Blue Remembered Earth (21 page)

‘Bandwidth was tighter than you said,’ Jitendra replied. ‘Kept being put on hold.’

‘That’s the Chinese,’ Chama said, ‘trying to break the quangle paths, or squeeze us on bandwidth.’

‘They can do that?’ Sunday asked.

‘Not difficult, if you’re a government. Diplomatic-priority transmissions, that kind of thing. Flood the bandwidth with a pipe-load of government-level signals that
must
be routed ahead of routine traffic. It’s very clever.’ Sunday caught a smile through Chama’s helmet. ‘Fortunately, we have some even cleverer people on our side. Uh-oh.’

‘What, in this context,’ Geoffrey said, ‘does “uh-oh” mean?’

‘Means I’ve just been given my final warning,’ Chama said happily. ‘Border enforcement interceptors are on their way.’

‘Could be a bluff,’ Sunday said.

‘Except that radar also has incoming returns, heading our way. Moving too quickly to be crewed vehicles. Probably just armed drones.’

‘Armed drones,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel.’

‘Deterrence,’ Chama replied dismissively, as if he’d said something very naive. ‘That’s all it’ll be. No one shoots things down any more. We’re not on Earth now.’

An impact warning started to blare. Those parts of the walling not taken up with windows, instruments and equipment modules began to strobe scarlet. Sunday saw Jitendra and Gleb flicker and vanish, and almost immediately felt puppet strings striving to yank her back into her own body, in the Descrutinised Zone.

She was there, for a heartbeat: standing up in her living room, in the middle of domestic clutter. Then she was back in the hopper, and her friends had returned as well.

‘OK,’ Chama said. ‘Change of plan. I’m taking us in steeper and harder than I was intending. This is all good fun, isn’t it?’

‘I’m in the middle of a major diplomatic incident,’ Jitendra said marvellingly ‘This was so not in my plans for the day when I woke up this morning.’

‘You’re not in the middle of anything,’ Chama corrected. ‘You’re observing. There’s nothing they’ll be able to pin on you for that. Oh,
please
shut up.’

He was talking to the hopper. It silenced its alarms and ceased strobing its warning lights.

Lunar surface scrolled past with steadily increasing speed as the vehicle lost altitude. Though it was day over Pythagoras, the crater’s high altitude meant that the shadows remained ink-black and elongated. There was little sign that people had ever come to this pumice-grey place; no glints of metal or plastic signifying habitation or even the arduous toiling of loyal machines.

But there were tracks. Against the ancient talcum of the surface, footprints and vehicle marks were immediately obvious to the eye. On Earth, they might have been taken for lava flows or dried-up river beds. On the Moon, they could only mean that something had perambulated or walked there.

Sunday had to adjust her preconceptions when she realised that the curiously stuttered vehicle tracks she was trying to make sense of were in fact footprints, and that the hopper was merely hundreds of metres above the Moon’s surface rather than several kilometres. They had come down much faster than she had thought.

‘There it is,’ Chama said, pointing ahead. ‘The place where your granny came back – see the scuffed-up ground?’

‘I can’t see anything,’ Sunday said.

‘Voke out the hopper. You have authorisation.’

Sunday issued the command – it hadn’t occurred to her before – and most of the hopper vanished. All that remained was a neon sketch of its basic outline, a three-dimensional wedge-shaped prism with Chama cradled somewhere near the middle. The golems, and Gleb and Jitendra’s disembodied heads and torsos, were flying along for the ride.

And now she could indeed see the disturbed ground where Eunice had returned, some unguessable interval after her long walk from the 2059 crash site. Everything was the same as in the aerial image Jitendra had shown them in the ISS: the touchdown marks from another ship, the hairpin of footprints where someone had crossed to Eunice’s original trail and then headed back to the ship. The area of dug-up regolith, like a patch of dirt where a horse had rolled on its back.

Nothing else. Nothing to suggest that anyone had beaten them to this place.

‘This is where it gets interesting,’ Chama said. ‘Here come the interceptors.’

