Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  “I’m afraid I’ll break your suit!”

  But Tiago, glued to the floor and looking straight up at the ceiling, could see fragments continuing to break free and fall all around them. The whole thing would come crashing down at any minute. “Do it!”

  With uncharacteristic hesitancy, Hardbody pried at one side of Tiago’s backpack unit with his hooflike fingernails. With a cracking, tearing sound and a certain amount of pain, it began to pull free from the floor … and then a sharp hiss sounded and Tiago’s ears popped.

  “I’m leaking!” Tiago cried, and Hardbody stopped pulling. “No, no, keep going! Hurry!” If he wasn’t up and moving before the ceiling collapsed they’d both be dead.

  “All right…” And with a grunt Hardbody pulled Tiago off the floor.

  Tiago rose, tumbling, thrashing, and helpless, into the airless space above, falling oh so slowly back down toward the floor. His arms and legs scrambled for purchase, but there was nothing nearby.

  Black, gray, and white tumbled in alternation across Tiago’s vision as he spun in midair, a crazy patchwork of illumination and shadow that reminded him, for one insane moment, of his own skin. Meanwhile the hissing sound increased in volume and Tiago felt the cold rush of escaping air across the skin of his lower back. And then, on one rotation, he noticed a person-sized roll of heavy plastic sheeting in its rack not far away. Could he use that to patch his suit? He reached out with his power to pull it to himself …

  … but the roll and its metal rack were heavy, much heavier than he himself was, and his floating, tumbling body was pulled toward it instead. Stunned by the impact, Tiago nonetheless welcomed it, as it had gotten him back on the ground. Quickly he got his feet under himself and pulled the end of the roll, tearing off a strip of the stuff with the metal cutter provided. Then he tossed the strip of plastic into the air and exerted his power. Immediately it slapped onto his back, clinging to the outside of his suit and becoming a part of him. The hissing diminished slightly. “Help me with this!” he called to Hardbody.

  Hardbody’s clumsy fingers were little help, but together they got several square meters of plastic sheeting onto the outside of Tiago’s suit. His power stuck it down, and the air leak slowed further. At the same time, though, Tiago kept one eye on the ceiling above. Before they were done patching his suit, the giant crack he’d been watching suddenly, silently, gaped wider, spreading like a jagged black lightning bolt. The ceiling was starting to come down. “Let’s go! Now!”

  Tiago pulled one more length of plastic from the roll as he scrambled out of the way of the falling rocks. As he ran he passed the forklift, which was already pinned under a pile of rubble. Its one functioning headlight seemed to glare balefully as he passed.

  A moment later the forklift was obliterated by a huge falling rock, as the entire stretch of tunnel where they had been working collapsed.

  Tiago shielded his plastic face with an arm as a hail of sharp fragments clattered against his suit, along with a blinding cloud of dust. But in the airless vacuum it all settled in less than a minute. He and Hardbody were left standing, panting and dust-covered, in the half-finished stretch of tunnel just inside the work area. There was no sign of the other diggers. “Mayday, mayday!” Tiago called again, but all channels were still silent.

  “So now what?” Hardbody gasped.

  Tiago slapped the last piece of plastic onto his suit—the leak had slowed to a trickle—then glanced at the readout on his left forearm. “I’ve got maybe two hours of air left.”

  “No new tank for you. Your backpack is all fucked up.”

  “Then we have to get inside before then.”

  “What you mean ‘we,’ white man?” Hardbody glanced at his wrist. “I’ve got ten hours, and there are spare tanks in every air lock. All I need to do is get to one.”

  “Let me remind you that someone is trying to kill us.”

  “Yeah, I kind of noticed that. Any idea why?”

  “I have a guess, about who as well as why.” Hardbody was in as much danger as Tiago now, he realized, and deserved to be informed. “You know all those power failures we’ve been having? It’s because of sabotage at the nuke plant. I believe it’s someone coming in from outside the base, and I’ve been trying to figure it out and stop it. But Schwartz thinks it’s an inside job … and he thinks I’m involved. And now, after last night’s blackout, I think he may be trying to kill me.”

