“I wanted to say, before anything else, how much I appreciated your testimony after Vicksburg,” Remy said.
Graves scowled. “Vicksburg was a mistake, Cade, and I’m sorry for it. But that’s ancient history now.” He studied Remy’s face. “Some hold the opinion I should shoot you. That you’re a traitor aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States.”
“Sir, my allegiance has never been to the New Earth Order,” Remy said. Stick to the truth as much as possible. It sells the lie. “The upshot is this: I fell in love with the wrong woman. ”
“Elise Kisaan? The UN Secretary of Biodiversity?”
Remy nodded. “I knew her long before that. Nursed her back to health when she had her legs attached.”
Graves arched his eyebrows.
“Bionic, sir.”
“The daughter of the most powerful agriculture magnate in the world goes over to the Neos.” Rising, Graves began to pace. “And you’ve been with her since Alaska?”
“Yes, sir.”
Graves changed the subject. “Why did that man, Rico, shoot you?”
Remy let a breath fill the space. “I couldn’t go through with it,” he said. “Rico considered me a traitor to Cassandra.”
“Explain that statement to me, son.”
“I wouldn’t help him upload the virus, sir. I knew it would put thousands of US military troops in danger. If that virus had gotten into the DoD core … that’s where I drew the line. That’s why he shot me.”
The general sat down on the edge of his desk, looming over Remy.
“And the girl?” Graves said. “What about her?”
What about Elise? Remy didn’t have to lie about that topic. “She’s gone, sir. She’s one of them now.”
The general nodded, saying nothing. After a long time, he extended his hand.
As Remy gripped the hand of his former commanding officer, he felt the first twinges of doubt. He’d found Graves and gotten access to a Haven site—now what?
“Mr. Cade, I believe we can help each other.”
Chapter 11
Ming Qinlao • LUNa City, the Moon
It took Ming three days to figure out how to get off the Moon. She was lying on her back in a hammock strung between two columns of sewer pipes in sector 12, tunnel 6, bay 4, when the solution came to her.
Her preplanning had worked perfectly. She’d stashed food and water and other necessities all over the warren of maintenance tunnels, and she used a clean pair of data glasses to check the work schedules every shift to ensure they could stay out of the way of any maintenance crews.
What she hadn’t counted on was the boredom—and the guilt. Always lurking in the back of her mind was the specter of Lily.
So she planned their escape. As much for her sanity as her survival.
Option one was staying in LUNa City and living on the down low. Not a terrible plan, but with obvious risks. The city had enough population and transient personnel activity to hide them, but someday, somehow, through some tiny mistake, one of them would be recognized and they’d be on the run again. Also, as a pair they were more recognizable than they were separately, and she wasn’t about to leave Ruben to fend for himself.
She heard her brother shift in his hammock. “You still awake?” she said.
“Can’t sleep,” Ruben said from his matching hammock a few feet away in the pitch blackness. “I miss Lily. I wish I’d gotten to see her again.”
No you don’t, Ruben. No you don’t.
“Ming?”
“Yeah.” The mention of Lily conjured up images that made her want to scream into the dark, but she kept her voice low. Sweet Lily, whose only crime was loving Ming.
“I’m sorry. About everything. I—I was selfish. This all happened because of me.”
“Yeah, it did,” she said. He needed to hear the truth. “But you didn’t ask for any of this.”
“I’m a Qinlao,” he said. “It’s part of who I am.”
Ming reached her hand into the darkness, found Ruben’s hammock. He reached back and touched the tips of her fingers. He was doing a lot of growing up in a very short space of time.
Option Two was obvious: find a way off the Moon. Easier said than done. Even if she could get them to the docks and even if she could find someone to take them on an outgoing vessel, the bounty hunters would be watching for them.
