by Gary Gibson
The craft twisted around in its flight until it was oriented the right way. They dropped yet lower over the next several minutes, until thick plumes of grey dust billowed up around the lander, obscuring the view through the external cameras. Almost before he realized it, the lander had touched down with a gentle thump.
Saul let out a shaky breath. I’m alive, he thought.
‘That was a sweet landing, honey,’ said Lester, turning to her with a look of approval. ‘Why, I—’
Saul saw the back of Lester’s helmet shatter under a blow from the wrench gripped in one of Mitchell’s gloved hands. Lester exhaled sharply and reached out with one hand to the control panel before him. Another blow followed immediately, smashing through the ruins of his helmet to strike the back of his skull with sickening force.
Saul scrabbled at his restraints, then raised one arm in a feeble attempt at defending himself, just as Mitchell aimed the next blow at him. Saul’s helmet fractured under the impact, but still held together.
Mitchell leaned over him, his face filled with a snarl. Out of the corner of his eye, Saul could see Amy unbuckling herself, before bending forward to reach under her seat.
Mitchell pulled the wrench back for a second swing, but the module was too cramped and the weapon slammed into a control panel behind him, tumbling from his grasp. Saul tore frantically at his restraints while, swearing under his breath, Mitchell crouched down to find the wrench.
Amy stood up from her seat just as Saul managed to fight loose of his restraints. She gripped a weapon of her own in both hands. At first glance it looked like a regular shotgun, but with a peculiarly home-made appearance, as if it had been assembled from random pieces of junk.
Before Saul had time to wonder what the Roses were doing with a shotgun hidden on the lander, Amy fired it at Mitchell from point-blank range.
It took some moments for Saul to register what happened next. Mitchell had shifted to one side with startling, inhuman speed, the bullet smacking into a compumounted on the bulkhead behind him. It was as if someone had inserted a jump-cut into reality: first Mitchell had been here, but now he was there.
Saul already knew from the how-tos how easily the bullet could have punctured the lander’s thin walls.
Amy swore and tried to take aim a second time, and Saul noticed how the trigger mechanism was roomy enough for a spacesuit-gloved finger to fit around it.
Mitchell leaned over Lester’s prone form to snatch the weapon away from her, moving once again with that shocking fluid velocity.
Saul then remembered what Donohue had said. He’s not even human.
He grabbed hold of Mitchell from the side, only for the man to swing Amy’s rifle around like a club, slamming the stock into Saul’s ribs and sending him stumbling backwards. By the time Saul had struggled half upright again, Mitchell was swinging the rifle back and forth between him and Amy. The lander felt more intensely cramped and claustrophobic than ever.
‘I don’t want either of you getting in the way,’ Mitchell shouted. ‘Amy, I—’
The interior of the lander was so tiny that, when Mitchell glanced towards Amy, it was easy for Saul to reach out with one gloved fist and knock the rifle barrel upward, so that it smacked into a control panel mounted on the ceiling. Saul pushed his advantage by grabbing hold of the barrel, struggling desperately to pull it from Mitchell’s grasp. Mitchell was sweating inside his suit, with an expression suggesting he was in considerable discomfort. As his eyes became unfocused, Saul felt the man’s grip on the weapon begin to loosen.
‘Now you listen, you piece of shit,’ Saul barked, ‘you’re going to—’
A sound like a hammer blow filled the tiny cabin, and a nearly irresistible force almost lifted Saul into the air.
He slammed shoulder-first into one of the forward control panels, hard enough to leave him feeling dazed. He caught a glimpse of lunar regolith, down between the lander’s legs, then realized the forward hatch had somehow been blown, the air inside the craft explosively decompressing. Mitchell pushed Amy out of the way and literally dived head-first through the narrow hatch, before landing between the lander’s legs, in a great cloud of dust.
‘Don’t move,’ he heard Amy warning him over the A/V. ‘Your helmet’s cracked. I need to resecure that hatch before we can do anything else.’
‘What the hell just happened?’
