The Luna Deception (36 page)

Mendoza leaned forward, fascinated. This image must be based on the data from the nanoprobes. It was not someone’s best guess. It was not a clip from an immersion game. It was the most accurate map of Mars in existence.

And another piece fell into place.

The whole purpose of the Dust surveys was to gather data for pilot training.

A stream of black flecks drifted across the Elysium Planitia.

“Your mission,” intoned Frank, “should you choose to accept it …” He broke off to chuckle. “That line always cracks me up. Sorry. Your mission is to penetrate the PLAN’s orbital defenses. Go in low and hard. Your primary target is the Big Turd, where we suspect that the PLAN has its main computing assets in an underground data center powered by geothermal electricity. Secondary targets are the other surface facilities you can see on this map. However … HEADS UP!”

Mendoza flinched at Frank’s sudden shout. A black shape blurred across the optical feed. Then his screens flashed white and went off. The cockpit darkened to a womb-like gloom.

“You got slagged,” Frank said to him.

Mendoza rubbed his mouth in irritation (his hand went straight through the imaginary helmet that he wore). “That’s some kick-ass stealth technology. Just saying.”

“Don’t forget, masking your heat emissions is different from hiding your radar profile. Of course, the Fragger uses every known deflection and absorption technique, so it shows up on radar as something much smaller than a ship. A chunk of rock, maybe. But the PLAN has toilet rolls patrolling this volume all the time, specifically to zap anything that moves. Even chunks of rock. So, you got unlucky.”

“Unlucky, hell. You did that on purpose to give the wannabes a taste of combat.”

“What fun is a sim without space battles?”

“I’ve never been big on sims.
Or
space battles. Did any of our gang survive that?”

“Five guys slagged the toilet roll before it could get them. Three of those survived the next attack, too. They’re now approaching the outer ring of orbital fortresses. In real life, that’s the tricky bit. Those fortresses are the size of asteroids. Maneuvering through a debris field that’s moving at orbital velocity … it’s not a game for pikers. But Vicky managed it. Abdul and Erik did too, we believe.”

Wishful thinking,
Mendoza decided. “Can I see?”

“You’re supposed to be dead. Oh, fine. Here you go.”

Suddenly, he seemed to be floating in space, as if he had survived the destruction of his fighter. He was now much closer to Mars. It filled the sky. Gigantic rocks glided between him and the Red Planet, sidelit by the sun.

“Those are the PLAN’s orbital fortresses,” Frank said. “Megawatt laser cannons emplaced on each one.”

“Where’d all those rocks come from, anyway?”

“Mars used to have
two
moons.”

They heard a distant screech. “Allahu akbar!”

“Sounds like someone’s having fun,” Mendoza said.

“They have a long cultural tradition of this kind of thing,” Frank said.

“Suicide bombing?”

“Let’s call it berserking. Scandinavians, too. The Irish. All the Celtic peoples. My family comes from the old United States. A nation of latte-sipping bleeding hearts. It took a long time on Luna before we learned to unleash the crazy.”

“So maybe there’s hope for me.”

“Ha, ha. Yeah. I think so. It’s nothing to do with ethnic heritage, really. When we start recruiting pilots, we’ll be looking for people who don’t care if they live or die … who are ready to sacrifice everything to save humanity.”

“That’s what you’re doing right now, isn’t it?”

“Huh?”

“Recruiting.”

Frank chuckled. “You got me.”

“Allahu akbaaaaarrghh!”

A concatenation of white flashes twinkled between the orbiting fragments of Phobos.

“Looks like someone took a few toilet rolls with him,” Frank said. “Give that man a job.”

A second later, Mendoza felt the space around him shiver, as if the vacuum were a waterbed and someone had jumped on it. “I felt that,” he said, puzzled.

“So did I,” Frank said.

“Must be a bug,” Mendoza said. “You can’t feel shock waves in a vacuum. You’d better fix that.”

Frank did not answer.

Another tremor rolled through Mendoza’s body.

Which was one hell of a bug, actually. Since he didn’t have a BCI. And wasn’t lying in a telepresence couch. So he shouldn’t have been experiencing
any
sensory feedback beyond what the mask and gloves could provide.

He logged out. Sitting up on the lawn, he wrenched off his mask and headset.

A wave of noise crashed over him.

Klaxons.

Screams.

