Luna--Wolf Moon--A Novel

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  THE WOLF MOON

  The Farmers’ Almanac derives the names of the months from the Native Americans of what is now the north-eastern United States.

  The Wolf Moon is the Moon of January, the moon when the wolves howl in hunger and want; the moon of deepest cold and darkness.

  NEAR SIDE of THE MOON

  AFTER THE FALL: ARIES 2103

  ‘Fly me to the Earth,’ Lucas Corta said. The crew unstrapped him from the moonloop capsule and dragged him into the lock anoxic, hypothermic, dehydrated.

  ‘You’re aboard the VTO cycler Saints Peter and Paul, Senhor Corta,’ the lock manager said as she sealed the pressure doors.

  ‘Sanctuary,’ Lucas Corta whispered, and vomited. He had held firm for five hours while the capsule fled the destruction of Corta Hélio. Five hours, while targeted strikes destroyed his industry out on the seas of Luna, while attackware iced his finances, while Mackenzie blades gutted his city. While his brothers drew blades to defend the house of Corta, and he fled, across the Sea of Fecundity, up and away from the moon.

  Save the company, Carlinhos had said. You have a plan?

  I always have a plan.

  Five hours, spinning away from the destruction of Corta Hélio like blast debris. Then the comfort of hands, the warmth of voices, the solidity of a ship around him – a ship, not a bauble of aluminium and plastic – relaxed the bands of tight muscles and he threw up. The VTO dock crew moved in with portable vacuum cleaners.

  ‘It helps if you orient this way, Senhor Corta,’ the lock manager said. She wrapped a foil blanket around Lucas’s shoulders as the crew turned him upright and manoeuvred him into the elevator. ‘We’ll get you back under lunar gravity very soon.’

  Lucas felt the elevator move and the cycler’s spin gravity take hold of his feet. Earth, he tried to say. Blood choked the words. Burst alveoli rattled in his chest. He had breathed vacuum, down on the Mare Fecunditatis, when Amanda Sun tried to kill him. For seven seconds he had been exposed to the naked lunar surface. No suit. No air. Breathe out. That was the first rule of the Moonrunners. Empty the lungs. He had forgotten, forgotten everything except the airlock of the Moonloop station before him. His lungs had ruptured. He was a Moonrunner now. He should have the pin: Dona Luna, one half of her face black skin, the other white skull. Lucas Corta laughed. For a moment he thought he might choke. Bloody phlegm pooled on the elevator floor. He had to make the words clear. These Vorontsov women had to understand.

  ‘Take me down to earth gravity,’ he said.

  ‘Senhor Corta,’ the lock manager began.

  ‘I want to go down to the Earth,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘I need to go to Earth.’

  * * *

  He lay on the med centre diagnostic bed in only a pair of shorts. He had always loathed shorts. Ridiculous and infantile. He had refused to wear them, even when they came into fashion, which they did as all fashions wheeled on the moon. Skin would have been better. He would have worn the dignity of nakedness well.

  The woman stood at the foot of the diagnostic bed. Sensor arms and injectors surrounded her as if she were a deity. She was white, middle aged, tired. She was utterly in control.

  ‘I am Galina Ivanovna Volikova,’ the woman said. ‘I will be your personal physician.’

  ‘I am Lucas Corta,’ Lucas croaked.

  Dr Volikova’s right eye flickered, reading from her medical interface. ‘A collapsed lung. Multifocal cerebral micro-haemorrhages – you were ten minutes from a likely fatal brain haematoma. Corneal damage, interior bleeding in both eyeballs, ruptured alveoli. And a perforated eardrum. Which I fixed.’

  She gave the smallest, tightest smile of dark amusement and Lucas knew he could work with her.

  ‘How long…’ Lucas Corta hissed. Broken glass ground in his left lung.

