Moonsteed

by Manda Benson

  The slight up-draught from the scarp’s face pushed against the hang-glider’s fabric, the bar lifting against her hands. She pressed the button to boot the computer. A pattern flickered on the screen, and the patchwork scales of the wing fabric flushed subtly as the computer calibrated itself. Dark colors spread over the sail’s underside, transforming it into an image of the sky overhead.

  “Will this thing carry two?” Verity thought.

  Anthony replied, “Air’s thin, but gravity’s weak. I’m fairly sure it will.”

  “What happened?” Vladimir got to his feet, squashing the telescope back up. “Does it go transparent?”

  “It transmits the light falling on one side out from the other side,” Verity explained. “Like holovision. It makes it hard to detect using visual scanning systems, and it’s about as close as you can get to radar invisible.” She moved closer to him. He was taller than her, with longer arms, so he would have to go behind. “Can you reach around me and hold on to the bar?”

  While he stood, much as the well-behaved horses back on the base did, and held the glider in position, Verity secured the straps to both of them and fixed the bottom shield--another sheet of chameleonic fabric to obscure the glider’s passengers from below--over the handlebar, shielding her chest and legs. She would have to hope bits of Vladimir wouldn’t poke out from behind it.

  When she got into position in front of him and put her hands on the bar, she saw starry sky projected above, and a projection of the edge of the scarp and the dark plain below from the inner surface of the shield. Vladimir’s body pressed close against her back, his arms over her shoulders and his hands outside hers on the bar, although she could feel little of the shape of his body and no warmth through two layers of armor.

  “You ready?” she said.

  “Ya.”

  “On the count of three, jump. Just let the harness support your legs once we’re airborne.”

  “Okay.”

  “One, two, three.”

  The spikes of ice jutting from the edge of the scarp slid out of view, and Verity’s legs tangled with Vladimir’s inside the harness. The bar vibrated in Verity’s hands as the craft hit the up-draught from the scarp face. A jolt of vertigo sent fear racing up through Verity’s chest and into her throat.

  “Anthony, how do I--”

  “Lean into it!”

  A buffet of air rocked the glider, and the handlebar quivered as she tensed against it, fighting the motion. Behind her, Vladimir’s shoulders stiffened, his arms straightening against the length of the bar and nudging the glider back into control.

  Verity relaxed her grip as the glider rose. How the? “Do you know how to fly this thing?” she shouted back at him.

  Vladimir laughed in her ear. “Of course I do.”

  “What? How’d you learn that?”

  “You were in the Magnolia Order in your time at Torrmede. Let’s just say I was in the hang-gliding club.”

  Verity had to resist the urge to turn to face him.

  “There you go. Never judge a book by its cover,” Anthony chided.

  The hang-glider’s nose swung steadily toward the distant base, air currents rippling the fabric that only showed as a faint outlining of seams where the patchwork of chameleonic fabric had been joined. Wind shrilled over Verity’s helmet, and tremors from the motion of the wing ran through the handlebar and into her hands. Lift came like a lessening of gravity in a centrifuge.

  “Where do you want this thing put down?” Vladimir said.

  “It needs to be beneath the watchtower, so surveillance won’t notice when we get off it.”

  Verity repeated Anthony’s reply to Vladimir. The hang-glider dipped steadily, the base growing larger ahead as Vladimir’s hands guided it on either side of her own.

  They approached the base fast now, the white tower of the observation deck standing out dead ahead. The repeating shapes of the prefabricated roof raced below.

  “Put your feet down.” Vladimir told her.

  She tripped over on the impact, and the glider’s left wing grazed the roof with a loud scrape. The nose tipped forward and crashed into the surface, throwing Vladimir on top of her.

  “Are you all right?” Vladimir asked as they lay tangled up in the harness.

  “I think so.” Verity flexed limbs, checking everything still worked properly. “Let’s hope no one heard the noise on the roof.”

  After unfastening the harnesses, they switched off the hang-glider and folded it back up. They left it under the observation tower.

