Luna: New Moon

Adriana purses her lips, shakes her head in frustration.

‘Oh come now, Lucas.’

‘He sees the Mackenzies’ hand in everything. Rafa’s said this to me. You know Rafa: good old Rafa, fun Rafa, party-boy Rafa. Who else might he say it to in an unguarded moment? Can you see the danger to the company?’

‘Robert Mackenzie will want payback for losing the Chinese deal.’

‘Of course. We’d do exactly the same. But Rafa will see it as another piece of Robert Mackenzie’s personal vendetta.’

‘What are you asking for, Lucas?’

‘Cooler heads, Mamãe. That’s all.’

‘Do you mean, Lucas Corta’s head?’

‘Rafa is bu-hwaejang, I have no disagreement with that. I wouldn’t want any diminution of his prestige. But maybe delegate some responsibilities?’

‘Go on.’

‘He’s the face of Corta Hélio. Let him be the face. Let him be the figurehead. Let him take the meetings and the pitches. Let him continue to sit in that chair at the head of the board table. Just, very subtly, move him out of making the decisions for the company.’

‘What do you want, Lucas?’

‘Only the best for the company, Mamãe. Only the best for the family.’

Lucas Corta kisses his mother goodbye: twice, for family. Once on each cheek.

Twenty kilometres downline from Crucible, Robson Corta-Mackenzie’s familiar wakes him with a song in his ear. The boy runs to the observation blister at the front of the car and presses his hands against the glass. To an eleven-year-old, the first glimpse of the capital of the Mackenzies never ages. The railcar is a Mackenzie Metals private shuttle, running out across the Ocean of Storms on the slow east line of Equatorial One: six sets of three-metre wide track; pure and shining with reflected Earth light, reaching out around the shoulder of the world, all the way around the world. A fast express, inbound from Jinzhong, seemingly leaps out of nowhere and is gone in a blur of light. Rachel finds the view from the front end of the shuttle nerve-wracking. The boy loves it.

‘Look, a Ghan-class hauler,’ Robson says as the rail car skims along the flank of the long, ponderous freight train on the slow up-line. It’s quickly forgotten for, on the eastern horizon, a second sun is rising; a dot of light so brilliant and piercing that the glass darkens to protect human eyes. The dot expands into a ball, hovering like a mirage on the edge of the world, never seeming to grow closer or brighter.

We will be arriving at Crucible in five minutes, the familiars announce.

Rachel Corta shields her eyes. She has seen this trick many times: the dot will dance and dazzle, then at the last instant, resolve into detail. It never fails to awe. The dazzle fills the entire observation bubble, then the rail car moves into the shadow of Crucible.

Crucible straddles the four inner tracks of Equatorial One. The bogies run on two separate outer tracks; old-fashioned steel, not maglev. The living modules hang twenty metres above the line, studded with windows and lights, casting perpetual shadow on the track beneath. Above them are the separators, the graders, the smelters; higher than all of them, parabolic mirrors focus sunlight into the converters. Crucible is a train ten kilometres long, straddling Equatorial One. Passenger expresses, freighters, repair cars run under and through it as if it’s the superstructure of a colossal bridge. Forever moving at an inexorable ten kilometres per hour, it completes one orbit in one lunar day. The sun stands at permanent noon above its mirrors and smelters. The Suns call their glass spire on the top of Malapert Mountain the Tower of Eternal Light. The Mackenzies scorn their affectations. They are the dwellers in endless light. Light bathes them, soaks them, enriches them; leaches and bleaches them. Born without shadows, the Mackenzies have taken darkness inside them.

The rail car passes under the lip of Crucible into shadows and spotlights. Half-seen highlights become a freighter, disgorging regolith through a battery of Archimedes screws. The rail car slows: train and Crucible AIs exchange protocols. This is the bit Robson likes best. Grapples lock on to the railcar and lift it from the line to dock into a slot in the rack of MacKenzie Metals rail shuttles. Hatches meet, pressure equalises.

Welcome home, Robson Mackenzie.