Luna: New Moon

‘Give me a hand,’ Ariel orders, wrestling with the jacket of her suit. Marina helps her off with it. Ariel is stripped down to Capri tights and sports bra: her fighting garb.

‘Give me my bag,’ Ariel says. Marina kicks it away from her reach.

‘How are you going to carry that? In your teeth?’

‘The cash could be useful.’

‘More useful than keeping your throat intact?’

Ariel hauls herself up two, three, four rungs of the ladder.

‘I’m not going to be able to get very far.’

‘I said I’d help you.’ Marina ducks in close to the ladder under Ariel’s hanging body. She drapes the paralysed legs on either side of her neck. ‘Lean forward and put your weight on my shoulders. We’re going to have to co-ordinate this. Left hands. Right hands. My right foot, then my left foot.’ Piggyback, Ariel and Marina climb the ladder. Jo Moonbeam muscles and lunar gravity reduce Ariel’s weight but they don’t abolish it. Marina guesses Ariel’s perceived weight at about ten kilogrammes. How long can she climb straight up ladders with a ten kilogramme weight on her shoulders? One level and she’s aching already.

Two levels. Three. Sixty to go to the roof of the world. What Marina will do there she doesn’t know. Whether the Cortas live or die, whether their empire stands or falls, she doesn’t know. If she’ll find a place in Bairro Alto, if she’ll survive, if the Mackenzies will be waiting for her, she doesn’t know. All she knows is left hands right hands, left foot right foot. Left hands right hands, left foot right foot, rung by rung, level by level, Marina and Ariel climb into exile.

The sound room burns; sheets of flame lick and lap across the walls, the acoustically perfect floor. The perfect mechanisms beneath crack and pop. Smoke swirls, stirred by the air-conditioning system into ghosts and devils, flicked with fire. The ball of vapour and smoke ignited in a fireball. The fire prevention systems click in, seal the room and douse it with halon.

The first taser takes Carlinhos in the back. He locks rigid. Every muscle spasms. Carlinhos cries out with effort as he fights to keep grip on his knives. He slashes down, jolts as he severs the wires that connect the barbs to the tasers. Spins, slashes out. Blades step back. He is alone now. All his squad lie awkward in their blood along Kondakova Prospekt. Mackenzie blades dance around him but Carlinhos Corta battles on. His armour is slashed and gouged, jagged with barbs where tasers have struck Kevlar not flesh. Five Mackenzies have fallen to him but every second more arrive.

Carlinhos has fought step by step, Mackenzie by Mackenzie, back to the lock of East refuge. Heitor Pereira is dead, his escoltas with him, but the refuge is full and sealed and safe.

Blades pile in around Carlinhos, taunting and jabbing. He cannot get out. He cannot get out. The second taser drives him to his knees. The third disarms him. The fourth turns him to a jerking puppet of flesh, webbed with the sparking lines of taser barbs. His strength, his agility, his knives are gone. He will die on his knees in a cave on the moon. All that remains is the rage. A blade steps towards and removes their helmet. Denny Mackenzie. He picks up one of Carlinhos’s fallen knives and admires the finesse of line and edge.

‘This is nice.’

He pulls Carlinhos’s head back and slashes his throat through to the windpipe.

When the corpse is drained the blades strip it naked. They drag Carlinhos Corta to the West 7 crosswalk and hang him by the heels from the bridge.

Five minutes later, the contracts go out. To all surviving employees, subcontractors and agents of Corta Hélio. Terms, conditions and remuneration rates for the transfer of allegiance to Mackenzie Metals. The money is more than generous. The Mackenzies repay three times.

The rover races north across the Sea of Fecundity.

It is a fool who only has one escape plan.

Lucas first devised his exit strategies when he ascended to the board of Corta Hélio. Every year he reviews and revises them against such a day as this. They are all based on the same insight: there is nowhere to hide on the moon. He realised that when he took his seat at the board table and touched his hands to the polished wood and felt the fragility of the elegant table, the spindly chair on which he sat, the weight of the rock above him, the cold of the rock beneath him. No hiding place, but there is a way out. The last instruction Lucas gave Toquinho before he shut it down was to lay in the course to the Central Mare Fecunditatis moonloop terminal.

Ten million in gold, deposited in the Mirabaud Bank in Zurich, Earth, five years ago. The Vorontsovs adore gold. They trust it when they can’t trust their machines, their ships, their sisters and brothers.

Save yourselves, he’d ordered the escoltas at the lock. Throw away the knives, drop the armour, go dark. I’ll go from here.