The Luna Deception (30 page)

“Not in the habit of taking advice from pirates,” said the voice. Kiyoshi laughed. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.” He had thought the Hyperpony was a pirate ship. They thought the same of him. “Get gone, asshole. Access to this facility is restricted, by order of the Interplanetary Court of Justice.”

“Fuck you,” said the voice. “This is
our
facility.”

“Yeah? Who’re you?”

“Hope, dude. Department of Intrepid Exploits.”

“Is that seriously a thing?”

“Sure. Note the acronym.”

D.I.E.
“Ah, hah, hah. Still not scared.”

Another hatch, another ladder. He floated down to the laboratory they’d seen on the news feeds. No sign of Father Tom. He pushed off from the ladder, heading for the partition wall that bisected the lab. The other side of it was the only place left where the Jesuit could be.

“IP theft is a felony,” the guy from D.I.E. said.

“So’s Gray Goo. Guess they escorted you out of here in a hurry.”

“Didn’t even give us time to clear our desks,” the man from D.I.E. acknowledged.

Kiyoshi pulled himself down to floor level, using the grab handles on the partition wall. He ducked through the door in the partition, into—

A decontamination corridor. Air-jet and microbead shower nozzles hung above his head, inert. The door he’d just come through should have been pressure-sealed, but wasn’t.

Movement spun him around.

At the far end of the corridor, behind the rubber-curtain walls of the microbead shower, floated Father Tom. His helmet was off, which was why Kiyoshi couldn’t hear the words he was mouthing. But he knew what they must be.

Funeral rites.

Five bodies floated around the Jesuit in a grotesque waltz.

Kiyoshi shoved through the plastic curtains. Three male and two female corpses. All spaceborn. Their gear leant towards the black-leather-and-unnecessary-buckles end of things, much like Kiyoshi’s own. The biggest guy had a tattoo of the Crab Nebula on one bare pectoral. One of the women had silver hair, the other blue, and that was about all you could say about their appearance, because their faces exhibited symptoms of severe cyanosis. Their eyes bulged.

“What happened here?” Kiyoshi said, but Father Tom could not hear him because his helmet was off.

Kiyoshi gestured:
Put your helmet back on!

In the end he had to shake Father Tom by the arm to get him to break off his prayers. The Jesuit picked up his helmet and spoke into its radio. “Have you no respect for the dead?”

“Were they all here? Just floating around like this?”

“No, they were in the clean room, on the other side of this partition. I brought them through—it seemed like the decent thing to do. They must have died in agony. I suppose those bozos from the ICJ used energy weapons on them.”

“Nope. They got spaced.”

“How can you tell?”

“They’re freaking
blue.
Eyes are bloodshot. Tongues sticking out. Those’re signs of death by asphyxiation. I wonder how it happened, who brought their bodies into the station …” The girl with blue hair drifted lifelessly towards him. He gave her a gentle push. It was just a superficial similarity, but she reminded him of Alicia Petruzzelli, the recycler captain with whom he’d had a very brief thing a while back.

Studd broke in. “There’s another ship approaching!”

“Oh, what next?” Kiyoshi said.

“It’s 12,000 klicks out. Approaching at 100 meters per second.”

“Barely drifting.”

“Yes, it’s not under thrust. It appears to be in the same libration orbit as this space station, overhauling us at a steady rate.”

“Have you tried hailing it?”

“Yes. Got an automated ID burst from the hub. It says it’s the
Knock Knock Who’s There,
an independent passenger ferry out of Eros. I can’t get its captain or crew to talk to me.”

“No, they wouldn’t be talking to you. They’re here.”

“What?”

“They’re dead.”

It didn’t take an AI to work out what must have happened. The crew of the
Knock Knock Who’s There
must have seen the same news stories Kiyoshi had. They’d realized that the Hope Center for Nanobiotics had been vacated, and had hared out here to grab whatever goodies had been abandoned in the confusion. Maybe the space station
had
had defenses—the
Knock Knock’s
crew
had taken them out … but then something, or someone, had taken
them
out.

Leaving their ship under the control of its hub, in a stationkeeping orbit around the L2 point.

“Hang on. Did you say the ship was
not
under thrust?”

“No plasma emissions,” Studd confirmed.

Then,
not
a stationkeeping orbit, anymore.