Ming scratched at the grime behind her ear. If there was only a way to get out of LUNa City without being seen, maybe through one of the mining camps that dotted the lunar surface. If she could bribe enough of the right people, they had supply shuttles that ran regular routes off-planet…
Point Bravo . She sat bolt upright in the darkness, her fingers searching for the LED light she’d stuck to the pipe over her head. Cold illumination flooded over Ruben, huddled into a ball in his hammock. His dark eyes gleamed from beneath a ragged fringe of hair.
“Pack your stuff,” Ming said. “We’re moving.”
She unstrung her hammock and stuffed it into her backpack. Her hands automatically checked the food and water supplies on hand. Including what Ruben had in his pack, they were good for three days. More than enough time to get to Point Bravo and arrange for a ride off this rock. Ming was even a little annoyed at herself for not thinking of it before. After all, she had been a construction engineer on LUNa City long before she was a fugitive.
When the concept for LUNa City was first established, the first engineering task was to decide where to site the new lunar metropolis. A series of vertical tunnels were dug at five points twelve kilometers apart around the Albategnius Crater. The tunnels, named Alpha through Echo in military speak, were used to study the stability of the underlying rock strata, the available minerals, and the presence of sublunar ice. The final decision placed LUNa City on Point Charlie, but not before there was a connecting tunnel dug between Bravo and Charlie to further explore the underlying rock.
And just like the ad hoc maintenance tunnels under LUNa City were only mapped as an afterthought or not at all, the existence of the Point Bravo tunnel was not on any topside engineering drawing she’d ever approved.
Ruben waited for her patiently. He’d become adept at moving quietly in the dark and making sure they minimized any trace of their existence in the tunnels. The acting out she’d been dealing with before the bounty hunters arrived was gone.
Ming touched his forearm. “I never said I was sorry about what happened with Angel.”
Ruben smiled shyly. “At least I’ll remember my first kiss.”
Ming tried to return the sentiment, glad the light was dim. If you live long enough to get a second kiss.
They traveled with a dim light and sharp ears, listening for any maintenance crew that might stray across their path. Ming did not worry about the bounty hunters following her into the tunnels. They could bring a platoon of hunters down here and she could avoid them. No, she was convinced the hunters would use face-rec bots on the vid-feeds and focus their efforts on choke points, like the docks.
The whirr of a scooter and a pair of voices arguing made Ming stop and press Ruben into an alcove. Her hand found the handgun in her backpack. The sounds drifted away.
The entrance to Point Bravo was an unmarked steel door at the end of a long winding tunnel. She shined the light on the gauge to see if there was atmosphere on the other side. Slightly below one atmosphere. Ming swore to herself. She could equalize pressure between the two compartments slowly, but that would take hours, maybe a full day. Too risky.
She needed to force the door open and minimize the time it took to get through. The sudden equalization in pressure would cause a slight atmospheric dip on the LUNa City tunnel-side. Not much, a slight popping of the ears at most, but enough to alert an astute maintenance crew to come looking for the cause.
But Ming was committed to Point Bravo now. This was their best chance of getting off the Moon—or being trapped.
“Help me,” she said to Ruben. She detached a heavy metal bar from a
bracket and inserted an end into a wall socket to form a lever. She ratcheted the bar down, each cycle adding a tiny amount of force to a spring that could manually open the tunnel door.
She worked until sweat drenched her body, then stepped aside to let Ruben have a turn. As the boy pumped, she checked the spring gauge. A quarter charged. “Keep going,” she said. At half charged, she signaled him to stop. They only needed to get the door open enough for them to slip through. His heavy breathing echoed in the confines of the tunnel.
Ming positioned him close to the door. “When I trigger the spring, it will force the hatch open for a few seconds, until the spring loses charge and the door closes. It’s going to be noisy, so be prepared.”
Ruben nodded. Ming took a deep breath and triggered the spring. A noise like rapid-fire gunshots sounded, and the hatch cracked open. A rush of wind was sucked out of the tunnel around them into the blackness beyond. Ming’s ears popped from the pressure change.
The hatch was open about six inches when she forced the backpack through. The spring noise seemed to peak, and Ming thought for a heart-stopping second that she had miscalculated the amount of force needed to open the hatch .
