His work pals were emailing back and forth about it. He even exchanged a line or two with Elfrida Goto, far away on Earth.
“I’ve decided to take the job on Mercury,” she wrote.
Mendoza’s interest in Charles K. Pope evaporated.
That was news.
This was bad.
Elfrida Goto worked for the Space Corps. After her last assignment on 4 Vesta, where they’d shared some hair-raising adventures, she had been given a choice of working on Luna or Mercury. He’d assumed she would come to Luna. Why had he been so naïvely optimistic?
“Why?” he emailed back.
He had sixteen minutes to regret the blunt question: long enough for his email to reach Earth, and Elfrida’s reply to travel back to Luna; long enough for the high-speed train to plunge through the network of tunnels between Malapert Mountain and Shackleton Crater, stopping at underground stations beneath outlying domes, until it reached Gingrich Station in Wellsland. Still waiting for Elfrida’s reply, Mendoza got off and took the elevator up to Hope Circus.
People in mechanical wingsets clogged the sky of Wellsland, soaring dangerously close to the airship lanes. Mendoza shuffled around a grove of trees shaped like egg whisks, where the servants of the well-to-do were walking dachshunds and Yorkies. The scent of freshly watered grass tinted the air. A huge statue of Dennis Hope III peeped through the trees, garlanded with posters for yet another campaign to improve childhood health. Mendoza noticed none of this. He was immersed in his personal tragedy.
“I just feel like it would be interesting to see Mercury,” Elfrida emailed at last.
Mendoza entered Doyle Tower, a fantasia in fake brick and marble. He subvocalized to his comms program, ~Does this have anything to do with Pope’s death? Stared at the words on the virtual screen in his left eye. Deleted them.
~Congrats! he emailed, as the elevator carried him up to the 14th floor. ~Hope it goes well. Keep me posted. –John
He stumbled into the office of the United Nations Venus Remediation Program’s data analysis division, section three, feeling like a dirty nuke had just hit his future.
No one noticed his distress. They were all chattering about the death of Charles K. Pope. He had been their boss, after all, the director of the United Nations Venus Remediation Program (UNVRP). When Mendoza’s supervisor, Nate Sindikuwabo, strolled into the office, the first words out of his mouth were, “Anyone for coffee? We need to share our feelings of loss and abandonment.”
Half the office took up the offer. It was a good excuse not to do any work this morning.
Mendoza demurred.
Left alone, he sank onto his high stool. The starmaps on the screen made no sense. All he could see was the face of a klutzy, brave, cute-as-hell Space Corps agent who had just told him that she wasn’t interested.
He pulled himself together. Got a pouch of inferior java from the machine. Booted up his search engines.
It had been a long and improbable journey for John Mendoza, born in Manila to a single mother, to wind up on Luna, employed by the United Nations Venus Remediation Project as an astrodata analyst.
No matter what happened, he couldn’t jeopardize his job.
But it was not astrodata that he called up now.
Guiltily hunched over his screens, he navigated to one of the internet forums that discussed forbidden topics.
Well; not forbidden.
Just.
The kind of thing no one talked about in real life.
Join conversation: HEY GUYS NEW SURVEY IT’S FOR REAL AFAIK CHECK IT OUT
Thread: Survey data.
Forum: All-We-Know-About-Mars/secret.cloud.
New replies: 261.
Holy crap. His thread had really taken off.
Mendoza felt excited, and a bit scared.
★
Mendoza left the office at six, local time (GMT+10). He took his walking-stick.
It was getting on for dusk. The roof of Wellsland displayed delicate citrus hues in the west, where a theoretical sun might be setting on this whimsical recreation of Victorian London.
Mendoza passed thousands of men dressed like himself, and thousands of women in high-necked blouses and long skirts. The majority were spaceborn. Mendoza stood 175 centimeters tall, but he was dwarfed by these beanstalk people. Even with their longer legs, though, the spaceborn did not bound ahead or leap over others. (Pretty difficult to do that in ankle-length skirts.) Rush hour in Shackleton City was regimented, dictated by the commuter rail schedule and the sheer density of the crowds.
