by Ian McDonald
The answer drowns out the eternal rumble of the smelters, rings from the steel girders of the atrium.
‘Are you with me?’ Denny says again and again Hadley answers stronger. ‘But, mates, mates. Our enemies are out there. They are strong, they are hard, they outnumber us and they will take everything we hold dear away from us. What are we going to do?’
Fuck ’em!
Denny milks the moment, cupping his ear, working the crowd, mouthing What? What?
‘Fuck ’em!’
Balanced on the balustrade, Denny Mackenzie drinks down the adulation, arms spread wide, beseeching. Come on. A figure moving through the press of people on the balcony catches his eye. Apollonaire, his mother, in mourning white. He jumps from the balustrade.
‘Mom!’
The open arms embrace her hard. Apollonaire smiles and bends to her son’s ear.
‘Welcome back, Dennis,’ she whispers.
‘Thanks for sending the railcar, Mom,’ Denny whispers back. Apollonaire stiffens.
‘What? I didn’t … Good to have you back.’
‘Mackenzie way or fucking what?’ Over her shoulder he sees another woman in white emerge from the crowd: Anastasia, Duncan’s keji-oko. More women in white step from the press: his sister Katarina, her granddaughter Kimmie-Leigh, Mykayla and Ngoc, Selma and Princesa. Cousins and out-cousins.
‘Lead them right, Dennis,’ Apollonaire says. ‘First we have to tell you how the Mackenzie way works from now on.’
* * *
The Eagle of the Moon hands the martini glass to his Iron Hand.
‘I shouldn’t,’ says Alexia. Lucas opens the windows on to the terrace garden.
‘And you don’t like gin,’ Lucas says, stepping on to the terrace. ‘But this isn’t gin, and I want you to.’
Alexia follows him over the warm stones of the path, through the elegantly mutilated bergamot trees to the small domed pavilion perched on the precipice. It is built for two, intimate and vertiginous. Alexia sips and is ambushed by the smoke and salt of cachaca.
‘What do you think?’
‘Good. For the moon.’
‘I try, I fail, I try again and fail better. Jorge wasn’t impressed either. I thought I’d improved the recipe.’ Evening descends on the hub, not a lengthening of shadows but a crimsoning of the world. In the Antares Quadra it is dawn, purple turns to blue. In Orion, it is high noon. It is beautiful and quite quite alien to Alexia. ‘I find I have developed some terrible habits. This one I call “down the garden”. Meetings are over, reading is finished, briefings are absorbed, I take a glass and I wander through the bergamots down the garden. The only ones who see me are my escoltas and spies.’
‘And the entire hub.’
‘Oh, they find me very boring,’ Lucas says. ‘Compared to my predecessor and his husband.’
‘Bryce is refusing to back down,’ Alexia says. She sets down the cachaca on the small stone table. It is shit.
‘Darius will cut Bryce to pieces.’
‘With any luck.’ Lucas allows himself a tight, wry smile. ‘Denny Mackenzie will be a different matter.’
‘So how does Denny Mackenzie turn up in Hadley with half of Bairro Alto and the guns of a thousand jackaroos?’
‘He was tipped off,’ Lucas says. ‘And bankrolled.’
‘Mackenzie Metals? His mother?’
‘None of those,’ Lucas says. ‘It was me.’ He takes a sip of his down-the-garden gin. He tried cachaca once and will not make that mistake again. Pure and pristine gin of his own design, now and always. ‘Don’t look so surprised. You shouldn’t be so expressive. They have machines reading your face, calculating your emotions. I slipped him enough money to get back to Hadley and chartered the railcar. All very discreet: untraceable.’
‘Denny Mackenzie.’
‘Yes.’
‘In charge of Mackenzie Metals?’
‘Well, that remains to be seen. Darius Sun is building a formidable force out there. Maybe he will prevail. Taiyang’s pockets are bottomless. But I believe it is always good to introduce a third force into a simple binary. It sows instability and chaos. I like chaos. And the terrestrials are nervous enough about the sun-belt without Taiyang staging a hostile takeover of Mackenzie Metals. No, let Denny swagger and posture. Let him claim Hadley. I will know where he is. You always know where you are with the Mackenzies.’ Lucas looks out at the deepening sunset, dropping into indigo. ‘I have another bad habit, alas. I call it “back up the garden”. Care to accompany me?’