When the gap had widened to twelve inches, she slapped Ruben on the back. “Go!” The boy worked his shoulder into the still-widening slot, then disappeared.
Just as Ming slipped her arm into the gap, the spring noise stopped. She felt the hatch start to press on her thigh. Panic set in as the thought of being crushed took over. Ming froze, then started to back out. From the other side, Ruben seized her arm and heaved her through the narrowing gap.
The hatch closed with a resounding boom.
Ming sprawled across the rough stone floor, pitch darkness all around. She held her breath to still the sobs that threatened to burst out of her. For the first time since all this had started, Ming had felt afraid, really afraid. Afraid of dying, afraid of getting maimed, afraid for Ruben … just more scared than she’d ever been in her life.
“Are you hurt?” Ruben said tentatively.
Ming shook her head, then laughed as she realized he couldn’t see her. “No.” It came out part sob, part laugh. Then: “Thank you. For pulling me through, I mean.”
“I didn’t want to be alone, Ming. I’m scared.”
The air in the dark tunnel was damp and stale, but she breathed it in like a tonic. She found her light and switched it on. “Me too.”
• • •
Point Bravo was a twenty-by-twenty room at the top of a long climb from the tunnel. Besides the airlock to the lunar surface, there was a single porthole, a rack with three emergency pressure suits, and a pile of junk left over from the geologists who had done the soil evaluation years ago.
Ming slumped against the wall and slid to the floor, her thighs burning from the climb. She was officially moonsoft now. Ruben clambered out of the hole in the center of the floor and crawled to sit next to her. His face was smudged with dirt and he needed a haircut. He panted at her. “This is it?”
“Welcome to Point Bravo.” She hauled herself to her feet to look out the porthole. It was good to see the stars again after days in the lunar underground. The surface was ablaze in daylight, the sun’s rays bending around the rocky cliffs of the crater. Ming watched a transport lift off from LUNa City.
Ruben joined her at the window. “What now?”
Ming dug into her backpack for her glasses and eye-scanned to a secure uplink. “Now, I make some travel reservations.”
Zeke Bronksi’s day job was supervisor of the Helium-3 extraction crews on the Moon. In that capacity, he controlled all mining operations flights on and off the Moon. If you worked on an extraction crew outside of LUNa City, you went through Zeke. His part-time job was of more interest to Ming: Zeke Bronski was the King of the Darkside, the Moon’s thriving black market.
Theirs was a casual relationship, one borne of necessity when Ming was the lead construction engineer on LUNa City. She’d learned to take a pragmatic view of the black-market economy. The UN’s policy of price controls on incoming materials made for bureaucratic inefficiencies that worked against the larger goal of completing LUNa City. There were times when Zeke needed some adjustments to the bills of lading for incoming shipments of construction materials and times when Ming needed certain materials expedited to meet her schedule. In all her time on the Moon, Ming never took a bribe or cut corners on quality, but she frequently bent the bureaucratic rules in the name of efficiency.
Zeke owed her, Ming told herself. They had enough of a relationship to warrant a favor, but how large of a favor might that be?
Only one way to find out. She used an anonymizer program and triggered a call to his day job.
Zeke’s jowly face had a perpetual five-o’clock shadow and his shaggy dark hair was more salt than pepper since she’d last seen him. He was looking away when he answered her call. “Bronski.”
“Zeke, it’s me.”
The man’s eyes snapped to the screen and he opened his mouth.
“Don’t say my name.” It was a near surety the bounty hunters had the ability to scan voice comms for keywords. Ming prayed the anonymizer fooled their voice-rec bots.
He closed his mouth. “Holy shit.”
“Don’t hang up, Zeke. I’m in trouble.”
“Holy shit,” he said again, his face a war of emotions. What might have passed for goodness won out. “You okay?”
“I’m okay, but I need a ride.”
He shook his head, his jowls wobbling. “You’re crazy. There’s no way you can get to the docks. These guys are dropping serious coin to find you. You wouldn’t last five seconds—”
“I can pay. And you owe me.”