That regimentation was one secret of the city’s longevity and prosperity. To keep millions of people alive in the deadly environment of Luna was no small feat. You needed some degree of conformity. Couldn’t just have everyone doing their own thing. All the same, it got Mendoza down.
He took the train out to Cherry-Garrard, an outlying suburb on the slope of Shackleton Crater. This was a humbler dome than Wellsland. A low-slung roof seemed to press down upon terraced houses of Luna rock and splart. Wrought plastisteel streetlights lit up the fronds of pignut palms, whose fruit provided high concentrations of vitamin B12. Parents called tall, spidery children in to supper.
Mendoza went into a building near the perimeter of the dome. Large and square, it sported an unobtrusive cross. It was St. Ignatius Church, one of only two Roman Catholic churches in Shackleton City.
Down in the basement, practise had already started. He bowed towards the scrum of sweating men and women and hustled into his stabilizer braces. At the touch of a button, his walking-stick shed its handle and expanded into a two-meter shinai. He put on his gi and hakama and joined in.
Mendoza had once thought of himself as a peaceable person. But last year, he’d nearly died on 4 Vesta, when the PLAN took over the protoplanet’s infrastructure and murdered its human population. Mendoza had survived, but not through his own efforts. A peaceable person? Ha! He was simply a wimp. He’d let Elfrida and that Japanese guy do all the shooting, while he cowered in fear. He couldn’t fire a gun to save his life. Couldn’t even throw a punch.
So why wasn’t he out on a shooting range? Or taking krav maga, or Greco-Roman wrestling, or something?
What was he doing in Shackleton City’s one and only part-time dojo, learning the ancient Japanese art of kendo?
Well, for one thing, a shooting range on Luna? Wasn’t happening. The plebs might get ideas. As for krav maga, etc., Mendoza wasn’t at the point where he wanted to trade punches with 200-centimeter laborers on crazy-making muscle therapies.
Kendo had rules. It had history. It had masks that made you look like a ninja.
And hitting people with a two-meter plastic sword turned out to be really, really satisfying.
All the kendo-ka wore stabilizer braces, to simulate the resistance of Earth’s gravity. That ruled out the balletic leaps seen in pro vids, but you could still pull some cool moves. 0.16 g was 0.16 g, braces or no braces. Watching the final bout of the evening, between Sensei and one of the black belts, Mendoza absolutely understood why micro-gravity kendo was a thing, despite the fact that the practical applications of swordfighting skills in a spacefaring civilization were zero.
After practice, he hung around, helped to polish the floor.
The other kendo-ka trickled away. Sensei turned to Mendoza. “Not in a hurry?”
“Sorry. I know you have to lock up.”
Sensei zipped his shinai into its bag. He’d already changed into his street clothes. A casual observer might have thought he was still wearing a gi and hakama, but the long black garment was a cassock. Father Thomas Lynch, S.J., was the parish priest of St. Ignatius, as well as being a 3rd-dan black belt in kendo.
“If you have time for a coffee, I’d be glad of the company,” the Jesuit said.
They locked the church and walked down the street towards the edge of the dome, where the starry ‘sky’ swept down to meet the ground.
In larger domes such as Wellsland, the roof was so far away it
really did look like a sky. In shitholes like Nightingale Village, the roof was simply a roof. Here in Cherry-Garrard, a medium-size dome, you could see that the ‘sky’ was a patchwork of hexagonal glassbricks. The discolored leading between the bricks enhanced the Victorian atmosphere.
Glass could be manufactured cheaply on Luna by sintering raw regolith, and it made an excellent radiation shield.
The Jesuit pushed through the bushes at the end of the street. He pushed a sequence of buttons to open the airlock. Anyone could go outside, though few did. What for?
The communal EVA suits smelled like the inside of a kendo mask. Made to fit the spaceborn, they wrinkled around both men’s boot-tops.
Outside, they stepped into the middle of a two-week lunar night. Mendoza’s faceplate stuttered through several filters before settling on one that turned everything pale cerise.
