Moonsteed

by Manda Benson

  Arrays of Neuro Technology could get information for her, or run probability calculations, but they couldn’t make decisions. She would have to choose what was best. Killing him had not been an ideal contingency, but running through what had happened again as she strode back to John Aaron, she still saw no alternative. She’d told him to stop, twice. He’d reached for a weapon. It had been her or him.

  Aaron whimpered like a six-year-old when she grabbed him by the neck of his cloak and ripped through the fabric of it with her wakizashi. Turning to a stand of ice spikes, she raised her knee to her chest and brought her heel down hard into the heart of the formation, smashing it. She gathered the shards into the cloak, placed the head in the center, and folded the cloth around it to form an ice pack. Incorrect freezing damaged cells, but she hoped the ice would only chill the brain, with bone and skin insulating it.

  Her horse stood with its right front hoof lifted slightly. Aaron’s horse was uninjured and would be faster. Verity synced herself to it. She put the cloak with the man’s head in it in the bag behind the saddle. Now she had a problem. Leading the injured horse back with John Aaron on it would slow her. She needed to get the spy’s head back to the base as fast as possible. Leaving the horse here in a sweat where it would freeze to death would be irresponsible, and she couldn’t abandon Aaron to the same fate, even if his actions made him a criminal.

  “Stand up and come over here!” Verity moved to the injured horse and reached across to take hold of its bridle.

  Aaron’s mouth distorted with pain as he struggled to his feet, a tear dribbling from his eye and freezing as it tracked down his face.

  He came forward, holding up his clasped and bound hands as though he were praying to his magic god. Verity lashed his wrists to the pommel of the injured horse’s saddle.

  “Now get on and take the horse back to the base! Let them deal with you there when it’s done.”

  He got into the saddle as Verity returned to the other horse. “But I’m not calibrated to this horse! I can’t ride it with no interface on this terrain.”

  “Then learn to like people did in the old days, or fall and die.” As she adjusted the stirrups, Verity glanced at the dead horse’s bulk and the sheet of frozen blood under it. “Noble death is for the noble.”

  She jumped up, caught the front and back of the saddle and swung her leg over. The horses were all eighteen hands high, and she’d never have mounted them on Earth without standing on something.

  From behind her, Aaron shouted, “Waste of time expecting compassion from you! You’re made by man and not by God. You don’t have a soul!”

  Verity turned her horse and set off back along the track around the spire. She urged the horse to as fast a gallop as she dared on this narrow path with sharp ice debris bordering its edges. For what seemed like an age they weaved along the path, concentrating so fiercely it felt dangerous even to risk an instant to blink. At last the shard-like outcrops of ice dwindled, and the treacherous terrain of the eruptions around the newer crater gave way to the older dark plain of the great Valhalla crater with its knobbly spires blunted by erosion. The horse galloped flat out toward the research base on the horizon. Verity counted seconds.

  The gates and the walls of the compound loomed ahead. Verity rode straight through the courtyard and into the stables. Hoofs thundered on the flooring in the main corridor. A bespectacled man stood ahead of her, a hold-all in each hand. He was young, broad framed, tall and slightly plump with a sickly demeanor and an expression suggesting he was about to throw up.

  “Get out of my way!” Verity drove the horse into the man’s shoulder, knocking him against the wall. She didn’t look back. She would have felt it had the horse trampled the man, and it was his fault for obstructing the corridor.

  A woman in a lab coat met her at the corridor junction. “Take this to Inquisitor Farron, at once!” Verity pulled the head in the cloak out of the bag and slung it at her. The woman turned and ran down the corridor toward the laboratories.

  Her connection with the ANT told her the four minutes was up just about now. The brain should still be in reasonable enough condition for Farron to get the information from it, whatever information that was. Perhaps he would also find why the spy had been prepared to lose his own life and kill a perfectly good horse over it. Now the race was over, her and the horse’s breathing came loud and fast in the corridor, and the heaving of the animal’s ribs pushed her feet out with each breath.