They leave their glasses on the table. Subtle lighting has turned the Eyrie into a cascade of lights, pools of blue, rippling whites: a lightfall.
‘One condition,’ Alexia says. ‘I want the gin.’
EIGHTEEN
Jesus and Mary, they’re fast. Half-glimpsed flickers between the mirror pylons, using the array for cover. This is a hideous place to fight. His jackaroos are strewn across the mirror field; names, tags overlaying the visual and infra-red maps. Radar throws up five thousand false contacts. He’s fighting blind. The common channel crackles.
They’re too fast, the fuckers …
Rachel, where are you? Where are you?
I’m pulling back, I’m pulling back.
I can’t see …
A name tag turns white.
‘Fall back!’ Finn Warne orders. White-outs all over his HUD and his tactical displays are blind. The enemy is radar-soft and masking its thermal signature in the heat-glow of the mirrors. Finn has helium miners, processing engineers, field surveyors, maintenance workers against sleek, fanatic Taiyang killing machines and trained wushis. Finn Warne flicks the rendezvous co-ordinates to his fighters. Jackaroos, dusters, down-on-their luck mercs. Get them under the cover of the rover-mounted chain-guns. Figures bound past him, three-metre leaps, dust pluming. Sasuits, shell-suits, a miscellany of surface-survival engineering. Workers against soldiers.
‘Get the rovers closer!’ Finn Warne orders, throwing out evacuation points to the AIs. ‘We’re being cut to pieces out here.’
A prickle on the top of his scalp: a warning from the suit haptics. He looks up to see the black sparkle with sharp blue stars, falling slowly. Thrusters.
‘The fucking things are trying to cut us off!’ Finn shouts on the common channel. Bots drop to the regolith, rebound on their shock absorbers. There lies their weakness. A Sun fighting drone lands in front of him. Finn Warne twists and snaps the spear into two halves. The axe-head whips out on its cable and takes two of the machine’s legs out at the knee joints. Finn leaps, reverses the weapon and drives the spear-point hard through the sensory core. The thing goes down in a flail of limbs and blades. Still the bot kicks a circle of moondust around the axis of the impaling spear. Finn Warne opens the tangs and wrenches the blade from the machine’s carapace in a mess of capillaries and processors. The bot is still at last.
‘Where are my fucking rovers?’
He wanted guns. Gauss rifles. You need guns to take Hadley. Bryce had vetoed them: they would take too long to equip; the mirror array would be smashed to a maelstrom of flying glass.
Fuck you, Bryce, always valuing the materiel more than the meat.
Another tingle at the back of his head: he spins. Charging down on him, a blade on each wrist, is a combat shell-suit in the matt black and silver of Taiyang. Finn cracks the spear shaft, the cable whips again and drives the axe-blade through the face plate in an explosion of shivered glass and blood. He kicks the spasming body away, rips the axe free and snaps both halves of the pole-arm together again.
Nice little weapon. Some smart fucker at Huygens came up with it: easy to print, easy to use. An Information Age society that fights its wars with Bronze Age weaponry.
The rovers finally load up.
‘Rachel, Quoc, with me!’ Finn commands. His rearguard falls in at his side, weapons hefted, but the Taiyang bots and wushis have halted on the edge of the mirror field. They have won. They have humiliated Mackenzie Helium. There is no profit
in prolonging the slaughter.
Eighty jackaroos went in. Forty-six came out.
The bots and wushis melt away into the shadow and dazzle of the mirrors, save one, which raises an armoured hand, rotates it, extends a single finger. Darius? Could be. The suit is small. Finn has only met him on rare formal visits to Crucible, spoken no more than the niceties due the son of Robert Mackenzie and Jade Sun, but he came away with the sense of a RALF. Right Arrogant Little Fucker. Darius Sun would do something like that.
Finn Warne’s haptics let him appreciate the solidity and weight of the spear-axe in his hands.
Nice piece.
‘Rachel, Quoc, go.’
The rovers have loaded up the survivors and fire up their traction motors.
