The Luna Deception (37 page)

“I wish you were a woman,” Elfrida said suddenly.

“I could shave my legs, if hairiness is the issue,” Mendoza pretended to joke.

“Until we met, I’d only ever slept with women. It was different.”

Mendoza had known she was with a woman before him, of course. He had spent a long time being jealous of that woman. Thankfully, Cydney Blaisze wasn’t in the picture any more. But he had not known he was Elfrida’s first boyfriend
ever.
His mind instantly formed the words:
So I took your virginity.
He had just enough sense not to say them.

“How is it different? Better, I hope.”

The reflections of lights on water wavered across the ceiling. Elfrida blurted, “The Church says that homosexuality is wrong.”

She’d been getting more and more interested in Catholicism. Mendoza was afraid she was doing it for him.

“Well, the Church says fornication is wrong, period,” he offered. “It doesn’t matter with who.”

“So we’re sinning right now.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And you’re OK with that?”

No. Yes. No, but you unbuttoned my shirt, and I forget what happened next. No, but I’ve been waiting my whole life to hold you in my arms.
“No,” he said, “but I’ll go to confession tomorrow.”

“And that makes it all right?”

“No! Of course it doesn’t.” He rolled on top of her, kissed her to stop her from arguing. This was Earth, so he weighed enough to pin her down. “I’m a sinner, Elfrida.” Kiss. “I’m a selfish bastard.” Kiss. “Do as I say, not as I do.”

“Just as long as you keep on doing that.”

“This?”

“No, the other …”

“This.”

“Yes, that. That. That! Ohhh …”

But nothing had been resolved, and the next morning at breakfast, Elfrida said, “I think Lorna’s going to get off.”

Mendoza eyed her uneasily. He had been to confession already, slipping out of the hotel and back again before she woke up—he had enough self-respect to keep his word about that. “Lorna won’t get off.”

“You’ve got this childlike faith in justice,” Elfrida said darkly.

“I think I’ve just been insulted.” Mendoza loaded his plate with bacon and sausages from the breakfast buffet. In the back of his mind was the thought that this might be his last chance to eat real food.

“Pig.” Elfrida selected strawberries and kiwis from a vat of fruit salad. She was trying to lose weight, as usual.

“Why do you think Lorna’s going to get off?”

She shook her head, spooning yogurt over her fruit.

“You’re going to testify at his trial. You’re going to tell them the truth about everything that happened on Mercury. With the evidence from Gloria dos Santos’s BCI, that’ll convict him beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

Her forehead crinkled at the mention of dos Santos. “It might. But you see, I don’t think he’s ever going to come to trial.”

“It’s already on the ICJ docket!”

“Yes, but who says he’s going to show? I say he won’t. He’ll skip bail. His friends on Luna will protect him.” Her lips curled in an ugly grimace. “The guys you work for.”

“I told you, I’ve already quit.” He prayed she never found out the truth. Or at least not until the war was over and he could be named as one of those who helped to defeat the PLAN.

“Sorry; the guys you
were
working for. They won’t want him going on the witness stand. Who knows what would come out? So, they’ll either kill him or spirit him away.” Elfrida wandered over to the beverage station.

Mendoza came up beside her as she was ordering an espresso. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“You’re pretty defensive of them, considering that you quit because you realized they were all about the money.”

Mendoza felt himself getting snared in his own lies. He ordered a latte with goat’s milk.

“So my guess is they’ll spirit him away,” Elfrida resumed. “Because he’s still got his expertise, and that’s worth a lot of money. If it wasn’t for the mess in Shackleton City, they probably would have done it already. But in my opinion, he deserves to die.”

“I agree.” He wasn’t sure he did agree.

“It’s a shame we don’t have the death penalty anymore.”

“Well, the Church is against the death penalty, too,” Mendoza pointed out.

“I might just take a weekend trip to Luna and do it myself. I’m sure I could get to him. I know Dr. Hasselblatter and everything. I’ve got an in.” After an excruciatingly long moment, Elfrida grinned.

Filled with relief that she was joking, Mendoza took his latte and led the way to a table. He slurped foam. “Mm, pretty good.”

