Avengers of the Moon

by Allen Steele

As always, Roger grinned when he saw his son. “There he is!” he exclaimed, coming down off his stool to kneel on the floor. “The Man in the Moon!” He threw open his arms, and the baby burbled and shrieked with infantile glee. “Let me see you come to Daddy!”

  “Maybe a little later,” Elaine said wearily. “We just got through walking around the solarium, and I think he’s ready for a bottle and a nap.”

  At least once every twenty-four hours or so, they made a point of leaving the underground warren and going up to the part of the lab visible from the crater floor. The dome wasn’t used for very much except as a surface entrance and a storage area, but it also had a solarium where they could do a little sunbathing behind the filtered lunaglass.

  Lately, it had also become Curt’s playroom. Elaine didn’t want her child growing up with a molelike existence, so they went up there every Earth day for exercise. And while Roger and Elaine were careful not to let Curt walk too fast, lest his staggering baby steps in one-sixth gravity cause him to bounce off the ceiling, they were also mindful that he’d eventually have to return to Earth, and therefore needed to maintain proper muscle tone if he wasn’t going to be the weakling that many native loonies were.

  “Of course,” he said, reluctantly dropping his arms. “Lunch and a nap is always good, too.”

  Elaine relented a little. She picked up Curt from the stroller and carried him over to his father. As Roger took his son into his arms, Simon lost patience. “What do you mean?” he demanded, his eyestalks twisting in Elaine’s direction. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  Elaine didn’t look at him. She rarely did anymore. Although she’d helped design the cyborg and had supervised the transfer of Simon’s brain into it, she’d come to regret her role in the creation of something she now regarded as horrific. Although she was careful never to say so, hearing her old friend’s voice coming from something that looked rather like a flying crab gave her the creeps. Which made what she had to tell him all that much harder to say.

  “I downloaded the status report from the bioclast this morning,” Elaine said, “and we’re still having trouble with subcutaneous formation. For some reason or another, the bioclast is having trouble replicating certain epidermal functions.”

  “Which ones?” Roger asked, gently bouncing Curt in his arms.

  “Follicle growth and melatonin infusion. Strangely, we’re finding melatonin in the optic centers at the irises, but nowhere else. Otho will have your eyes, Simon…”

  “But the rest of me will be pale and hairless.” Simon made a slight bobbing motion that might have been a shrug. Seeing this, Roger was again intrigued by how Simon’s subconscious movements were manifested by the cyborg. “So I’ll be a little cold and should stay out of the sun. I can live with that.”

  “Yes, but there’s something else as well.” Still not looking directly at him, Elaine walked over to the refrigerator where she kept bottles of baby formula. She didn’t open it at once, though, but paused with her hand on its door. “The neural pathways are developing at a higher rate than anticipated. Otho’s brain is becoming … mature.”

  Roger stopped playing with Curt, gave her a sharp look. “Mature? He isn’t completely formed yet. How can—?”

  “I don’t know either.” Elaine shook her head. “The fact remains, though, that neuron synaptic development is occurring ten to twelve percent faster than the rest of his body. This isn’t the same sort of brain we have, remember, but rather an organic silicon matrix. We designed his neural pathways to be more efficient, so—”

  “His brain is growing faster,” Roger finished.

  “Correct. By the time he’s ready to come out of the bioclast, he’ll have the learning aptitude of an adult male. Not the same intelligence, of course, but we’ll be able to educate him more quickly than … well, Curt.” She paused. “If we choose to do so, that is.”

  None of them said anything for a few moments. Each knew what this portended. When it was still considered likely that Otho would be born an empty vessel, no one had any trouble replacing his mind with Simon’s. But if he was destined to become a conscious individual, it would be ethically questionable to erase what amounted to a developed, receptive brain to make room for someone else’s.

  “You can’t be serious,” Simon said at last. “We can’t come this far just to let that get in the way.”

