Luna: New Moon

Fractal curls of white cloud stream across the Pacific. The blue of Earth’s oceans never fails to tear Wagner’s heart. Nothing is more blue. He can never go there. His is a distant, untouchable god. The wolves are the outcasts of heaven.

Night has already touched Earth’s lowest limb, a hairline of darkness. Over the coming days it will climb the face of the world. The dark half of Wagner’s life is drawing close. He’ll leave this place, the pack will disperse, the nés become shes and hes. He’ll find new powers of concentration and focus, analysis and deduction; he’ll go back to Analiese and she’ll see the healing marks all over his skin and she won’t ask but the questions will always be there.

Wagner closes his eyes and drinks in the light of distant Earth.

Carlinhos has been hunting the raiders for thirty-six hours now across the Mare Crisium. They struck first at Swift: three extractors destroyed, five immobilised. The blast pattern of shaped charges was unmistakable. Even as Carlinhos led his pursuit bikes along their tyre-tracks, they struck again at Cleomedes F, three hundred kilometres north. A mobile resupply and maintenance base destroyed. Two deaths. Carlinhos and his hunters, his caçadores – crack dusters and bikers – arrived to find tractor and habitat punched through and through again with five-millimetre diameter holes. Entries and exits matched. Projectiles.

Two strikes, three hundred kilometres apart, in under an hour. No ghosts on the moon, but other entities can haunt a plugged and re-pressurised mobile base: rumours, superstitions, monsters. The Mackenzies are teleporting; they work deep Australian magic, they have their own private moonship.

‘Not a private moonship,’ Carlinhos says, flicking through satellite data. ‘VTO lifter Sokol.’ From orbit, the scatter patterns in the dust are clear. Carlinhos books time on the moonloop’s cameras and, on the second pass of Ascender Two, São Jorge spot an irregularity in the shadows of Cleomedes H crater. Magnification resolves the speck into the unmistakable shape of a moonship. ‘Mackenzie is flying them in.’

Carlinhos’s hunters saddle up and ride out. São Jorge has predicted that the most likely target is the Eckert samba-line; a flotilla of six primary extractors moving to the south-western end of the Mare Anguis. The caçadores hammer the dustbikes for every drop of speed until they see the running lights of Corta Hélio gantries lift over the horizon. Carlinhos insinuates his team into the shadows of the slow-moving extractors. São Jorge’s orbiting eyes report a moonship grounded just below the south-eastern horizon. Carlinhos grins inside his helmet and snaps off the safety locks on the knife scabbards he wore on each thigh.

Three rovers. Eighteen raiders.

‘Wait until they’re out of the rovers,’ he orders. ‘Nene, your team take out the rovers.’

‘That’ll leave them marooned,’ Gilmar protests. He’s a veteran biker, built the first trails along Dorsa Mawson. Abandonment is the violation of all morals and custom. Dona Luna is everyone’s enemy. As you save, so you may be saved.

‘They’ve got a ship, haven’t they?’

The rover tags break into subtags. Raiders on the move.

‘Steady,’ Carlinhos says, crawling in the cover of Number Three extractor. ‘Steady.’ The tags are fanning out. Plenty of targets. Plenty of space. ‘Take them!’

Six bikes power up; wheels kick up dust. Carlinhos banks around the excavator and hurtles down on the nearest tag. The figure in the sasuit freezes in shock. Carlinhos draws a knife.

‘Gamma hutch,’ says Lousika Asamoah.

‘Hoosh,’ says Rafa Corta. ‘Gammahoosh. It’s French.’

‘French,’ Lousika says.

‘For that,’ Rafa says. ‘Gamahuche.’

‘I’m not sure I got that right. I learn better through practical experience. Hutch?’ She rolls up over Rafa, tucks legs under his shoulders with a small oof of exertion, squeezes his head between her thighs.

‘Huche,’ Rafa says and she comes down on his tongue.