The Luna Deception (8 page)

vi.

“We haven’t seen you in a while, Mendoza!” Father Lynch said.

“I got transferred to a different section, so I’ve been busy.”

Those were the only words they exchanged until practice was over and everyone else had left.

Fr. Lynch dragged the maidbot out of its closet and turned it on—a move that was neither habitual nor necessary. As part of their discipline, the kendo-kas polished the floor with rags after practice. The maidbot did not find much dust to vacuum up. It settled for buffing the already-shiny plastic floorboards. The whine of the buffing head filled the church basement.

“What’s wrong?” Father Lynch said in a low voice, which the noise of the maidbot would drown out.

“Is it that obvious?”

“You look as if you’ve suffered a blow.”

“I was wondering if we could maybe do some target shooting?”

“Grin!
We’ll make a warrior of you yet.”

They went out into the shadow-streaked beginning of a lunar morning. At these polar latitudes, the sun never set, just endlessly circled the horizon. However, the topography hid it for part of the month-long lunar day. How much light you actually got depended on how high up you were. Cherry-Garrard lay halfway up the long slope of Shackleton Crater’s north side, so it was still mostly in darkness. Mendoza’s faceplate filtered the light to orange.

Half of the sun’s orb peeked above the distant ridge of Shoemaker Crater. Its horizontal light illuminated the tops of the city’s largest domes. They didn’t look as pretty in daylight. Just dingy gray bubbles flocked with moondust.

Fr. Lynch set up the target and handed Mendoza a laser pistol. Mendoza aimed it across the valley at Wellsland.

“The target’s over there, Mendoza.”

Mendoza tapped his chest.
“Sickly grin.
No, Father, I’m the target.”

He told the Jesuit everything, from his first meeting with Lorna to their attempted sabotage of Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign. Fr. Lynch listened in silence, tapping his pistol thoughtfully on his thigh. Bright spots streaked across the sky. Some of them would be ships en route to Earth. How he wished he were aboard.

“I did my best work,” he said. “But I guess, and I want to be humble here, but I guess it was too good. It’s backfired. And he blames me! Well, I guess it is my fault. But he thinks I did it on purpose.”

Fr. Lynch said, “I actually saw something about this on the news. ‘Audacious proposal to revive tourism on Mercury …’”

“You’ve been following the election, Father?”

“No, it was on
The Civilized Universe.”

Mendoza groaned.
TCU
was one of the top news feeds in the solar system. This was getting worse and worse. “And Lorna’s mad because he didn’t see it coming. It never even occurred to him that the whole thing might backfire. He’s too highly educated, too sophisticated. He lives in a garden city on the freaking moon. He hasn’t a clue what regular people want.”

“I’d say that’s accurate. He might forgive you for screwing up. He’ll not forgive you for having made him look a fool.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. I just did … my best.”

“And that was the right thing to do. We should always do our best. Sadly, it doesn’t always work out for the best.”

“So WHAT AM I GOING TO DO, Father?”

“Calm down.”

“OK. OK.” Mendoza steadied his breathing, like they were taught to do in kendo practice. “He wants me to fix it. But how? I
can’t
fix it.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s what you should be worrying about,” Fr. Lynch’s calm voice said in his helmet. “The man knows that
you
know he’s been illegally meddling with an election. That’s a felony. There’s a non-zero chance he’ll try to kill you.”

Mendoza sat down on a rock. “Jesus.”

“I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily, but you’ve been dodging his calls all day. A man like him would interpret that as a declaration of hostility. He’ll think you are thinking about going to the authorities.”

“I wasn’t. You’re the only authority I trust.”

“Some authority I am!
Sardonic chuckle.
But you don’t need to be powerful to know how the minds of the powerful work. It’s all in the Gospels and St. Augustine.”

Fr. Lynch started to walk back towards the Cherry-Garrard dome. Mendoza followed.

“I’m glad you came to me. I shouldn’t say this, wish I didn’t have to, but going to the authorities would probably have been a mistake. Lorna has a lot of connections in this city.”

“He’s made sure I know that. I thought about hiding out, trying to get a flight back to Earth, but …”

“I think that might be wise.”

Mendoza had not expected the Jesuit to endorse his panicky impulse. “But Father, you
can’t
hide in Shackleton City! It’s impossible.”
He’s a priest, not an IT guy. He doesn’t know how the surveillance works.
On the other hand, Fr. Lynch’s repertoire of precautions—going outside to hear confessions, turning on the maidbot to mask voices—indicated a healthy awareness of the surveillance regime.