  “That way, I guess.” Vladimir turned to the exhaust stacks lurking on the far side of the base.

  Verity nodded. “Keep in the shadows and try to stay out of sight of the tower. It’s not designed to scan the roof, but better safe than sorry.” She picked her way over the roof and climbed down into a recess where two blocks of the base had been joined, creating a short wall she could crouch in the shadow of. Vladimir followed.

  Their course brought them over the research precinct, where they had to clamber between the chimneys of the fume cupboards in the lab block below, and where unpleasant chemical smells pervaded the air. Past this, they crossed the stable block roof, and skirted around the dome that roofed the experimental paddock. When Verity crouched beside the glass and peered through, she saw several horses loose in the paddock within. They’d ripped all the grass up and ruined the paddock completely. It would all have to be re-seeded now. And the stallion was in there with them. Putting him with that many mares in that confined a space, and with no one supervising them, as it would appear, was stupid. Those horses were going to get hurt if they were left like that. Had Sergeant Black done this? Was she trying to mate them? Was she being lazy and using this as a substitute for proper exercise, without Verity and the Commodore around to question her? A surge of hot anger hit Verity. Those were her horses. She wanted to be there to see when the first wet, bedraggled foal dropped to the stable floor to rise on shaky knees. She didn’t want them to be treated like this, by idiots who didn’t understand what they were.

  “Let’s keep going,” she told Vladimir, continuing around the paddock’s roof perimeter.

  At the end of the next block, the base’s habitation area ran out. A stretch of empty ice divided the blocks from the fusion engine. Verity knelt on the edge of the roof to check the ground below. “Make sure you don’t jump down in front of a window,” she warned Vladimir. “And make sure you wait until I get out of the way so you don’t land on me.”

  Vladimir rolled his eyes behind his visor. “It’s only three-twenty-fifths-something g out here. It’s not going to hurt much if I fall on you from that height.”

  Verity dropped down, crawled under a window and bounded over the ice to the base of the fusion engine. She quickly put one of the blast walls between her and the base, and after a few seconds Vladimir appeared beside her.

  The fusion chamber was raised from the ice on stout metal pillars, Verity supposed to prevent heat from it melting the ice crust and sinking it. The pillars had been driven deep into the terrain beneath, and a slight bowl-shape to it showed where the heat radiating from the engine had sublimed the ice away in the early stages of terraforming.

  Peering into the shadows beneath the fusion block, Verity could make out what looked like machinery, roughly in the center. As she walked toward it, her eyesight resolved it as a double steel cable, running through a pulley system suspended from girders above. The cables descended into a twenty-foot wide circular hole in the ice.

  Vladimir switched on his headlamp. The light revealed a furrowed wall to the shaft, the sort a drill might make. When he moved his head to aim the light down the shaft, it slid away into nothing. He moved the light sideways, illuminating a thick pipe running up the side of the shaft and heading up into the engine.

  “That must be the pipe for the hydrogen supply for the fusion engine,” he said.

  “Liquid hydrogen?”

  Vladimir considered. “Probably supe
rcritical hydrogen. They’d have to pressurize it too much to make it liquid. Those pipes are strong stuff. They’re made of single-molecule polymer alloy in sections, but it doesn’t make sense to pressurize gas any more than necessary. It looks as though they put the storage tanks for it in the holes they made extracting the ice.” He stood staring down the shaft for a moment, the light from his helmet vanishing into oblivion. “When you think of all the matter you’d need to create an entire atmosphere...it must be a labyrinth down there.”

  Verity pulled off her helmet, her breath frosting on her lips. She drew back her head and lunged forward to add force to an expectorant spit, which froze midair, ricocheted off the far wall of the shaft, struck the near wall and disappeared into the darkness below.

  “Oh, that’s very impressive.” Vladimir folded his arms awkwardly in his armor. “Now if there’re guards or someone at the bottom, and that hits them on the head, they’ll know we’re coming.”