A ruby maze of infrastructure cluttered the landscape between the domes: waste heat and water recycling plants, solar arrays, garages for maintenance bots, etc., etc. Nearer to hand, construction debris, broken parts, and spent batteries strewed the terrain. The truest sign of Shackleton City’s prosperity: recycling was optional.
The Jesuit set up a couple of targets made of spare glassbricks. He gave Mendoza a pistol. It was a pulsed laser pistol with a molten salt battery. Same type of weapon as the one that Mendoza hadn’t fired even once on Vesta.
Training with a sword was all well and good, but the Jesuit would be the first to admit that the fundamentals of self-defense rested on at least a basic ability to shoot.
They plinked away at the boulders for a while. Fr. Lynch was a crack shot. Mendoza managed to drill a hole the depth of a finger into one of the targets, which made him absurdly happy.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” the Jesuit said at last on the suit-to-suit channel.
Mendoza tasted blood. He had bitten his lip in his furious concentration on the target. He hesitated.
The silence out here was the silence of the confessional. Outside, and only outside, they could be confident that no automated surveillance would pick up their voices. It would be technically feasible for the powers that be to eavesdrop on a couple of guys shooting at rocks outside Cherry-Garrard, but highly unlikely that they would. You’d need a satellite pointing in the right direction, listening for the low-power FM signals used in suit-to-suit comms, at exactly the right time. You’d need forewarning, in other words, which the Jesuit had deliberately avoided giving them.
Yet that wasn’t why Mendoza hesitated.
Man up, he told himself.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last confession.”
The time before that, it had been four months.
The time before that, fifteen years.
Mendoza had fallen away from the Church when he left home. The calamitous events on 4 Vesta had brought him back to the Faith.
“I have committed the sins of lust and, uh, self-abuse.” His face felt so red, he had a new reason to be grateful they were outside, faces hidden by tinted rad-proof glass. “But that’s nothing new, right, Father? I don’t know. I just can’t get over her.”
“The same woman?”
“Yeah. I just found out she’s taking a job on Mercury.”
“That’s a long way from here.”
“It’s almost like she’s trying to get away from me.”
“Maybe she is.” The Jesuit was not one to sugar-coat things.
“I guess I have no right to feel betrayed. She’s with someone else. And according to her, she doesn’t even do men. Although that wasn’t the impression I got when … well, never mind.”
“It seems as though the basis for this relationship is very slender.”
Mendoza had to laugh at that. “Yeah.”
“So maybe the loss you’re feeling isn’t really about her. Maybe she represents something else to you.”
“Well, I do sometimes feel like there’s something missing from my life.”
“Didn’t you tell me that she saved your life on 4 Vesta?”
“Yes.”
“That’s wonderful, but Mendoza, that doesn’t mean she owes you anything else.”
That observation startled Mendoza. “I know it doesn’t, Father,” he said defensively. “I know that if I want any kind of a relationship with her, I’ll have to show her that I really care.”
“If it’s meant to be, God will show you the way.”
“I guess so.” Mendoza hurried on. “But that isn’t what I need to confess today.”
“No?”
“I’ve committed another sin.”
Silence. No one did silence like a priest.
“I’ve been stealing. At least, I think it’s stealing. At work: I’ve been using their research capabilities for unrelated purposes.”
More silence.
“I guess I need to start at the beginning. After what happened on 4 Vesta, I got interested in the PLAN.”
“The PLAN.”
“Yes, the PLAN.” Mendoza swallowed, the noise loud in his ears. “So a few months back, I started using my work privileges to look at astronomical survey data, astrodata as we call it, related to Mars.”
“Is there any?”
“Oh, not much. You know, we can’t put probes closer than fifty thousand klicks before they get zapped. You get a few grainy long-distance pictures, then boom. But people are still trying. Specifically, here on Luna, there’s an outfit called the Hope Center for Nanobiotics. Sounds dull, but they’re on the cutting edge of Mars surveillance. And I have access to their data because, um, well …”
One sin led to another. They were inextricably intertwined.
