The Luna Deception (38 page)

He hesitated to speak up. Everyone was busy. Youssef wasn’t here. Jasmine already thought Mendoza was a typical Earthling …

On impulse, he stepped down from his ergoform, took his jacket, and moved towards the door.

The PA emitted the two-tone chime that preceded an important announcement.

“Everyone, be informed that there has been an accident. The Fragger has crashed.” It was a real person making the announcement, not an MI. Her voice broke. “Frank was piloting. We don’t know what happened. The good news is he’s expected to survive …”

Mendoza didn’t wait to hear the rest. He kept moving, out of the building. He did not know where he’d been going to go. But he knew where he was going now.

Frank.

An accident?

There are no accidents,
his mother often said, with the certainty of a lifetime immersed in Catholic cosmology.

Standing in the sunlight, Mendoza summoned his Grasshopper via his contacts. It drove up from the underground garage. He got in and instructed the autodrive to take him to the ‘roadlock,’ as Hopetowners called the airlock assigned to vehicles. You were not allowed to drive your own car inside the dome. Once outside, he disabled the autodrive and zoomed upwards.

The Grasshopper’s hydrogen fuel cell powered a cold-gas propulsion system that could provide rearwards and vertical thrust. It travelled, like its namesake, in hops. Up he went, through the stripe of sunlight that sheared through the PLAN’s hole in the roof. He could see the patch on the roof of Hopetown, like a knob of keloid tissue on a face. Down, down, down to the jagged floor.

The dead were out here. Despite the best efforts of the search teams, not all the people sucked out of the breach on 9/29 had been found. Mendoza kept the headlights on maximum strength, half-expecting to see a frozen, irradiated body bouncing up from the floor every time he landed.

The lava tube kinked. He flew into daylight, and out.

Earth partnered the sun, low in the sky. Using the GPS, he navigated through the lumpy terrain of the Marius Hills, down to the Mare Vaporum.

The solar panels of the new launch facility glittered in the distance. They must have seen him coming klicks away, as the Grasshopper kicked up a fountain of moondust each time it touched down. He was met with, “You can’t see Frank. He’s in intensive care.”

“Oh, come on,” was all Mendoza could think of to say, standing beside his car, which had been de-dusted in the vehicle airlock and now sparkled clean. The garage smelled of mint. This launch facility was so new that dust, dirt, and fungal growths hadn’t had time to lodge in the crannies.

“Trey’s on his way,” said the elderly field engineer confronting Mendoza. “I guess you can go in for a couple of minutes, until he gets here.”

“I told those assholes to let you in as soon as you arrived.” Frank said, when Mendoza was admitted to the launch facility’s sickbay. To be precise, he did not
say
the words. They appeared on a screen above the privacy baffles that hid all of Frank except for one bare foot. The baffles bulged and trembled: medibots at work behind them. “I’ve got comms in here, feeds. I saw you coming.”

“Are you OK?” Dumb question.

“I’m fine. But listen, Mendoza. They’re going to say I’m crazy or some shit. Dad thinks he’s always right about everything. So I need you to listen to me.
Believe
me.”

“I’m listening.”

“Vicky’s alive.”

“Frank …”

“She’s alive! I
saw
her! That’s why I crashed. Lost control for a moment, I guess. It was a shock.”

“Where … was she?”

“That’s the weird part. She was …” The words appeared one by one on the screen. “In the cockpit with me.”

Dumbfounded, Mendoza blurted, “How was there room? The Fragger’s cockpit is scarcely big enough for one.”

“She was sitting on my lap.
Laugh.”

Mendoza moved closer to the privacy baffles. He laid his hand on Frank’s foot. It was icy cold, and did not move a millimeter.

“They say the Fragger’s totaled,” Frank went on. “I’m not buying it. Shit, I’m OK, so how can the ship not be?”

Fear overtook Mendoza. He stepped around to the foot of the bed.

The baffles were open here, so that the medibots could move in and out. He saw another privacy screen, which hid Frank’s head and shoulders. On this side of the screen was a red, glistening mess. A medibot hunted and pecked, suturing the purple snakes of Frank’s intestines. A suction hose gulped up blood and fluids. Frank’s entire body had been crushed. His pelvis and ribs rose from the gore, macabrely intact. But even nanotically reinforced bones were not unbreakable: something had sheared through both of Frank’s legs above the knee. The foot Mendoza held was not attached to anything. It lay in a tray.

