The Luna Deception (22 page)

“That’s not the issue.”

“Yes, it is. Let me put it differently. Our Lord said, ‘Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.’ That thing tried to recruit me down there, Yonezawa. And I think it’s trying to recruit you right now. Don’t let it win.”

Kiyoshi’s eyes narrowed, as if the words had been blades flung at his face. Then he smiled, a bit awkwardly. “Respect. It’s been a long time since I met a layman who could quote Scripture to make a point.”

“Years and years of Sunday school,” Mendoza said.

“Me, too.”

Kiyoshi unfolded his long body from the gunnery couch. He pushed off, heading for the door.

“We’ll take the
Wakizashi
down to the surface,” he said over his shoulder. “If she’s there, OK. If she’s not, bombs away. Close range is better, anyway. Make
sure
it’s slagged.”

Mendoza flew after him. In the next room but one, they crashed into Fr. Lynch. “I was looking for you, Mendoza. I need your help with something.”

“Later, Father,” Kiyoshi said. “Right now, we’re going to take the Superlifter down to the surface to look for Mendoza’s girlfriend.”

“It’s urgent.”

“So, come with us.”

“You aren’t joking,” Fr. Lynch said after a second.

“I never joke,” Kiyoshi said, straightfaced. “But I can admit when I might be wrong.”

★

On board the
Wakizashi,
Mendoza logged into the sim again, using an immersion kit that Kiyoshi dug out of a locker. It still wasn’t up to what he used to get with his BCI, but the kit had gloves, a mask, and everything, giving him tactile and olfactory feedback.

This turned out to be unpleasant. The desert was burning, its scrubby vegetation set on fire by the repeated lightning strikes. The smoke reeked of sulfur. The crusaders’ surcoats were no longer white. Wearily, their blades rose and fell. Their opponents looked to be even fewer now, but Mendoza understood that these replicas of American soldiers were tougher than fighter jets or Death Stars. He saw Gonzo among them, parrying Peter Akagi’s lunges with a shovel.

He himself was in exactly the same place as before, climbing the same damn cliff. His
jizo
statues were now gone from the top of the scarp. In their place stood heaps of what looked to be washing-machines and toasters.

The climb took much more effort than it had before. In the back of his mind, Mendoza knew that was because the Superlifter was decelerating towards the surface of Mercury. The “gravity” pulling on him was thrust gees.

Panting, he glanced back. Only three grunts now remained: Gonzo, a woman, and a tattooed heavyweight. The equation had tipped in favor of Jun’s knights. They closed in on the three diehards.

A wind picked up, blowing the smoke away.

With the last of his strength, Mendoza rolled onto the top of the cliff.

There lay Elfrida’s avatar, styled like a pudgy Japanese teenager.

He ran to her, stumbling through the heaps of toasters. “I thought you’d never get around to using the edit function,” he said, instead of any of the romantic things he’d been thinking.

“Mendoza?” she wrote, in red text.

He still had his visored helm on. He pushed the visor back.

She picked herself up, straightened her miniskirt, and threw herself at him. Her arms wrapped insubstantially around his armored bulk. He wished like hell he had sensory feedback in this thing.

A text from Kiyoshi appeared in his HUD area, spoiling what might otherwise have been a romantic moment.
“Jun’s pretty much wrapped this thing up. Those last three hostiles are the MI personalities of the last three vinge-class phavatars. They’re real. The others were just phaeries. Anyway, Jun is disabling the daemons that the Heidegger program installed in the phavatars. Then he’ll be able to control them himself.”

Joy filled Mendoza at this news. “Come here,” he told Elfrida. “Look.”

He drew her to the edge of the scarp.

The three surviving grunts knelt in a circle with their hands behind their backs. Over their heads, a cloud towered, growing. It was like a hole in the sim, a demented blizzard of zeros and ones, but it had a shape, and it was the shape of a mushroom.

One of the knights stood looking up at it. He seemed very small, overshadowed by that storm of organized data.

“That’s Jun,” Mendoza said.

“Jun Yonezawa?”

“No other.”

“What’s he doing? Is it—safe?”

“No, it’s not safe. But he knows what he’s doing.”

Hands on hips, Jun stared up at the mushroom cloud. Then he laughed.
“Totally
cheesy,” he said, and then in a different, harder voice, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”

All in an instant, the cloud broke up. It fled to the four corners of the sky and disintegrated.