  ‘An orbit at least, before I let you out of here,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘And don’t talk.’ An orbit: twenty-eight days. As a boy Lucas had studied the physics of the cyclers; the clever minimum energy orbits they wove around the moon, touching twice and then slingshotting back across the face of the Earth. The process was called a backflip orbit. Lucas could not understand the mathematics but it was part of the business of Corta Hélio and so he had to learn its principles if not its details. Loops around moon and earth as earth and moon described their own cycles around the sun and the sun and its worlds on its quarter-billion year dance around the galactic centre. Everything moving. Everything part of the great dance.

  A new voice, a new figure at the foot of the bed, shorter, more muscular than Dr Volikova.

  ‘He can hear me?’ A woman’s voice, clear and musical.

  ‘He can.’

  ‘And talk,’ Lucas grated. The figure stepped into the light. Two worlds recognised Captain Valentina Valeryovna Vorontsova, yet she introduced herself formally to Lucas Corta.

  ‘You’re welcome aboard Saints Peter and Paul, Senhor Corta.’

  Captain Valentina was solid, square built; Earth muscles, Russian cheek-bones, Kazakh eyes. Two worlds knew also that her twin sister Yekaterina was captain of Our Lady of Kazan. They were women of legend, the Captains Vorontsova. The first legend was that they were identical foetuses raised in separate host-mothers in disparate gravities. One space-born, one earth-born. The second enduring myth was that they shared an innate telepathy, an intimate identity beyond communication, no matter the distance that separated them. A quantum magic. The third myth was that they regularly switched command of VTO’s two cyclers. Of all the legends of the Twin Captains, this was the only one that Lucas Corta believed. Keep your enemies guessing.

  ‘I understand you have yet to be apprised of the situation on the moon,’ Captain Valentina said.

  ‘I’m prepared.’

  ‘I don’t think you are. Lucas, I have the worst possible new for you. Everything you knew has been lost. Your brother Carlinhos was killed in the defence of João de Deus. Boa Vista has been destroyed. Rafael died in the depressurisation.’

  Five hours, alone on a moonloop transfer orbit, the pod wall staring back: Lucas’s imagination had travelled into dark places. He had seen his family dead, his city crushed, his empire toppling. He had expected Valentina Vorontsova’s news, but it still hit as hard and emptying as vacuum.

  ‘Depressurisation?’

  ‘Better not to talk, Senhor Corta,’ Dr Volikova said.

  ‘Mackenzie Metals blades blew the surface lock,’ Captain Valentina said. ‘Rafael got everyone to the refuges. We believe that he was searching for stragglers when the habitat depressurised.’

  ‘He would do that. Something noble and stupid. Luna? Robson?’

  ‘The Asamo
ahs have rescued the survivors and taken them to Twé. Bryce Mackenzie has already applied to the Court of Clavius to formally adopt Robson.’

  ‘Lucasinho?’ Now he had the emotional rigour, the physical control of his body, to say the name he wanted to cry out first. If Lucasinho was dead, he would get up from this bed and walk out of the airlock.

  ‘He’s safe in Twé.’

  ‘We could always trust the Asamoahs.’ Knowing that Lucasinho was safe and secure was a sun-hot joy: helium at fusion heat.

  ‘Ariel’s bodyguard helped her escape into the Bairro Alto. She’s in hiding. As is your brother Wagner. The Meridian pack is sheltering him.’

  ‘The wolf and the cripple,’ Lucas whispered. ‘And the company?’

  ‘Robert Mackenzie is already assimilating Corta Hélio infrastructure. He has issued contracts to your former workers.’

  ‘They would be idiots not to take them.’

  ‘They are taking them. He has announced a new subsidiary: Mackenzie Fusible. His grand-nephew Yuri Mackenzie is CEO.’

  ‘Australians all start to blur after the first two or three.’ Lucas chuckled, deep and blood-filled, at his dark joke. To make a joke is to blow dust in the face of the overpowering. ‘You know it was the Suns. They set us at each other.’

  ‘Senhor Corta,’ Dr Volikova said again.

  ‘They make us cut each other’s throats with delight. They plan in decades, the Suns.’

  ‘Taiyang is exercising a number of options on equatorial real estate,’ Captain Valentina said.

