Luna: New Moon (45 page)

‘You, you, with Rafa and Lucas. Heitor, take five escoltas and fall back.’ Carlinhos can’t afford five escoltas. But he’s seen the bodies among the flying debris of the exploded offices. The Mackenzies are destroying Corta Hélio substance and soul. ‘Put a general call out: every Corta Hélio employee musters with you. Get them to the East Sebastião refuge. The Mackenzies won’t touch them there.’

‘You think?’

‘Refuges are sacred. Not even the MacKenzies would blow a refuge. Go.’

Heitor Pereira beckons his troops to him. They lope up Kondakova Prospekt, hands on hilts. They are a brave sight and a hopeless one. João de Deus is too big, too diverse, spread across too many timezones and the Mackenzies are already all through it. João de Deus is lost.

‘Rafa!’

Lucas is already a level up, climbing steep ladders with his two bodyguards against the downpour of refugees. For the schemer, the man is handy.

‘Get out of here!’

‘Carlo!’

Lucas calls down from two levels up. The streets and prospekt are emptying now; abandoned motos crowd the refuge locks, purposeless bots scurry back and forth.

‘I can burn them. The Mackenzies. Robert, Jade, Duncan, Bryce: all of them. I can burn them all.’

‘We’re not like them, Luca.’

Lucas nods, then he is swooping hand over hand up the ladders. Rafa takes a last look and ducks down a cross-street. Carlinhos straps on his impact armour. He slides the knives into magnetic scabbards.

‘We buy time,’ Carlinhos tells his squad. Eight escoltas. The Mackenzie blades are twenty abreast, sweeping up Kondakova Prospekt. ‘A fighting withdrawal. Buy that time dear. Okay, with me.’ He breaks into a jog. His fighters form a wedge. Carlinhos cries a howl of defiance and his voice rings from the walls of empty São Sebastião Quadra.

Rafa runs. His jacket and tie flap. His shoes are all wrong. Emergency lights pulse-rotate yellow. The floor of the orbital tunnel is littered with discarded water bottles and drums and tassels in the colours of the orixas. The Long Run has finally come to an end.

Before they leave the apartment Ariel stuffs her and Marina’s bags with cash.

‘Lucas said the accounts were locked,’ Ariel says. ‘This works anywhere.’

‘On the train?’

‘I booked the tickets ten minutes ago.’

Corta Hélio is collapsing. João de Deus is under attack. Carlinhos is fighting, Rafa is trying to get to Boa Vista. No one knows where Lucas is. Wagner is in Meridian, Lucasinho in Twé. Ariel and Marina are going to join him there and seek sanctuary. Marina can’t believe how fast it all came apart.

Twenty levels, one kilometre to Meridian Station. A hundred deaths could be waiting out there. Motos are fast but motos can be hacked. Elevators and escalators can hide a dozen blades. Any or all of the hundreds on the street could be hired knives. Right now, drones could be targeting this apartment, assassin bots and neurotoxic insects climbing up the ductwork.

‘Get your legs,’ Marina says. ‘We walk.’

Ariel freezes halfway to the ladeira.

‘Come on,’ Marina shouts.

‘I can’t,’ Ariel says. ‘My legs won’t work.’

Marina had covered every threat and hack except the most personal and debilitating.

‘Get them off.’ The very next hack could command the legs to walk Ariel straight into a ring of blades.

‘I can’t disconnect them.’ Ariel hisses with effort and fear. Marina pulls her knife.

‘Sorry about this.’

The first cut sends the skirt to the ground. The second and third sever the flex cables to the power supply. Servos unpowered, the legs buckle. Ariel flails, falls, Marina catches her.

‘Get them off me, get them off me,’ Ariel cries, fumbling at the dead prostheses.

‘I don’t want to cut you.’ Marina works carefully, quickly with the point of the knife, nicking plastic locks and catches. The concentration is furious. ‘Keep still!’ Two connectors to go. Ariel’s apartment is off a quiet side alley but it can only be a matter of moments before those who hacked the bot legs come looking to see why their plan has not succeeded. And this is a blind alley. ‘Got you.’ Marina prises the legs open. Ariel drags herself clear.

‘Can you climb?’ Marina asks.

‘I can try,’ Ariel says. ‘Why?’

Marina nods at the service ladder at the back of the access alley.

‘I don’t know if I could make it all the way down,’ Ariel says.

‘We’re not going down. There’ll be a Mackenzie a metre all the way to the station. We’re going up.’ Up into the poor places, the high places, the Bairro Alto. The city of the unregarded. Where the moon’s greatest matrimonial lawyer and her bodyguard can disappear into the roof of the world. ‘I’ll help you. First though …’ Marina touches a forefinger between her eyes. Familiars off. Beijaflor vanishes an instant after Hetty. ‘You go first.’

