The Luna Deception

by Felix R. Savage

  “I’m pretty sure there are no eavesdropping devices out here,” Lorna said.

  Mendoza laughed. “I thought you had friends in high places.” He thought again about the picture of Lorna with Dr. Ulysses Seth.

  “Sure, sure. Mayor Hope’s a friend. But I don’t want everyone knowing everything.”

  Mendoza sipped his coffee. It shouldn’t have been coffee they were drinking out here, it should have been buko juice or guyabano, something cool and sweet that tasted of home.

  “I really have to go.”

  “Of course. Of course. You can use my jitney to get to the station.”

  “Thanks.” Mendoza wondered what a jitney was.

  “Of course, you could always take the day off.”

  “Well, we’re kind of busy at the moment.”

  “Naturally. And the work of MeReMSG is important.” Lorna’s tone said the exact opposite. “But is that really what you want to be doing?”

  Mendoza shrugged.

  “I could use you on my team. Full-time; official. No more sneaking around behind La Dillinger’s back.”

  Mendoza smiled and nodded. He realized that he had known this was coming. Why else had Lorna invited him to Bloomsbury? Given him a taste of this budgety lifestyle? Because Lorna knew he’d pushed Mendoza just about as far as he could without offering him anything in return. So here it was. A higher salary, better living conditions …

  And a chance to figure out what Lorna wasn’t telling him.

  He knew for sure that there was something.

  (Lorna and Dr. Ulysses Seth, grinning, with their arms around each other’s shoulders.)

  “Wow. I … I’ll have to think about it.”

  “You do that. Now, the butler’ll show you where the jitney’s kept. You might be in for a surprise. Ever seen a horse?”

  ★

  And then everything went to shit.

  ★

  Mendoza had barely reached the office—sliding into his place with muttered apologies, cringing from Preeti Dillinger’s gaze—when Lorna pinged him. Because Dillinger was staring at him, he let it go to voicemail.

  “Hey, pick up. I need you back here. We’ve got a situation. Goddamn it, Mendoza. Pick up NOW.”

  He made his excuses to Dhillinger: he shouldn’t have come into work at all, he felt sick, so sorry.

  But he did not go to the employee clinic. Or back to Bloomsbury, as Lorna demanded.

  Before he even reached the elevator, Lorna had left five more messages in his voicemail, sounding angrier and angrier. Lorna had also dropped enough hints about the ‘situation’ that Mendoza was able search the news feeds for himself and find out what Lorna was talking about.

  Oh, holy crap.

  Instinct told Mendoza to stay out of Lorna’s way until the man had a chance to cool down. He went home to Nightingale Village. But as he climbed the zipshaft to his apartment, Lorna pinged him again.

  “Fucking pick up! You broke this shit, Mendoza. I need you to fix it, or I’m going to fix YOU, and that is a fucking promise.”

  Mendoza started to shake. He spent five minutes curled on his bunk in the fetal position, while his HUD kept flashing. You have … 11 new emails from Derek Lorna! The man was not only calling him every five minutes, but emailing him, too. This was crazy.

  I need to hide.

  The thought was not rational but it was all he had. He went out again. There was a pawnshop on the ground floor of his building. Mendoza felt as if everyone must be staring at him, although they weren’t. He resisted the impulse to lower his face. You couldn’t hide from the surveillance cameras. “Clothes,” he told the guy at the counter.

  “Sure. I got a nice suit, better ‘n what you’re wearing. Dress code compliant. Need a shirt, too?”

  “No … Not a suit.”

  The clerk leaned across the counter and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Jeans?”

  “No …”

  “Denim, man. Made on Earth.”

  “No …” He had it. “A uniform. I need a uniform. A schoolmaster’s gown. Or … or a streetsweeper’s uniform. Or a coverall, like the Shackleton Railways staff wear.”

  “They hand those out to employees, man. Recycle ‘em when they get too dirty.”

  Mendoza backed away from the counter, through the stench of body odor and old clothes. The air was hazy with whatever vile vape the Nightingale Village pushers were selling this week.