Sunday tensed. She wasn’t in any conceivable danger, but Chama’s confidence might well be misplaced. It had been decades since any kind of lethal, state-level action had occurred between two spacefaring powers . . . but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again, given sufficient provocation.

‘How many?’ Gleb asked.

‘Three,’ Chama said. ‘What I expected. Small autonomous drones. Demon-cloaked. You wanna see them? I can override the Chinese aug if you don’t, but they’ve gone to so much trouble, almost be a shame not to—’

The drones came in fast, swerving at the last instant to avoid ramming the hopper. In their uncloaked form they were too fast and fleet to make out as anything other than bright moving sparks. They might have weapons, or they might rely purely on their swiftness and agility to ram any moving object. Whatever they were, beyond any reasonable doubt they were rigorously legal. They might be operating within Chinese sovereign airspace, but they would still need to abide by the wider nonproliferation treaties governing all spacefaring entities.

There was, however, nothing to stop them projecting fearsome aug layers around themselves. The demon-cloaks made them look much larger than the hopper. Each was a grinning, ghoulish head, styled in Chinese fashion, trailing banners of luminous fire behind it. As the drones whipped around the descending hopper, harassing it but never quite coming into contact, their fire-tails tangled into a whirling multicoloured corkscrew. One demon was a pale, sickly green, another a frigid blue. The third was the liverish red of a slavering tongue. Their eyes were white and wild, furious under beetled brows. They looked like Pekinese dogs turned rabid and spectral.

‘Cease your descent,’ a voice said, cutting across the cabin. ‘Do not attempt to land. You will be escorted back into neutral Lunar airspace. Immediate failure to cooperate will be construed as hostile action. Hostile action will be countered with sanctioned military force.’

The corkscrewing demons were getting closer now, spiralling ever tighter around the hopper.

‘Do what they say,’ Gleb pleaded.

‘Just words,’ Chama said. ‘Nothing I wasn’t expecting.’ But at the same time he reached up and touched his neck ring, as if to reassure himself that the helmet really was engaged and pressure-tight.

‘Cease your descent,’ the voice said again. ‘This is your final warning.’

‘I think they mean it,’ Sunday said.

‘They’re bluffing. Last thing they want to do is shoot down some idiot tourist who just happened to key the wrong coordinates into their autopilot.’

‘I think, by now, they probably realise they’re not dealing with an idiot tourist,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Guess that’s possible,’ Chama admitted.

The blue demon rammed the hopper. As the demon veered away, apparently undamaged, the hopper went into a slow tumble. Chama released the joystick, letting the avionics stabilise the vehicle. They didn’t do much good. Just as the hopper was regaining orientation and control, another demon would come in and knock it back into a tumble. The knocks were becoming more violent, and the ground was rushing up towards them like the bottom of an elevator shaft. The demons were coming in two and three at a time now, jackhammering against the hull. The tumble was totally uncontrolled, the ground spinning in and out of view several times a second.

Chama started saying something. It might have been, ‘Brace!’ but Sunday couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that an instant later Chama wasn’t there. Where the seat had been was an impact cocoon, a cushioned, mushroom-white adaptive shell that had enveloped both the seat and its occupant in an eye-blink.

Everything went blank. There was a moment of limbo and then she was back in her apartment again. Only for another moment, though. The ching bind had been interrupted, but not severed. She fell back into the golem and the golem was out of its harness, lying in a limb-knotted tangle against one of the equipment modules on the opposite wall. The hopper was back to solidity now, no longer a neon sketch of itself. Jitendra’s head and torso phased in out of view, cross-hatched with cartoon static to indicate bandwidth compression. Gleb flickered. Geoffrey’s golem was hanging out of its harness.

‘That went well,’ Chama said.

The impact cocoon had folded itself away and Chama was unbuckling. Upside down, he dropped at Lunar acceleration onto what had been the ceiling. Jitendra resumed solidity. Geoffrey extricated his golem from its harness. Sunday tried to move her own proxy body and found her blue metal limbs working normally.

