecting the checkpoints as part of the oxygen recycling system for the new colony. Water beneath the surface is mined for its oxygen, made into the hybrid of breathable air, and piped into the city. Thanks to the tunnel connecting the two sounding points, we have air to breathe.”

“Uh-huh,” said Strunk. “How do you know all that?”

“My sister Ming was the lead engineer for the United Nations when LUNa City was built,” Ruben replied. “We lived here for a while when I was a kid. She taught me all about that stuff.”

“Okay.” Strunk’s tone expressed a compromise between respect for the answer and a layman’s desire that he hadn’t asked the question in the first place. “How’s Tony?”

“Stable,” Ruben breathed. Tony Taulke’s color was sallow, but his breathing was strong. The antibiotics and pain meds from the Roadrunner seemed to be doing their job despite being way past their expiration date.

Strunk stood up, and Ruben felt the size of the man’s shadow extend over him. The enforcer moved off to conduct his own overwatch of the lunar surface.

“Your little ship took it hard on the jaw,” Strunk said. Ruben heard it as an attempt at casual conversation. So, the big man was trying. Maybe it was Strunk’s way of apologizing for having broken decorum earlier.

“Like I said before,” Ruben answered with more sadness than he’d expected, “she won’t fly again.”

“I don’t like that we’re stuck here without transportation.” Ruben could hear the tactician’s judgment in Strunk’s voice. “I don’t like it at all.”

“Neither do I,” Ruben said, rising. “And there’s worse news still.”

“Our medical implants? They’re like homing beacons to SynCorp Central.”

Strunk took a minute to process that. “You’re saying they can track us.”

“Yeah—if Cassandra has access to Gregor Erkennen’s databases.”

“Through our SCIs?”

“Yeah. Once she matches a frequency with a DNA profile… But it’s possible she doesn’t have access yet. All we’ve seen is a lot of talk on CorpNet. So she’s got control of the subspace network. But Gregor’s security protocols for the Company’s databases are tight. It’s possible, maybe even likely, she doesn’t have access. Yet.”

“That’s likely only a matter of time, though.” Strunk exhaled. “Motherfucker.”

“They find us, they find…” Strunk paused, staring at his helpless boss. “Tony’s got one too.”

“Everyone does.”

Strunk edged closer to the two regents, clenching and unclenching his fists. Like he was preparing for an attack. “We have to turn them off.”

“My thinking, too.”

“Know how to do that?”

“Nope. I’m not a doctor.”

Strunk’s eyes moved while he thought. “I could cut them out.”

“I’m serious.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it.”

The enforcer began casting around, looking for useful tools. He moved toward an old, wooden workbench.

“Yeah, we’re not going to do that,” Ruben said.

Strunk halted. “We have to—”

“Even if I was comfortable with you cutting into Tony’s head, we can’t deactivate his medical implant. It’s helping to keep him alive.”

“And we need to supplement his care with something else if we do deactivate it. Fischer gave us the name of that doctor in Darkside: Brackin. I’ll go get him and bring him here. You watch over Tony till I get back.”

But Strunk was shaking his head. “Too dangerous. You’ll be recognized.”

Ruben reached down and filled one palm with moondust, spat in it, then worked it with a finger like stirring soup before applying it to his face.

“Facial rec will see past that,” Strunk said. Ruben continued roughing up his look. “I should go.”

“I’ll find a hat or something. You forget, I used to live here. I went to school here as a kid. I know the place.”

Faced with logic, Strunk closed his mouth.

“All right. How long will you be gone?”

“Several hours, at least. The lunar gravity will help me quick-travel through the tunnel. Once I come up in Darkside, I’ll need to be more discreet.”

Strunk reached into his pocket and pulled out his stunner. Ruben wondered if he’d suddenly reconsidered signing up with the SSR. The assassin turned the pistol over and held it out butt-first. “Take it.”

“I don’t need it,” Ruben said. He ignored Strunk’s raised eyebrow, a wise guy’s amusement at a rich man’s arrogance. “It’ll only raise questions if it’s found. In fact, here,” Ruben said, reversing the offer and handing Strunk his own stunner. “Take mine.”

“I have other, quieter options.” Ruben pulled out the katara daggers he’d taken from Elinda Kisaan, the clone-assassin he’d left a prisoner on Mars. “And I know how to defend myself.”

Richard Strunk nodded. “I remember the fight on the station.” Ruben could see a grudging respect in his eyes.

“Best get going,” Strunk said, settling down next to Tony. He looks like a worried son , Ruben thought. “The sooner, the better.”