Kiyoshi stared at the dead face of the guy with the Crab Nebula tattoo, whom he took to be the
Knock Knock’s
captain.
You dumbass. You were remote-controlling your ship, weren’t you? Didn’t give the hub any autonomy at all—didn’t trust it not to go behind your back, take over your job, steal your manly prerogatives … I know how you felt, my friend.

So now you’re dead, and your ship’s kidney-beaning it around the L2 point like a big dumb lump of debris.

“Get ready to launch,” he told Studd. “We’re coming out.”

“But the guys from Hope …”

“Screw the guys from Hope. Start the launch sequence.” He hauled Father Tom to his feet.

“The guys from Hope?” the Jesuit questioned him.

“Yeah. That’s who was in the Hyperpony. They came to get their stuff.” But if that was why they had come, why send a Hyperpony, which could hardly carry any of this pricey lab equipment?

Father Tom reached out helplessly towards the drifting bodies. There was no way to lay them out properly. He and Kiyoshi both bowed their heads and crossed themselves.

“By the way, did you find any probes?” Kiyoshi asked as they crossed the production floor. Thinking:
They could be all around us. They could be inside your suit, in your ears, in your afro.

“No. On the far side of that partition is a clean room, and the equipment in there is definitely intended for nanoscale biological work. You’ve got your bioreactors, your gel baths, DNA sequencers. This is the upstream side, where they’d have cultured proteins to feed the probes. Everything’s here, except the probes themselves.”

“Maybe the
Knock Knock’s
crew took them,” Kiyoshi suggested, not believing it. The pirates hadn’t even got around to taking the computers.

They floated back up to the reception area. “Studd! Keep me updated, would you? Don’t make me bug you for information. What are the Hope guys doing?”

“They’re trying to launch the shuttles,” said the astrogator. Nervous excitement thrummed in his voice. “They want me to stand off.”

“You’ve been
talking
to them?”

“Um, they kind of think I’m the captain ...”

This sub-personality needed a refresher course on his job description. It did
not
include pretending to be the captain. “Don’t do that.”

“All right,” Studd muttered.

I can’t believe Jun is sitting this out,
Kiyoshi thought. “Do they know we took one of the shuttles?”

“Um, yes. They want it back.”

Kiyoshi switched to the public channel. “Hey, D.I.E., do you copy me?”

“Finally, a goddamn human being. Oh, excuse me. Pirates aren’t human beings. Whether you’re made of flesh or bytes, you’re urine-drinking outer-system scum. Give us our fucking shuttle.”

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that insults are a bad way of getting what you want? Money is a much better way. I’ll be happy to return your shuttle for a very reasonable processing fee.”

Screw taking it home for the boss-man, Kiyoshi decided on the spur of the moment. His Erich-Maria Holdings account was empty. He’d maxed out his credit on propellant, not to mention paying for the boss’s shopping. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to replenish his coffers.

The guy from D.I.E. swore colorfully. Kiyoshi bounded across the reception area, followed by Father Tom.

“Ten million spiders,” he said when the guy from D.I.E. paused for breath. “I prefer physical iridium, if it’s no trouble.”

More swearing.

Father Tom was lagging. Kiyoshi hauled him into the airlock. The pressure counter ticked down with maddening slowness.

“Um, that ship,” Studd said.

“The
Knock Knock?”

“It’s getting pretty close. I think we probably ought to launch as soon as possible.”

“Coming out now.” Kiyoshi switched back to the public channel. “By the way, you were talking about pirates?”

“Three million, and that’s my final offer!”

“Done, and I’ll throw in a helpful bit of information. There
were
pirates here: the crew of a so-called passenger ferry from Eros. It goes by the name of the
Knock Knock Who’s There,
although I’m sure that’s a dummy registration. Well, the crew are in your lab module, dead. But their ship is still orbiting the L2 point.”

“So
that’s
what that is,” said the guy from D.I.E.

Kiyoshi laughed. He couldn’t believe it. “You guys really are human, aren’t you?”

“Of course we fucking are!”

“It’s not always easy to tell the difference. I assumed you were phavatars or software-based MIs, actually. You were decelerating at ten gees.”

The airlock’s external valve opened. Kiyoshi leapt into empty space. The lab module swung away. He soared towards the
Monster
.