  Verity pulled the climbing ropes out from her bag, and hammered the pegs into the ice at the top of the shaft as she’d done when she’d climbed into the crater in search of Anthony Cornelian’s corpse.

  “I take it we’re not using the lift.” Vladimir pointed to the pulley system and a console on a pole beside the hydrogen pipe.”

  “No. It might register on the ANT if we use it. You said you don’t know how to abseil. Are you ready to learn?”

  “I guess I’d better be.” Vladimir dropped his arms to his sides.

  Chapter 12

  Abseiling down was far easier than climbing the scarp. Even Vladimir seemed to adapt to it quickly, and before long they were both at the bottom of the shaft. The lift from the surface--a rickety, cage-like thing with rime all over it--sat in the middle of the space at the bottom.

  Verity removed her abseiling harness. Three tunnels radiated outward from the base of the shaft, equidistant from each other. When Verity removed her helmet, she detected the slight noise of ventilation fans and a faint draught, emanating from one of them.

  “It’s this way,” she said quietly, putting her helmet back on. Confined places like this must need good ventilation if people were working in them. She pondered this idea, wondering if there was any way she could easily suffocate Farron in his lair.

  “There’s a hydrogen pipe going down here too,” Vladimir remarked.

  “Quiet,” whispered Verity. “There might be people nearby.”

  The tunnel ended with a blockage of white foamy wall, as though a giant cork had got stuck inside it. The wall had a door in it with a receiver that would open it if the correct thought-prompt was given.

  “You still have that manual override key you grave-robbed?”

  Verity transmitted an exasperated thought. “It wasn’t a grave, it was the bottom of a crater, and I needed it to finish your mission. And yes I do have it.” She detached the key from her belt and sank the plug into the door socket beneath the receiver, giving it a sharp forty-five-degree twist. The door opened.

  Verity stepped through, beckoning Vladimir in behind her when she was sure the corridor behind was empty. The door clicked shut after him. The walls in this part had been lined with some kind of foam insulation, to keep the warmth in and prevent the ice from melting, she supposed. Verity pulled off her helmet, wordlessly put her index finger to her lips and motioned for Vladimir to follow her.

  As they continued into the depths of the catacombs that had lain unnoticed beneath the Callisto base all the time Verity had lived here, they passed doors, alternately on either side. The windows in them mostly revealed rooms in darkness, although a few were lit and contained scientific equipment and furniture strewn around, as though the denizens had only recently moved in and had not yet had time to unpack properly. As she passed yet another dark room, Verity noticed an odd glow, and when she stopped by the door she distinguished lights from computer equipment, and many cylinders illuminated with dim green light from within like a lava lamp shop.

  There was no lock on this door, and it opened when Verity pulled the handle. She stared in the dark room as she entered, trying to make out the shapes inside the forest of glass cylinders. Each one stood on a stub, like the stump of a tree bole, covered with wiring and the glow of indication lights and monitoring equipment. The cylinders seemed to contain some sort of liquid, more wiring and objects, hard to see clearly with the room in total darkness and the bases of the cylinders shone with that green under-glow. As she crept closer to the nearest row of them, she realized what they were--fetuses.

  The nearest hung supported by a plastic ring secured by spokes to the walls of the tank. A ganglion of wires spread from the mooring, reaching to various points on the surface of the skin. The slimy gray rope of the umbilical cord wound around the suspended body and descended to a pulsating, amorphous mass lying in the bottom of the cylinder. Shunts, jacks and plastic tubing protruding from the living tissue of the placenta led to pipes and cables running up through the base stand. Another umbilical cord--a fiber-optic cable--stretched up from the stand and looped through the torus supporting the fetus, up through a ring at the top of the tank where it curved down and connected with the forehead. The muzzle of the face protruded unnaturally under the bulbous grey shadows of the unformed eyes.

  Vladimir’s breathing sounded loud in the quiet hall. “It’s not human.”