Amy reached down for a handle attached to one side of the hatch. ‘Give me a hand here,’ she ordered.
Saul took hold of the handle on the opposite side, and held it in place, following her clipped directions as she reset the locking mechanism. He had to lean over Lester to do s and noticed his unmoving eyes staring off through one of the lander’s triangular windows.
‘I don’t know how he figured out how to do that,’ Amy muttered tightly, ‘but he triggered the emergency release.’
Saul remembered studying Mitchell when he had assumed he might be asleep, and seeing the man’s eyes dart back and forth under their lids, no doubt planning and preparing, while searching out flaws in the lander’s UP-linked control systems.
‘I think I might know,’ he admitted.
Once Amy had finished resecuring the hatch, she reached out and flipped a couple of switches on a control panel, then did the same with a virtual panel floating to one side. A distant hiss quickly built to a roar as the cabin filled up with air once more, from an emergency tank.
‘How he did it doesn’t matter right now,’ said Amy. ‘Well, that’s us repressurized. Now we’ve got to help Lester.’
‘Amy . . .’
She ignored him, pulling open a steel cabinet and withdrawing a large white plastic box. ‘Medical kit,’ she explained. ‘We’ll need to dress that wound.’
Saul gazed down at Lester’s slumped form, with a feeling of hopelessness, as Amy hurriedly pulled off her helmet and dropped it to one side.
Saul pulled off his own damaged helmet too, then helped her remove Lester’s. Tears trickled down her cheeks, as she murmured Lester’s name over and over again, like a litany. Lester’s head rolled to one side, his jaw slack and his eyes vacant.
‘Amy, please, listen to me.’
She began weeping in earnest. ‘We can get him to a hospital in Copernicus,’ she insisted. ‘Someone might still be there, someone who can . . .’
Saul stared down at Lester’s lifeless features. ‘It’s too late for that.’
Amy sniffed and reached up to pinch away the tears gathering around her eyes. She stood up abruptly, the medical kit slipping from her grasp. ‘I don’t understand . . . why did he do this? He tried to kill you, too.’
‘I don’t know,’ Saul replied, reaching out with two gloved fingers to close Lester’s eyes.
Amy kneeled on her seat, her face twisted in anguish, as she stared down at her husband. ‘Listen to me, Saul,’ she said eventually, her voice hoarse. ‘There are some auxiliary suits.’
‘There are?’ Saul felt a sudden stab of hope.
Amy nodded listlessly and touched one gloved hand to Lester’s cheek. ‘ou can get yourself another helmet belonging to one of them.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath, and then stood up as straight as possible. Her eyes, blazing with anger, met Saul’s. ‘I want you to kill him, do you hear me?’
‘Amy . . .’
‘No, dammit, I want him dead.’
Saul tried to think of something to say. ‘I need to find out why he did this, and if I kill him, I can’t do that.’
Her gloved fists clenched themselves by her sides. She might be an old woman now, but Saul suddenly saw just how very formidable she must have been in her youth.
‘Then make damn sure he never gets as far as the colonies,’ she hissed in a half-whisper.
The spare suits were located in a locker hidden beneath a floor panel at the rear. Amy helped him pull out a new helmet.
‘Now listen up,’ she said. ‘We’ve landed a couple of klicks south-east of the Lunar Array. Any normal day, we’d wind up in jail
for flying anywhere near this close to it.’ She retrieved the rifle from where she’d propped it against a bulkhead. ‘Here, you’re going to need this thing when you go after Mitchell.’
Saul searched her eyes as he took it from her. ‘Why in God’s name would you need something like this on board a tourist craft?’ he asked. ‘You could have blown a hole in the lander and killed all of us, not just Mitchell.’
‘It’s an insurance policy.’
‘Insurance against what?’
An uncomfortable look crossed her face. ‘Against getting caught.’
‘You were smuggling, is that it?’
‘Not necessarily in this bird. In the VASIMRs, mostly. Things got tight a few years back, and we were on the verge of going under. This way, we can slip all kinds of stuff past customs and fly it straight back home without going anywhere near Florida. People, sometimes, too.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess telling you this doesn’t matter now.’