The three grunts fell on their faces like puppets whose strings had been cut.

Jun knelt over them. He took his helmet off and made the sign of the cross. Then he straightened the bodies and folded their hands on their chests. He walked back towards the scarp.

The other knights were standing around the hole that the avatars had dug, rubbing their chins.

Mendoza nudged Elfrida in the ribs. “Is that where you are?”

She nodded.

Jun looked up and waved.

“There’s a kind of a crevice at the foot of the scarp,” Elfrida said. “I guess whoever dumped those toasters, they collapsed the scarp, so it got covered over. There’s like twenty centimeters of shadow left. That’s where I am. I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.”

“Stay that way,” Mendoza said. “We’re coming to get you out.”

★

As soon as the
Wakizashi
landed on the surface, Jun commanded the three surviving phavatars to break into Elfrida’s hiding-place and rescue her. They carried her to the Superlifter, bundled like a baby in the solar parasol she’d been using for insulation. The temperature on the surface was now 190° and climbing. The phavatars, tough as they were, had begun to break down.

Jun commanded them to return to the crevice and fetch the object Elfrida had almost died for. It was an insulated hard-shell suitcase. It contained the portable supercomputer that hosted the source code of the Heidegger program, version 2.0.

The phavatars dropped it in the open. Kiyoshi went out and fragged it with a grenade launcher. He was only outside the ship for twenty seconds, but when he returned, his EVA suit was burnt black all down one side.

“We’re leaving,” he gasped. “This place is hotter than hell.”

★

Mendoza cradled Elfrida in his arms as the
Wakizashi
burnt back into orbit on a ballistic trajectory, sparing them the high gees associated with a vertical launch. You didn’t have to worry about soaking surface facilities with radiation, here.

Kiyoshi and Jun chattered in Japanese, laughing, in high spirits. The Heidegger program, version 2.0, was now a molten lump of metal. They’d done what they came to do.

So had Mendoza.

Nothing had ever felt as good as the weight of Elfrida’s body in his lap. He lowered his head to feel her breath on his face.

“You came for me,” she croaked.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“I thought I was gonna die.”

Her gray complexion and cracked lips testified to how close she’d come. She’d been stuck in that crevice for about 50 hours, and her EVA suit had not been able to shield her fully from the relentlessly climbing temperature on the surface. The Superlifter’s medibot had diagnosed dehydration and shock, and recommended a sedative. Elfrida had refused.

“What happened to my suitcase?” she asked in a rasping voice, unlike her own.

“We fragged it,” Mendoza said.

“Good.”

Her eyes closed. Mendoza thought,
Maybe she’ll sleep now.

She had fled onto the dayside with the suitcase to stop the Heidegger program’s phavatars from taking it and escaping off-planet.
Vinge-classes … they’re bigger in real life ...
Two meters at the shoulder, as strong as backhoes. Before the Superlifter landed, the last three surviving vinge-classes had been trying to break into Elfrida’s shelter to retrieve the suitcase. They’d almost got to her. Almost.

Mendoza fussily adjusted the drip that was feeding saline fluid into her arm. She winced. “Sorry,” he whispered.

“Where’s my thing?”

“What thing?”

“That.”

She weakly reached for the thing she had brought on board with her.

The head of Angelica Lin.

Elfrida had not been alone on her trek across the dayside. Angelica Lin had gone with her, or chased her, or maybe it had been the other way round. Mendoza suspected he’d never know exactly what had gone down between the two women. He didn’t want to know. It had ended with Lin dead, and her severed head on board the
Wakizashi
with them.

Roughly hacked off with a cutter laser, the grisly object had bled all over the cockpit before Kiyoshi caught it and stuffed it into a ziploc. It was now rolling around the floor. Elfrida kept reaching for it, so Mendoza, stifling disgust, grabbed it for her. She tucked it under her arm like a teddy-bear.

“Her name wasn’t Angelica Lin, actually,” she croaked. “It was Gloria dos Santos. I knew her … before.”

“Before?”

“Before she got all that surgery.”

Kiyoshi, overhearing, cracked up. “That’s one hell of a neck job you gave her. Tak about going under the knife.” After a second, Elfrida started to laugh, too. The two of them hooted until Elfrida began to cough. Mendoza patted her on the back.