‘They took us out,’ she said, amazed.

‘Tactical disablement,’ Chama replied, thoroughly nonplussed. ‘Very well done, too. We’re still airtight, and the collision was within survivability parameters.’ He grabbed a yellow handhold and propelled himself across to the hopper’s door. ‘Hold on – I’m venting. No point in saving the air now.’

The air fled the hopper in a single dying bark, dragging with it a fluff cloud of silvery dust and spangling human detritus. Moving in vacuum now, Chama operated the door’s bulky release mechanism. The door opened onto a view like a late Rothko: rectangle of black sky below, rectangle of dazzling bright Lunar ground above.

The golem’s vision system dropped software filters over the scene until the ground dimmed to a tolerable grey.

Chama was first out. He sprang through the door and fell to the surface, landing catlike. Sunday followed, Chama already bounding to the other side of the hopper by the time her golem touched dirt.

Sunday looked back just as Geoffrey’s machine spidered out of the upturned hopper, followed closely by the bobbing, balloon-like head and shoulders of Jitendra’s figment, and then Gleb’s. Jitendra and Gleb were merely moving viewpoints, entirely dependent on Chama and the golems to supply their ching binds with a constantly updating environment. The demon-cloaked drones were still swarming overhead, circling and helixing above the spot where Chama had crashed.

‘This way,’ he said, breaking into a seven-league sprint, flinging his arms wide with each awesome stride. ‘Can’t be too far north of where we came down.’

The golems, built for durability rather than speed, had difficulty keeping up with the bounding figure. Chama had a spade strapped to the back of his suit, of the perfectly mundane common-or-garden type. He must have put it in one of the hopper’s external stowage lockers, ready to grab as soon as they were down. There was something else, too: a grey alloy cylinder, tucked under his life-support backpack.

Some new order must have reached the demons, for they aborted their spiralling flight and rocketed away in three directions, streaking towards the crater wall that marked the effective horizon. But they were not leaving. A kilometre or so away, they whipped around and came back, streaking at man-height across the crater floor, demon-cloak faces tipped forward, eyes glaring, tongues rabid and drooling.

They screamed and howled through the aug.

‘Keep moving,’ Chama called. ‘This is just intimidation. They won’t touch us.’

‘I certainly feel adequately intimidated!’ Jitendra said.

Sunday flinched as the red demon blocked her path, its doglike face as wide as a house. The cloak was nebulous; through its billowing, flaming translucence she made out the hovering kernel of the drone, balanced on spiking micro-jets.

‘Do not move,’ said the same commanding voice that they had heard in the hopper. ‘You are under arrest. You will remain in this area for processing by border-enforcement officials.’

‘Keep moving,’ Chama said again.

Chama had his own demon intent on blocking his progress: the blue one. Chama wasn’t stopping, though, and the demon was actually backing up, not letting itself get too close to what it undoubtedly registered as a warm, breathing, easily damaged human presence. The green demon was fixating on Geoffrey. None of them was paying any attention at all to Jitendra or Gleb, their figments all but undetectable.

But if the blue demon was unwilling to obstruct Chama, the other two had no compunctions about blocking the golems. Some governing intelligence had already determined that these were disposable machines. The monstrous face leered and glared as it anticipated Sunday’s movements, ducking and diving to either side like a keen goalkeeper.

Then, without warning, the demon-cloaks vanished.

A man was standing in front of her now, hands clasped behind his back, with the hovering drone at his rear. He wore a neat platinum-grey business suit of modern cut over a white shirt and pearl necktie. His shoes failed to merge with the soil, their soles hovering a centimetre or so above the dirt. He was young, handsome and plausible.

‘Good morning,’ the man said, agreeably enough. ‘I am Mister Pei, from the Department of Border Control. Would you be so kind as to remain where you are, until this matter can be resolved? Officials will be with you very shortly.’

Another copy of Mister Pei had appeared in front of Geoffrey, presumably reciting the same spiel. There might be a real human being behind these figments, or it might still be some kind of automated response.