  “I don’t see how we have a choice,” Roger said. Curt was beginning to get cranky; hungry and tired, he was starting to whimper just a bit. Elaine opened the refrigerator and pulled out a nipple bottle. “If we proceed with this as we planned, eventually we’ll have to produce the results … and when that happens, all hell will break loose.”

  When Roger came up with the idea of faking their deaths and relocating to the seclusion of Tycho Crater, it had never been meant to be a permanent solution. Once Otho was fully formed and Simon’s mind was transformed to the new body, the four of them would emerge from hiding, perhaps holding a press conference where they would go public with their accomplishment. Granted, it was possible that they might face criminal prosecution for perpetrating a hoax, but this way they’d be assured that Victor Corvo couldn’t assert ownership of their work for his own purposes—namely, the creation of a race of androids to be used as slaves or disposable soldiers.

  If, however, Roger and Elaine Newton produced an artificial being that once had a conscious mind of its own before it was replaced with that of a dead man, the scientific community would learn this as soon as they examined the data. And they would doubtless be repelled, just as the public would once they learned about this as well. And if Roger and Elaine’s work were morally compromised, their efforts would be in vain. At the very least, it would give Corvo an opportunity to push them aside while he claimed it for himself.

  “We can’t do this,” Roger said. “Not the way things are working out.”

  “Oh no.” Simon’s voice gained an edge they’d never heard before; even Elaine looked at him as he drifted closer. “Oh no you don’t. I don’t give a damn about your fine sense of propriety. Don’t you dare leave me in this … in this…”

  “Otho doesn’t have to be the end result.” Roger gestured at the bioclast. “This could be just the first version, the one we learn with. We can do this again, and the next time—”

  A soft chime from his ring interrupted him. A second later, Grag’s voice came through.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” the robot said from his habitual post on the lunar surface, “but a spacecraft is approaching the crater. It appears to be coming in for a landing.”

  Roger and Elaine glanced at each other, eyes wide with surprise. Simon was the first to react. “Can you make out a registration number on the hull?”

  “Just a moment, please. It’s not close enough yet.” Several seconds went by, during which no one in the lab said anything or even dared breathe. Then Grag’s voice returned. “Yes, I can see the registration number. It is MRC-7611-F.” Another pause, then: “I’ve checked the SolCol spacecraft registration records. The registration number matches that of a lunar shuttle belonging to the Corvo Company.”

  “Victor.” Elaine’s voice was a fearful whisper. “He’s found us.”

  VI

  Three figures in vacuum suits emerged from the shuttle airlock and climbed down the ladder. As they marched the short distance to the dome, two things became apparent.

  First: the person in the middle was their leader, and even before they reached the dome, there was no doubt who he was. No one but Victor Corvo could walk on the Moon like he owned the place.

  Second: the two figures with him, a man and woman, were both armed. They wore particle-beam pistols on their suit belts, and when they cycled through the airlock, Roger noticed that the holster flaps were unbuttoned.

  “Tell your people to put away their guns,” he said as they entered the solarium.

  “Hello, Roger, Elaine. Nice to see you again.” Victor cradled his helmet beneath his left arm;
in his right hand was an airtight attaché case that he placed at his feet. “For a couple of dead people, you’re looking well.”

  Roger didn’t return the smile. “The guns, Victor … I want them gone.”

  “Ummm…” Victor pretended to think it over a moment. “No, I think not. You don’t trust me, but I have even less reason to trust you. After all, you’re the ones who tried to cheat me with this rather elaborate charade. That being the case, I think it would be foolish to believe I could safely walk in here unarmed. So the guns stay, along with my bodyguards.”

  There was no expression on the face of the hard-eyed young man standing on Victor’s left, or on that of the pretty but vaguely repellant young woman standing on his right. They’d removed their helmets, too, but left them in the airlock, keeping their hands free. Their right hands lingered near their holstered guns, and each wore gunsight monocles in their right eyes. Professionals.

