Luna: New Moon

‘I can’t think of a more intractable situation. It’s almost as if your grandfather deliberately chose the most provocative act possible.’

The rover lurches. Rachel’s safety harness snaps against the sudden acceleration. And again. Something is crashing against the rover, again and again. She feels not hears the vibrations of cutters, drills. A sudden deceleration: the rover is slowing.

‘What’s happening?’ Ariel Corta asks. Concern on her perfect mask.

‘Cameny, show me!’ Rachel shouts.

‘I’m alerting Rafa,’ Ariel says, then Cameny flashes the exterior cameras up on Rachel’s lens. The maintenance drone clings to the rover like a little toothed nightmare. Manipulators and cutters hack at cabling and power conduits. Again the rover slows as the drone severs another battery. How can this machine be here? Where did it come from? Cameny pans the cameras: there are the upraised horns of the BALTRAN relay among the thicket of solar panels, not two hundred metres away. That’s the answer: her family has retasked the relay’s maintenance drone.

But they’ve forgotten the rover is a depressurised model. Two hundred metres of vacuum is a stroll in sasuits.

Rachel touches Robson on the knee. He starts; his eyes are wide with fear.

‘When I say go, follow me. We’re going to have to finish this on foot.’

The rover drops with a jarring crash to one side. Rachel is thrown hard against her restraints. The rover is immobile, capsized at a crazy angle. The drone has cut away a wheel. Then it takes out the final camera.

‘Robson, my love: go.’

The hatch blows. Dust and hills and the flat black heaven. Rachel grabs the side of the hatch and propels herself out. She hits the regolith, runs. Glances over her shoulder to see Robson land light as a hummingbird and run. The drone is crouched over the wreckage of the rover. Rachel thinks of Bryce Mackenzie, of cancer, if cancer could walk and hunt.

Now the bot raises itself on its manipulators from the wreckage of the rover. Unfolds cutters and long sharp plastic fingers. Climbs down on to the surface, picks its way towards her. It’s not fast, but it is inexorable. And there are operations Rachel needs to perform before she and Robson can catapult to safety.

‘Robson!’

Step by step, the bot gains on the boy. He is slew-footed on the regolith. He doesn’t know how to move in vacuum, how to avoid kicking up blinding sheets of dust. His father kept him too long in the coddled womb of Boa Vista. Should have taken him up to see the Earth at age five, the Mackenzie way. Should have could have would have.

The hatch is ready, Cameny says. The personnel lock will only take one person at a time. Out on the Mares, the BALTRAN system is rough and ready, prioritised for bulk transport.

‘Get in!’ Rachel shouts. Robson scrabbles at the lock. He is so clumsy.

‘I’m in!’

Cameny closes the hatch. Now Rachel must rotate in the capsule. Slow. Why is it so slow? Where is the bot? She doesn’t have time for even a glance behind. Breath hisses through teeth in supreme concentration as Cameny powers up the launch sequence.

The pain in her right calf is so sharp and clean Rachel cannot even cry out. Her leg won’t hold her. Something has been severed. Helmet displays flash red; she gasps as the sasuit fabric tightens above the breach, sealing the suit, compressing the wound.

Your right hamstring tendon has been severed behind the knee, Cameny announces. Suit integrity is compromised. You are bleeding. The bot is here.

‘Get me in,’ Rachel hisses and then the pain comes, more pain than she imagined could exist in the universe and she screams; terrible, bellowing agonised screams. Screams that sound impossible from a human throat. A movement, a dart, a second clean slash, and she’s down. The bot is over her, a shadow against the black sky. Her suit lights glint from three drills, descending on her helmet visor.

‘Launch it, Cameny! Get him out of here!’

Launch sequence initiated, Cameny says. The probability of your survival is zero. Goodbye Rachel Mackenzie.

Drill bits shriek on toughened visor. And at the end Rachel Mackenzie finds only rage: rage that she must die, that it must be here in the cold and dirt of lonely Flamsteed, rage that it is always family fucks you. Her visor shatters. As the air explodes from her helmet she feels the ground shake, sees the flicker of the BALTRAN capsule from the mouth of the launch tube.

Gone.

Rafa Corta is ire and thunder, striding at the head of his security detail. João de Deus is his town; his face is familiar among the Corta Hélio workers and ancillary staff, but not like this: an icon of rage and joy. He is Xango the Just, São Jeronimo, judge and defender. His people glance away from his eyes and make way for him.