Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  The room was located in a round bunker that, in turn, was dug into the floor of the largest greenhouse attached to the main house. Full of monitors, computer banks, and communications equipment, it was where Theodorus spent most of his time these days, only venturing out to tend his beloved plants.

  Right now he was watching the main screen, which showed what appeared to be the side of someone’s leg, decked out in fatigues of some kind. The knee was bent, so the person on-screen was seated, but the occasional jostling told Mathilde that whoever it was, they were riding in some kind of conveyance that was in motion.

  The hatchway to the greenhouse opened and more people came in. Malachi and the joker snake man, Marcus Morgan. IBT. Theodorus had, over everyone else’s objections, loosened Malachi’s leash somewhat. The two people following them were a pair of Clifford Bell’s guards. They wore the body armor and running shoes of his elite, having been trained to fight at the incredible speeds his power could grant them.

  Theodorus had his hand held up, indicating that everyone should remain silent. There was sound accompanying the image on the screen, coming from speakers built into the walls. Sounds like a diesel engine, thought Mathilde. Then, over the engine noise, came a woman’s voice.

  “We’re ten minutes out. Everyone knows what we’re doing, right? Objectives clear? Mission parameters in mind?”

  “Arrest the snail,” said a man’s voice. Mathilde wasn’t sure whether it was just an illusion created by placement of the speakers, but it seemed to her that the speaker was the owner of the leg up on the screen. “Oh, and don’t kill anybody if we can help it. We know the drill, lady.”

  The woman’s voice replied, “Mr. Spencer, you are a civilian employee of the Department of Justice. Don’t let your nom de guerre go to your head.”

  The sound cut out.

  “Clifford?” Theodorus asked.

  “I’ve got drones launched, but I haven’t spotted them yet.” He was typing rapidly. “Spencer is probably Alan Spencer, the ace Colonel Centigrade. He works for SCARE.”

  “I was on TV with him,” Mollie said, her tone of voice making it sound like she was having a completely different conversation. “He’s an asshole.”

  “What is all this?” asked Marcus Morgan.

  “The transmission is from a body cam being worn by an ace who works for SCARE but who is sympathetic to us,” said Theodorus.

  A spy, thought Mathilde.

  “Okay,” Cliff barked, “I spot two, make that three armored personnel carriers heading down the state highway toward the main gate. There are two more on the county road that parallels the rear property line beyond the creek, and there’s a fifth parked outside the Kincaid place already.”

  The Kincaids had owned the property next to the House Secure for as long as Theodorus’s maternal ancestors had lived in the area. The two families had cordially loathed each other for nearly four hundred years.

  “SCARE means aces,” rumbled Troll. “But there are hundreds of people here, dozens of guards. What do they think they’re going to accomplish with all this military-style bullshit if they’re just here to arrest you?”

  “My guess is that the woman we heard giving orders was Joann Jefferson, the current director of SCARE,” said Theodorus.

  “Lady Black,” said Troll. “She was on the world tour with me. That was … shit, was it really thirty-five years ago?” He blinked. “She’s all right.”

  “And is resisting retirement until the next administration is sworn in, according to my sources,” said Theodorus. “She won’t have signed off on this unless it’s a by-the-book operation. But I wonder…”

  Mathilde said, “This is it.”

  They all turned to look at her.

  “They’re taking their shot. I don’t know what this Jefferson woman thinks is happening, but I’m willing to bet anything that at least one of the people with her has orders to take out Theodorus. And Mollie, too, if they’ve finally figured out she’s here.”

  Theodorus looked at Mollie sharply, but the woman’s scarred face was neutral.

  “Mollie,” he said. “You have to clear the House Secure.”

  Mollie shrugged, and a gateway shimmered into existence next to her. “I’ll try. I’ll send as many of the people on the grounds away as I can. Hopefully to the Moon.” Then she was gone.

  “Clifford, Howard, Marcus,” Theodorus said, and the three men nodded in turn. “They’re coming at us from three directions.”

