‘No vigilantes, Momoka!’
‘I’ll play by the rules. We’ll do it the way you just said.’
‘Sure?’
Momoka sighed. When she spoke, her voice trembled as if she was holding back tears. ‘Yes, I’m sure. I promise.’
‘I don’t trust you,’ said Rogachev after a while.
‘You don’t?’
‘No. I think you’ll put us all in danger. But it’s your decision, Julian. If you want to let her drive – then go ahead.’
* * *
Hanna saw the mining machine approaching from the left. Dust billowed out around its legs and shovel wheels, while freezing clouds forced their way out of its sides and mixed with the suspended matter to form a hazy camouflage. He tried to estimate whether he could safely cross in front of it. It was pretty close already, but if he stepped up his pace he should be able to manage it.
On Earth, he thought to himself, that thing would create a hell of a racket. Here, it approached with malicious silence. The only thing he could hear was the whoosh of the air-conditioning system in his suit and his own disciplined breathing. He knew that silence nourished foolishness, and that – especially in the glistening haze – correct estimations of distance were hardly possible, but on the other hand he didn’t feel the slightest inclination to wait until the monstrous thing had crawled by. The mining station had to be really close by now. He’d had enough now, he just wanted to get there.
Clasping the last of the survival backpacks tightly under his arm, he sprinted off.
* * *
‘I see him!’
The Canadian’s blurred silhouette had appeared on the horizon. He was sprinting over the plain with long springing jumps, while the colossal body of a mining machine was approaching from the left. Julian waved Momoka’s rover over next to his and waited until they were alongside each other.
‘He’s taking quite a risk there,’ whispered Amber.
‘And rather an inconvenient one, for us,’ grumbled Rogachev. ‘The beetle is already quite close. Should we really risk it?’
‘I don’t know.’ Julian hesitated. ‘If we let the machine pass it could take ages.’
‘We could drive around it,’ suggested Evelyn.
‘And then what?’
‘Approach him from the other side.’
‘No, then he’ll see us. Our only chance of taking him by surprise is if we stay behind.’
‘Then let’s go,’ hissed Momoka. ‘If he can get through ahead of the beetle, then so can we.’
‘The machine really is very close, Momoka,’ said Rogachev insistently. ‘Shouldn’t we wait? I mean, it’s not like Carl can give us the slip.’
‘Unless he’s seen us,’ Evelyn pondered.
‘Then he would have shot at us.’
‘Perhaps he’s trying to throw us off.’
‘Not Carl. He’s a professional. I know people like him – none of them would think twice about shooting in his situation.’ Rogachev paused. ‘Nor would I, for that matter.’
The rovers were approaching the fleeing figure at a steady speed. At the same time, the beetle was getting closer and closer to Hanna, who was now running even faster. The stomping choreography of the six powerful insect legs was only vaguely outlined in the dust. The Canadian looked like vermin in front of the monstrosity, but he seemed to have estimated his chances accurately.
‘He’s going to get through,’ whispered Momoka.
‘And then some,’ said Amber. ‘Oleg’s right, he can’t slip through our fingers. We should wait.’
‘Nonsense! We’ll make it.’
‘But why would we take a risk, and especially now? We have his footprints.’
‘The beetle will erase them.’
‘So far we’ve found them again every time.’
‘Momoka,’ said Rogachev in a dangerously quiet tone, ‘you promised—’
‘End of discussion,’ decided Julian. ‘We’ll wait.’
‘No!’
Momoka’s rover jerked as she pressed down on the pedal. Regolith sprayed up on all sides. Rogachev, who had almost straightened himself up, lost his grip, was hurled out of the vehicle and landed in the dust. The vehicle swerved for a moment, then thrashed forwards.
‘You piece of shit!’ she screamed. ‘You miserable—’
‘Momoka, no!’
‘Come back!’
Paying no attention to their cries, Momoka sped the rover forwards after the running figure. Evelyn held tightly to the back seat but was thrown backwards, hearing Rogachev utter a string of sonorous Russian swearwords. They shot off towards Hanna at top speed. In a matter of seconds he would be killed by the force of the collision.
‘Momoka, stop! We need him—’
At that moment, the Canadian turned round.
* * *
Hanna believed neither in intuition nor in some higher inspiration. As far as he remembered, none of his colleagues who had trusted their gut, so to speak, had survived very long. The regulatory authority of the intellect commanded the use of careful thought to compensate for the lack of eyes in the back of one’s head; anything else was pure chance, although looking behind him at that one, decisive moment turned out to be pretty useful too.
He saw the rover shooting towards him.
