Luna: New Moon

Two rovers accelerate away in arcs of dust; one of the raiders kneels by the side of the third rover, aiming a long metal device. The kneeler jerks: recoil. And Fabiola Mangabeira’s head explodes. Her body flies from the dustbike; the machine careers on, the dead woman spins in a spray of glass and fibre, bone and flash-frozen blood. Her name turns white on Carlinhos’s hud.

‘They’ve got a fucking gun!’ Gilmar cries. The shooter tracks another target. Silent recoil. Carlinhos’s hud tracks an ejected red-hot thermal clip. The shot takes Thiago Endres through the shoulder. Not a clean shot, not a head-shot; but a killing shot all the same. Sasuits can heal, but not this much damage, not this fast. Thiago spasms on the regolith, thrashing as blood sprays into vacuum and freezes in a thick glossy ice. Another name goes white.

The gun swings on to Carlinhos. He throws the bike over into a skid, slides across the dust. Then he sees Gilmar pile full speed into the shooter. Gilmar strikes true and hard. The shooter goes down under the wheels, arms and legs flailing; the bike bucks high, Gilmar holds it down. The massive tread of the drive wheel rips open sasuit, skin, flesh, ribs. The gun spins away.

Carlinhos sprints to his still-running bike.

‘After them, get after them!’

The third rover clamshells up and accelerates away. Carlinhos stands in the soft-settling dust, a knife in each hand, bellowing.

‘Let them fucking go!’ Gilmar yells.

Carlinhos walks to the corpse of the shooter. Fabric, bone, bowel. Carlinhos contemplates it for long heartbeats; the fragility of this goop and gore, the totality of the destruction. The moon makes any injury fatal. A woman, he guesses. They are often the best shooters. Then he raises his boot to stamp down through the helmet and crush the skull. Gilmar seizes his arm and whirls him away. Carlinhos leaps back, blades ready.

‘Carlo, Carlo, it’s over. Put the knives away.’

He can’t see. Who is this? His signs are off the scale. Red all over his visor. What are they saying? Something about knives.

‘I’m okay,’ Carlinhos says. The dust has settled. The rest of his team wait on him, standing at a distance between respectful and fearful. Someone has recovered his dustbike. The ground shakes; from over the horizon a moonship rises on diamonds of rocket-fire, lights flashing, three rovers clutched to its belly. Carlinhos stabs his knives at it; roars in two-bladed futility at the lights in the sky. It turns, it’s gone. ‘I’m okay.’ Carlinhos puts the knives away, one at a time.

Carlinhos learned to love the knife young. His guards were playing a game; stabbing the point of the blade between outspread fingers. Carlinhos aged eight could see the stakes and the appeal at once. He understood the small lethality, the simple precision, how there was nothing complicated or unnecessary about knives.

Like his brothers and sister, Carlinhos Corta had been taught Brazilian jiu jitsu. He won’t apply himself, Heitor Pereira reported to Adriana. He jokes and play-acts and won’t take it seriously. Carlinhos didn’t take it seriously because it could not be serious to him. It was too close up and undignified and he loathed the master-pupil discipline. He wanted a weapon fast and dangerous. He wanted elegance and violence; an adjunct to his body, an extension of his personality.

After Madrinha Flavia found him printing out fighting daggers, Heitor Pereira sent Carlinhos to Mariano Gabriel Demaria’s School of Seven Bells in Queen of the South. All dark skills were taught here; thieving, stealth and assassination, confidence tricks and poisons, torture and excruciation, the way of the two knives. Carlinhos fell in among the freelance security and bodyguards like true family. He learned the way of one hand and two, of attack and defence and how to trick and blind; how to win and kill. He grew fast and lean, muscular and poised as a dancer. Corta means cut in Spanish, Mariano Gabriel Demaria said. Now it’s time to try the Bell Walk.