Moonsteed

by Manda Benson

  “This is where I killed the spy,” she told Vladimir as she pulled the mountaineering gear out of the bag. “Do you know how to abseil?”

  “No. And if that’s an offer, I don’t want to, either. I think learning to ride is enough for one day.”

  Verity picked up the chisel and hammer, and pressed the heating switch on the chisel. “It’s probably best if you stay up here, anyway, for safety reasons.”

  Vladimir got down from his horse. “Good.”

  When the metal rod of the chisel glowed red, Verity pounded it into the ice with the mallet, the tip pointing downward toward the drop. The ice hissed as the chisel went in. She pulled it out and banged one of the pins into the hole, the water sealing it there as it refroze. She repeated this at another point two feet away and parallel to the first pin. After donning a climbing harness, she secured the rope to the pins.

  With the rope connected to her belt, Verity pulled against the pins, testing them. She stepped to the edge of the path and kicked down, stamping off the ice stalagmites to clear a gap through which to descend. The fragments of ice rolled away down the side of the crater, dwindling until they became imperceptible over distance.

  Vladimir watched her, fiddling with his armor. “What am I supposed to do if you don’t come back?”

  “Well, go back to the base, of course. And I am going to come back!”

  “Look, just supposing you die, what am I supposed to tell the Commodore you were doing?”

  Verity shrugged. “Tell him the truth. I’m hardly going to care if I’m dead, am I? I’ll be half an hour at most. Keep the horses in the sun and walk them around a bit. It’s only twenty-five below so they should be okay.”

  “I thought you said I’m not supposed to touch the big horse?”

  “Well, all right, you are allowed to touch her in these particular circumstances. But remember what I told you about them. I don’t want to think up an excuse to tell the Commodore if I come back up here and she’s trampled you.”

  Verity took hold of the rope, gave it one more tug and dropped backward off the path and began to abseil down into the crater. She soon fell into the rhythm of pushing off with her knees, letting the rope run, bending her knees and taking up the slack in the rope as her feet came back against the wall. Pockmarks, tiny craters and irregularities pitted the surface--she’d need them on her way back up.

  The gradient slowly began to decrease and abseiling became more difficult. When the ground became level enough, she disconnected herself from the rope and turned to look around. The far side of the crag lay in an inky pool of shadow, the sun cradled in a rocky cusp on the rim. A few feet ahead, one of the fragments of ice she’d broken off at the edge of the path lay in a crater. The spy couldn’t have landed far from here. An irregular lump lay in the crater basin some distance away. She could still sense the horse’s signal, although it was indistinct because of the ice in the way. Through the big mare’s vision, she could see Vladimir sitting on the ice near the pins.

  She looked up at the rope snaking down from the path above. The crater was huge and looked pretty much the same from any position within it. What if she went down there looking for the corpse and couldn’t find the rope again? That wouldn’t do. Not seeing any other way to mark it, she pulled off her helmet and switched on its lamp, and set it down at the bottom of the rope. Cold air stabbed into the membranes of her nostrils and lungs, and her breath blossomed into white vapor when she exhaled. She felt vulnerable without her helmet, particularly with the knowledge that John Aaron might still be at large. Her eyes followed the rope up until distance swallowed it, to where she knew but could not see the path lay. Aaron might kill Vladimir and follow her down the rope. Or he might disconnect the rope and throw it over, stranding her out here. Tense fear and doubt knotted about her innards. Perhaps it had not been a good idea to come here looking for information she had no right to.

  Well, she was here now, so she might as well get on with it. The sooner she found that body, the sooner she could leave.

  She shuffled forward down the steep incline. As she drew closer, she saw the irregular object was indeed the spy’s body, lying on its back with the arm still bent over the midriff toward the hip. Looking down on it, she could tell from the unnatural angle of the pelvis that the fall had broken the spine. Needles of ice had crystallized from the neck wound, giving the bloody flesh a fibrous, grainy appearance.