  For the first time, Roger regretted not bringing any weapons to the Moon. He’d spent millions on state-of-the-art scientific and medical equipment, including some that was unique and built to custom specification … and just then, he would have traded all of it for a PBP of his own. The only protection he and Elaine had was Grag, whom he’d instructed to join them in the dome. But while the giant robot was intelligent—even more than before, now that Elaine had upgraded his quantum AI to allow for non-Asimovian judgment and independent decision making—he’d never before been asked to guard the lives of the people who’d recently acquired him. Roger could only hope that his presence was intimidating enough to give Corvo’s thugs second thoughts about drawing their guns.

  “Very well,” Roger said. “So you’ve found us—”

  “And now you want me to leave? Without even asking how I figured out the four of you are still alive?”

  “Three,” Elaine said. “Simon died right after we got here.”

  Which was true enough. There was no point in mentioning that Simon Wright had been resurrected in cyborg form. He’d remained below to watch over Curt, and had strict orders from Elaine not to open the airtight door of the shaft leading underground until told to do so. Simon was observing them via a pinhole camera hidden in the ceiling and had a subaudible comlink with Grag; this gave Roger a small measure of confidence.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Corvo said without a trace of sympathy. “And your baby? Curt, is it?”

  “In our quarters. I’d appreciate if you kept your voice down … he’s asleep.”

  Roger had to refrain from smiling when she said that. Corvo could have yelled at the top of his lungs and Curt wouldn’t have heard him in his bedroom twelve feet beneath the dome. Elaine had told Victor this to subtly reinforce the impression that the dome was all there was to the lab. With luck, he and his people would leave without becoming the wiser.

  There was something in the way the woman standing beside Corvo smirked, though, which gave him little hope of that.

  “I’ll try to keep it in mind.” Corvo grunted as he bent over in his heavy suit to place the helmet on the bare floor. “Anyway … I’ll give you credit for ingenuity. You played it very well, making it seem like your ship blew up while on a vacation jaunt. Even the fact that no wreckage was found didn’t raise anyone’s suspicions. Every expert I spoke to told me that, when magnetoplasma engines go boom at high thrust, there’s generally nothing left but dust. So it fooled me—”

  “Thanks,” Roger said dryly.

  “—but just for a little while. There was something about the whole thing that was just too … y’know, convenient. Particularly since you’d expressed reluctance about some of the possible uses I’ve envisioned for your work. So even before I returned from Mars, I put my security team to work on tracking you down, with the assumption that you weren’t really dead but had simply gone into hiding somewhere. And lo and behold—”

  “They found what you were looking for.”

  “Yes, they did, by closely examining your company finances. First, they noticed that, shortly after I left for my Martian holiday, quite a large amount of money was transferred from your corporate account to a second one you’d established under another name. While specific information about that account was supposed to be inaccessible by anyone except the two of you, you had the misfortune of opening it at a New York bank where I have quite a bit of influence.”

  Elaine closed her eyes. “Damn,” she muttered.

  Roger said nothing, but his wife had voiced his own reaction. His family fortune was accessible through a trust fund he’d established under another name, which he’d been able to continue using even after he and Elaine were legally pronounced dead. Lately, Simon had been given access to the same funds. But the three of them needed more money than that to continue their research, and although Roger thought he’d been sly about diverting funds from one account to another, apparently he hadn’t been sly enough.

  “Yes,” Victor continued, “I’m afraid you were a bit negligent. Once we learned that you’d transferred most of your company’s assets to a hidden account, it became apparent what you’d been planning to do … particularly since that money was going toward the purchase of equipment that you already had in New Montauk. But the real tip-off was the leasing of construction robots here on the Moon. All my people had to do was access the rental company’s records to find out where those robots had been sent and … well, here we are.”

  Roger had to bite his lower lip to keep from swearing out loud. He’d taken pains to cover their trail, going so far as to erase the memories of the robots before they were returned; Grag, they’d purchased outright after he and Elaine decided that it would be useful to have an intelligent ’bot to handle routine tasks. In hindsight, though, he should have known that someone like Victor might suspect subterfuge and would use his resources to follow up on his suspicions.