Automated voices bellowing in English and Arabic, overlapping so that neither language was intelligible.

Frank hurried around the lawn, pulling headsets off, wrenching the protesters out of immersion. He gestured for Mendoza to help. Still woozy, Mendoza just sat there, staring.

Until he felt a breath of wind touch his hair.

Wind.

In a dome, that meant only one thing.

Depressurization.

xxvii.

Mendoza did not even think about the other people still sprawled on the lawn. He bounded towards the R&D building.

A voice said, quietly, but clearly, in his head: “Go back and help the others.”

Mendoza turned back, into the teeth of the wind, which was now a gale. It pulled leaves off the trees. It fluttered the dishdashas and niqabs of the people still lying on the lawn. Mendoza helped to drag them out of immersion. As he hauled an obese girl to her feet, something car-sized smashed on the path outside the R&D building, right about where Mendoza would have been standing if he’d been banging on the door, trying to get in.

“That,” Frank shouted, “looked like a piece of the roof!”

The wind picked up. Mendoza could now hear its thin howl, despite the din of alarms and screams. He dragged the fat girl towards the R&D building. She blubbered, “Laa hawla wa laa quwwata illa Billaah, laa hawla …”

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” Mendoza responded. They were praying in different languages, but they were both praying for the same thing: to live. “The Lord is with thee. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners …”

Another piece fell out of the roof. It hit the cross on top of Notre Dame de la Lune and knocked it upside-down.

“ … now and at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary …”

Roof tiles danced in the air, proving that they were not tiles in the Earth sense at all, but rectangles of lightweight insulating material. The wind sucked them towards the hole in the top of the dome.

“… full of grace …”

Frank led them around the R&D center. With the wind howling between the buildings, they had to fight for every step. Mendoza dragged the fat girl bodily, and her mass (he later realized) saved him from being blown away, like the other people now thrashing in the air.

There was a trapdoor in the terrace outside the cafeteria. It opened to Frank’s command, explosively. They tumbled down into a bunker where the rest of the staff had already taken refuge.

★

“Well,” Trey Hope said, “so that was the long-rumored, much-feared PLAN attack.”

The PLAN fleet in orbit around Mars had been a ruse. While humanity’s attention was fixated on it, the PLAN had launched a smaller strike force. Four nine-packs had snuck up on Luna, fully stealthed. They had disabled the PORMSnet with a wave of EMPs. The Lunar Defense Brigade had never even got off the ground. Star Force had slagged a few of the toilet rolls as they were leaving … by which time, they’d already bombed hell out of Luna. They had rained enhanced-radiation nukes on the surface cities, and deployed kinetic missiles against the underground habs.

The regolith above Marius Hills had fractured, causing shards of igneous rock, each weighing hundreds of tons, to fall into the lava tube. One of these had struck the Hopetown dome, and breached it.

Armies of repair bots had instantly leapt into action. They had wrestled a nanofiber mesh net over the breach, and then squirted liters and liters of splart on it. Air had continued to rush out while they worked, so that as it solidified, the patch bulged up like a boil from the roof of the dome.

The agony of Hopetown had lasted just under seventeen minutes.

Death toll: eighty-three, mostly people working in the building that the shard had fallen on top of, plus a few who had been sucked out of the dome to their deaths.

Wounded: lots.

Traumatized: pretty much everyone.

The therapy industry was going to have a bumper year.

“But you know what I think?” said Trey Hope, a silver-bearded lion of a man, prowling the stage at an all-hands meeting on campus. “If
that’s
the worst they can do? Pffft.”

He raised his face to the ceiling, shook his fist.

“We’re still alive! Damn you! We’re still here!”

Laughter and cheers rang out. Mendoza applauded as wildly as anyone. His heart overflowed with gratitude for the simple fact of survival. He had gone to Mass this morning, and joined the volunteer party who scaled the steeple to restore the cathedral’s cross to its upright position.

When the clapping died down, Trey Hope got serious. He confirmed that Shackleton City had been hit much worse. Verneland had been flattened. Confirmed deaths had already mounted into the five figures, and many more were missing, presumed dead.

“They’ve asked us to take some refugees,” Trey Hope said, “and we’ve agreed, of course. I want all of you to open your hearts and your homes to our unfortunate neighbors.”