“Mine’s disgusting,” Elfrida said, pushing her espresso away. “I should’ve known better than to order espresso in New York. No one can make it right except Italians.”

“Let’s blow this town. Let’s go to Italy. Introduce me to your parents. Show me where you grew up.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, John, but I just want you to go.”

“What? Why?”

“You’re going, anyway, aren’t you? You’re going out to the Belt with the Yonezawas. This …” She gestured at the view of Central Lagoon, the swan boats and floating hot-dog vendors. “This is too painful. I’d rather just say goodbye and get it over with.”

Goodbye.

Mendoza hadn’t wanted to frame it like that, even to himself. But the fact was, it
might
be goodbye … forever.

“I love you,” he said.

“That doesn’t really make me feel better. Actions speak louder than words, you know.”

He did know that, of course. He prayed that in the future, when his actions in the war against the PLAN could be revealed, she’d understand why he had to do this.

“OK,” he said, feeling like a complete shit. “I’m leaving.”

xxviii.

Mendoza had been accepted as a Fragger pilot, but this was not the accolade it sounded like. Regardless of what Frank had said about favoring the descendants of Vikings and jihadis, the selection committee was, in fact, taking all comers. When it came time to sign on the dotted line, not many people were willing to risk their lives.

Few of the volunteers had ever flown a spaceship before, let alone a stealth fighter. But most of them had spent years of their lives playing shoot-‘em-up immersion games, which gave them a head start. Mendoza didn’t even have that. Never would he have expected that his lack of interest in sims, usually considered a sign of a rational and well-organized mind, would end up holding him back.

Frank had actually said that he was just putting Mendoza on the list as a bribe to get him to stick around after 9/29 (as they were now calling the PLAN attack on Luna).

Determined not to be left out, Mendoza did regular sessions in the training sim, but he wasn’t even in the rotation for hands-on practice with the Fragger.

The
Fragger.

Until the first shipment of new fighters from Mercury arrived, there would be only one Fragger for the new cadre of pilots to train on. This was the one that Frank had been going to pilot to Mars, but hadn’t, due to the skiing accident that had broken his back. (He was fine now. When you had a nanotically reinforced skeleton, it could be fixed with a welding torch, crudely speaking.)

The Fragger had been brought back to Luna and tuned up. Through October, training flights took off from the new inertial launcher on the Mare Vaporum, near Marius Hills.

The Fragger’s ion propulsion drive could not achieve escape velocity from Luna without burning a wasteful amount of juice, which would draw down its reserves for maneuvers. That was why they had been launched from space to begin with. The inertial launcher—a rail launcher bought from a mining company that had been hit on 9/29—solved the problem in a different way, by catapulting the ship into space from an elliptical maglev track.

Several times a day, Mendoza enviously watched the Fragger whizz into the lunar sky. And then he got back to work.

While he waited his turn, he was still toiling away in the analysis section.

They’d given up on finding the lost batch of Dust. Now they were working on improving tracking for the next drop.

Mendoza wondered why there even needed to be a next drop. They already had a good enough map of Mars for target-finding. But the IT axiom applied: data good, more data better.

In addition to the unused probes that had come back with Frank’s Fragger, trillions more were now pouring out of the new fab in Hopetown. Making them was not difficult, for an outfit like Hope Energy, with its expertise in biotechnology and nanoscale manufacturing processes.

Controlling and tracking the probes
was
difficult.

“Crap on it!” Youssef howled.”I’ve lost my swarm again!”

“They just don’t like you,” Mendoza said. “Seriously, they probably went behind a building.”

Luna’s tenuous surface boundary exosphere was not enough of an atmosphere for the probes. They could only fly where there was air. And that meant inside a dome. The citizens of Marius Hills would have been uneasy if they knew that Hopetown and New Jeddah were now teeming with winged bacteria. But they did not know. Even when millions of probes swarmed together, they looked like nothing more than a sparkle of dust in the air.

The analysts flew them everywhere, in and out of buildings, and spied on their friends. This was not prurience. It was practice.