“Hey,” the screen blinked in his peripheral vision. “Can you tell me what they’re doing down there? Damn bots aren’t very talkative.”

“They’re fixing you up,” Mendoza muttered.

“I sure hope so. It better not take too long. I have to get back up there and find Vicky.”

Mendoza stumbled away. Heading for the door, he threw up at the feet of Trey Hope, who had just entered the room with an entourage of state-of-the-art, Kali-armed surgeons.

★

Driving, he parsed Frank’s bizarre statements. Tried to work out how Frank could have been telling the truth.

Say Vicky really was out there. She made it back, but her ship was damaged, she couldn’t land, couldn’t communicate. Frank spots her and tries to rescue her … but it goes wrong, and he crashes. But he can’t admit that he deliberately risked the last Fragger, so he comes up with this other story.

It was possible, Mendoza guessed. In a universe where people acted dumb when those they loved were near.

Which, actually, described this one.

The other alternative was that Frank was crazy. But if he was, Mendoza was, too.

He went home. Couldn’t face going back to the office. Everyone would ask him how Frank was.

Even his Copts asked. They, too, had heard the news. “He’s expected to survive,” Mendoza told them.

Eliana, little Gerges, patriarch Binyamin, and all the others shook their heads solemnly. There seemed to be even more of them today, rustling and shivering in their heavy Shackleton City clothing. Mendoza grabbed his hat and went back out. Abraam, who was hanging around near the door, flattened himself against the wall so that he would not get in Mendoza’s way. They tried so hard to be good guests.

Back in his Grasshopper, Mendoza cued up a Bartok violin sonata on the sound system. He drove down the tube to New Riyadh.

This 6-km long dome, pimpled with satellite dishes and air exchangers, was the private residence of the Saudi royal family. The House of Saud provided fodder for an entire subcategory of gossip feeds, proving both the timeless appeal of royalty, and the allure of the incompletely known. You couldn’t even get in here … unless, for example, you worked for one of the King’s best friends, such as Trey Hope.

Mendoza had never been inside before. He expected to be overwhelmed by bling.

Instead, he stepped into a desert.

“Wow,” he said, genuinely overwhelmed.

Low dunes stretched to the horizon. On Luna, the horizon was only ever a couple of kilometers away, so it looked like the sand went on forever, until it met the cobalt sky. Heat mirages rippled. Silence filled Mendoza’s ears, making him realize how accustomed he’d grown to living with the background noise of a dome.

“Come on,” said the security guard who had met him at the airlock. He tramped into the dunes. Mendoza followed.

Dry, oven-like heat pressed on their skin. Off to their left, date palms shaded a pond as flat as a mirror.

“Sorry we have to walk,” the security guard said. “All the camels are out today.”

“The camels … are out?”

“You were expecting decadence? Swimming pools and things?” The security guard was about seventeen years old, earnest and informative. “New Riyadh isn’t modelled on
old
Riyadh. It’s basically a wildlife preserve. That’s why you had to go through a full decontamination protocol before you could enter the dome. We have hyraxes, gerbils, desert foxes, leaf-nosed bats, and even a breeding pair of leopards. And camels, of course.”

“Wow. I think I actually read something about that.”

“The deserts of the Middle East were greened in the late twenty-first century. We’re
told
it was necessary to combat climate change,” the young security guard said darkly. “But we
know
it destroyed the ecology of the region. So the House of Saud made a commitment to preserve the natural beauty of the Arabian peninsula.”

Ahead, a sand-colored mountain rose out of the heat haze.
There’s nothing natural about a desert inside a dome on the moon
, Mendoza thought. Hot and tired, he said, “Can we skip the guided tour? I want to see the King.”

A black shape separated from the distant mountain, soaring. The security guard yelped and fell flat on his face.

“Is it dangerous?” Mendoza yelled, but got no answer.

The enormous bird swooped down, folding its wings, and landed in front of them. Sand spurted up from its jewelled sandals. Yes, sandals. It was not a bird. It was a woman in an abaya, with wings spanning four full meters. Green eyes sparked in the slit of her niqab.

“Frank’s friend,” she said in English.

“Yes.”

“How dare you make him walk?” she scolded the security guard. “Look, he’s red in the face, he’s sunburned!”

The security guard, still face-down, babbled in Arabic.