‘So what were you planning on doing, if you got caught? Have a shoot-out with the ASI?’
Amy made a sound of irritation. ‘Officials we can pay off, but we had competitors – sometimes very vicious ones. We thought they might plant someone on board, a ringer of some kind, so . . .’ She gestured at the rifle. ‘You should realize that thing’s designed to work in a vacuum.’
Saul nodded. He rather suspected that the rifle, when disassembled, might look, to the casual eye, like nothing more than random components of normal onboard equipment.
She squinted at him. ‘You’d figured this out already, hadn’t you?’
‘I had a feeling, yes.’ He lifted up the helmet and paused before sliding it on. ‘You’d better put on your own helmet, if we’re going.’
She laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? I’d only slow you down.’
‘You need to get to the city, Amy. Your friends will be waiting for you.’
She nodded slowly, with a look of desperate sadness in her eyes that Saul recognized. It was the same way he himself had looked on the day the Galileo wormhole had collapsed.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I need to stay here with Lester. Just for a little while longer.’
‘Amy . . .’
‘No.’ Her expression was stony. ‘Go find him now, before he gets away.’
TWENTY-NINE
Lunar Array, 11 February 2235
Saul pocketed some extra ammunition that Amy gave him, her mouth pursed all the while in a thin line. By the time she had depressurized the lander again, Mitchell had already gained half an hour’s head-start.
‘You’re better equipped than he is,’ Amy pointed out, over the A/V, after he mentioned this. ‘Remember, you’re carrying a full air supply in your backpack, while he jumped out with just his suit’s inbuilt emergency supply. He’s not going to waste time doing anything but heading straight for the Array. Besides,’ she added, her voice crackling slightly, ‘it’s not like you’re going to have too much trouble following his trail.’
Saul pulled himself through the tiny hatch and then down a narrow ladder, a plume of dust rising around his weighted boots as he touched down. He looked back up at the lander, shocked at how tiny, frail and primitive-looking it seemed, and gave Amy a wave just as she swung the hatch shut again.
He looked around and saw that the lander stood on a wide shelf of rock, only a few kilometres from the edge of Copernicus Crater. Hills ringed the crater’s rim, and he could spot part of the city, where it lay further around the crater in the narrow gap between two peaks. The city itself spilled down the wide, terrace-like steps of the crater’s inner wall, its tallest buildings reaching upwards like pale spears that had been thrust into the regolith. The snaking lines of pylons that carried trains back and forth between the city and the Array were as yet invisible from Saul’s vantage.
Mitchell’s footprints stood out clear and sharp in the dust, and Saul followed them along the lunar surface, in long strides that would have been impossible back on Earth. He looked ahead and saw tvantage.ed straight to the rim of hills, a few kilometres away. He breathed evenly as he ran, pacing himself and keeping his eye out for any loose rocks that might trip him. He recalled reading somewhere that the close proximity of the lunar horizon made it hard to judge distances.
‘Mitchell!’ he yelled over the A/V. ‘Can you hear me? Mitchell!’
No answer.
The most economical way to run on the Moon, he knew from previous visits to Copernicus, was a kind of lope that fell just shy of skipping. It exhausted him all the same, so that when he came to a halt, about halfway towards the hills, the inside of his suit already reeked of stale sweat. The terrain had meanwhile taken on a different texture, the regolith giving way to ripples of ancient lava and boulders left over from the time when part of the crater wall had collapsed, aeons before. This made it a lot harder to pick out Mitchell’s footsteps.
‘I just want to know what the hell’s going on,’ Saul shouted again over the A/V. ‘You owe me that much.’
‘Do I?’ came the unexpected reply.
Saul straightened up, still panting from his exertions, and stared over towards the hills. If Mitchell was there somewhere, he couldn’t see him. He tried zooming in with his contacts, but there was so much debris scattered everywhere, it would be easy for Mitchell to hide himself amongst it.