  “And there’s three of us, I get it,” said Troll. He looked at the screens, one of which showed a schematic of the grounds. “I’ll go see what’s going on with your neighbors.” He lumbered out.

  On another screen, Mollie had appeared in a hall where a couple of dozen jokers were watching a lecture delivered remotely from one of the lunar bases. There was no sound, but that hardly mattered as Mollie clearly wasn’t explaining herself. She opened portals and shoved the surprised people through them.

  “So now we’re fighting federal agents again,” said Marcus. “Olena is back in our rooms.”

  “I’ll send someone to watch out for her,” said Clifford. He nodded at one of his guards and the woman zoomed out.

  “Can you make me go that fast?” asked Marcus.

  Bell said, “Yes. You don’t have a heart condition or anything, do you?”

  “Just a need to get this over with,” the snake man replied.

  “Head for the rear of the property,” said Theodorus. “Keep a channel open on the watch I gave you.”

  Then the Infamous Black Tongue was gone and Cliff said, “That leaves me and my folks for the main gates. Sir, you should bring Tesseract back here. You should go ahead and leave.”

  “Not yet,” said Theodorus. He was punching buttons on his console. Screens showed greenhouse wall panels retracting into the ground all over the estate. They showed large shapes moving in the foliage. “I have to coordinate the defense.”

  Cliff seemed to be about to say something more, but then just turned and left with his last guard. “What do you want me to do?” Mathilde asked.

  “For now,” said Theodorus, “watch. Wait. Get ready.”

  Mathilde suddenly realized that Malachi hadn’t said a word during the tense meeting. She looked over to where he’d taken a seat at another keyboard, and saw that he’d fished out a pair of earphones from somewhere. She’d never seen him wearing such before. And she never would have guessed he would be so deft in attaching them to a port in one of the computers arrayed before him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him.

  He tapped a few keys on his terminal. He didn’t look up from the screens, but he did answer her. “Everything I can,” he said.

  Mathilde had never particularly enjoyed watching television, and now she was trying to pay attention to what was being shown on at least a dozen monitors. It didn’t help that Theodorus kept changing the feed on the big main screen, jumping views from spot to spot on the grounds, at the gates, even drawing on the cameras in Clifford Bell’s high-flying security drones.

  The feed from one of those was up on the big screen now. She watched as Troll reached the wall that separated the Witherspoon and Kincaid estates and easily clambered over it. An eight-foot wall wasn’t much of a barrier for a nine-foot joker.

  Suddenly, the screen went dazzling white, then faded to black. A message reading “No Signal” flashed up.

  “Something took out the drone,” said Theodorus. “They may have a flier.”

  Mathilde made a quick check of the other screens slaved to drones. “Maybe. Or it might have just been a coincidence. Look, there’s a storm blowing in.”

  “It was an attack,” said Malachi. His voice sounded strained. He was hunched over in his chair even more than usual.

  All of the screens showing exterior views were darkening. Those that showed glimpses of the sky revealed roiling clouds, punctuated with lightning flashes.

  “Forecast!” Theodorus said. One screen switched
to weather data. Sunny and hot, it read, just as it had for weeks, now that Mathilde thought of it. The satellite photo of the area—time-stamped three minutes earlier—was clear of any cloud cover.

  Theodorus keyed his microphone. “Friends, be advised that one of the government aces has some sort of weather control power.”

  One of the side screens showing a perimeter camera feed flashed white, then showed Troll climbing to his feet. He edged away from a smoking, scorched spot on the groomed lawn he was crossing. His voice came over the speakers. “No shit. I almost just got fried by lightning.”

  A computer at the station where Mathilde sat flashed urgently—a priority message from the larger lunar station. She read it and almost laughed aloud, forced that down, wondered if it meant she was panicked. She picked up a headset and spoke into it. “Mollie, can you hear me?”

  There was a whistling noise Mathilde couldn’t identify, then Mollie said, “Busy.”

  “You’re porting people into the cisterns, Mollie. Some of them can’t swim.”

  A crash, a shout, a scream. “Biggest place I can think of up there that has atmo. You have a better idea?”

