Luna: New Moon

‘I did,’ Robert Mackenzie says.

‘This is a whole new moon.’

‘The moon doesn’t change.’

‘There is no profit in fighting the Cortas.’

‘We’d have our pride,’ Hadley says. Duncan stands close to him; eye to eye, breath-close.

‘Can you breathe pride? Step out there and say that to Lady Moon: I’ve got my Mackenzie pride. We fight them the way we do best. We make money. Mackenzie Metals isn’t pride, Mackenzie Metals isn’t family; it’s a machine for making money. It’s a machine for sending profits back to all those investors; those fund owners and venture capitalists back on Earth who trusted you, Dad, to take their money to the moon and make it work for them. They’re Mackenzie Metals. Not us.’

Robert Mackenzie growls in his stone lungs.

‘My husband is very tired,’ Jade Sun says. ‘Emotions are exhausting for him.’ Robert’s LSU chair turns and Duncan knows it is against the old monster’s will. The inlock to the transit capsule opens. Hadley nods to his half-brother and follows the slow-rolling entourage.

‘We need peace with the Cortas!’ Duncan shouts after them.

She sees Wagner in the chair and freezes.

‘Everyone in this bar is a wolf,’ Wagner says. She looks around. The two women at the near table, the group at the far table, the lone drinker at the bar, the handsome couple in the booth, turn and look at her. The bartender nods. Wagner indicates the seat opposite him.

‘Please. Something to drink?’

She names a herbal cocktail unknown to Wagner. You were frightened before you entered this room, he thinks. But you became angry the moment you saw me. I can read this in the dilation of your pupils, the fixtures of your jawline, the lines on the back of your hand around the glass, the flare of your nostrils; a hundred micro-tells. Sometimes the heightened senses of his full-self overwhelms Wagner in barrage of impressions; sometimes their insight is as precise as a fighting knife. He can smell the components of her drink: a basil and tarragon spritzer with a dash of sours. The water is Peary ice-fresh.

‘You set that up well,’ she says.

‘Thank you. I worked hard at it. I knew you’d run background checks. Did you like the social profile? Minor shareholder in the Polar Lunatics. I actually took a position in the team, in case you checked that. I sold it back when my people told me you were at the door.’ He’s over-telling. It’s a danger in his light-self. Everything is there at once inside him: words fight for a place through the narrow doors of thought and voice. Mundanes are so slow.

‘You were never that diligent in the colloquium.’

‘Diligent. Diligent, yes. No. I’ve changed a lot since then.’

‘So I’ve heard. That’s your usual familiar?’

‘Everything is different when the Earth is round,’ Wagner says.

‘I am scared of you,’ Elisa Stracchi says.

‘Of course. Yes. I had to make sure you wouldn’t run. But I just want information, Elisa.’

‘I didn’t know what it was for.’

Wagner leans forward. Elisa Stracchi flinches at the intensity of his gaze.

‘I don’t think I believe that. No, I don’t believe that at all. An assassination attempt on my brother? Bio-processors specifically designed for a fly-based neurotoxin delivery system? I don’t believe that.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you I have no idea who the client was?’

‘I do believe that you would carry out the same due diligence on your client as you did on me. From which I can conclude that the real client was concealed by a similar nest of shell companies.’

‘You sound like a fucking dick, Wagner,’ Elisa says. Her foot jerks under the table. It does not take wolf senses to read that tell.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Who did you deliver to?’

‘Am I safe, Wagner?’

Wagner wishes he could stop reading her face. Every unconscious muscular twitch and tensing triggers empathies and anxieties in him. Sometimes he wishes that he could just stop perceiving so minutely, reading so deeply. To stop that would be to stop being Wagner Corta.

‘We will protect you.’

She flicks Dr Luz the address of a corporate upload box. Dr Luz interrogates. A shell company, now closed down. She must have known this. The question for Wagner is how many other shell companies and dead drops the file went through before arriving at an assembler. His thoughts are already scurrying along a dozen different paths at once. Wagner thinks of his full mind as a quantum computer; exploring possibilities in many parallel universes at once, then collapsing the superimposed states to a single decision. He knows what to do next.

‘Wagner.’

It’s seconds before Wagner can refocus. Then, full seconds are instants to mundane folk.

‘Fuck you forever. Once a Corta, always a fucking Corta. No one’s ever said no to you, have they? You don’t even understand the word.’

But she hesitates, just a second, just enough, when she turns to leave and finds the bar empty. Wagner doesn’t have the authority to hire private security on the Corta account. He can hire a bar out of his own pocket. And he can crew it with his friends, his family, his pack mates.