Luna: New Moon

‘How do you know?’ The apartment has no clocks. The Sisterhood does not countenance them: clocks are the knives of time, slicing the Great Now into finer and finer divisions: hours, minutes, seconds. Continuity is the philosophy of the Sisters: time whole and undivided, existing all at once in a fourth dimension, in the mind of Olorum the One.

‘It feels late.’

‘Don’t like this,’ Lucasinho says, sniffing the glass with a scowl of distaste.

‘Who says it’s for you?’

Lucasinho drinks. By the time Flavia comes back from washing the glasses in the kitchen, he is curled up asleep on the sofa.

Twelve lines of moon dust. Twelve riders in V formation, cutting across the Eimmart K crater. Marina Calzaghe is three hours into the ride. Her ass has long since turned to rock. Her neck aches, her fingers are numb with vibration, she can feel the cold gnawing her sasuit and she cannot tear her gaze away from the O2 figure in the bottom right of her hud. It’s all been calculated: air enough to reach the location plus an hour. That’s time enough for the rovers from Mare Marginis to reach them and resupply. Three hours in, one hour to go, one hundred and eighty kilometres an hour – two hundred and twenty flat out but it chews battery life – and somewhere, up there, around the shoulder of the world, the Vorontsov fleet is barrelling towards Mare Anguis. The calculations say Team Corta will arrive at the furthest vertex five minutes before the Mackenzie/VTO transporters. Plus or minus three minutes. All worked out. Lucas Corta is precise in his calculations.

The first hour of the ride north from the rail stop is over jolting, jarring highland terrain; craters and ejecta and treacherous slopes that demand the focus of every sense, natural and cybernetic. The dustbikes’ massive drive wheels take the smaller debris with ease but every rock is a judgement call; run it, steer it. Call it wrong, wreck the wheels and the transmission and you are alone among the craters watching your comrades draw long lines of dust away from you. The lifeboats won’t come. They’ve been bought up by the Mackenzies. Marina grits her teeth at every rock and rille. Every rim sends a jolt of pain up her spine. Her back is a rod of molten pain. Her arms throb from holding the handlebars steady, steady as the bike bounds and bucks over the fearsome terrain. Her jaw is set rigid and she can’t remember when she last blinked. Marina Calzaghe is deliriously alive.

‘Motorbikes,’ she’d said.

‘Dustbikes,’ Carlinhos had corrected.

Eleven bikes, corralled on the flatbed car. Magnificent, potent things that showed their veins and wires and bones and gears; brutally functional and beautiful for that. Each was different, handcrafted and bespoke, metal surfaces engraved with death’s-heads, dragons, orixas, big-cocked men and mega-breasted women, flames and starbursts and swords and flowers. Biker aesthetic is changeless and eternal. Marina ran a gloved hand over a chromed flank.

‘Have you ridden one of these before?’ Carlinhos asked.

‘Where would I …’ Marina began and then remembered the game.

‘Do you think you could?’

‘How hard can it be?’

‘Hard. If something goes wrong, you will be left behind.’

There was no bike for her. The Jo Moonbeam would ride to Meridian in pressurised warmth and comfort. But with Paulo Ribeiro heading back to autopsy at João de Deus Team Corta was down a rider and the plan required every bike. The Mackenzies might pull something out of their asses yet. The more riders, the more flexibility.

‘Will you come?’

In Portuguese, it was an invitation, not a question. Already the train was slowing. Lucas’s plan was simple. Marina remembered him as the dark, serious man who had spoken the words that had saved her life: You work for Corta Hélio now. He had remembered a detail that even Carlinhos had forgotten: they were dustbikers. Lucas’s plan: rail all available dustbikes to the closest point to the claim, open the throttles and strike north for the Mare Anguis. Fire up a GPS transponder from each of the four corners of the territory. Four corners, eleven bikes.

‘I will,’ said Marina Calzaghe.

‘Here’s the contract.’ Hetty flashed it up on Marina’s lens. A cursory scan – so many clauses referencing accidental death – a yin and back to Carlinhos.

‘Keep with me,’ Carlinhos said on Marina’s private channel. Eleven bikes, four corners. So it would be her and Carlinhos racing Mackenzie Metals and all their spaceships for the furthest, final point of the territory.

Riders mounted up. Marina’s machine was a beast of twisted aluminium and crackling power cells. A chrome-etched Lady Luna regarded her from between the handlebars, her skull hemi-face grinning. The AI meshed with Hetty as Marina settled on to the saddle. The bike came to life. The controls were easy. Forward, back. Twist for speed.