“Father, we’re going the wrong way!”

The Jesuit had struck out on a path angled around the Cherry-Garrard dome. Ahead, the lights of the high street glowed through the trees in the dome’s prow. On their right stood the recycling facility that handled the dome’s organic waste. Overhead pipes channeled water from the recycling plant’s tower to the reservoir on top of the dome. The whole system was gravity-fed, taking advantage of what little gravity Luna had, to keep the water flowing in the unlikely event of a power outage.

“Turn off your BCI,” the Jesuit said.

“Can’t. I can turn off my uplink to the wifi network, but …”

“Do it. Got any other implants?”

“Only my retinals. Oh, and I’ve got iEars.”

“Can you disable them?”

“You want me to give up Mozart and Beethoven?”

“You want to stay alive? Do it.”

Mendoza shut down his network connection. For good measure, he blinked off his HUD.
Blind.
No clock display in the corner of his eye. No playlist. No feed updates. No comms icon reminding him that “You have five voicemails from Derek Lorna! You also have 16 emails from Derek Lorna!”

With his vision cleared of icons, outside suddenly seemed
big
. The sweep of Shackleton Crater’s skirt was a rocky sea with glass boats stranded on its swells. Sunbleached mini-crater rims gnawed at the black sky, eroded by billions of years of micro-impacts and exposure to the solar wind. A half-remembered quotation popped into Mendoza’s mind:
We live by grace of the ground we stand on.
He had been born on Earth, but now he was on Luna, alive by the grace of this battered ball of rock.

If this was blindness, he could get used to it.

Then something moved in the long shadow of the water tower.

“Father! Watch out!”

A maintenance bot crabwalked out of the storage area beneath the tower. Size of a tiger, six-legged. These bots could fold up their legs and use the sucker pads on their elbows to climb the outsides of domes. People called them window cleaners. Despite their homely function, it could give you a nasty shock to see one of those things peering in at you through the glass.

The bot took something out of its cargo pannier and whipped it at Mendoza and the Jesuit like a throwing star.

“Susmaryosep!”
Mendoza yelled. The missile fell short. He broke into a hopping run. Another missile sailed past him. A flat brown hexagon. It didn’t explode. He glanced back.

Fr. Lynch wasn’t following him. He stood his ground, facing the bot.

Flash.
Another missile exploded in a cloud of brown powder.

Mendoza’s leading foot hit the ground. He threw his weight backward, flailed his arms, overbalanced. Righted himself and bounded towards Fr. Lynch. Before he got there, the Jesuit’s laser pistol flashed again. Mendoza’s suit overreacted by blacking out his faceplate.

The bot pranced on, a shadow in the darkness. Its arachnoid head sank. Ploughed into the rock. Its rear legs kept running, so that it was pushing its head along the ground like a shovel. Its midlegs hinged to reach into its pannier. It hurled missile after missile.

Father Lynch fired another pulse into the bot and then turned and ran. Mendoza reversed direction to keep up.

Missiles shattered harmlessly ahead of them

And then behind them.

“Head for the Evans Square airlock,” Father Lynch yelled over the radio.

“Jesus God, Father!”

Angling his stride to brush Mendoza in mid-bound, Father Lynch passed him the other pistol. “Don’t look back now. But there are more of them coming. If you have to shoot, aim for their batteries.”

At the apex of his next bound, Mendoza looked back. Half a dozen bots breasted the nearest rise. Their cutter and splarter appendages undulated in time with their seesawing gait.

However, the men outpaced the bots, which were not made to leap but to scuttle safely over the landscape. The Evans Square airlock stuck out of the dome’s wall. While Father Lynch worked the valve, Mendoza faced the terrain whose beauty he had so recently admired. He could smell his own terror.

The airlock opened. The two men scrambled in.

“Welcome back!” said an automated voice over the radio link. “Did you have a nice walk? Please wait for the air pressure indicator to turn
green
before removing your helmets!”

They struggled out of their sharesuits and stuffed them into the USED locker. Father Lynch had his cassock on. He hid the pistols in an inner pocket. They ducked out of the airlock into an alley behind the public toilets at the end of Evans Square.