  Verity crouched to examine the corpse. He had worn no proper armor, just a standard type of ship-suit made from a closely woven insulating polymer fiber with a lightweight armor waistcoat, boots and gloves over it, all made up of durable fabric covered with plates of thin polymer alloy. A scarf unraveled from the head. He’d probably been trying to breathe through that, keeping his nose warm. He must have been desperate and freezing, clinging to the back of that horse as he tried to flee from her and Aaron.

  She frowned as she saw where his hand reached over to his hip. She could see no gun there as she’d expected. Perhaps it had detached from him in the fall. From the way his fingers were poised, it looked as though he’d been reaching for a pocket on his waistcoat, beneath the belt. Verity grasped the arm, trying to move it out the way, but it was frozen solid. The hand felt as if it were made of stone inside the glove. She rolled the stiff body over to get a better view of the pocket. The fabric of the waistcoat was still flexible enough for her to reach inside. Through her glove, she could only feel a numb friction. Her fingers slid over something. As she fumbled, her hand closed upon a small flat rectangle. She couldn’t feel anything else in there.

  She withdrew the glove. The object was just a white card with a name, hologram and familiar coat of arms--a Torrmede alumnus’s card. She had one herself, very similar to that. There was no weapon.

  She’d killed an unarmed man.

  She bent her head over the card, trying to read the characters embossed on the surface in the weak sunlight. Anthony Cornelian, MSc. She glanced at the body again, its arm frozen with the hand over the pocket. There was nothing else he could have been reaching for apart from this card. So why would he possibly think a Torrmede alumnus’s card would be of any use to him against someone armed with a katana?

  With fingers made clumsy by her gloves, she turned the card over. On its back was a geometric rendition of a flowering tree, with a similarly stylized owl perched in the fork of the trunk. The sigil of the Magnolia Order. She had killed an unarmed man and a fellow of the Order?

  There was a bulkiness about the back of the corpse in its rolled-over position. A backpack. Verity crawled forward and undid the clasp on it. The top flap was stained with frozen blood that cracked and fell away in dry flakes when she eased it open. The edge of a thin, flat object showed inside its recesses. Verity pulled it out--a computer slate. There wasn’t anything else in the main compartment of the bag and the only thing she could find in the pockets was what looked like a plastic key with a circuit embedded in it. Leaving the computer and the card lying on the ice, she rolled the body back into its former position and checked the other waistcoat pocket stuck down against a thigh that felt like a frozen ham wrapped in a cloth. Nothing.

  Gathering the computer, the card and device, she got to her feet, looking down at the corpse once more. It felt different to be viewing the headless body and knowing it had belonged to someone of the Magnolia Order. The dead spy had become a person, no longer simply stolen data. With a shudder, she turned away and walked briskly back to the place where the light of her helmet showed. She’d not thought to bring a bag, so she had to improvise one by wrapping her cloak around the computer and stuffing the hem of it through her belt. Her ears, her nose and even her eyeballs felt frozen as she put the helmet back on.

  Climbing back up got the blood flowing again and warmed her. Her shoulders ached by the time she got to the top and reached up to pull herself over.

  “Oh there you are, finally!” Vladimir grabbed her by the elbow and helped pull her up. “Did you find your data?�
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  “Maybe.” Verity pulled the computer out of her cloak and stowed it in the bag on her horse.

  “You probably won’t get anything from that,” said Vladimir, noticing the computer. “I expect it got smashed up in the fall, and it’s been frozen.”

  “We’ll see.” Verity mounted her horse. “Pull those pins out and let’s get back to the base.”

  * * * *

  Back at the base, Verity told Vladimir to wait outside with the horses while she went in and fetched a roll of plastic film. She wrapped it around the cold computer to stop water from condensing on it and damaging it when it was brought back into the warm air. She saw to her horse quickly, took the computer back to her billet and dumped it on her bed, then went back to the stables to make sure Vladimir had seen to his horse properly. He said he had to read a research paper, and went off after that. She was glad to have some time to herself to look into things.