“How’d you get here, anyway?” she said to Kiyoshi. “It’s like you’re my guardian angel or something.”

“Some angel I’d make,” Kiyoshi said, sobering. “No, the one you should thank is him.” He nodded at Mendoza.

Elfrida gazed up into Mendoza’s face. The look in her eyes nearly made him bust out bawling. It was what he had hoped and longed to get from her one day. A look of love.

Because he sucked at romantic moments, he indicated the bagged-up head on Elfrida’s lap. “It’s tragic, isn’t it? I mean, her part in the whole thing … I guess she trusted Derek Lorna, believed they were in it together. And then he betrayed her.”

“Yeah,” Elfrida said. “But she deserved it. She murdered Charles K. Pope.”

“Whoa. Why?”

Kiyoshi said, “To take his place, obviously.”

“Actually, no,” Elfrida said. “Because she wanted to be with Derek Lorna. She thought they were going to do great things together. So she installed the program he sent her, without even running an anti-virus scan. And that’s not tragic. That’s just stupid.”

She began to cough. Mendoza patted her back, fed her gatorade from a pouch. The Superlifter docked with the
Monster,
a violent smooch of metal.

“Sorry,” Kiyoshi said. “Now, Elfrida, listen, we haven’t got direct docking capability. The
Monster’s
airlocks are so old, their seals don’t fit modern ones like on a Superlifter’s. So we’re gonna have to spacewalk to the operations module. Think you can manage that?”

“Sure,” Elfrida said, although she looked grayer than ever. “Floating is easier than walking.” She held the bagged-up head out to Mendoza. “John, could you carry this for me?”

As they floated across to the operations module, in the shadow of the
Monster’s
bulk, the eyes of Angelica Lin—no, Gloria dos Santos—reflected the ship’s exterior warning lights, seeming to wink redly at Mendoza.

Kiyoshi said via suit-to-suit radio, “Make sure you don’t drop that. It’s going to put Derek Lorna in jail.”

“Huh?” Mendoza said.

“Duh. Lin, dos Santos, whatever her name really was, she must have had a BCI. It’ll have records of her contacts with Lorna. Hard evidence. That’s what the courts look for.”

Mendoza looked at the head with a fresh perspective. It struck him as disgusting to steal a dead woman’s memories. He switched channels. “Jun?”

“Yes?”

“Is this for real? Are we going to cut her head open and extract her BCI?”

“Absolutely not,” Jun said. “We’ll have to deliver it intact to the Interplanetary Court of Justice. We obviously can’t take it to Earth. And I wouldn’t want to trust it to a drone delivery service. But I’ll think of something. Anyway, it can go in the freezer for now.”

“ … OK.”

“I know what’s on your mind,” Jun said. “They’re dragging us down to their level. But Elfrida almost died for this. We can’t just throw it away because we have high moral principles about not violating the dead.”

Mendoza reached the airlock ahead of the others. He reached out his free hand and pulled Elfrida the rest of the way in. His admiration for her increased by the moment.
Of course
she hadn’t taken Gloria dos Santos’s head as some kind of grisly souvenir. She had taken it precisely because she knew it contained the evidence that would convict Derek Lorna of genocide.

A medibot met them on the inside of the airlock. Elfrida gratefully reclined into its embrace. “First time I’ve ever been on your ship,” she croaked to Kiyoshi. “Wow, is this place a mess, or what?”

She drifted into unconsciousness.

Mendoza followed the medibot to the
Monster’s
sickbay and watched it transfer her into a temperature-controlled sleeping-bag, which was secured to the wall amid a platoon of advanced medibots, bioprinters, and scanners, many still adorned with factory inspection seals. None of this fancy equipment would do Elfrida any good. The prescription for shock and dehydration had not changed in centuries: rest, fluids, more rest, and more fluids.

He kissed her forehead and left her to sleep.

★

Fr. Lynch caught him outside the sickbay. “Finally, you’re back. Thank God you were able to rescue her.”

“Father, what do
you
think about mutilating the head of Angelica Lin, sorry, Gloria dos Santos, to get at her BCI?”

“From a theological standpoint, it’s wrong to mutilate a corpse. But it’s also true that her BCI is not part of her body, so removing it would not count as mutilation. In fact, some in the Church hold that implants and augments are unnatural to begin with.”