“My job … I’m an astrodata analyst for UNVRP, as you know, Father. The thing about astrodata is that it’s really hard to get hold of. What’s in the public domain is old and unreliable. The private sector does the best surveys, but they don’t like sharing their data. So my section operates in a kind of a gray zone. We infer the existence of asteroids in a given orbit, and then we generally just, um, hack into the databanks of whatever corporations are active in that volume. Once we know what they’ve got, then we go through the front door, ask them to confirm the existence of the rocks we’re interested in, or kick it downstairs to the legal division if they won’t play nice. So, the point is, I have a lot of tools. For going in through the back door.”
The Jesuit interrupted, “This is allowed?”
“Allowed, Father?”
“Your supervisors, your boss. They know that you’re hacking into corporate databanks?”
“Yes and no. They turn a blind eye. They know we can’t get the astrodata any other way.”
“And I expect that if you didn’t produce enough data, at any cost, you’d be out of a job.”
“Yes, exactly, Father.”
The Jesuit shook his head. “Go on.”
“Well, so I started, um, hacking into the Hope Center for Nanobiotics. They’ve done some awesome surveys recently. I guess they’re using nanoscale probes to get closer to Mars before the PLAN zaps them. You can see the structures the PLAN has built in the Hellas Basin. They’re up to four kilometers high. During dust storms, you can see their spires sticking up through the tops of the clouds. Not that that really tells us anything about what the PLAN is, or why it’s trying to kill us. But it has to mean something, you know? And so I thought more people ought to see this stuff. Independent experts. Random individuals who are obsessed with the PLAN and know more about it than anyone outside of Star Force. Hell, Star Force ought to see it. I’m pretty sure some of the commenters on All-We-Know-About-Mars are Star Force officers … So that’s what I’ve been doing. Posting the Hope Center for Nanobiotics’s data on a couple of private forums.”
“I wonder,” the Jesuit said, “if you also wanted to earn the approval of these independent experts and enthusiasts.”
Mendoza bowed his head. He knew Fr. Lynch was right. The expectation of kudos gave
him a rush every time he logged on.
“Online communities are dangerous. Spiritually, and of course, practically. If your employers found out about this, you’d be in big trouble.”
“Yes, I know. But I do believe the survey data should be shared.”
“But it’s not your job to share it.”
“No. I know. It’s just the secretiveness of these people, Father ...”
“Way of the world,” the Jesuit said brusquely. “We have more information at our fingertips than any other generation in history. For that exact reason, information is an asset, only as long as you have it and other people do not. So don’t blame the Hopes for sitting on their proprietary survey data, or your private-sector supermajors for refusing to share their starmaps with everyone in the solar system. If they behaved any differently, they’d be out of business. And I think that we can trust a publically funded research institute like the Hope Center for Nanobiotics—yes, I’ve heard of it—to share their data with the right people, in the right way.”
“Which is not on a secret forum. I know, I know,” Mendoza sighed. “I’ll stop.” Uttering the promise felt like pulling a scab off a wound. “I just hope it’s not too late. My last post really took off.”
“Oh, I expect that if you haven’t been caught yet, you’ll be OK. I assume you hid your tracks, like any professional hacker would.”
“Yes.” That, too, now felt like a shameful admission.
“Then say an act of contrition, and I’ll absolve you of your sins.”
Mendoza called the act of contrition up on his retinal implants. He still had the Tagalog version by heart, but he was rusty on the English. “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you …”
The Jesuit spoke the words of absolution and made the sign of the cross over Mendoza’s helmet. “For your penance, say the Creed, the long version, three times. On your knees, no half-assery. You don’t have to do it now. Any time before you next receive Communion is fine.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“Now, how about that coffee? I think the Jolly Green Bean across from the station is still open.”
So they had coffee, and talked about music. Fr. Lynch admitted to being a polyphonic metal fan, and Mendoza told him that if he liked that stuff, he had to get into classical. They even traded a few music files. The Jesuit didn’t have a BCI; he used a wristwatch.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 95