Mendoza inhaled fresh-ish air, smells of curry and chicken poop. “Jesus. Sorry, Father. But
Jesus!
Were those bots attacking us?”

“No, that was the finals of the Bot Frisbee championships. We just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Ah ha ha ha,” Mendoza said. A free-range peacock strutted into the alley. It arched its neck and let out an
“Aaark! Aaark! Aaark!”
that sounded exactly if it it were shouting for security.

“I don’t think the bots would have killed us,” Father Lynch said. “More likely, your friend Lorna was trying to scare you. I may have overreacted.”

“No, Father! You were heroic.”

Fr. Lynch shook his head. The look of worry on his face undermined Mendoza’s relief at having reached a place of safety. After all, Cherry-Garrard was
not
a place of safety. Even though Mendoza had disabled his network connection, Lorna would still be able to find him by locating his BCI. It would just take more ingenuity, and Lorna had plenty of that.

“Come on,” the Jesuit said. “Quick.” He led Mendoza into the alleys behind the station. Lean-tos, awning-shaded patios, balconies, chicken coops, and rabbit pens narrowed the already-narrow canyons. This was one of the “Free” areas where people could indulge their inner architects, as long as they selected one of three approved patterns of fake brick.

“Father, what were they throwing at us? I thought those things were grenades, but they didn’t explode.”

“Shit,” Father Lynch said.

“What? What?!”

“Shit. That’s what they were throwing at us. Compacted, dehydrated fecal matter. Local agriculture doesn’t need as much manure as we produce, so the recycling facilities process the excess into tiles for insulation and rad-shielding. Some facilities outside are entirely built of the stuff.”

“Huh,” Mendoza said. “And I always thought they added flavoring and sold it as ReadiPak meals.”

They both laughed aloud, a release of tension.

The Jesuit ducked into a curbside pho restaurant. Mendoza followed him past the kitchen and up a pulley-style zipshaft. You stood on a plate and hauled yourself up. Easy when you weighed 1/6
th
of what you would on Earth, and had just sweated off another couple of kilos, running for your life. They got off on the third floor. WITHNAIL & I. WHO-CERTIFIED THERAPISTS.

“This is where I was going to bring you, anyway. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to explain. Withnail and I—well, there’s no Withnail, but I Cheong is a good friend of mine. She’ll be able to help you.”

The Jesuit spoke into a hidden intercom. The door valved. A spaceborn East Asian woman came from behind her desk. She wore a cross around her neck. Her smile crumpled when she saw Father Lynch’s expression.

“It’s urgent,” the Jesuit said. “Can you do him immediately?”

“Of course,” I Cheong said. She switched on a professional manner. “Please go through to Consulting Room B. A therapist will be with you in a moment.”

Mendoza went into the cubicle she indicated. It held a cot and nothing else. He wondered what kind of therapy this joint provided. Some places flaunted WHO certification, but exploited needy patients, trapping them in a cycle of emotional addiction at fifty spiders a pop. He was sure Father Lynch wouldn’t have anything to do with such a racket, but …

The door opened and a therapist entered. It was a granny-class geminoid bot with a wispy white bun, wearing surgical scrubs.

“Hello, John,” it said. “Try to relax. You won’t feel a thing.”

It pushed him down, yelling and clawing, on the cot. It slapped a patch on his neck. Before he could rip the patch off, blackness swallowed him.

vii.

Mendoza awoke on an unfamiliar bed for the second time in 24 hours. But this was nothing like waking up in Derek Lorna’s guest bedroom. The bed was hard and scratchy. Also, he had the worst headache of his life.

A shadow moved across the dim light source. Fr. Lynch stooped over him. “Good, you’re awake. Lie still while I finish packing.”

“Thirsty.”

“I Cheong told me to give you this when you woke up.”

Mendoza’s fingers closed around a pouch. He squeezed its milk-flavored contents down his throat. The Jesuit knelt in front of a chest-of-drawers, packing a rucksack.

This must be where Fr. Lynch lived, in the small priory attached to the convent behind St. Ignatius. From where he lay, Mendoza could see a crucifix on the wall, the only decoration. Carved of pale wood, it would have been too subdued for most Filipinos’ taste, but Mendoza liked, if that was the right word, the tortured serenity on the face of the crucified Christ. Fr. Lynch stopped in front of it. Moved a hand to its hook, as if to lift it down. Then shook his head.