  An uncomfortable tension knotted her stomach, refusing to be reasoned away. Aaron’s words returned to her: If I don’t succeed today, someone else will finish the job for me. What did that mean? Was it something to do with the spy? Could he have been involved too? Could it be that a conspiracy was afoot, and some unknown number of people on this base plotted against Verity just because of the way she had been born? She queried the ANT for John Aaron’s location and it came back negative. He shouldn’t be out of range. He should at least be off the scarp by now, so where was he? There was no record on the ANT’s database of any thought-prompts having been received from him since she’d left him, and the ANT’s scanning equipment could not locate him or the horse anywhere within its range.

  Why had the spy not surrendered? What secret was so vital it could be worth dying over? Verity was tired. She would have liked to have seen Farron and found out if the data in the man’s brain had survived and could be extracted, but attending to the horse took priority. She flicked her feet out of the stirrups and slid off. Taking hold of its bridle, she headed back toward the stable block.

  It was times like this she missed Gecko most. His name was Lieutenant Dwayne Uxbridge, but everyone called him Gecko after some incident in his past of which Verity had never discovered the full details. Probably it was to do with his controlled, patient manner, what his squadron members called cold bloodedness. Verity had always suspected that whole squadron laughed at her behind her back. They seemed to find endless amusement in the phenomenon of someone like Gecko carrying on with the likes of her.

  At the time Verity had never thought of her arrangement with him as being anything more than two people scratching one another’s mutual itches, and there had never been any expectation from either of them for it to last--it never did in the Sky Forces. Her area of expertise had been in animal handling, so after she’d been promoted to sergeant, she’d been relocated to the new base on Callisto. Gecko’s specialism was machines, and the Dennis Terraforming Company was paying him to oversee a survey of one of Saturn’s moons.

  She stroked the horse’s neck, now wet with thawed sweat and condensation as they passed through the stable doors.

  It wasn’t just the sex Verity missed, although Gecko had turned out to have surprising stamina and appetite for it, given the impassive attitude he presented to the outside world. Since they’d parted, Verity had come to miss his great tolerance for being shouted at--an ability to sit calmly and humor her while she raged and lost her temper at him over something that always seemed trivial afterward. Other people, it seemed, so easily took umbrage over a harsh word or an abrupt comment, but not Gecko.

  Verity wanted to send word to him, to tell him what had happened here. Perhaps he could give some words of reassurance that would make what had happened feel less of a shock. She had already sent him two messages in the three months she’d been on Callisto, but he’d replied to neither. She sometimes worried about something having befallen him out there on Titan, but more often she feared he had simply moved on from the past, and his refusal to contact her was merely a hint to her to do the same.

  Chapter 2

  Another horse poked its head over a door as Verity led hers into the stables. Its nostrils flared and its upper lip pulled back over its teeth and, as it exhaled a great moist gust into Verity’s face, she sensed an urge and a broadcast of frustration. It was a male horse, a stallion. The other horses were all mares, although Verity never really thought of them as having a sex when she worked with them. The stalli
on must have been brought in on the recent shuttle.

  A nervous worry had begun to cramp up inside her. The ANT still returned negative when she requested the whereabouts of Private Aaron. What if he hadn’t gone back to the base as she had ordered, but had gone somewhere else? It had already occurred to her he might have something to do with the spy, and the spy must have been going somewhere, and what if Aaron had known about it and had gone there? Perhaps she had made the wrong decision. Verity made a request through the ANT to Commodore Smith, asking to speak with him as soon as possible.

  She led the mare past the stallion and into her loose box before divesting herself of her helmet, sweaty jacket and gloves. The mare nudged a panel at the back of the stall and water poured into the bucket fixed there. Verity quickly removed the bridle so the horse could drink freely. She soon had the saddle and the rest of the armor off, and hung them on the door to the stall. The ice on the horse’s coat had already melted, leaving the hair damp, so she rubbed vigorously with a stable blanket to dry it off and stimulate its circulation. She checked the diagnostics from the connection: horse was uninjured, heart rate and breathing slightly increased from the exercise, and horse was happy to be home and have its armor off and be rubbed down.

