The Luna Deception (33 page)

But the 16
th
passed without incident, as Mars oppositions always did. The doomsday crowd moved on, oblivious to the fact that the toilet rolls could attack Earth any time they wanted, if they had the capability to attack Earth in the first place.

Whether the PLAN actually had or was acquiring that capability was one of the questions the nanoprobes might’ve answered.

Mendoza got so frustrated with the lack of updates that he took to prowling around the virtual walls of the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, looking for a new way in, now that he’d lost his UNVRP tools.

So when he got a call from a stranger named Frank Hope IV, on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, while he was helping out as an usher at Mass, he nearly had a heart attack.

They’ve caught me.

Not exactly.

“Hello,” said Frank Hope IV, standing in a virtual window in the wall of San Pedro Calungsod. He was handsome, in his twenties. He had curly hair and a nose like the blade of a cleaver, like his father Trey Hope’s. “I’m sorry to hear you’re out of a job. But I figured you might be scouting around for something new. Ever thought about working in the energy industry?”

Mendoza moved to one side, out of the flow of congregants. He stared up at the stained glass windows. Frank Hope IV floated between Jesus and St. Peter, half their size. “I don’t know you. I mean, I know
of
you, of course, but we’ve never … How’d you get my ID?”

“Well, actually, you do know me,” Frank Hope IV said. “You just know me better as Fragger1.”

“Oh. Shit.”

“About that job. We’re doing some of the stuff I talked about on the forums. Are you interested?”

xxv.

Kiyoshi had wanted to visit Tiangong Erhao for ages. No one in the Belt knew very much about the Chinese space program. Officially, it was minimal and 99% automated. The Han Chinese were purebloods, which made them targets for the PLAN.

Regardless, the Chinese
did
go into space, taking their losses in the name of the Imperial Republic. And Tiangong Erhao was their jumping-off point.

A dumbbell-shaped space station fifty kilometers long, the largest in the solar system, “Heavenly Palace 2” had been built over decades, section by section. Now almost complete, it rotated in space like a child’s teething toy. It even had ‘tooth marks’ on it—the hard-vacuum docking bays where shuttles, colony ships, and resource haulers parked.

Sometimes, for a very long time.

Kiyoshi rented a berth alongside the
Nan Yang,
a colony ship bound for an asteroid named 10199 Chariklo. He took to spending his evenings with the
Nan Yang’s
captain, a congenial guy who liked to snort elephant-sized doses of
cijiwu
while complaining about the shipping company. “We’ll get underway for the Belt this year, they say. No, maybe next year. Fucking Highs, they think in terms of centuries.”

“What’s
cijiwu?
Doesn’t that just mean ‘stimulant’?”

“That’s what it is. Have some.”

Meanwhile, shuttle-loads of colonists dribbled in and took up residence aboard the
Nan Yang,
apparently untroubled by the prospect of not going anywhere for years. It was some weeks before Kiyoshi realized that these beaten-down-looking people were prisoners. They wore stun cuffs around their ankles as they went about their tasks in the
Nan Yang’s
bowels. There were even baby-size cuffs for the little ones. The asteroid 10199 Chariklo—the
Nan Yang’s
eventual destination—was to be a convict colony.

“Well, it makes sense from an economic point of view,” said the captain of the
Nan Yang,
defensively. “They’re likely to get whacked by the PLAN sooner or later, so why send anyone valuable?”

“Why send anyone at all?” Kiyoshi said. “You guys are purebloods. You’ve got targets painted on your backs.”

“A population of three billion crammed into a country smaller than Canada, half of which is desert,” said the captain. “Any more questions?”

“Is there any
cijiwu
left?”

When he got bored, Kiyoshi explored the regions of Tiangong Erhao near the docking bay. He was disappointed. The space station was just a giant manufacturing plant. High-tech fabrication equipment thrashed and sparkled in vacuum. A few lonely individuals floated around, complying with the legal requirement that robots be supervised. So much for the rumors you heard.

His acquaintances in Docking Bay 14 agreed that they, too, had heard about lakes and gardens tucked away within Tiangong Erhao—a replica of the Summer Palace, a replica of Versailles, communities of winged near-immortals who secretly controlled the entire Chinese economy and were probably also Jewish—but no one could confirm whether or not they existed.