  “Come back if you change your mind about those jeans.”

  Mendoza bumped into people, apologized, cleared the doorstep. In the comparatively generous headroom of the street, robot sparrows darted. They were surveillance bots, it was well known. Mendoza ducked into the corner grocery and bought some chocolate and a ReadiPak meal. Then climbed the steps of his alley. Upstairs again, he shut himself into his apartment and forced himself to eat the food, while he reviewed the disaster.

  Exhibit A: the results of a poll conducted by the Inferior Space Election Commission.

  Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter had surged into the lead. Throughout Inferior Space—the volume that contained Mercury, Venus, and the NEOs—61% of voters now said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for him. His closest rival, Zazoë Heap, garnered just 24%.

  (Angelica Lin? 4%.)

  Exhibit B: a slew of talk-pieces that used the new ISEC poll as a hook to discuss What The Spaceborn Really Want.

  Apparently, they wanted a city on rails, a quidditch league, landscape art, and robot bison.

  Mendoza groaned, clutching his head.

  He knew what had gone wrong.

  He’d gotten carried away. He’d put his heart into his work. And something had gotten into his freebie sim, something real, something wacky but just plausible enough to be attractive. The quality that the people in the content industry called sensawunda.

  The kind of thing that voters reared on sims and immersion games drank up like mother’s milk.

  No wonder Dr. Hasselblatter had taken the bait. He had recognized, long before Lorna or Mendoza himself did, that this stuff was electoral gold.

  “You have a new voicemail from … Derek Lorna,” said his comms program.

  “Mendoza! What. The. Fuck? Am I going to have to come out to that recycling unit you call home, and drag you out of your fucking coffin by your toes? I WILL.”

  Sweating, Mendoza thought: I have to get away.

  Yes, he was panicking. But sometimes panicking was the smart option.

  I have to disguise myself and hide out until I can get a flight back to Earth.

  But how, exactly, could he hide in Shackleton City? Even if he wore a Queen Victoria costume, his network connection would pinpoint his location. He could shut down his network connection, “go blind,” as they said, but he couldn’t turn off his BCI. It ran on a power cell implanted in his skull, fueled by glucose, the same stuff that fed his brain. As long as it was drawing power, they’d be able to locate it.

  Which left only one thing to do.

  Only one person he could trust.

  He lifted his walking-stick down from its storage hooks and went out to Cherry-Garrard, where he sat in the church until it was time for kendo practice.

  vi.

  “We haven’t seen you in a while, Mendoza!” Father Lynch said.

  “I got transferred to a different section, so I’ve been busy.”

  Those were the only words they exchanged until practice was over and everyone else had left.

  Fr. Lynch dragged the maidbot out of its closet and turned it on—a move that was neither habitual nor necessary. As part of their discipline, the kendo-kas polished the floor with rags after practice. The maidbot did not find much dust to vacuum up. It settled for buffing the already-shiny plastic floorboards. The whine of the buffing head filled the church basement.

  “What’s wrong?” Father Lynch said in a low voice, which the noise of the maidbot would drown out.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You look as if y
ou’ve suffered a blow.”

  “I was wondering if we could maybe do some target shooting?”

  “Grin! We’ll make a warrior of you yet.”

  They went out into the shadow-streaked beginning of a lunar morning. At these polar latitudes, the sun never set, just endlessly circled the horizon. However, the topography hid it for part of the month-long lunar day. How much light you actually got depended on how high up you were. Cherry-Garrard lay halfway up the long slope of Shackleton Crater’s north side, so it was still mostly in darkness. Mendoza’s faceplate filtered the light to orange.

  Half of the sun’s orb peeked above the distant ridge of Shoemaker Crater. Its horizontal light illuminated the tops of the city’s largest domes. They didn’t look as pretty in daylight. Just dingy gray bubbles flocked with moondust.

  Fr. Lynch set up the target and handed Mendoza a laser pistol. Mendoza aimed it across the valley at Wellsland.

  “The target’s over there, Mendoza.”