  ‘They plan to turn the entire equatorial belt into a solar power array,’ Lucas hissed. Pieces of his lung were breaking away in bloody sludge. He coughed up fresh blood. Machine arms moved to sop the red.

  ‘That’s enough, Captain,’ Dr Volikova said.

  Captain Valentina touched fingertips to thumb and dipped her head; a lunar bow, though she was a woman of Earth.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lucas.’

  ‘Help me,’ Lucas Corta said.

  ‘VTO Space and VTO Earth keep a distance from the VTO Moon,’ Captain Valentina said. ‘We have unique vulnerabilities. Protection of our Lagrange-point mass driver and our Earth-based launch facilities are paramount. Between the Russians, the Chinese and the Indians, we come under jealous eyes.’

  The machine arms moved again. Lucas felt a sudden needling spray beneath his right ear.

  ‘Captain, I need the moon to believe I’m dead.’

  Captain and doctor, the slow worshipping arms of the medical unit, softened into a blur of white.

  * * *

  He could not identify a moment at which he became aware of the music but he surfaced into it like a swimmer breaking through a meniscus. It surrounded him like air, like the waters of birth and he was content to lie within it, eyes closed, breathing, painless. The music was noble and sane and ordered. A jazz of some kind, Lucas decided. Not his music, not a music he understood or appreciated, but he recognised its logic, the patterns it drew in time. He lay a long time trying to be conscious of only the music.

  ‘Bill Evans,’ a woman’s voice said.

  Lucas Corta opened his eyes. The same bed, the same medical bots, the same unfocused soft light. The same thrum of airconditioning and power that told him he was on a ship, not a world. The same doctor moving around the edge of his field of vision.

  ‘I’ve been reading your neural activity,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘You respond well to modal jazz.’

  ‘I enjoyed that.’ Lucas said. ‘You can play that any time.’

  ‘Oh can I?’ Dr Volikova and again Lucas heard the amusement in her voice.

  ‘How am I, doctor?’

  ‘You’ve been unconscious for forty-eight hours. I’ve repaired the most egregious damage.’

  ‘Thank you doctor,’ said Lucas Corta. He moved to prop himself up on his elbows. Flesh tore inside him as Dr Volikova gave a small cry and rushed to the bedside. She lowered him to the yielding surface.

  ‘You need to recover, Senhor Corta.’

  ‘I need to work, doctor. I can’t stay here forever. I have a business to rebuild and limited funds. And I need to go to Earth.’

  ‘You’re moon-born. It’s impossible for you to go to Earth.’

  ‘It’s not impossible Doctor. It’s the easiest thing. It’s just fatal. But everything is fatal.’

  ‘You cannot go to Earth.’

  ‘I can’t go back to the Moon. The Mackenzies will kill me. I can’t stay here. The hospitality of the Vorontsovs is not bottomless. Humour me doctor. You specialise in low-gravity medicine. Hypotheticals.’

  A new tune now, loping and modal. Piano, bass, whispering drums. Such small forces. Such great effect.

  ‘Hypothetically, with intensive training and medical support, a moon-born individual might survive two lunes under Earth conditions.’

  ‘Hypothetically, would four lunes be possible?’

  ‘It would take many lunes of physical conditioning.’

  ‘How many lunes doctor? Hypothetically?’

  He saw Dr Volikova shrug, heard the small sigh of exasperation.

  ‘At least a year. Fourteen, fifteen lunes. Even then the chances of surviving lift-off would be no better than fifty per cent.’

  Lucas Corta had never been a gambler. He dealt in certainties. As vice-chair of Corta Hélio, he had parleyed uncertainties into definites. Now iron certainties besieged him and the only hope was the bet.

  ‘Then I have a plan, Dr Volikova.’

  1: VIRGO 2105

  The boy falls from the top of the city.