  Verity stared at the fiber-optic vine growing from the fetus’ forehead, at the point where a neural shunt would go. Involuntarily, she found herself reaching with her fingers to her own forehead and her neural shunt behind the electromagnetic blindfold. Flickers of color raced back and forth within the translucent walls of the cable. A chill spread down her back, transforming into a dull ache in her intestines. “It’s born knowing what to think.”

  She started and turned at a muffled noise from behind the door through which they’d entered. Footfall rang dully in the corridor.

  Without a word, they both crossed the room to the door on the far side, passing a row of fetuses lined up in order of size. Verity pulled open the door and they darted across the corridor and into another room. She hadn’t had time to check through the window first, and they’d entered via a door at the back of a room filled with chairs, like a lecture theater where a man sat, his back to them, in one of the chairs at the front. Verity froze, dropping her hand on Vladimir’s wrist to make him do the same.

  The man’s wiry sable hair showed over the top of the headrest, hair Verity knew.

  “Sir?” She took one step toward him on the aisle down the side of the room. “Commodore Smith?”

  He didn’t move, and as she came closer, bringing herself alongside the front row, she could see how his head slumped against the headrest, the slackness of his wrists on the chair’s arms where leather cuffs bound them. More straps restrained his legs and waist, and something held up his head. It was an inquisitor’s chair. They were all inquisitor’s chairs, arranged in rows like seats in a cinema.

  A goggle-like mask with opaque lenses covered Commodore Smith’s eyes, and wires ran up the back of the chair, terminating in foam-covered plugs blocking the man’s ears. More wires tangled over the top of the head restraint and connected directly to his neural shunt.

  As Verity stared, a muscle in the Commodore’s limp face spasmed briefly.

  “Is he unconscious?” she whispered.

  “It looks like he’s been drugged,” said Vladimir.

  She counted chairs--enough to process sixty at once. And there could be more rooms just like this. The area beneath the base was riddled with tunnels left over from the terraforming. There was no limit. Verity found her gaze wandering from the Commodore’s inert figure, following the thick bundle of cables running lengthways along the middle of the floor to the wall the chairs faced. Lights flickered in its recesses, and screens and keyboards lay about the table before it. Masses of cables scrambled like malignant growths of ivy across the exposed ports, and a faint warmth and hum of machinery emanated from the wall.


  “It’s an ANT,” Verity realized. “He’s got another ANT down here, and he’s using it for this.”

  She thrust her helmet into Vladimir’s hands, and reached out to the Commodore, meaning to rip those jacks out of his neural shunt.

  “No!” said Vladimir. “The ANT will know and you’ll set off an alarm!”

  She stared at him. “You need to get out of here.”

  “Verity, I said I’d help you.”

  “You can’t help me. You can’t help me go any farther than here.”

  Vladimir’s face grew twisted and tense. “What, you think I’ll hold you back, because I’m not Sky Forces?”

  “No, it’s not that. I don’t want him doing this to you. I can’t be brainwashed by Farron. You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand? No one’s immune to indoctrination. You’re made of flesh and blood like everyone else.”

  “Vladimir, there’s something you don’t know.” Verity gazed at the slightly plump cheeks and the softness under his jaw. His close-shaven, pale stubble was nearly imperceptible in this light, and it struck her how differently she regarded him from when they’d first met, and how right his face looked and how right his body and hands felt. She thought back to how she’d mentally derided him in favor of her memory of Gecko, who in retrospect had been merely a passing fling, and Farron, about whom something unwholesome and devious hung that she’d perversely been attracted to, and how she’d treated him when the horses...

  A surge of shame and self-disgust filled her chest. She’d ennobled what was worthless, what was nothing, and treated with contempt what was good and worthy, someone who deserved better than that, who was better than that. She had acted without thinking, just as she had when she’d decapitated Anthony Cornelian. And now his eyes, glacial blue, beheld her with a perception she had not earlier noticed, and before him she felt exposed even more so than when she had been naked and at the point of orgasm with him.