  Back in her quarters, the plastic wrapping on the computer was covered with beads of dew and a damp patch had begun to spread across the bedcover. She wiped the moisture off the computer, but it was still painfully cold to touch.

  She took out the card again and examined it. Anthony Cornelian. Verity ran a search on the name through the ANT and it came back with no matches. There weren’t and never had been any personnel registered to the base with that name. She went back to the records for the morning the arrest warrant had been issued on the spy. The entry had been changed, to Freedom of Information violation, unpublished research theft. Scanning through the records of the day, she couldn’t find anything else relating to it. She gave the command to the ANT to compile a list and any fragments of any files or data that had been deleted between two hours before and four hours after the arrest warrant had been issued.

  She went back to the computer. It still felt cold to touch, but the moisture on the surface was not so much as before. Verity peeled away the plastic, wiping the computer off on her uniform. Carefully, she pressed the on key mounted on the side of the unit.

  The screen lit up--the computer still worked! Verity found its signal. Damn. It was protected by an owner imprint. Verity used the same software with her own computers--a simulation of her own personality and consciousness as imparted through the interface to create an individually customized firewall. After all, who knows better than you what files you don’t want to be viewed by your mother, or your boss, or some stranger you’ve never met?

  Verity stared at the computer. There was no way of removing an imprint, short of wiping the drive and destroying all the data. It was unlikely she’d be able to get it to reveal anything to her, but it would cost nothing to try, she supposed.

  She pressed the sync button on the side of the unit, and reached to her forehead to tune her interface to it.

  “Unrecognized operator. Access denied.”

  Lying to a computer was a pointless endeavor. Verity got straight to the point. “Anthony Cornelian is dead, killed for failure to comply with an arrest warrant from the Meritocracy on grounds of spying and violation of the Freedom of Information Act. I have reason to suspect his death may have been a miscarriage of justice and his arrest warrant a forgery. I cannot substantiate my suspicions without further information, data which I have reason to believe may be stored in this unit. Will you permit me access to such data?”

  For what felt like a long time, the computer did not respond.

  Eventually a reply came. “Are you Zeta Verity?”

  Verity started back from the computer. “How do you know who I am?”

  “If you are Zeta Verity, then Anthony Cornelian is indeed dead, and I have no doubt you were the one who killed him.”

  Chapter 5

  In the refectory, Verity stacked her rations of fiber loaf and levigated esculents onto a tray. “If you know stuff about me,” she thought to the computer in her pocket, “I’m entitled to know it under the Freedom of Information Act.”

  “The Freedom of Information Act applies to humans and ANTs. I don’t fit into either of those categories.” The voice in Verity’s head was a rich male tenor, with a Martian accent and a slightly haughty parlance.

  “What category do you fit into, then?” Verity demanded as she scanned the refectory for an empty table. She found one near the windows.

  “I’m a closed security system. I’m not going to divulge the information I have to you or anyone or anything else. Data storage protection is exempt from the Act in order that it can be programmed to be impenetrable so old computers can be disposed of without risk of leakage.”

  “Yes, but you’re not an ordinary security system. You’re an imprint of a person, and people are not impenetrable, they’re fallible!” Verity covered the distance to the table in long angry strides.

  “Well, perhaps I am fallible. I’m not sure yet. I’ve not decided whether you’re a friend or an enemy of Anthony Cornelian.”

  “I’ve already told you, I’m neither. I killed you, but I was obeying an order and I had a warrant for your arrest, and I told you to stop, and you didn’t, and you reached for some stupid Torrmede card, and I thought it was a weapon so I killed you.” Verity slammed her tray down on the table and dragged a chair across the floor. “Why do you even care? You’re an imprint. You’re not actually him. You only exist when someone tries to use this computer. He’s dead and you’re just a ghost in a machine.”

  Something almost like a laugh forced itself into Verity’s imagination. “I don’t feel like a ghost. Not since you started playing around with me.”

  Verity stopped halfway through ripping open a cardboard carton. “Right. I’m switching you off.”