Finn lifts the spear, finds the balance in its irregular form. He feeds power into the suit servos. He hurls it with all his amplified strength at the Sun suit’s chestplate.
Weren’t expecting that, were you, you little fuck?
The figure sidesteps, drops to a crouch. The hand moves faster than anything Finn Warne has ever seen and snatches the spear in mid-flight. Spins it, aims it. Finn Warne is sure he can see a smile behind that dark face plate.
‘Bryce!’
No answer.
‘Bryce!’
Finn Warne summons another display – the ragged wedge of rovers fleeing the bloody debacle of Palus Putridinis. There is Bryce’s rover, ahead of the pack.
‘No you fucking don’t,’ Finn swears. The combat suit calculates reserves. He has enough power for ten minutes at full speed. Enough to catch up with Bryce’s executive rover, though he will be down to milliwatts and gasps.
Enough to outrun a spear aimed at his back?
He turns and kicks the suit into power run. He cries out at the agony in his joints, would fall and roll if the suit were not in control. Ten minutes. He can’t take it. He has to take it.
There is the dust-line of the retreat. He sprints between the scattered rovers and their defeated cargoes: shell-suits clamped into acceleration frames, sasuited dusters clinging to struts and strapping, webbed in, lashed down, jolting to every rock and divot. Bootprints among the tyre-tracks. One set of tracks and a single dust plume now.
Power eight per cent.
He catches up with the racing rover, locks a glove around an inspection ladder. Mid-swing he slams into the ladder with an impact he can feel even through shell and pressure skin. Has he broken anything? He dangles from the back of the rover, each swing a down-tick on the power meter; then gets a boot against a bulkhead, pushes and manages to get his other hand on the ladder. From that it is a simple, agonising process to haul himself up the ladder and over the pressure hull to the life-support section.
Power two per cent.
Finn Warne uncoils the power conduit, flips up the dustcap and plugs himself in. It’s like sex. Better. Air now. Fresh and sweet and so so cool. What you smell most in a shell-suit is your own mouth. He lies on his back on the top of the rover, bathing in clean, sweet air. Last, communications. He patches into the rover’s common channel.
‘Bryce. What you did there, running off, I didn’t appreciate that.’
There is no response for a long time but Finn will not concede the weakness of having to repeat himself.
‘Finn. Glad you made it.’
‘No thanks to you, Bryce.’
‘Finn, Finn. This was a business decision.’
‘First Blades being just another fungible asset.’
No reply from inside the comfortable, air-conditioned cabin.
‘I see you’re taking us back to East Insularum.’
‘I must get to Kingscourt.’
‘Not that way you won’t.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘VTO Moonship Skopa just landed at East Insularum. They’re cutting off your retreat.’
Again, long silence.
‘Help me, Finn.’
‘What was that?’
‘Help me.’
‘I can do that, Bryce. I can get you back to Kingscourt in a blink. But it may not be up to your usual standards of comfort and style.’
‘Just tell me the fuck where to go!’
True fear in the big man’s voice. Finn Warne smiles inside his helmet. He summons co-ordinates on his suit hub and throws them through the hull to Bryce.
‘Here you go.’
‘A BALTRAN station.’
‘It’s fast and it’s sure. And we have history with BALTRAN capsules.’
Finn Warne grips hard as the rover changes course at speed.
‘I hold you responsible for this embarrassment,’ Bryce says.
Thirty-four deaths. Good people, staunch people, gutted, dismembered, disembowelled; limbs and organs and blood sprayed across Palus Putridinis. And you call it an embarrassment.
The horns of Huygens BALTRAN rise from the horizon. Enjoy your ride, fat man. I said I’d get you back to Kingscourt, but I lied. Two blinks, three blinks. Maybe more. You’ve never travelled BALTRAN before, so make the most of the experience. Tumble in your own vomit and piss and shit. I will watch you launch, then I will cycle into the rover and drink your fucking personalised vodka to thirty-four staunch jackaroos all the way to Hadley.
I’m looking forward to the inaugural meeting of the Ex-First Blades Club.
