Luna: New Moon

‘Maybe eight months, if the grafts take first time. Then there’s the recuperation process, learning to use the motor systems all over again, imprinting the neural pathways. We cannot rush this. It’s precision work. Any mistakes can’t be rectified.’

‘A year, in total,’ Lucas says.

‘Anything you need, we’ll get it for you,’ Adriana says. ‘Equipment, new techniques from Earth, anything. Ariel will have it.’

‘Thank you, but our medical technology is in advance of anything on Earth. We’ll do everything we can, Senhora Corta. Everything.’

‘Of course. Thank you, Doctor.’ The second thank you is the dismissal. Adriana turns to her sons. ‘Rafa, Carlinhos, if you please? I need a word with Lucas.’

‘I’d be a fool and a liar if I said this didn’t work for me,’ Lucas says when the suite is empty.

‘You expect me to admire that?’

‘No. It’s reprehensible but it is good business. But it’s not the issue uppermost in my mind. The wedding, Mamãe. Without Ariel negotiating the nikah, the MacKenzies will eat Lucasinho alive.’

Lucas sees his mother try to take in this new perspective, like a piece of extraction plant that requires whole landscapes to make a turn, a train that must begin to brake before it’s over the horizon. She would have spun like a dancer once. Quick of wit and apprehension. This dynastic marriage will not be the long trap he shared with Amanda Sun. Ariel will broker a deal. The best marriage contract of her career. Lucas still hasn’t told Lucasinho. He had not intended to until the contract was prepared. Now the boy is on his way up from Meridian and Lucas dreads the coming conversation.

‘What can we do?’ Adriana asks and Lucas hears exhaustion and indecision in his mother’s voice.

‘Play for time.’

‘The MacKenzies will never allow that.’

‘I’ll see who I can find. Beijaflor manages Ariel’s contacts.’

‘Yes,’ Adriana says but Lucas can see that her thoughts are turned to the room below. ‘We’ll do our best for Lucasinho.’

‘Mamãe, I feel for Ariel, I truly do, but the company …’

‘Tend to the company, Lucas. I’ll tend to Ariel.’

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

He’s reeling up and down corridors trying to find food, tea, something to pass the waiting time with which medical facilities are so generous. She’s stumbling out of a room where she has been debriefed by Heitor Pereira; question after question, questions, three hours of questions. Details. Memories. Tell me again, again, again. Any glimpse or peripheral detail that might be an insight into the attack. She is tired and sick.

The attacker was dead dead dead by the time the rest of the bodyguards arrived. Someone prised her fists off the vaper. Someone pulled her away from the pooling blood. Bots arrived first; scuttling across the ceiling, floating on fans. They assayed Ariel Corta, already blue from blood loss, ran lines and tubes into her arms, compressed and stapled the gaping flaps of flesh, printed up artificial blood, put her into recovery position and called human medics. A freelance security team, crash-contracted by Beijaflor, cleared the party. Now Corta Hélio brought its resources to bear. A Vorontsov moonship was arriving at Aquarius Quadra’s surface lock. Ariel was to be taken to João de Deus. No questions. The security mercenaries escorted gurney and med team up into the hold of the moonship. Marina drifted in their orbit, a bloodstained satellite. She had never been in a moonship before. It was noisy. Everything shook. She felt much less safe than she ever had on Carlinhos’s dustbikes. She was nauseous the entire twenty-minute flight, then understood as she threw up quietly in the corner of the elevator down into Nossa Senhora da Gloria Hub that it was from the stench of blood from her dress.

Heitor Pereira seized her at the gate and hurried her away from the emergency team. She glimpsed mother and brothers over shoulders, between milling bodies.

Tell me everything.

The cameras were swarming.

We need to know. Everything.

I saved her fucking life.

‘Your, ah, dress.’

Marina’s still wearing the Jacques Fath. It’s rigid with dried blood, reeking of iron and death.

‘They wouldn’t let me …’ Now she has stopped moving and the momentum of events and voices and faces threatens to topple her. Marina is dizzy with fatigue, shocky and vertiginous.

‘Come on, we’ll get you something.’

The big printers are tied up with medical parts or Corta Hélio furnishings but there is a small public unit behind the med centre teahouse. Customers stare, at the blood, at the Corta.

‘Stop staring at me!’ Marina shouts. ‘Stop fucking staring at me!’

The deprinter refuses to accept Marina’s dress. Contaminated material, Hetty informs her. Please recycle by contracting Zabbaleen.

‘Here.’ Carlinhos offers tea as Marina waits for the printer. Casual, classic: hoody and leggings. Pumps.

‘Do you mind?’ Marina peels the straps from her shoulders.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ Carlinhos jokes.