  “Fine. Turn me off. I know you’ll only turn me right back on again.”

  “Ugh.” Verity grimaced as she arranged her food on the table. “You’re annoying! I’d want to kill you, if I hadn’t already done it!”

  She stuffed the foul food into her mouth, chewing for as little time as possible before swallowing.

  “This food is awful!” said the mind within hers “What are you, a vegetarian or something?”

  Verity almost choked. “You can taste what I’m eating?”

  “Sure thing. I can see it too, and it doesn’t look any better.”

  Verity rolled her eyes. Bleed-back.

  “She’s nice,” the ghost of Anthony Cornelian remarked as Verity caught sight of a woman, a little older than herself, putting food on a tray. “Look down a bit.”

  “That’s Sergeant Black,” thought Verity disgustedly, “and she doesn’t fancy computers. She wouldn’t be very pleased if she thought I was ogling her tits.” She looked away from Sergeant Black to see Vladimir with a tray, smiling ingratiatingly and walking toward her.

  “He’s nice too.”

  “No he isn’t.”

  “Why not? Because he’s a bit chubby and he wears glasses? A bit of meat on a man isn’t a bad thing, and nerdy can be sexy.”

  Vladimir set down his tray and a computer similar to the one in Verity’s pocket. “I’m so starving, even this horrible food looks enticing. So, did that computer work?”

  “Oh, it works.” Verity glared at him. “Only there’s nothing useful on it apart from an arsy bisexual ghost.” In the back of her mind, Anthony Cornelian made a tut-tutting noise.

  Vladimir raised one eyebrow and twisted his mouth. He ripped open his carton, spilling the contents on the table and his own computer. “Damn!”

  Verity watched him wipe up the mess before continuing. “Want to see something else I found?” She put down the spy’s Torrmede card on the opposite side of the table to Vladimir’s food. She put her own card next to it.

  After studying them for a moment, Vladimir fumbled in his pocket and brought out another Torrmede card, and put it with the other two. “Snap. So what? Like you said to me not long ago, going to Torrmede doesn’t make you special.”

  Verity reached across and turned over her and Anthony Cornelian’s cards, showing the image on the back.

 
Lines formed on Vladimir’s forehead. “What’s that?”

  Verity sighed. “It’s a Magnolia Order insignia.”

  “Ah.” Vladimir picked up his card and turned it so the unadorned back faced toward Verity. “Is that what makes you special, then? What exactly is the Magnolia Order?”

  “It’s an independent martial arts and philosophy organization. Jananin Blake and Takahashi Yūtarō founded it.”

  “And you belong to it? It’s got something to do with that sword you’ve got, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s called a katana.”

  “So, this Magnolia Order. Is it a division of the Meritocracy’s military?”

  “No, it’s autonomous from the Meritocracy.”

  “What, so you have votes among its members about what you’re going to do, and whether you’re going to send spies to research bases on ice moons?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound very meritocratic.” Vladimir raised his eyebrows in a sardonic sort of way.

  Verity glowered at him. “It is meritocratic. People without merit aren’t allowed to join it.”

  “Who’s in charge of it, then?”

  “I don’t know. Probably the people who have been in it longest.”

  Vladimir snorted. “Sounds dodgy.”

  “Who are you to say what sounds dodgy? You’re a not-a-proper-doctor from a country where people don’t have full meritocratic rights!”

  Vladimir scraped out the carton and licked his spoon. “All I’m saying is it sounds like exactly the sort of organization that would send spies to places to steal research data that’s exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” said Verity quietly.

  “What more?”

  “The spy knew what my name was.”

  Vladimir shrugged. “He probably looked you up on the ANT.”

  “No, he knew who I was the instant I tried to access the computer! My name’s mixed up with this somehow. Either the spy was an infiltrator and he was in league with John Aaron and they were both trying to kill me, or the spy was here for some other purpose to do with John Aaron and whoever else he’s in league with that’s being covered up, and John Aaron set out to kill both me and him.”