  “So you’ve found us,” he said. “What do you intend to do now?”

  “Yes. What indeed?” Victor cocked his head a bit to squint inquisitively at them through one eye. “Let me ask you something … how much progress have you made the last few months? If my money has been well spent, then I can forgive a lot of things. We might even be able to start over with a clean slate.”

  “Not very far,” Elaine said before Roger could come up with a plausible lie of his own. “I’m afraid the otho project has been something of a dead end. We lost Simon before we were able to preserve his brain, and even if we hadn’t, our attempts to develop an artificial body failed.”

  “The best we were able to do was devise a higher order of cybernetic intelligence, using this robot as our test subject.” Roger turned to Grag. “Say hello to Mr. Corvo, Grag.”

  “Hello, Mr. Corvo,” Grag replied. “I’m Grag.”

  Corvo stared at the robot for a moment, then slowly let out his breath. “I’m very disappointed in you, Roger,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought you were smarter than this. All that money I invested, just so the two of you could play house. You never even intended to produce an android, did you?”

  It was all Roger could do to keep from smiling. If Victor believed that he and Elaine had done nothing worse than embezzle investment capitol, then they’d won. Corvo would go away, and even if he later sued them, at least he’d be out of their hair. By the time they were ready to go to court, Otho would be born … and even if he, Elaine, and Simon hadn’t met their primary objective of developing a replacement body for recently deceased individuals, at least they would have produced a fully functional artificial person.

  “I’m sorry, Victor,” he said. “I hope we can make it up to you.”

  “I’m sure you can.” Corvo stepped back and pointed to him and Elaine. “Get rid of them.”

  VII

  It was through the camera concealed in the ready-room ceiling that Simon Wright saw everything that happened next.

  On a viewscreen of the underground lab’s surface monitor console, he watched helplessly as the bodyguards accompanying Victor Corvo snatched
their guns from their holsters. In a moment, their weapons were leveled at the Newtons.

  “No!” Roger shouted and flung up his hands, but before he could do anything more, the male bodyguard squeezed the trigger. A ruby particle beam lanced from the barrel of his gun; it went straight into Roger’s chest and came out through his back. Even as it burned a tiny hole through the dome wall behind him, Roger collapsed to the floor.

  In the same instant, Elaine screamed and tried to dive behind a stanchion. The woman who murdered her was laughing as she tracked Elaine with the barrel of her gun. She fired before Elaine could take cover. Elaine fell in midstep, the beam slicing through her neck. Nearly beheaded, she hit the floor a few feet from her husband.

  The second particle beam burned another hole in the wall, but the slow, hissing decompression posed no danger to either Roger or Elaine. Both were dead in seconds. Roger lived just long enough to make a feeble attempt to reach out for Elaine, then life left his body and he laid still.

  Simon stared at the scene for a long moment, not quite comprehending what he’d just witnessed. Then horror and disbelief were swept away by cold fury, and he yelled:

  “Grag … kill them!”

  The robot was already in motion. A titanium monster with burning red eyes, it stamped forward with arms raised. The woman was the closest of the three; she managed to get off a shot that grazed the robot’s right bicep before his arm swept forward. Simon heard bones snap like dry wood as Grag swatted the killer across the room. Her eyes were still open as her body collapsed just a few feet from that of her victim.

  Grag was advancing on the other bodyguard when Victor knelt beside the attaché case he’d brought in. As Simon watched, he opened the case. Inside was a metal cylinder rigged to an electronic device. Victor pushed a button, then leaped for the open airlock behind him.

  “Grag, get out of there!” Simon snapped. “Corvo just set a bomb!”

  The airlock hatch swung shut, and Corvo disappeared from sight. By then, the second killer was another corpse on the floor, his skull crushed by a single blow. Grag started to follow Corvo, but halted when he heard Simon’s voice. The robot looked down at the bomb just a few steps away, and started to move toward it.