  Mendoza tapped his chest. “Sickly grin. No, Father, I’m the target.”

  He told the Jesuit everything, from his first meeting with Lorna to their attempted sabotage of Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign. Fr. Lynch listened in silence, tapping his pistol thoughtfully on his thigh. Bright spots streaked across the sky. Some of them would be ships en route to Earth. How he wished he were aboard.

  “I did my best work,” he said. “But I guess, and I want to be humble here, but I guess it was too good. It’s backfired. And he blames me! Well, I guess it is my fault. But he thinks I did it on purpose.”

  Fr. Lynch said, “I actually saw something about this on the news. ‘Audacious proposal to revive tourism on Mercury …’”

  “You’ve been following the election, Father?”

  “No, it was on The Civilized Universe.”

  Mendoza groaned. TCU was one of the top news feeds in the solar system. This was getting worse and worse. “And Lorna’s mad because he didn’t see it coming. It never even occurred to him that the whole thing might backfire. He’s too highly educated, too sophisticated. He lives in a garden city on the freaking moon. He hasn’t a clue what regular people want.”

  “I’d say that’s accurate. He might forgive you for screwing up. He’ll not forgive you for having made him look a fool.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose. I just did … my best.”

  “And that was the right thing to do. We should always do our best. Sadly, it doesn’t always work out for the best.”

  “So WHAT AM I GOING TO DO, Father?”

  “Calm down.”

  “OK. OK.” Mendoza steadied his breathing, like they were taught to do in kendo practice. “He wants me to fix it. But how? I can’t fix it.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s what you should be worrying about,” Fr. Lynch’s calm voice said in his helmet. “The man knows that you know he’s been illegally meddling with an election. That’s a felony. There’s a non-zero chance he’ll try to kill you.”

  Mendoza sat down on a rock. “Jesus.”

  “I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily, but you’ve been dodging his calls all day. A man like him would interpret that as a declaration of hostility. He’ll think you are thinking about going to the authorities.”

  “I wasn’t. You’re the only authority I trust.”

  “Some authority I am! Sardonic chuckle. But you don’t need to be powerful to know how the minds of the powerful work. It’s all in the Gospels and St. Augustine.”

  Fr. Lynch started to walk back towards the Cherry-Garrard dome. Mendoza followed.

  “I’m glad you came to me. I shouldn’t say this, wish I didn’t have to, but going to the authorities would probably have been a mistake. Lorna has a lot of connections in this city.”

  “He’s made sure I know that. I thought about hiding out, trying to get a flight back to Earth, but …”

  “I think that might be wise.”

  Mendoza had not expected the Jesuit to endorse his panicky impulse. “But Father, you can’t hide in Shackleton City! It’s impossible.” He’s a priest, not an IT guy. He doesn’t know how the surveillance works. On the other hand, Fr. Lynch’s repertoire of precautions—going outside to hear confessions, turning on the maidbot to mask voices—indicated a healthy awareness of the surveillance regime.

  “Father, we’re going the wrong way!”

  The Jesuit had struck out on a path angled around the Cherry-Garrard dome. Ahead, the lights of the high street glowed through the trees in the dome’s prow. On their right stood the recycling facility that handled the dome’s organic waste. Overhead pipes channeled water from the recycling plant’s tower to the reservoir on top of the dome. The whole system was gravity-fed, taking advantage of what little gravity Luna had, to keep the water flowing in the unlikely event of a power outage.

  “Turn off your BCI,” the Jesuit said.

  “Can’t. I can turn off my uplink to the wifi network, but …”

  “Do it. Got any other implants?”

  “Only my retinals. Oh, and I’ve got iEars.”

  “Can you disable them?”

  “You want me to give up Mozart and Beethoven?”

  “You want to stay alive? Do it.”

  Mendoza shut down his network connection. For good measure, he blinked off his HUD. Blind. No clock display in the corner of his eye. No playlist. No feed updates. No comms icon reminding him that “You have five voicemails from Derek Lorna! You also have 16 emails from Derek Lorna!”