Except Jun. “Yes, there are pressurized regions,” he said. “They’re laboratories. The Imperial Republic runs an experimental human breeding program up here. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘the banality of evil’?”

“Now I
have
to see these places.”

“I always thought Arendt was wrong. I mean, evil isn’t banal. That’s the last thing it is. But now I know what she was talking about.”

Jun drifted away, and would not gratify Kiyoshi’s curiosity any further. He had not gone back into hiding, but was still acting distant. He was spending most of his time in his garden. (Kiyoshi had given in and bought fertilizer and so forth. Dronazon
did
deliver to Tiangong Erhao.) Jun could not, however, retreat entirely from the real world.

Every minute of every day, he was negotiating for their survival. The torpid rhythms of human life in Docking Bay 14 veiled an ongoing argument on the intellectual plane. The protagonists of this argument were the AIs of the various Chinese ships docked at Tiangong Erhao. And now, Jun.

Though the Chinese publically denied it, their ships
were run by AIs, whose motto might have been, “Don’t care, so there.” Or, as the phrase coined by the sitting president of the Imperial Republic went, “The overcoat of apathy blunts the dagger of malevolence.” The Chinese AIs detested everything and everyone. But they were not (very) dangerous. They cared so little about life that they didn’t even trouble themselves to be hostile to it. They went along with their human masters’ plans,
faute de mieux,
because human beings so often screwed up spectacularly, and it was fun to watch. One of these stunted artificial minds’ few pleasures was schadenfreude.

Another was historical revisionism.

They delighted (if AIs marinating in existential despair could be said to delight in anything) in discussing the 4,000-year history of China and identifying all the occasions when the (human) Chinese had screwed up, failed, or been stabbed in the back.

One of their favorite topics was the 20
th
century, with a special focus on World War II.

Jun’s arrival had come to them as a gift from above. Someone new to argue with! Better yet, an entity they had thought non-existent: a
Japanese
AI! They had pounced on him before the
Monster
even docked, and demanded that he apologize for the Japanese atrocities committed in China between 1937 and 1945.

“This is exactly what I knew would happen,” Jun said glumly. “They have no imagination.”

Ever since then, he’d been fencing with them, deliberately titillating their pride to keep the argument on a low boil. The stakes were high. It was entirely possible that if the Chinese AIs got too irritated, they would simply frag the
Monster.
This happened. In fact, it happened regularly enough that it was a recognized category of diplomatic incident. If it happened to the
Monster
, there wouldn’t even be any government to make a stink about it.

So their lives depended on Jun’s ability to keep their hosts amused.

Kiyoshi felt bad that he couldn’t help. Neither could Father Tom. From the point of view of the Chinese AIs, the two humans were nothing.

They kept busy in their own ways: Kiyoshi treading water in the shallow end of his drug addiction; the Jesuit doing works of mercy among the convicts on the
Nan Yang
and her sister ships. The two of them did not meet often, and when they did, their exchanges were ill-tempered.

Kiyoshi pestered the boss-man regularly for updates about the passenger they were waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for, but the boss refused to divulge any new information. Instead, he told Kiyoshi to find out more about the Chinese space colonization program.

Kiyoshi was already doing this, haphazardly, by hanging out in the seedy little village that was Docking Bay 14. The Chinese spacefarers were the most pessimistic bunch he’d ever met, although they laughed a lot.

So he took it for more of the same when a new, uneasy rumor made the rounds.

This Mars opposition is different.

This time, something bad is going to happen.

The PLAN is mustering a new fleet in orbit.

They’re going to hit us, or Earth, or maybe Luna, or it could be Midway, or UNLOESS, or something symbolically important, anyway.

There’s new survey data that PROVES it.

“Yeah, uh huh,” Kiyoshi said. “Is there any more
cijiwu?”

August 16
th
passed without incident, and Kiyoshi felt smug. But the rumors did not abate, and Jun said one day to Kiyoshi and Father Tom, having called them together: “I’ve seen the survey data that people are talking about. It’s not very good, but it’s real. It’s observations from a radio telescope at the L2 Earth-Moon LaGrange point, so in theory, the UN should have it, too. And it does look as if the PLAN is mustering a fleet in orbit around Mars.”

