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!” Fr. Lynch chuckled sardonically. “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.”
He started to walk back towards the Cherry-Garrard dome. Mendoza followed.
“I’m glad you came to me, Mendoza. 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?”
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,” 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 1/6th 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.
“Time to go,” he said to Mendoza.
Mendoza levered himself upright, bracing for a surge of pain. It didn’t come. The drink in the pouch must have been some kind of analgesic.
I Cheong had drilled into his skull with miniature robotic instruments and removed his BCI and its fuel cell. She had explained the process to him after the surgery, when he surfaced from the anesthetic. He remembered seeing the actual components on her gloved fingertip. Two bloodied scraps of metal and crystal.
Now, he felt in his hair and found two nuskin bandages, one above his left ear, and one at the base of his skull.
His vision was empty, clear. Nothing happened when he rolled his eyes or purposefully blinked.
He put on his shoes. He had fallen asleep fully clothed. “Where are we going?”
“It’s better if you don’t know that yet.”
Two rucksacks leaned by the door. Fr. Lynch took the bulkier one and gave the other to Mendoza. It weighed next to nothing in Luna’s gravity.
At the door, the Jesuit uttered a bad word under his breath. He went back into the room and took the crucifix off the wall. “Maybe I’m just superstitious, but I don’t like leaving Our Lord behind.”
Mendoza kept quiet. The way Fr. Lynch said that, it sounded like he did not expect to come back here. How deeply had Mendoza dragged him into his troubles?
The priory had a ladder instead of a zipshaft, proving how old it was. They climbed down into the grounds. The convent was dark. With no HUD, Mendoza could not tell what time it was, but he figured it must be the small hours of the morning.
An enormous Vitamin C tree filled the front garden of the convent. Mendoza slipped on the rotten peel of one of its citrusy fruits.
“Careful! Don’t forget you’ve just had brain surgery.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
“That’s the painkillers talking.”
They went out to the street. Widely spaced streetlights yellowed the fronds of the pignut palms. The people here were hardworking citizens. They were asleep in their beds. A streetsweeper bot trundled down the street, brushes swishing on the cobbles. Mendoza did not breathe until it had passed them.
They walked to the airlock near St. Ignatius. Before ducking into the bushes, Father Lynch stopped to look around and listen.
From the direction of the Evans Square commuter rail station, a distant siren whooped once, and fell silent.
Father Lynch grinned. Mendoza had seen him grin like that only a few times before, when a kendo-ka pulled off a particularly difficult kata. Inside the airlock, he took out his tablet, wrote with a finger on the screen, and held it up for Mendoza to see.
That’ll have been the cops finding your BCI. I Cheong ditched it at the station, to buy us some time.
Mendoza grabbed the tablet and scrawled: But Father! They’ll get all my data!
Think they don’t have it already?
Hmm. Mendoza was pretty sure that his BCI had never been hacked. But on the other hand, what could Derek Lorna and his cronies learn from Mendoza’s data? Only that he collected classical music recordings, and had a crush on a girl. With any luck, they would dismiss him as a sad sack who screwed up everything he touched.
He went to open the sharesuit locker. Father Lynch stopped him. He dove into their rucksacks and pulled out two suits of the second-skin type. They looked like thick, black wetsuits with flexible boots attached.
Fr. Lynch wrote on the tablet, The sharesuits have beacons in them. We’re using these. They have inflatable helmets, and integrated oxygen and water reservoirs. Strip.
Mendoza just stared until Father Lynch was down to his black ecclesiastical skivvies. Then, understanding that the Jesuit meant it, he turned his back and took off his own clothes.
Father Lynch reached around his shoulder to show him the tablet. Condom-style urine collection system. The other tube is a suction system for solid waste. Insert it into your anus.
By the time Mendoza got himself sealed up, he had pretty much managed to stop blushing. He pressed the button to inflate his helmet and fitted it to his neck seal. The odorless purity of canned air replaced the smell of moondust.
“Comms check,” Father Lynch said in his ear.
“OK. I mean, copy.”
The Jesuit cycled the airlock. “These suits are Space Force surplus. They’re made for Marines, which is to say numpties who never finished school. You shouldn’t have any trouble with the onboard systems, but the MI assistants have been disabled, so if you can’t figure something out, ask me. Any questions so far?”
“Are you seriously telling me that Marines go into battle with suction tubes up their asses?”
Father Lynch laughed. “Most of them never go into battle at all. But yeah. It kind of detracts from the glamor, doesn’t it?”
They exited the airlock and trudged away from the dome. Sharp pebbles dug into Mendoza’s feet, as if he were walking barefoot. So much for Star Force suit technology.
“Stick to the shadows,” Fr. Lynch said.
With the sun just a degree above the horizon, that wasn’t difficult. Even the smallest pieces of debris cast long, inky shadows. Mendoza looked up. A full Earth hung overhead like a blue Christmas tree ornament on black velvet, 40 times as bright as the moon seen from Earth. The Star Force suit’s faceplate provided true-color f
iltration. He had never seen Earth looking this beautiful, except in the fake sky of Wellsland. Outside, it was different. It was real. He felt a connection, across the centuries, with the very first moonwalkers. Then he stubbed his toe. “Ow shit!”
“Watch your step.”
They were walking in the shadow of Wilson Hill, a mini-crater to the north of Cherry-Garrard. The rim of the crater was festooned—like every bit of high ground in the area—with solar arrays. Boulders, junk, and heaps of unused glassbricks turned the low ground into an obstacle course. This area was not as heavily trafficked as the immediate periphery of the dome, so a layer of loose moondust still covered the ground. It puffed up at each step. The legs of their suits were already grubby gray.
Ahead lay the next dome down on the Wiechert line, Oates. Behind them and to their left, the Cherry-Garrard recycling plant had come into view. Mendoza tensed, but nothing emerged from its inky shadow.
“In these suits,” Fr. Lynch said, “we can’t be tracked.” They reached the edge of Wilson Hill’s shadow. “Count to ten. Then follow me.” Fr. Lynch took off at a fast lope. Seven … eight … screw it. Mendoza pushed himself into a kangaroo-hopping run. Owing to his defective boots, he did not catch up with Fr. Lynch until the Jesuit stopped in the shadow of the tri-peak Oates dome.
“Why … count to ten?” Mendoza panted.
“In case I got zapped by the PORMS.”
“I thought you said they couldn’t track us!”
“A sat might pick us up visually. That’s why we’re sticking to the shadows. But since I didn’t get zapped, I assume they’re not searching for us outside. At least, not yet.” As they walked on, Fr. Lynch continued, “I’m a person of interest to the police. Not just because I’m a priest, but because I’ve helped people to disappear before.”
“You have?”
“You aren’t the first person connected with the Church who’s had to drop out of sight.”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 100