‘Give me a hand,’ Ariel orders, wrestling with the jacket of her suit. Marina helps her off with it. Ariel is stripped down to Capri tights and sports bra: her fighting garb.

‘Give me my bag,’ Ariel says. Marina kicks it away from her reach.

‘How are you going to carry that? In your teeth?’

‘The cash could be useful.’

‘More useful than keeping your throat intact?’

Ariel hauls herself up two, three, four rungs of the ladder.

‘I’m not going to be able to get very far.’

‘I said I’d help you.’ Marina ducks in close to the ladder under Ariel’s hanging body. She drapes the paralysed legs on either side of her neck. ‘Lean forward and put your weight on my shoulders. We’re going to have to co-ordinate this. Left hands. Right hands. My right foot, then my left foot.’ Piggyback, Ariel and Marina climb the ladder. Jo Moonbeam muscles and lunar gravity reduce Ariel’s weight but they don’t abolish it. Marina guesses Ariel’s perceived weight at about ten kilogrammes. How long can she climb straight up ladders with a ten kilogramme weight on her shoulders? One level and she’s aching already.

Two levels. Three. Sixty to go to the roof of the world. What Marina will do there she doesn’t know. Whether the Cortas live or die, whether their empire stands or falls, she doesn’t know. If she’ll find a place in Bairro Alto, if she’ll survive, if the Mackenzies will be waiting for her, she doesn’t know. All she knows is left hands right hands, left foot right foot. Left hands right hands, left foot right foot, rung by rung, level by level, Marina and Ariel climb into exile.

The sound room burns; sheets of flame lick and lap across the walls, the acoustically perfect floor. The perfect mechanisms beneath crack and pop. Smoke swirls, stirred by the air-conditioning system into ghosts and devils, flicked with fire. The ball of vapour and smoke ignited in a fireball. The fire prevention systems click in, seal the room and douse it with halon.

The first taser takes Carlinhos in the back. He locks rigid. Every muscle spasms. Carlinhos cries out with effort as he fights to keep grip on his knives. He slashes down, jolts as he severs the wires that connect the barbs to the tasers. Spins, slashes out. Blades step back. He is alone now. All his squad lie awkward in their blood along Kondakova Prospekt. Mackenzie blades dance around him but Carlinhos Corta battles on. His armour is slashed and gouged, jagged with barbs where tasers have struck Kevlar not flesh. Five Mackenzies have fallen to him but every second more arrive.

Carlinhos has fought step by step, Mackenzie by Mackenzie, back to the lock of East refuge. Heitor Pereira is dead, his escoltas with him, but the refuge is full and sealed and safe.

Blades pile in around Carlinhos, taunting and jabbing. He cannot get out. He cannot get out. The second taser drives him to his knees. The third disarms him. The fourth turns him to a jerking puppet of flesh, webbed with the sparking lines of taser barbs. His strength, his agility, his knives are gone. He will die on his knees in a cave on the moon. All that remains is the rage. A blade steps towards and removes their helmet. Denny Mackenzie. He picks up one of Carlinhos’s fallen knives and admires the finesse of line and edge.

‘This is nice.’

He pulls Carlinhos’s head back and slashes his throat through to the windpipe.

When the corpse is drained the blades strip it naked. They drag Carlinhos Corta to the West 7 crosswalk and hang him by the heels from the bridge.

Five minutes later, the contracts go out. To all surviving employees, subcontractors and agents of Corta Hélio. Terms, conditions and remuneration rates for the transfer of allegiance to Mackenzie Metals. The money is more than generous. The Mackenzies repay three times.

The rover races north across the Sea of Fecundity.

It is a fool who only has one escape plan.

Lucas first devised his exit strategies when he ascended to the board of Corta Hélio. Every year he reviews and revises them against such a day as this. They are all based on the same insight: there is nowhere to hide on the moon. He realised that when he took his seat at the board table and touched his hands to the polished wood and felt the fragility of the elegant table, the spindly chair on which he sat, the weight of the rock above him, the cold of the rock beneath him. No hiding place, but there is a way out. The last instruction Lucas gave Toquinho before he shut it down was to lay in the course to the Central Mare Fecunditatis moonloop terminal.

Ten million in gold, deposited in the Mirabaud Bank in Zurich, Earth, five years ago. The Vorontsovs adore gold. They trust it when they can’t trust their machines, their ships, their sisters and brothers.

Save yourselves,
he’d ordered the escoltas at the lock.
Throw away the knives, drop the armour, go dark. I’ll go from here.