The woman snapped something in the same language. She held out her hands to Mendoza. “Come, I can carry you. I’m very strong.”

Doubtfully, Mendoza stepped forward. She pulled him into her arms and leapt into the air. As the desert fell away beneath them, Mendoza wrapped his legs around her bottom so as not to be dangling vertically. Face to bosom, groin to groin. This was awkward.

“I’m Nadia,” the woman panted. Mendoza twitched. He knew that name from the news. He was being carried through the air by
Princess
Nadia, who’d recently broken off her engagement to Prince Jian Er of China. “Do you like my wings? I’m getting fed up of them, actually. It’s annoying to have to sleep on your stomach, and you can’t sit in ordinary chairs, either.”

“They’re lovely,” Mendoza mumbled into her breasts. He had assumed the wings were a fancy, feathered version of the wingsets that you could rent in the touristy areas of Shackleton City. Now that he knew they were augments, he could feel her enhanced shoulder muscles flexing under his hands. “I like the … feathers.”

“Not feathers! Pycnofibers.”

“Like the coats of dinosaurs.”

“Yes! Exactly like that!” She giggled, which made her breasts heave. “I am a dinosaur. We’re all dinosaurs here.”

“Laugh,”
Mendoza said weakly.

Something terrible was happening. He knew she had to be able to feel it.
No. No.
Think of Elfrida. Think of … think of … death by decompression, Horowitz at Carnegie Hall …

Abdul.

Nadia’s feet thumped onto solid ground. Mendoza reeled away from her, tomato-red, smoothing his trousers.

She uttered a triumphant cackle that said she knew exactly what he was trying to hide.

Pressed against her, he had not been able to see anything during their flight. Now, they were high up on the mountain. But the mountain was actually a citadel, or the citadel was built into the mountain, carved of the same lunar basalt. Craggy walls enclosed a courtyard dotted with succulents and fruit trees. An infinity pool spilled over the far wall.

Looking up, Mendoza saw domes crowning spurs of rock. Windows dotted cliff-faces. Minarets pricked the sky, which was now close enough that he could see it was made up of individual panels.

Something touched his foot. He leapt back. A meter-long lizard hissed at him.

Nadia giggled. “Say hello to my father.”

“Uh?” Deciding that she was insane and he’d better humor her, Mendoza bent towards the lizard.

“Over here!”

A sort of mobile throne rolled across the courtyard on soundless treads. The sunlight reflected off the bubble that enclosed its occupant. A voice boomed from external speakers.

“Terrible, terrible news. How did it happen?”

Pulling himself together, Mendoza gave an account of Frank’s crash—leaving out Frank’s claim that Vicky had appeared in the Fragger’s cockpit. Sweat rolled out of his hair. He stood in the shade, but it made no difference because the heat did not come from the ‘sun.’ It was the heat generated by the habitat’s life support machinery, allowed to build up to desert temperature.

“Doesn’t make a damn bit of sense,” said the voice from the mobile throne.
“Why’d
he crash? Ship trouble? That’s the problem with outsourcing production to Mercury. You get what you pay for.”

Mendoza plucked up his courage and stepped closer to the throne. Now he could see into the bubble. Cradled in polyfoam, like a toy in its packaging, lay the most wizened specimen of
Homo sapiens
Mendoza had ever seen. A traditional ghutrah headdress stood away from a corpse-yellow brow. Eyes: closed. Mouth: open. Resemblance to cadaver: 99%.

“He said he saw Vicky up there,” Mendoza said. “He said she was in the cockpit of the Fragger. Sitting on his lap. It startled him. That’s why he crashed.”

The mouth of the cadaver-like object twitched. “Ha, ha,” said the voice from the throne’s speakers (now revealed as synthetic). “Ho, ho, ho. That’s right up there with ‘the dog ate my homework.’”

Believe me …

“Sir—your majesty—”

“’Your royal highness’ will do.”

“Dad is the King’s brother,” Nadia interjected. She was sitting sideways on the rim of the infinity pool, her wings trailing on the ground. “But that doesn’t make me a princess. I’m only a sheikha. Abdul was a sheikh, not a prince. The feedtards always get that wrong.”

With a shock, Mendoza realized that Nadia was Abdul the Fragger pilot’s sister, the living corpse his father. He blurted, “Your royal highness, is there any chance that your son might be alive? Have you heard from him—heard
of
him …”
seen him?