  Mathilde sighed. But then she said, “The Moon Maid’s caverns. They’ll hold a few hundred people at least.”

  “Then I’ll send the next few hundred there. Hey! Toward the portal, moron! Go out that way and you’ll get shot!”

  And then Mathilde recognized that she was hearing gunshots. Cliff’s people didn’t carry sidearms—Theodorus despised them—so it had to be the SCARE team. But who were they shooting at?

  Theodorus was muttering softly into a microphone, and she saw at least one source of the gunfire. Black-clad agents with submachine guns were walking in formation through the western gardens—the side they hadn’t covered, the side where they hadn’t identified a threat. They were laying down fire as they went, but what they shot at wasn’t slowing down.

  A trio of Theodorus’s enormous war snails advanced toward the invading team, ripples showing in their flesh where they were taking fire. As Mathilde watched, one made contact with the SCARE point man and … engulfed him. It slowed, slightly, then moved its great head back and forth, seeking and finding another target.

  “They’re going to crash the gate.” That was Cliff Bell, speaking to his security guards out front. “Let them through, then close on all three vehicles simultaneously. They’ll try to disembark when they see us. Hit them hard as the hatches open.”

  “Are those tanks?” Mathilde asked as the lead vehicle smashed through, mangling wrought iron.

  “Up-armored APCs,” replied Theodorus, though he was paying scant attention to that part of the fight. “Military-grade hardware. You were right. They’re not here to subpoena me.”

  Cliff’s plan played out more or less as he’d directed for the first two vehicles. Ultrafast security guards swarmed the sides and rear as hatches opened, fists and feet flying. The people attempting to leap from the vehicles were as heavily armored as Cliff’s guards, but didn’t stand a chance against opponents moving five or six times faster than them.

  The third APC was a different story. It skidded to a halt behind its two companions, but its hatches didn’t open. The half-dozen Witherspoon Security officers buzzing around it slowed, then retreated. One of them slipped and fell on the driveway, and didn’t rise.

  A circle of ice was expanding from the third vehicle, whitening the asphalt, then actually cracking it.

  “That must be Spencer, Centigrade,” said Theodorus. “He’s using his cold powers to keep Cliff’s people away.” As they watched, the APC maneuvered off the road and around the scrum going on at the first two vehicles.

  “I still haven’t spotted anything at the back,” radioed Marcus Morgan. “Do the drones still show vehicles beyond the creek?”

  “Check for him,” Theodorus said. “I’m rousing more war snails from the pits.”

  Mathilde didn’t even know what “pits” he was talking about, but rapidly brought the various camera feeds into active windows at her station. Only one drone was still in the air, and it wasn’t covering the area near Morgan. She tasked it his direction and keyed her mike. “I don’t have eyes beyond the back wall right now. I’ll let you know when I do.”

  “These bastards are shooting at me!” shouted Troll. He sounded like his mouth was full of dirt, which was probably not far from the truth. The window showing the Kincaid grounds was confusing to look at, partially obscured, and Mathilde realized that a branch had fallen in front of the camera pointed that direction. The torrential rain falling in that area didn’t help.

  “That’s all the big groups I can find,” said Mollie. “Do you want me to go fuck up some government aces now?”

  “Shit!” said Marcus Morgan. “Here they come! One of them just walked right through the fence. And I don’t mean she ghosted through it, I mean she busted through it!”

  “Theodorus!” said Mathilde. “What do we do?”

  “The assault on the western gardens is contained,” he replied calmly. “Who needs help?”

  “They all do!”

  Theodorus caused the main screen to flip through shots from a dozen cameras in rapid succession. Mathilde saw Marcus Morgan wrapping his coils around a helmeted woman while a half-dozen other agents clubbed him with rifle stocks. Troll was barely visible through the rain, but he was clearly wreaking havoc at the Kincaid house, bodies flying in every direction. Cliff Bell was surveying the scene at the front gates, pointing up the driveway at something she couldn’t see.