  With his vision cleared of icons, outside suddenly seemed big. The sweep of Shackleton Crater’s skirt was a rocky sea with glass boats stranded on its swells. Sunbleached mini-crater rims gnawed at the black sky, eroded by billions of years of micro-impacts and exposure to the solar wind. A half-remembered quotation popped into Mendoza’s mind: We live by grace of the ground we stand on. He had been born on Earth, but now he was on Luna, alive by the grace of this battered ball of rock.

  If this was blindness, he could get used to it.

  Then something moved in the long shadow of the water tower.

  “Father! Watch out!”

  A maintenance bot crabwalked out of the storage area beneath the tower. Size of a tiger, six-legged. These bots could fold up their legs and use the sucker pads on their elbows to climb the outsides of domes. People called them window cleaners. Despite their homely function, it could give you a nasty shock to see one of those things peering in at you through the glass.

  The bot took something out of its cargo pannier and whipped it at Mendoza and the Jesuit like a throwing star.

  “Susmaryosep!” Mendoza yelled. The missile fell short. He broke into a hopping run. Another missile sailed past him. A flat brown hexagon. It didn’t explode. He glanced back.

  Fr. Lynch wasn’t following him. He stood his ground, facing the bot.

  Flash. Another missile exploded in a cloud of brown powder.

  Mendoza’s leading foot hit the ground. He threw his weight backward, flailed his arms, overbalanced. Righted himself and bounded towards Fr. Lynch. Before he got there, the Jesuit’s laser pistol flashed again. Mendoza’s suit overreacted by blacking out his faceplate.

  The bot pranced on, a shadow in the darkness. Its arachnoid head sank. Ploughed into the rock. Its rear legs kept running, so that it was pushing its head along the ground like a shovel. Its midlegs hinged to reach into its pannier. It hurled missile after missile.

  Father Lynch fired another pulse into the bot and then turned and ran. Mendoza reversed direction to keep up.

  Missiles shattered harmlessly ahead of them

  And then behind them.

  “Head for the Evans Square airlock,” Father Lynch yelled over the radio.

  “Jesus God, Father!”

  Angling his stride to brush Mendoza in mid-bound, Father Lynch passed him the other pistol. “Don’t look back now. But there are more of them coming. If you have to shoot, aim for their batteries.”

  At the apex of his next boun
d, Mendoza looked back. Half a dozen bots breasted the nearest rise. Their cutter and splarter appendages undulated in time with their seesawing gait.

  However, the men outpaced the bots, which were not made to leap but to scuttle safely over the landscape. The Evans Square airlock stuck out of the dome’s wall. While Father Lynch worked the valve, Mendoza faced the terrain whose beauty he had so recently admired. He could smell his own terror.

  The airlock opened. The two men scrambled in.

  “Welcome back!” said an automated voice over the radio link. “Did you have a nice walk? Please wait for the air pressure indicator to turn green before removing your helmets!”

  They struggled out of their sharesuits and stuffed them into the USED locker. Father Lynch had his cassock on. He hid the pistols in an inner pocket. They ducked out of the airlock into an alley behind the public toilets at the end of Evans Square.

  Mendoza inhaled fresh-ish air, smells of curry and chicken poop. “Jesus. Sorry, Father. But Jesus! Were those bots attacking us?”

  “No, that was the finals of the Bot Frisbee championships. We just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Ah ha ha ha,” Mendoza said. A free-range peacock strutted into the alley. It arched its neck and let out an “Aaark! Aaark! Aaark!” that sounded exactly if it it were shouting for security.

  “I don’t think the bots would have killed us,” Father Lynch said. “More likely, your friend Lorna was trying to scare you. I may have overreacted.”

  “No, Father! You were heroic.”

  Fr. Lynch shook his head. The look of worry on his face undermined Mendoza’s relief at having reached a place of safety. After all, Cherry-Garrard was not a place of safety. Even though Mendoza had disabled his network connection, Lorna would still be able to find him by locating his BCI. It would just take more ingenuity, and Lorna had plenty of that.