Zeke’s eyes narrowed with interest, then he shook his head. “Too risky. Sorry, I’d really like to help you, but— ”
“What’s the bounty on us?”
His eyes ticked left, a sure sign he was lying. “Six fifty. Cash.”
Ming had no alternative, and Bronski undoubtedly knew that. “I’ll double it,” she said. “As long as you get us off this rock in the next twenty-four hours.”
She saw greed flicker in his eyes. “You got that kind of scratch?”
“A hundred now, the rest when—”
“Two fifty now,” Bronski interrupted. “In ByteCoin.”
Ming did her best not to wince. That amount would all but clean her out.
“Two hundred in coin, take it or leave it,” she said in a voice that brooked no compromise.
Bronksi hesitated and she played her trump card. “I know where your skeletons are buried, Zeke. One call to the marshals and we’re sharing a cell.”
“Deal,” he said after a pause.
“I’m at Bravo. We need a pickup here.”
Zeke’s lips twisted in thought. “Point Bravo? Smart girl.” His eyes defocused as he scanned the list of ships on his retinal display. He grunted.
“What?” Ming said. Every second she stayed connected to the network, even with an anonymizer, put them at serious risk.
“Your best option is not really an option.”
“Tell me.”
“The Lucky Baldwin is leaving in the next shift for an ice-mining job on Mars. This is not the nice side of Mars, girl, with all the domes. This is a low-rent shithole operation. The manifest on this crew looks like a bunch of degenerates. ”
“Book it.”
“You don’t want this—”
“I don’t have a choice. Make the deal, Zeke. Two new crew members, no questions. We’ll be outside at 2300. A simple touch-and-go landing and no one’s the wiser.”
“All right, I’ll get it done. Been nice knowing you.”
“I owe you, Zeke.”
“Only if you make it.”
• • •
Ming helped Ruben into his pressure suit. He’d never been on the surface and this was as good a time as any to let him enjoy the experience. The suits were older models but still serviceable, and they were charged
with two hours of air, enough in theory to walk back to LUNa City if there was an emergency.
The suits were sized for a full-grown man, so they hung on both their frames like clown outfits. Ruben giggled when he saw Ming in her suit. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh in days.
“You don’t look much better, kid,” she said, laughing along with him.
By Earth reckoning, this side of the Moon was twenty-six days into its twenty-nine-day cycle of daylight, and the long shadows of the coming night stretched like black shark’s teeth. Earth shone in three-quarter view, a blue and white jewel suspended in the twinkling velvet of space.
“It’s beautiful,” Ruben said. His voice was tinny through the comms of the old pressure suit.
“Yeah, it is.” A wave of loneliness passed through Ming. “ That’s home.” She slid her arm around the loose folds of Ruben’s suit, pulling him to her.
A transport lifted off from LUNa City, veering in their direction, staying close to the lunar terrain.
The ship drew close enough for her to read Lucky Baldwin on the side of the scarred hull. It was an older model, with angular lines never intended for atmospheric entry, known in the trade as a MOAB, or Mining Operation in a Box. In theory, a team of miners could land a MOAB anywhere in the solar system and start mineral extraction.
The transport touched down, and a side airlock cycled open.
“This is us,” Ming said. “Stay close.”
• • •
The Lucky Baldwin was a dirty ship full of dirty people who leered at the new arrivals with dirty thoughts evident on their faces.
Ming and Ruben stayed to themselves, holed up in their quarters for the first couple of days of their journey to Mars. Tobias Johns, the Baldwin ’s captain, let his last-minute passengers—now known as Hui Luong and her nephew Ricky—have their space. He’d been paid well enough by Zeke to take them aboard, but in her one and only interaction with him, he’d made it clear he wanted nothing to do with them or their troubles.
By the third day of the voyage, just when Ming had lulled herself into believing they’d gotten away safely, a loud banging on the door woke her from a dead sleep. She opened her eyes to find Ruben standing in the middle of their small room .
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