Ruben stared through the horizontal louvers of the air duct. His journey from Point Bravo to Point Charlie, then up through the air tunnel and into the bowels of mankind’s first off-planet colony, had gone as smoothly as he’d hoped it would. Now he stood in an accessway reserved for maintenance personnel that ran parallel to the public thruway, awaiting his chance to slip in among the foot traffic of Darkside’s population.

Boy, had LUNa City changed.

Make that Darkside , he reminded himself. The “pride of the UN,” as the colony had once been called, had long ago ceased being that.

During his twelve-kilometer hike to Point Charlie, Ruben had wondered how he’d feel once he entered the city proper. Somehow, he’d never visited the Moon since briefly living here with his sister Ming. Their stay had ended rather abruptly, but Ruben was still able to unearth fond memories when he looked hard enough inside himself to find them. Of school friends and schoolwork and the life of a teenager, each day both excruciatingly boring and more fiercely significant than the last. Of being incarcerated briefly for breaking a bully’s nose. Of a red-haired girl named Angel, and his first kiss in a 3D sim-parlor.

The people passing in the corridor beyond the louvers, murmuring their daily lives to one another, seemed both warmly familiar and utterly foreign at the same time.

The United Nations had founded LUNa City as the indelible footprint of humanity’s first giant leap off the Big Blue Marble. When the Syndicate Corporation expanded into the solar system, the Moon and the newly renamed Darkside’s End were the diving board the Company leapt from to colonize the outer system. Darkside’s End: a bright city on a dull, gray hill that showed what the collective brain of Man could conquer with a little innovation spiced with muscle, grit, and determination. It had been a privilege to live here then, a goal parents touted to children—if they worked hard enough in school and dreamed beyond the limits of an Earth dying from a world climate stretched to the breaking point.

It had been a city of white and silver then, a lunar Gondor. Now there was grime everywhere. The Moon had encroached on human ambition one grain at a time until it stained the clothes and faces of the old city’s inhabitants like a permanent tattoo. Over the years, its name had simplified to its current, less aspirational Darkside, the backwater dumping ground for the Company’s poorest and least productive inhabitants.

The lack of noise in the corridor chased away Ruben’s daydreaming. His patience had paid off. The foot traffic beyond had finally tapered off, making the corridor momentarily deserted. He slipped the grate from its braces and crawled through, then carefully replaced the covering. More feet were headed his way. As shadows approached from around the corner, he struck off at a leisurely pace, unsure really where he was heading. Whenever he spotted an observation camera, Ruben coolly averted his face. Strunk had been right to warn him about the face-rec tech.

The hallway opened up into a central foyer, where other thruways led to other parts of Darkside. People passed by, none sparing a look his way. Instead, they worried over finding their next steps, as if walking a tightrope over a breezy canyon. The crisp, snap-inspection clean of UN uniforms had given way to faded, dirty jumpsuits. Ruben remembered a brightness everywhere from when he was a boy, from the walkways to the residents’ smiles. Everyone had been glad to be here, had appreciated the privilege of being away from Earth and all its problems.

Despite the dour people around him, Ruben realized his ad-hoc makeup job of Point Bravo dirt wasn’t enough. Strunk had been right about that, too. He needed to find a cheap vendor to buy clothes that would allow him to better blend in.

“Hey, buddy, can you help me?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

A passerby shook out of his detachment, wariness crossing his face. He eyed Ruben. The wrinkles on his forehead reached up to a receding hairline. “What do you want?”

“Directions. I’m new here.” Ruben tried to avoid looking directly at the man. It was unlikely an average Darksider would recognize him, but not impossible. Especially with his face transmitted all over CorpNet by Cassandra with the promise of a reward bigger than any ten of these people would earn from the Company in a dozen lifetimes.

“Who’d you piss off?” asked the little gray man in gray coveralls.

Ruben smiled, trying to make it unremarkable and genuine at the same time. The man’s curly-Q salt-and-pepper locks reminded him of Gregor Erkennen’s. “You don’t want to know.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m looking for a place called the Open Market. I hear it’s beyond the barrio.”

The man blew out a breath. “Look around you, bub. All of Darkside is a barrio.”

“No argument here.”

The gray man nodded, apparently judging Ruben a soul in common. “The Market’s past the Fleshway. All manner of diversion there, if you get my meaning. Cheap rooms, too—rented by the hour.” His right eye twinkled beneath a bushy eyebrow.

“Fleshway. Truth in advertising, that. You’ll see.”

“Okay.” Ruben gestured at the spokes of hallways exiting the foyer. “Can you get me started?”

Indicating a corridor to Ruben’s 10 o’clock, the gray man took his leave. “Follow the signs for the old Entertainment District,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s the Fleshway now.”