The Dust, being bacteria, could not be programmed in the traditional sense of the word. However, they could emit and receive signals at 512MHz, utilizing the antennae that they had been gengineered to grow from deposits of metal in their single-celled bodies. The subcarrier oscillator that the team used to communicate with them was modulated with bioinformation that included the wavelength of the light the probes were absorbing. This enabled them to ‘take photographs.’ It also allowed the team to control them like minuscule hang-gliders, by feeding them certain black-box strings which Mendoza did not understand.
That
part worked OK. But when their feeble signals were blocked, for example by a cathedral … or a crowd of people … they wandered off on their own and got lost. Then someone had to go out and look for them.

“Sigh,”
Youssef said, standing up. He grabbed one of the portable transceivers. “Back in a few. Hopefully they haven’t gotten flushed down a toilet, or something.”

“Huh?” Mendoza said.

“What?”

Staring at his own screens, Mendoza shook his head. “Nothing. See you soon.”

His own swarm was inside Notre Dame de la Lune. A graph wobbled downwards, showing an average loss rate. You’d start with a swarm of 2,000,000, say, and only 1,800,000 would come home. That was normal. What was
not
normal was that his graph had suddenly plunged. It said he had only
half
his swarm left.

“Can’t be right,” Mendoza muttered.

The swarm drifted over the altar, photographing the (electric) candlesticks. The raw images were blurry, but imaging software rendered them at a resolution high enough for him to see the altar boys’ fingerprints on the candlesticks.

A lens-less camera, too small for the naked eye to see, which could disassemble itself and fly away ... Mendoza preferred not to think about the potential commercial applications.

But there was no danger of Hope Energy commercializing the probes anytime soon. The control software was just too buggy. The Hope Center for Nanobiotics had handled that side of the development project, and the Hope Center for Nanobiotics was now defunct. Of course, its IP still existed, but all that stuff was now in suspended animation, buried under a bazillion court orders … just like everything else Derek Lorna had ever touched.

So the D.I.E. team were wrestling with a control program none of them understood, running MI diagnostics, trying out messy code patches.

504,809.

This was ridiculous.

“Is someone messing with my swarm?”

They did that. Pranks. Since they all had access to the secure wireless keys, you just had to de-authenticate a swarm from its assigned controller and re-authenticate it to yourself. Then send it to lurk in the toilets or something. Har, har.

“Naw, dude.”

“You losing probes?”

“Bunch of mine are gone, too.”

“Maybe it’s a protest. Someone bought bug spray, is killing them by the million.”

“Har, har.”

“Bug spray wouldn’t kill them,” Jasmine Ah said, humorlessly. “They’re tough. You guys need to figure out those black-box code strings. That’s where the problem is.”

Mendoza thought,
Frank should know about this.
Frank was the guardian angel of D.I.E., always in their corner, shielding them from blowback.

Mendoza clicked over to the personnel map, which showed where everyone was. He searched for Frank’s name.
OUT OF AREA.
Dammit. Now he remembered, Frank had taken the Fragger up today.

ID bubbles clustered so thickly on campus that they obliterated the 3D buildings. Text and mugshots ruffled up, tracking his gaze.

Wait. Go back.

The frowning face of a young Arab. Name: Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud.

Where have I heard that name before?

Mendoza was getting used to functioning without his BCI. His powers of recall had recovered. In a second he placed the name.

Abdul ibn Abdullah ibn Mahmud had been one of the Fragger pilots lost on the final, failed Dust drop.

So, he never got taken off the personnel roster. That’s understandable. It would be like admitting he’s dead.

Mendoza zoomed in on Abdul’s ID bubble. The young man had prominent teeth, a unibrow. Hawk-like eyes. The map gave him a location on the campus. R&D building … 3
rd
floor …Analysis Section.

Jesus!

Mendoza jumped as if he’d been stung.

Abdul’s ID bubble floated in the corner of this very office.

He’s in HERE!

Mendoza rose from his ergoform. Stood on it
to look over the tops of the fish tanks.

Everyone was in their place, bouncing up and down, shambling on a treadmill, or slumped immobile, according to personal preference.

No unibrowed young Arab pilot to be seen.

Mendoza rubbed his arms. All the little hairs were standing on end.