So Mendoza ended up sharing his deluxe apartment with a Coptic Christian family of eighteen, who spent their days shitting blood and getting radiation treatments.

In the D.I.E. offices, morale quickly rebounded. The King had made a commitment of
S
500 million in the wake of the disaster, which induced previous fence-sitters to jump on board. The elites of Luna were now united behind D.I.E. The PLAN had clearly intended to shut the project down.
Screw that.

As Trey Hope said: this proves we’re doing something right.

Quibbles emerged from Earth, and then the UN passed a Security Council Resolution
reaffirming
the obligation of “Member States” (read: Luna) to refrain from “technological activities” that might “endanger human populations.”

The resolution was respectfully ignored. The gulf between Earth and Luna yawned wider.

Elfrida said, “See, I was right. There was nothing to worry about.”

“Huh? Forty thousand people died!” Mendoza sat crosslegged on his sofa. Behind him, in the open-plan kitchen, his refugees shuffled and muttered, considerately keeping it down while he was on the phone.

“Same old, same old,” Elfrida said, her face pinched.

“Shackleton City was devastated. People are still dying every day from radiation exposure.” Mendoza beckoned to the youngest of the Copts who had come to him from Shackleton City. He carefully set the small boy on his knees. “This is Gerges. He’s seven. He’s already had a couple of stem cell transfusions, but he suffered massive damage on the cellular level. His gut lining is gone. He can’t keep anything down.” The little boy snuffled and stroked the furry carebot wrapped around his left arm, which was feeding him intravenously.

Elfrida paled. “You poor little guy,” she said, and Mendoza was glad he hadn’t shouted at her. Then she added, “I didn’t mean to minimize anyone’s suffering. I just meant they didn’t target Earth, so I was right about that, that’s all.”

“No, they didn’t target Earth!” Mendoza shifted Gerges onto the sofa beside him. Keeping his voice down so as not to frighten the boy, he leaned towards his tablet, which he’d propped up on the coffee table. “They didn’t target Earth, because they’ve already
defeated
Earth! They attack our moon, slaughter tens of thousands, and all the UN does is pass a Security Council resolution
blaming the victim!
At least Luna is fighting back!”

“Oh? I haven’t heard anything about that.”

Mendoza sucked his lips. Open mouth, insert foot, trample all over NDA. “I just meant, in principle,” he said lamely.

“Are you mixed up in something I don’t know about, John?” Elfrida’s eyes held a queer light. She was leaning on the carved balustrade of a bridge over the Tiber. “Tell me what’s going on,” she demanded.

Mendoza hesitated. “How about I come see you?” he said.

★

In the end, he wasn’t able to get away until October. D.I.E. was ramping up production of Dust at a new facility, this time right here in Hopetown, since there was no longer any need to be furtive about it. At the same time, fighter production had resumed on Mercury. The consortium had twisted the arm of the new CEO of Wrightstuff, Inc., to honor the contract his predecessor had signed. The Dawn Project’s other outsourcing partner, GESiemens Inc., had come through the tragedy on Mercury relatively unscathed. They estimated that a dozen Fraggers would be complete in time for the next Mercury-Earth launch window, at year’s end. The little fighters were not powerful enough to escape the Sun’s gravity well on their own; they’d be coming aboard a hauler. Everyone at D.I.E. was eager for them to arrive, so the next phase of their campaign could begin.

Before he returned to Earth, Mendoza had thought long and hard about what he would tell Elfrida. He couldn’t talk about D.I.E., but he had to explain why he would probably not be coming back to Earth again.

The truth: he had signed up to be a Fragger pilot.

What he told Elfrida: he was going out to the Belt with the Yonezawa brothers.

As he told this story, he realized that it reflected his regrets. A great sadness afflicted him when he thought about the way Jun and Kiyoshi had vanished, taking Fr. Lynch with them, but not Mendoza.

He’d worn the virtual armor of a Knight of the Order of St. Benedict of Passau. Had risked his life alongside them. But in the end they hadn’t judged him worthy.

He snapped at Elfrida when she begged for more details, and hated himself for that, too.

They took that long-postponed trip to New York, with Elfrida’s therapist for a chaperone. (The therapist was a robot, and could easily be ignored.) For Mendoza it was a guilt-fueled splurge. In the Plaza Hotel, a floating wedding-cake moored on Central Lagoon, they lay in each other’s arms, mutually miserable.