  “So why’s he trying to kill me?” Hardbody roared.

  “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Tiago replied, realizing the answer even as he spoke. “If you’d died back there, you would have been collateral damage. Now you’re a witness. Either way, I don’t think an extra death or two at this point is going to bother him at all.”

  Hardbody raised one enormous fist. “If you’re right, I can bring Schwartz your shiny plastic head and he’ll let me go.”

  Tiago didn’t even bother cowering. He was past that. “If you’d trust him to leave you alive as a potential witness—one who might be turned, or get caught in a lie, or whose very existence might interfere with whatever his story is for how this ‘accident’ happened—you’re even stupider than you look.” He gestured back toward the air lock. “Mind you, if you don’t want to be associated with me, you’re welcome to try and make your way back by yourself. But I think we’re both more likely to survive if we stick together.”

  Hardbody growled, and the fist trembled, but it neither relaxed nor came down on Tiago’s head.

  And then Tiago noted the shadows shifting.

  It took him almost too long to realize what he was seeing.

  “Run!” he yelled, and did the same himself.

  A moment later a rubble wagon, its bed filled with rocks, whipped around the corner of the tunnel between them and the air lock. Heavily loaded, its wheels had excellent traction on the tunnel floor, and it would hit hard if it did hit. It moved silently in the vacuum; it was only the wagon’s headlights that had tipped Tiago off to its imminent arrival.

  Tiago and Hardbody ran in opposite directions. Tiago was faster, and the smaller target, but the wagon immediately changed course to intercept him, rocks spitting from beneath its wheels as it turned. Plainly whoever was remotely controlling it had Tiago’s death as their first priority.

  There wasn’t as much room here as there had been at the work face, and the floor was smoother, offering fewer obstacles to the wagon’s rapid progress. Tiago dodged its thrusts several times, but though he nearly ran it into a wall once it didn’t fall for the feint.

  Hardbody, meanwhile, vanished around the corner toward the air lock. Tiago couldn’t blame him.

  Again and again the wagon slewed and skidded across the floor, narrowly missing Tiago each time. The battle was moving toward the air lock, which was good, but Tiago was tiring, slowing, making mistakes. It reminded him of his time dodging garbage trucks at the dump in Rio—but those had been slower, and hadn’t been trying to run him over.

  And then Tiago realized that the wagon was showing far too much intelligence and initiative—its behavior didn’t line up with what Mike had said about the limitations of robots.

  On the thing’s next pass he dodged and, as it whipped past and turned for another run, he leapt up on top of where the cab would have been if the vehicle had had a driver. This was where its radio antenna was located.

  With one triumphant twist of his giant plastic hand he snapped the antenna right off.

  The wagon immediately reacted like a wounded animal, twisting and slewing in its path as though trying to throw him off. Its dump bed, full of rocks, slammed up and down, and he had to quickly shift his grip to avoid losing a hand. Then the electric motors growled—he could hear them as long as he clung to the vehicle’s casing—and it raced at full speed toward a wall, obviously hoping to smash him between the wall and itself.

  This wasn’t at all what he had expected.

  But he had an unexpected trick of his own—a new trick, which
he had just learned in the past few minutes.

  He reached out with his power and pulled the regolene beams above toward himself.

  But they were firmly fixed in place, and the gravity was low, so instead of the ceiling coming down he rose up.

  He hit the ceiling hard. But the wagon hit the wall harder—its whole forward end crumpling, rocks spilling from its bed and sparks spitting from beneath. The wheels ground to a halt and the thing didn’t move again.

  Tiago dropped lightly from the ceiling and headed back toward the air lock at a dead run. He knew it was just what Schwartz—or whoever was controlling the machines—would expect him to do, but he really didn’t have a lot of alternatives.

  Then he heard Hardbody’s voice in his headset. “Damn it, Tiago,” he panted, “I need help!”

  “Where are you?”

  “Cavern … four? No, three. Hurry!”