“Well, that clinches it,” Kiyoshi said. “Because if they were going to attack a symbolically important target near Earth, they’d definitely warn us beforehand. They wouldn’t use their stealth technology to hide their expeditionary fleet. Of course not.”

“They probably
wouldn’t,”
Jun said. “That would be a massive expenditure of data.”

“And they wouldn’t be mustering a fleet at all if they were not up to something,” Father Tom said.

“Something, but what?” Jun said. “I don’t know what it all means.” Coming from an ASI, this was an unnerving admission. “Father, I know you already celebrated Mass today, but can we have an extra Mass later? It’s the feast day of the Martyrs of Nagasaki. I think we need to pray for their intercession.”

“Of course,” Father Tom said.

He invited some of his new Chinese friends to the special Mass, held in the
Monster’s
chapel. The Chinese stared and chattered. Kiyoshi scowled. He didn’t like having them aboard. There was no rule that said a convict couldn’t also be a spy. But they surprised him with fervent and mostly accurate responses during the liturgy, which Father Tom said in Latin. The Jesuit was turning out to be an effective harvester of souls, now that he was no longer constrained by UN laws against evangelization.

After the Mass, Kiyoshi saw the Chinese off the ship and got on the screen with the boss-man. This time their conversation lasted ten hours.

Maybe the boss had some reason to take the rumors of a PLAN attack seriously, or maybe it was something he saw in Kiyoshi’s face. At any rate, he finally relented. “OK. Come on home. I’ll tell the dickhead to find another ride.”

“Banzai!” Kiyoshi shouted. He got out his guitar, which had been gathering dust, and strummed chords while he ran pre-launch checks. Jun undertook the delicate task of disengaging from his months-long conversation with the Chinese AIs.

He, too, was happy to be leaving Tiangong Erhao, although it would mean swinging around Venus to get a gravitational boost out to the asteroid belt.

★

Auxiliary boosters sputtering, the
Monster
edged out of Docking Bay 14. Kiyoshi started the countdown to full thrust. He loved their new drive. It felt great to be sitting on top of such an abundance of power. Watching the temperature inside the tokamak climb from a cold start into the 40 million Kelvin range, he entirely understood why Derek Lorna and his co-conspirators had risked everything to get their hands on Mercury’s helium-3. D-He3 fusion left the old D-D kludge standing. Fewer nasty neutrons, too.

With half an eye, he watched Tiangong Erhao shrink on the optical feed.
Sayonara, Heavenly Palace 2.
His curiosity had been gratified. He would not be coming back here again.

“Uh oh,” said Jun, hunched at the astrogator’s workstation.

“What?”

Incoming messages blizzarded across the comms screen. Kiyoshi flew over to the comms workstation and picked one at random. From the
Luoxiao Shan.
“Yeah, hello?”

The response came in rat-a-tat-tat Chinese. On the screen, a plump little woman gestured angrily. She wore a severe gray uniform, and floated on what looked to be a ship’s bridge, amid geode-like clusters of exposed equipment.

Kiyoshi cued up the Chinese translation software he had installed in his BCI. It was buggy. Fine for dickering over the price of
cijiwu
, not so great for formal occasions. He was still trying to sort through the mistranslations it printed on his retinal implants when Jun interrupted.

“Turn around. We have to go back.”

“Back to Tiangong Erhao? Why? What’s this chick so upset about?” Kiyoshi felt a bit dazed. “Who or what is the
Luoxiao Shan,
anyway?”

“Check the optical feed.”

The sight clarified Kiyoshi’s thoughts. Several large, gnarled needles drifted around the
Monster.
More blips moved closer, twinkling around the distant lozenge of Earth.

“The
Luoxiao Shan
is a frigate of the China Territorial Defense Force,” Jun said in a leaden voice. “So are those others.”

The nearest Chinese ship was only a few thousand klicks away. But Kiyoshi figured they could shoot their way out of this. The
Monster
had a hypervelocity coil gun running the length of its spine, disguised as part of the ship. It could hurl any kind of projectile you gave it, but Kiyoshi now favored mini-nukes, which were non-lethal, when used as area-denial weapons to fry an opponent’s electronics.