  Verity selected a spanner from its place on the wall ledge outside the stalls, and gave the command for the horse to pick up its foot. They always liked it when their shoes were taken off. As she cradled the hoof in her hand and bent over, something in the horse’s vision caught her attention. She put down the foot and looked up to see a young man enter, the same one she had run the horse into in the corridor.

  He looked at her and looked away to stare at the horse. “Hi.”

  Had he come in here looking for an apology? Verity wasn’t going to apologize to him. He should have got out of the way. In the horse’s vision, his skin looked greenish, because horses can’t see red, but even in Verity’s own eyesight he looked sickly and nauseous.

  She stared at him. “I’m busy.” She turned back to the horse, but its eyesight confirmed he was still standing there, watching her. Couldn’t he take a hint? Didn’t he have work to do like everyone else on this base?

  “It’s Zeta, isn’t it?”

  The memory of what had happened outside flashed before Verity. How did this man know that? Who was he, and what was he doing here? Her hand gripped the hilt of her katana. “Don’t call me that!” The ears of every horse in the stable block turned back, hooves stamped and Verity’s horse let out a whinny. “No one calls me that! You understand?”

  “I--I’m sorry... I looked you up in the staff directory. I was told you were the person I needed to speak to... I understood that was your name.”

  “My name’s Sergeant Verity!” Verity’s hand still rested on her katana, but the slight pressure of her fingers brought back not the steady glide of steel in the sheath, but a sticky, viscous resistance. Too late she remembered the blood. “Shite!” She would have to deal with that later. Verity tried to control her temper, transmitting soothing thoughts to the horse, who snorted and moved uneasily as she lifted its foot to remove the shoe.

  The man flinched at the expletive. “I was told you were the best person to approach on the matter of the horses. My name’s Vladimir Bolokhovski.” It was only after speaking a longer sentence like this when Verity noticed his slight accent.

  “Look, I’ve told you I’m busy. If you’re a civilian, you’re not supposed to be in the stable block at any rate.” Verity wished he would go away. The bleed-back from her anger affected the horses, and he was making it worse. She unlocked the bolts securing the shoe to the bone implants and separated the inner cushion from the thick protective outer, its surface scalloped for grip and patterned with the holes of the retracted crampons. “You need to see Commodore Smith if you need access to the horses.”

  “I already did. He told me to speak to you.”

  Verity looked over her shoulder at him, narrowing her eyes as she stroked the powerful black neck of the horse. “What for? He knows I’m busy.” She ducked under the horse’s neck and went between it and the wall to take the shoes off the other side.

  Vladimir put his hands on his knees and craned his neck forward, trying to look under the horse at her. “I’m writing a thesis.”

  Verity grimaced. Was he trying to impress her? “What’s that make you, a not-properly-a-doctor?”

  “I’m working in the research group of Professor Eglin at Torrmede.”

  “Torrmede? Didn’t think they let foreigners into Torrmede.”

  “I’m not foreign. I’m half-British. And Torrmede aren’t racist. They’ll let in anyone with the grades.”

  “What did you study there? Spying, poisoning or nuclear weapons?”

  The horse’s vision showed Vladimir straighten and make a distasteful face. “Russia hasn’t been communist since the late twentieth century, and we’re starting to adopt meritocratic rule.”

  “Starting?”

  “We have public referenda on many political decisions. A democratically elected government still makes some of them, but we’re gradually moving toward meritocratic autonomy.”

  Verity scowled. “No country under the yoke of politicians can be called a meritocracy. If your country was worth the soil it was made of, its electorate would make all its decisions.”

  “Hmm, wise words,” said Vladimir quietly, “yet I’d say that wisdom was beyond your years, and I recall once reading something attributing a very similar comment to Jananin Blake.”