He didn’t want them to know his true escape plan. He hopes they made it. Lucas has always appreciated true service. So do the Mackenzies, so they won’t senselessly waste good labour, over and above the necessary bloodletting. It’s what he’d do. Lucas has had to run fast and silent to avoid Mackenzie detection. João de Deus will have fallen. Carlinhos will be dead. He can only hope that Rafa made it to Boa Vista, that the madrinhas got the kids to safety. The Mackenzies will eradicate his family, root and branch. It’s what he’d do. Wagner is on the run. Ariel. He has no idea about Ariel. Lucasinho is safe. The Asamoahs have asserted their independence in two dead Mackenzie assassins. That warms Lucas in his plastic environment bubble clutched to the belly of the Corta Hélio rover. His boy is safe.

Five minutes to Central Fecunditatis Terminal,
the rover says.

‘Ready the capsule,’ Lucas instructs. The curving screen shows him the terminal, a kilometre-tall girder work tower attended by a long row on tether-transfer pods. Loading and docking facilities, a solar farm, a siding from the close-by Equatorial One: Central Fecunditatis Terminal is a major cargo hub for Corta helium-3 canisters and pallets of refined Mackenzie rare earths. Today it will heft a different cargo.

‘Operate docking sequence,’ Lucas says. The nimble rover scuttles in to a ring of flashing blue lights: the outlock. And stops dead.

‘Rover, please dock with the terminal.’

The rover stands on the Sea of Fecundity five metres from the flashing lock.

‘Rover …’

‘It’s not going to work, you know.’ The voice breaks in on the com channels. A face appears on the screen: Amanda Sun.

‘Isn’t this a little excessive for post-divorce vindictiveness? Couldn’t you just have cut up a few jackets?’

Amanda Sun laughs deeply and truly.

‘I have to hand it to you, Lucas, you’re a professional. But, you know, jackets? Deprinter? No, what’s going to happen here has nothing to do with our divorce. But you know that. And I am going to kill you. This time, I will succeed. Unless you have a resourceful and plucky cocktail waitress tucked away in there somewhere? Didn’t think so.’

‘We always wondered how that fly got through security.’

Amanda Sun taps an earlobe.

‘Jewellery, darling. You half-brother would have got there eventually. He’s thorough. You Cortas are ridiculously easy to manipulate. All that Brazilian machismo. The Mackenzies hardly needed prodding at all. But it’s far too easy when you can predict your enemy’s next move. That’s why we knew you’d try and get off the moon. And so here I am, in your software. But we’re wasting time. I need to kill you. I have several options here. I could blow you up but you’re a little close to the moonloop terminal. I could depressurise the rover. That would be fairly quick. But I think I’ll just order the rover to drive and keep driving until your air runs out.’

Depressurise the rover. The human hide is an excellent pressure skin. The human body can operate for fifteen seconds in vacuum. Moonrun. He needs to keep her talking while he checks the cabin for what he needs to save his life. Vanity was always her vice.

‘I have a question.’

‘Yes, it is customary to grant a last request. What is it, darling?’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, that would be no fun at all. The villain gives away her entire master plan? I tell you what though, I’ll give you a hint. You’re a smart boy, Lucas. You should be able to work it out. It’ll give you something to do rather than watching the air gauge run down. From day one my family has been taking out options on surface terrain adjacent to Equatorial One. Two lunes ago we started to exercise them. There. That should provide you with some distraction.’

‘I’ll give it my undivided concentration,’ Lucas says and launches himself across the capsule. He slaps the emergency hatch release. The hatch blows. Lucas screams as needles are driven through his eardrums. Every sinus is filled with boiling lead. The scream is good. The scream saves his lungs from rupturing. The scream dies as the blast of air blows Lucas in his jacket and pleated pants and tie out on to the Sea of Fecundity. He hits the regolith in a cloud of dust and rolls. Eyes. Keep the eyes open. Close them and they freeze shut. Blind is disoriented. Disoriented is dead. He hauls himself to his feet. On the edge of his vision he sees the rover spin its wheels. It’s moving. She wants to run him down. One step, two steps. That’s all. One step, two. But everything is dying. He is tearing apart inside. Lucas lurches forward on his two-tone loafers and hits the outlock panel. The flashing lights lock solid blue. The lock slams open. Lucas hauls himself in. The lock seals. Lucas’s lungs and eyes and ears and brain are about to burst. Then he hears the roar of air flooding back into the lock. Over it he hears his own voice. He never stopped screaming. A bang, the lock shakes. Amanda has rammed the rover into the lock. The Vorontsovs build tough but assault by a possessed lunar rover is not in their design parameters. Lucas gasps down air and crawls to the inlock. The door opens, he falls through. The door closes. Central Fecunditatis Terminal rocks again. Lucas presses his cheek to the cold, solid, wonderful floor mesh. On the wall in his direct line of sight is an icon of Dona Luna. He reaches out to stroke a finger down Lady Moon’s bone face.