  He is lean and lithe as a power line. His skin is the colour of copper, spangled with dark freckles. His eyes are green, his lips are lush and full. His hair is a shock of rust-coloured dreads frustrated inside a lime-green head-band. Two stripes of white gloss highlight each cheekbone, a vertical runs down the centre of his lips. He wears tangerine sports tights, cut low, and a white over-sized T-shirt. FRANKIE SAYS … declares the T-shirt.

  It is three kilometres from the roof down to the floor of the great lava chamber in which Queen of the South stands.

  The kids were running the top of the city; free-styling the old, automated industrial levels, swinging through the rigging of the world with breathtaking grace and skill; springing from rails and stanchions, bounding from wall to wall to wall, leaping, flipping, tumbling, flying across abysses, up and up as if weight were a fuel they burned to turn gravity back on itself.

  The boy is the youngest of the team. He’s thirteen; brave, agile, audacious, drawn to the high places. He limbers up with his fellow traceurs down on Queen of the South’s forested floor, but his eyes are drawn towards the great towers, up to where they join the sunline. Stretch muscles, pull grip-gloves on to hands and feet. Practice jumps to loosen up, step up on to a bench and in a thought he is ten metres up. A hundred metres. A thousand metres; dancing along parapets and bounding up elevator gantries in five-metre bounds. To the top of the city. The top of the city.

  All it takes is an infinitesimal mistake; a fraction of a second slow in reaction, a millimetre short in the reach, a finger light in the grip. His hand slips on the cable and he falls into empty air. No cry, only a small, amazed gasp.

  Falling boy. Back first, hands and feet clutching at the gloved hands reaching down from the tangle of pipes and conduits along the roof of Queen. There is an instant of shock when the traceurs realise what has happened, then they explode from their perches, racing across the roof to the nearest tower. They’ll never be fast enough to beat gravity.

  There are rules of falling. Before he ever jumped, climbed, vaulted, the boy learned how to fall.

  Rule one: You must turn. If you can’t see what’s beneath you, you are at best hurt badly, worst dead. He turns his head, looks down into the vast spaces between Queen’s hundred towers. He twists his upper body; cries out as he wrenches an ab turning the rest of his body face down. Beneath him is a deadly lattice of crossing bridges, cable ways, catwalks and fibre-runs wove
n between the skyscrapers of Queen. He must navigate those.

  Rule two: Maximise air resistance. He spreads arms and legs. Atmospheric pressure in a lunar habitat is 1060 kilopascals. Acceleration under gravity on the surface of moon is 1.625 metres per second squared. Terminal velocity for a falling object in atmosphere is sixty kilometres per hour. Impact the floor of Queen of the South at sixty kilometres per hour and there is an eighty per cent chance he will die. Impact at fifty kilometres per hour and there is eighty per cent chance he will live. His fashion T-shirt flaps in the gale. And FRANKIE SAYS: This is how you live.

  Rule three: Get help. ‘Joker,’ he says. The boy’s familiar rezzes up on the lens in his right eye, the implant in his left ear. True traceurs run without AI assistance. It’s too easy for a familiar to map out the best route, locate hidden hand holds, advise on micro climate conditions. Parkour is about authenticity in a totally artificial world. Joker analyses the situation. You are in extreme danger. I have alerted rescue and medical services.

  Rule four: Time is your friend. ‘Joker, how long?’

  Four minutes.

  The boy now has everything he needs to survive.

  The overstretched abs hurt like hell and something tears in his left shoulder as he pulls the T-shirt off. For a few seconds he breaks his spread-eagle position and accelerates alarmingly. Wind tears at the T-shirt in his hands. If he loses grip, if he loses the shirt, he dies. He needs to tie three knots while falling at terminal velocity. Knots are life. And the 77th cross bridge is there: there! He goes into spread, applies his teaching: tilts his upper body forwards, his arms, shifts his centre of gravity above his centre of hang. Tracking position. He slides forward and misses the bridge by metres. Faces look up at him. Look again: they’ve seen fliers. This boy is not a flier. He is a faller.

  He knots neck and sleeves into a loose bag.

  ‘Time.’

  Two minutes. I estimate you will impact at …

  ‘Shut up Joker.’