  Tiago hurried. Soon he saw Hardbody, who was pinned against the wall by another loaded rubble wagon. It was a stalemate, for now—he was holding it at arm’s length with sheer strength—but he was clearly weakening and in a minute he’d be crushed.

  This cavern was nearly ready for occupancy, with proper lighting and insulated plastic paneling on its walls. Tiago reached and pulled, and the panels popped from their fastenings, flying through the vacuum and plastering themselves onto his body. Five, ten, twenty, fifty panels quickly added themselves to his bulk. Soon he was enormous, five meters tall, with strength to match.

  He reached down and tipped the rubble wagon to one side, dumping out its load of rocks. That made it just light enough to lift. He picked it up—its wheels spinning in what seemed like frustration—and then slammed it down hard on the floor, breaking its axles and jarring the battery loose from its housing. The headlights immediately went out, and the wagon sat still.

  “Damn thing was just sitting there,” Hardbody gasped, “until I was almost past it.”

  Right when Tiago had killed the other one, perhaps? Could there be just a single operator, able to control only one machine at a time? But he didn’t have time to worry about that now. “Come on,” he said. “We have to get to the air lock before he finds another robot to send after us.”

  The air lock wasn’t far. But when they got there the door was closed, and it wouldn’t respond to a press on the DOOR OPEN button. “Of course,” Tiago said. There was a manual override, but with the air lock full of air the door, which swung inward, physically wouldn’t open.

  “I’ll smash it down!” Hardbody shouted, preparing to do just that.

  “No!” Tiago said, blocking him with an arm across his chest. “We need to be able to close and seal it behind us, or we can’t get in. Not without causing a blowout and killing a lot of innocent people.”

  “So?”

  At that Tiago just glared, then turned his attention to the air lock’s outer wall, thinking hard. “How small a hole can you dig through this rock?”

  Hardbody’s face registered confusion—not an uncommon expression for him. “How small?”

  “Can you make it just big enough for yourself to pass through, but no bigger?”

  Hardbody blinked. “Uh, I guess so.…”

  Tiago relaxed his power, allowing the plastic panels to fall to the floor but keeping the plastic sheeting that held his air in. Now he was about the same size as Hardbody. “Do it now,” he said, gathering up a half-dozen of the panels in his arms.

  Still registering confusion, Hardbody drew back his fist, then punched the wall—hard, but not at his full strength. A small segment of the wall crumbled, his ace power making most of the fragments vanish even as the air within the air lock blew them out of the hole. The resulting hole was only a little wider than Hardbody’s shoulders.

  “Good job,” Tiago said, ducking through the hole.

  Though the air lock was a mess inside—not only because of the blowout Hardbody had just caused, but also because it looked like a large number of people had recently passed through without taking the time to properly rack their equipment—there were no bodies lying around. That was just good luck; with their communications cut off, he hadn’t been able to give any warning that they were coming in.

  “There should be some sealant in that cabinet,” Tiago told Hardbody, and ducked back through the hole for another armload of plastic panels.

  Soon they had patched the hole, a rough patch that might not hold for long. But it only had to last for one air lock cycle. Tiago pulled the EMERGENCY RECOMPRESS handle and was relieved at the rushing roar of air that followed. The emergency system was entirely mechanical, but there had been a chance that Schwartz would find some way to cut off its air supply.

  Tiago paused with his hand on the inner door’s manual override lever. “We’re going to head for the Stormwing hangar,” he told Hardbody. “I just hope we can convince one of the pilots to help us. I sure can’t fly one myself. But we have to get to the hangar if we’re going to get out of here. Smash walls if you want to, threaten people if you need to, but no unnecessary killing, all right? There’s been too much death already.”

  “Spoilsport.” But he plainly understood and agreed.

  There were seven levels between here and the hangar. They’d have to fight their way up the stairs. Every joker they met, probably, would be trying to stop them … and maybe even every machine. Because if a rubble wagon could fight, there was no telling what a copy machine or a communications laser could do. And Schwartz, Tiago was sure, wouldn’t hesitate to risk innocent lives for the sake of his damn project.