  Verity squeezed between the horse’s rump and the wall with the shoes in her hands. “Well, I think I can be forgiven for stealing Blake’s words. After all, she was Blake.”

  As the horse pawed the ground, enjoying the light weight of its feet and the sensation of the layer of warm sand on the floor, Verity put the shoes in the storage rack opposite and lifted the saddle. The metal edge on the outer part of one of the stirrups caught the light, sending a bright reflective rectangle flitting about the roof of the stalls. The stallion’s eyes rolled. His nostrils flared and he backed away from the stall door with a snort.

  Verity stared at the stallion. “He’s afraid. He’s not fearless?” She dumped the saddle on the rack.

  “You don’t mix testosterone with fearlessness.”

  Apparently satisfied that the threat posed by shiny things was gone, the stallion stretched his neck over the door of his stall to smell Vladimir. The man took a step out of the way. He didn’t look as if he’d seen very much in the way of either horses or testosterone.

  “What do you know about it?” Verity scowled at him.

  “That’s what my thesis is about.” He raised his voice at the end of the statement, making it sound like a question. “I’m doing a doctorate in genetic engineering. I engineered this horse.”

  “Oh,” said Verity after a pause in which things started to make sense. “Well, congratulations. He’s a nice animal. Apart from being frightened of tack.”

  “That’s why I need to talk to you. There’s supposed to be a breeding program commencing at this base.”

  Verity picked up her armor, closed the stall door and reached up to the implant on her forehead, cutting her connection to the horse. “You’re going to have to speak to me later. I have a meeting with the Commodore.”

  * * * *

  In Verity’s billet, she threw the armor on the bed and examined the katana, swearing at the blood smeared up the blade and inside the sheath. She rinsed out the sheath and dumped it in the bath before wiping the blade carefully and polishing it. She laid it down on the floor close to the wall before stripping off the rest of her armor and throwing that on the bed and pulling on the charcoal boiler suit that was standard indoor dress on the Callisto base.

  She exited her quarters and walked straight into the Commodore.

  “Ah, Sergeant Verity. I understand you want to speak to me?”

  “Yes, Commodore, Sir.” Verity stepped back from him in a hurry. “There’s been an inci
dent involving Private Aaron. I think he might have absconded.”

  Verity had never seen Commodore Smith smile, but he raised his eyebrows and turned his dark-brown eyes to her. “I had a quick read through the ANT’s details on the matter. Let’s discuss this in my office.”

  In the Commodore’s office, Verity took a seat on the outside of the desk.

  “Well,” said Commodore Smith, sitting. “Can you go through what happened? I’m going to need your account for the report.”

  Verity hesitated. If she had made a bad decision, she could be court-martialed. She carefully explained the horse chase, how she had shouted twice for the spy to stop, how he’d reached for a weapon, and how she’d beheaded him, how Aaron had got hold of her katana--and at this point, she noticed the Commodore cast his eyes down to her belt to check she didn’t have it--and how she had overcome him but sent him back with the horse because of the necessity to return the spy’s head as quickly as possible.

  Smith frowned, fingering his upper lip. “Did he say anything when he attacked you?”

  “Uh,” said Verity. She didn’t have to tell him the exact circumstances of her birth. The Meritocracy made that information private from employers, so people with powerful relatives couldn’t exploit their connections. “He’d found out someone who was my ancestor had done something he didn’t agree with. He thought killing me would avenge a crime he thought had been committed against him.”

  The Commodore grimaced. “Sounds like he was psychologically disturbed. That should have showed up in his screening.”

  “Do you know where he might have gone, Sir?” Anxiety crept back into Verity’s stomach.

  “If he’s not back, I don’t know what’s happened to him. The ANT can’t find him, so he mustn’t have left the scarp. It’s quite probable he could have fallen off the horse and killed himself, with no interface. Perhaps even deliberately after he realized he’d dishonored himself.”

  “I doubt it,” said Verity, thinking privately that John Aaron didn’t have any honor. “You don’t think he could have gone anywhere?”