Through the bunched struts of the space station, he could see the Hyperpony. A single EVA-suited figure clung to a grab handle on the outside of the little ship’s crew cube. Kiyoshi figured that’s who he was talking to. “How’d you stand the burn?”

“Military-grade skeletal reinforcements. Maybe you can buy yourself some with your
S
3,000,000. It sucks being spaceborn, right? So get your bones done and enjoy life, until the law catches up with you.”

“Maybe I will. At the moment, though, I’m hoping your reinforcements can withstand a collision with a passenger ferry.”

“What?”

“Due in approximately two minutes, according to my hub. I think the
Knock Knock Who’s There
started off orbiting just behind the space station. But we’ve been around the loop a few times since then. And you know, the L2 point. It’s unstable. Things drift.”

“Oh crap,” said the guy from D.I.E.

“You would have known that already if you were MIs,” Kiyoshi said. “If you could do more than one thing at a time.”

He dived towards the
Monster’s
operations module. Halfway there he realized that Father Tom was not following him.

Talk about not paying attention.

“Studd! Can you see Father Tom?”

“No—yes!” the sub-personality exclaimed. “He’s down there! I thought he was one of them!”

A bright red circle appeared on Kiyoshi’s faceplate, locating Father Tom. Draped over the wing of one of the shuttles, he wasn’t moving.

“Shit.”

Kiyoshi arrowed towards the Jesuit, instinctively adjusting his trajectory to compensate for the station’s yaw.

“There
you are,” the guy from D.I.E. exclaimed.

A flash of ionized plasma seared past Kiyoshi. It hit a refueling line, severing it. The whole line ripped off its clamps and stuck out rod-straight as hydrogen gasified into the vacuum. Though the gas was invisible, the path of the laser rifle bolt showed up as a hot contrail through it.

Kiyoshi landed beside Father Tom, his boots gecko-sealing to the space shuttle’s wing. He gathered the Jesuit up by the legs.

The cockpit of the shuttle whose wing he was standing on hinged back. Another person in a yellow spacesuit leaned out and shot at them. Kiyoshi felt the bolt punch into his shin. His HUD went wild.

A second bolt ignited the high concentration of hydrogen now boiling around the station. The flammable gas blazed up, corpse-blue.

“D.I.E., is that some kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy?” Kiyoshi screamed. Not daring to use his mobility pack in this blaze, he jumped.

Nanofiber mesh wrapped around him and Father Tom. Ron Studd had sent the Wetblanket to their rescue. It wafted them towards the cargo airlock, where it had been pre-programmed to go.

Out of the pallid inferno shot one shuttle. And then another one. Their drives burned purple spots into Kiyoshi’s vision.

The cargo airlock’s jaws opened. The shuttle they had stolen was still in there. Jun must have jammed the airlock’s cycle to prevent the shuttle from falling into his cloister.
Goddamn him, why isn’t he HELPING?

Kiyoshi crawled in underneath the shuttle, dragging Father Tom. They were all tangled up in the Wetblanket. His left leg hurt.

Studd yelped, “The
Knock Knock Who’s There
is almost here! But it’s going to miss us by a few meters!”

“Just get us out of here!”

Another shuttle burst out of the flaming hydrogen. That made three.

The
Monster’s
tethers retracted, flailing like fiery snakes. The ancient Longvoyager toppled away from the space station.

“Waiting to D.I.E.?” Kiyoshi mocked the Hyperpony pilot. Somehow, he knew that the guy he’d been talking to was the one who’d stayed behind, because he did not have a shuttle. Kiyoshi had it.

“Cowards run. Men stand,” the guy said calmly. “Anyway, it’s going to miss us by a kilometer.”

Not quite.

The
Knock Knock Who’s There
surged out of the darkness like a gargantuan sycamore seed. It was a twin-module Startractor. Its two hab modules rotated around a propellor arm set at right angles to its spine. As it glided past the space station, one of these struck the lab. Both ship and space station were moving in the same direction, at not-very-different speeds, so their collision did not instantly shatter them into a million little pieces. Instead, the impact tore the
Knock Knock’s
passenger module off, and dented the shell of the lab.

The lab module’s protective shielding ruptured. Several kilotons of water—which had served the double purpose of cooling the station’s equipment and shielding the staff from radiation—seethed into the vacuum. The station’s air followed. Lab equipment volleyed into the vacuum on an explosive wave of escaping atmosphere.