* * *
Beauty to Jiang Ying Yue is the actinic flicker of landing thrusters over the Bradley Massif. Lights moving against higher lights. Since girlhood, Jiang Ying Yue has loved spaceships. When she first went on to the surface her class stumbled and lurched, trying to find a way of moving in the heavy rookie shell-suits, but she had jumped. Jumped and reached for the lights in the sky. Shell-suit actuators were powerful but never enough to push her right off her world to the place where the ships flew. Since that day she has been trapped, pinned to her tiny moon, looking up.
Orel is a glitter of beacons and warning lights, then it catches the sun and Jiang Ying Yue sees the moonship whole. She recognises an executive transport module in the cargo gantry. She has learned every ship, crew member, module and configuration in the Vorontsov fleet. She resents that the Vorontsovs should command such beauty. They are coarse-souled, heavy, loud; to them their ships are engineering, navigation, orbits and payloads. To her they are angels.
Then the engine burns and dust billows over her.
She walks through the dust towards the image on her HUD. The ramp is lowered, the lock opens and she cycles through. Airblades scythe dust from her suit, revealing stripe by stripe the bright battle colours of Taiyang. Jiang Ying Yue opens her helmet and tastes the pepper spice of moondust. Beyond the lock the Suns await.
Corporate Conflict Resolution Officer Jiang, her familiar announces. She is not a Sun, she cannot wear the hexagrams of the clan. She does not need the tags her familiar adds to the gathered Suns: like Vorontsov ship design, she has learned the corporate hierarchy of Taiyang.
‘So Bryce Mackenzie fled like a weeping child,’ Zhiyuan says.
‘By BALTRAN,’ Ying Yue says. The suits suppress smirks, imagining Bryce Mackenzie bouncing like a handball inside a BALTRAN can.
‘Our losses?’ asks Amanda Sun. The Taiyang board sits in a semicircle of minimal, elegant chrome and faux-leather chairs. Jiang Ying Yue is very conscious that she is standing, in battle armour, leaving dusty footprints on the grey carpet.
‘Heavier than I would have liked.’ Her familiar sends lists and charts to the hovering hexagrams. ‘The greater part of these is robotic, but we have human casualties.’
‘Messy,’ Sun Gian-yin says.
‘Our models did not predict that the Australians would fight in the face of overwhelming odds.’
‘I’ve never known a Mackenzie to back down from a fight,’ Lady Sun says. A staffer pours a glass thimble of gin; she takes a decorous sip.
‘And what do your models predict for these Australians?’ Zhiyuan asks.
‘We are shipping in resources to maintain the siege until w
e gain control over Hadley’s life-support systems. At that point resistance will collapse very quickly. In the meantime, any counter-attacks by Mackenzie jackaroos will be swiftly and efficiently suppressed.’
‘Denny Mackenzie is not to be underestimated,’ Zhiyuan says. ‘He resisted all attempts to oust him from Bairro Alto.’
‘Tell me, has my great-grandson acquitted himself well?’ Lady Sun asks.
‘He commanded a bot squad and fought with great valour and bravery. He personally challenged Finn Warne and forced him to flee.’
‘Finn Warne, who has subsequently defected to Mackenzie Metals,’ Amanda Sun says. ‘With first-hand knowledge of our set-up and tactics.’
‘We have not experienced any significant deviation from our model,’ Ying Yue says. ‘We expect Hadley to capitulate within seventy-two hours.’
‘Stuck in this box for seventy-two hours?’ Lady Sun hisses.
‘We anticipate surrender long before then,’ Ying Yue says. ‘After all, it is just a transfer of management. The Mackenzies understand business.’ She pauses: images on her lens, words in her ear. ‘Excuse me. There has been a development.’ As her helmet closes, Jiang Ying Yue says to the seated board members, ‘Denny Mackenzie has come out to fight.’
* * *
There is still a memory of old dust on the air. Denny Mackenzie swipes a casual finger across a door frame. He feels the familiar prickle, the burned, spicy perfume. A soft grey smear on his fingertip. Lady Luna’s deadliest weapon: moondust.
His father had done the same, when he entered this room at the very top of the pyramid to wake Hadley after decades of sleep; turn the mirrors to the sun, kindle the fire in the city’s heart. He had tasted the dust.