  He held his breath. He pulled the lever.

  The inner air lock door swung open.

  Tiago found himself facing a wall of security personnel, guns drawn and leveled. Hundreds of jokers crammed the air lock antechamber behind them, making a confused ruckus. And in the middle of the line of security guards … one small, round, flabby figure.

  Schwartz.

  He looked terrible. He looked like he’d just fought and lost a battle to the death. Three battles to the death. But his coverall was still impeccable, and he still held his head high, to the extent that that was possible for him.

  “Hands up!” called the brick-faced security commander, glowering menacingly over his pistol sight, and Tiago reluctantly complied. Hardbody did the same.

  The guards moved forward to apprehend Tiago and Hardbody.

  And then the crowd gasped.

  Tiago didn’t want to take his eyes off of the guards or Schwartz, but the stunned expressions and peculiar green glow on their faces convinced him to risk a look over his shoulder.

  A gigantic moth—like the one that had appeared in Tiago’s room last night, but even bigger, three meters across or more—hovered near the high ceiling of the air lock antechamber, its wings waving lazily in the lunar gravity.

  “These jokers are innocent,” the moth said, its voice the same Indian-accented, feminine tones as before, but now so loud that everyone in the antechamber and the corridors beyond could clearly hear her words. “It is Schwartz who should be arrested.” And then it spread its wings still wider—each one stretched out into a broad rectangle two or three meters wide—and the patterns on each wing began to move and swirl into a new configuration.

  A moving picture. Two moving pictures.

  The left wing showed a view of Schwartz’s office, taken from somewhere near the ceiling. The project manager and his subordinates, including the brick-faced security commander, were gathered around Schwartz’s desk. The right wing showed security camera footage from the tunnels, where Tiago and Hardbody were just setting up at the rock face. The time stamp was less than an hour ago.

  “I have reached the end of my patience with Mr. Gonçalves,” the image of Schwartz declaimed, slamming his hands on the desk.

  “Shall we detain him, sir?” said the commander.

  “No. Leave him to me.” He gestured the others to leave, then as soon as they had done so he settled into his chair, folded his hands on the desk, a
nd closed his eyes.

  Just a moment later, on the other wing, Tiago suddenly shoved Hardbody, and a moment later the murderous forklift charged into the frame, slewing silently to a stop between them.

  “Kill that moth!” Schwartz commanded. The real Schwartz, in the antechamber. The Schwartz on the screen remained still and silent.

  But although the security commander directed one of his guards—one armed with a much bigger gun than his own dart pistol, Tiago noted—to carry out Schwartz’s order, the guard merely shook his head and lowered his weapon, his eyes still on the moth’s moving images.

  On the moth’s right wing the battle with the forklift went on as Tiago remembered it, though everything happened much faster than it had seemed at the time. And when the ceiling fell in, obliterating the forklift—along with the security camera that was capturing the scene—on the other wing Schwartz jerked as though from a blow, his eyes snapping open with a gasp. But then he regained his composure, closed his eyes again … and on the other wing the view changed to a new camera, where a rubble wagon in an empty tunnel suddenly stirred itself and rushed out of frame.

  “If you don’t kill that moth I will do it myself!” Schwartz shouted, and reached to grab the gun from the guard next to him.

  But the guard did not hand the weapon over, and it was not difficult for him to resist the rotund project manager’s attempts to take it by force. Nor did any of the other security personnel move to assist Schwartz … not even the commander, who seemed to consider interfering in the situation, but carefully observed his staff and then stood still, watchful but unmoving.

  The battle continued on the moth’s wings, with Schwartz appearing to feel the destruction of the first rubble wagon as it occurred. And then, after the image of Tiago on the right wing smashed the second wagon—this time the Schwartz on the left wing collapsed to his desk, taking a long moment before bringing himself back to a sitting position with a groan—the moth closed and opened its wings like a book, introducing a new but similar pair of scenes.