‘I know there’s some connection between you and those artefacts,’ Saul gasped. ‘Olivia found the proof: this all started when they brought you back from Site 17.’
‘What’s happening now,’ said Mitchell, ‘is too important to let you, or anyone else, interfere.’
Saul could tell from the sound of the man’s breathing that he had also been running. So he started moving again and, after another few minutes of steady progress, he spotted movement amongst the deep shadows cast over the base of one of the hills. He squinted intently, till one of those shadows resolved itself into a tunnel mouth cut into the side of a hill. Saul stopped, exhausted, and sucked water through a straw located inside his helmet.
He looked around and saw he had come to the edge of an old construction road. Rubble was piled into mounds by the roadside, while several abandoned-looking construction vehicles and a broken-down mobile foundry stood nearby, stark and black against the stars. He started running again, gradually picking up his pace.
‘You were never actually going to help me shut down the Array, were you?’
‘I should have killed you first, instead of Lester,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I can see that now: my stupid mistake. I had to find some way to stop you interfering. But I couldn’t take a chance on Lester and Amy sending out a distress signal, if I went for you first. But I screwed up, didn’t I?’
‘What’s too important f me to interfere in?’
Mitchell just laughed. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘Would it make you turn back? See things my way?’
There had developed a subtle change in the tone of Mitchell’s voice. There was a touch of echo to it, as if he were no longer wearing his helmet. Saul searched for local networks, and came across a public map of the area that included the locations of several emergency access entrances just inside the mouth of that tunnel. It now yawned ahead of him, just a hundred metres or so away.
‘I said try me.’
‘I’m trying to save the human race,’ replied Mitchell. ‘Is that good enough?’
Saul nearly stopped dead in his tracks. ‘What?’
‘Some of the Founder species wanted to destroy the network, because they came to realize that, once they’d created a wormhole leading into the very far future, as a result time between the two mouths became fixed, immutable. Do you understand?’
Saul saw he was now very nearly at the tunnel entrance. He’d hoped that, if he could just keep Mitchell talking, he had a better chance of catching up. But his muscles were starting to protest, and Mitchell meanwhile sounded like he hadn’t done anything more strenuous than take a short jog.
‘That doesn’t make one damn bit of sense to me,’ Saul gasped.
‘You’ve heard of the observer effect in physics, right? Once you observe an event, an infinite range of possible outcomes collapses to just one. It’s the same with time. Whenever you create a wormhole, and move one mouth through space at relativistic speeds, you create a path into the future – but the objective time that passes outside the wormhole becomes fixed into a single, unchangeable destiny. Do you see? It’s the death of free will. That’s why the Founders fought each other for control of the networks. Some of the artefacts we found had been weapons in that war.’
Saul finally reached the mouth of the tunnel, his lungs burning from overexertion. He knew he had to keep going but, in truth, he wasn’t sure he could. He glanced back the way he’d come, but by now the lander was lost amidst the boulders and dust.
‘The growths?’ he panted, his back resting against the tunnel wall. ‘They were one of those weapons?’
Mitchell laughed. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. The growths aren’t trying to kill us,’ he said. ‘They’re saving us.’
Saul pushed himself away from the wall, and headed further into the tunnel until he came to a door. ‘Tell me how the growths are saving us,’ he asked, still stalling for time.
‘You think they’re killing people,’ said Mitchell, ‘but they’re not. They’re preserving them.’
A UP-enabled menu sprang up in front of the door, just as Saul stepped closer. The interface was primitive, a set of simple textual menus displayed in lines of bright-green text hovering in the blackness before him.
‘Preserving them?’
A light blinked on above the same door, and it swung slowly open. Saul took a step back, suddenly afraid of Mitchell lunging out at him – but there was no one there. He stepped inside and found himself standing by the top of a ladder set into an unpressurized shaft that fell away into darkness. He lowered himself over the edge and began to descend, his suit’s shallow lights illuminating the shaft walls around him. It felt too much like descending into some bottomless pit.