  The rest of the screens showed empty meeting rooms and abandoned dormitories. A few stray jokers were running in random directions, but in the main, the estate seemed like a ghost town compared to the crowded conditions she’d noted just a couple of hours before. Tesseract was nowhere to be seen.

  “Did you hear me?” asked Mollie Steunenberg. “I asked if you want me to go fuck somebody up.” She was standing right behind Mathilde.

  “Jesus!” said Mathilde. “Don’t do that!”

  Mollie shrugged. “Okay. What do you want me to do then?”

  When she said it, Mollie’s breath steamed in the cold.

  The cold? “Get Theodorus and Malachi out of here!” Mathilde shouted, shoving Mollie toward the center of the bunker.

  “Got it,” said Mollie.

  Theodorus and Malachi suddenly dropped out of sight, furniture and all, as if trapdoors had opened beneath them and they’d fallen through. Which was probably pretty much exactly what had happened. Mathilde heard Malachi’s startled, complaining shout, but it cut off almost instantly.

  The closed and sealed doorway to the command center was rimed with ice, and the temperature was dropping fast.

  “Where did you send them?” Mathilde asked, standing and turning to face the door.

  “Front gate,” said Mollie, arms crossed, briskly rubbing her upper arms. “I figure Cliff can watch them for a few minutes while we deal with the Colonel.”

  Mathilde reached over and brushed a finger against the back of Mollie’s hand, raising her internal temperature a degree or two. “Why do they call him that? The Colonel part, not the Centigrade part.”

  Mollie said, “I’m not sure. I think maybe before his card turned he worked at a fast-food chicken place in Alaska.”

  The door shattered. The temperature dropped even further, and most of the view screens went dark. A man with terrible burn scars covering his face, wearing a white-and-blue parody of a military officer’s uniform, was standing in the entryway. His white-gloved hands were held up before him, as if he’d been leaning on the door before it went. “He has an outfit?” asked Mathilde.

  “I told you,” said Mollie, “he’s an asshole.”

  “Mollie Steunenberg! Mathilde Marechill!” He was obviously straining to speak in a deeper register than his natural voice. “You are under arrest!”

  “Behind him,” Mathilde said, and a portal opened next to her. She stepped through it, and out of its twin
right behind Colonel Centigrade. She put her hand on his face, saw the startled expression there, and said, “Maréchal. Is it really that hard to pronounce?”

  And then he reached up and took her by the hand.

  Mathilde had never really been cold. And Mathilde had been to the Moon.

  Oh, she registered temperature differences, of course. She knew, in a distant, intellectual way, that ice cream or a chilled glass of beer did different things to her palate than some sizzling peppers off a fajita platter at one of the goofy sort-of-Mexican restaurants Oliver so loved.

  But she had been a joker for forty-two of her fifty-one years alive, and she only had faint memories to go by if she wanted to imagine what it felt like to be cold. December wind off the Atlantic on the waterfront of La Rochelle. Sticking her hand into an Alpine snowbank at a Swiss train station on a trip to Italy. But what she really remembered from those occasions was warmth. The warmth of her mother gathering her in her arms and snuggling her scarf tighter against the wind. The warmth of the steaming cup of tea that her mother pressed on her when she pulled her hands from the snow.

  Her ace power made her body a furnace, if one she kept carefully damped and controlled. She could walk through a bonfire—secretly, she had—and even if her clothes burned to falling embers she would not be harmed. She could ignore heat, she could control it. She could manifest it and direct it.

  But she had never really been cold.

  Until now.

  “You’re an ace!” Centigrade said, his voice higher now. “They didn’t say any—” He broke off, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead. He grunted, and Mathilde felt something happening. She looked down, and saw that their joined hands were now coated in at least two inches of ice.

  She pushed, and the ice began sublimating, hissing straight to steam.

  Suddenly, Mollie Steunenberg was there, a dangerous gleam in her eye. But instead of doing something spectacular and bloody, she said, “Cliff’s calling. Everything’s gone to shit at the gates.”

  Where Malachi was. Where Theodorus was. “Go! I’ve got this!” said Mathilde.