Assessment of the situation: a design he was familiar with from the Schröter space station, so they had clearly made it from Aristarchus to here. He and the vehicle, tangential to the marching direction of the beetle. Time until the mining machine arrives: unknown. Time until the collision with the rover: three seconds. Pulling out weapon and firing: pointless. Two seconds. One second—
He threw himself to the side.
Rolling away, he got back onto his feet and found himself dangerously close to the beetle. Tonnes of regolith were spraying up high in front of his eyes. Behind it gaped the cloud-covered, jagged mouth of a gigantic shovel, filled to the brim and rising up from the ground, followed by another, another, another. The mining wheel was turning at an incredible speed, hovering from left to right in the process, transporting more and more masses of lunar rock into the sieve and onto the conveyor belt. The beetle took a step forward, stomping powerfully, making the ground shake.
Where was the rover?
Hanna whipped around. He saw his spare backpack lying on the ground a short distance away; it had slipped from him when he fell. He needed the oxygen reserves, but the vehicle had already turned in a fountain of dust and was speeding over to him again, and now there was a second rover too, approaching from the opposite side. His hand moved up to his thigh, tearing the weapon with the explosive bullets from its case.
* * *
‘I knew it!’ cursed Rogachev. ‘I knew it!’
He had clambered onto the seat behind Julian as Hanna flew through the air, had seen him thud down and get back up again. The Canadian produced a long and thin object, clearly undecided as to which of the two vehicles he should target. The second of hesitation sealed his fate. Momoka’s rover caught him on the shoulder with one of its man-size wheels. He flew a considerable distance, landed on his side and rolled over towards the walking factory, directly towards the rotating shovel, which was approaching at a worryingly fast pace.
‘Enough, Momoka,’ screamed Julian. ‘Let us get the bastard.’
But it seemed the Japanese woman was suffering from sudden deafness. Even while Hanna was still pulling himself up, visibly dazed, she jerked the steering wheel around once again, forced the vehicle into too sharp a turn and lost control. This time, everything went wrong. The vehicle became airborne, overturned several times in a row and ploughed through the spraying rocks towards the beetle. Momoka was hurled out and slid through the rubble with her arms and legs spreadeagled, screaming like a banshee. She jumped up and rushed on, seemingly uninjured, and went straight for Hanna. Horrified, Amber watched as the rover came to a halt with its wheels still in the air, a blanket of dust sinking down on it.
‘My God, Evelyn,’ she groaned. ‘Evelyn
!’
* * *
Evelyn’s only thought was to grip on to the strutting of the seat as tightly as she could. Unable to scream, she tried to picture the vehicle as a beetle, within which she would be protected as long as she managed not to lose her grip. Momoka had disappeared. There was no up or down any more, only bumps and dust and more bumps, smashing the chassis to pieces. Finally, she did let go. She fell to the ground and stared up at a wheel wobbling above her.
The rover had come to a halt, and she was alive. So far.
She immediately tried to free herself from the wreck, but she was stuck. But where? Her arms were free. She kicked her legs forcefully, and she could move them too, but the pile of junk still didn’t want to let her go. The ground shuddered as something colossal rammed into the regolith, right next to her, and with icy clarity she realised what it was.
‘Evelyn!’ Amber. ‘Evelyn!’
‘I’m stuck,’ she screamed. ‘I’m stuck!’
The ground trembled again.
The robots only react to one another; we’re not present in their internal image.
She had to get out of here! As fast as she could!
She began to pull wildly at the frame, scared out of her wits, but it was as if she were rooted to it, as if her back were soldered to the rover. She began to howl like a wolf in a trap, because she knew she would die.
* * *
Julian brought his rover to a standstill right next to the wreckage. He didn’t care in the slightest what Hanna and Momoka were doing. The two of them had disappeared on the other side of the mining machine, away from the gluttonous shovelling.
They had to get Evelyn out of there.
Rogachev and Amber jumped from their seats and hurried over to the wrecked vehicle. Evelyn stretched her arm out towards them. It wasn’t hard to see that her backpack had wedged itself into the grotesquely twisted strutting and was alarmingly stuck. Julian, overcome with worry, dared to glance up. The colossal body of the machine was making its way unrelentingly forward, darkening the sky, bathing the plain, people and vehicles in its ravine-like shadow. The strutting of its armoured plates was visible only in silhouette: rivets, seams and bolts, the trichina mechanism of the pipes. The insectoid curve of the skull with its chewing apparatus, sieves and mining belts swayed slowly back and forth, as if the thing were picking up their scent. Conically formed hip joints sprang out from angled legs, each around ten metres high, multiple-jointed and as thick as the crossbeams of a building crane.
The crashed rover lay directly in its path.
At that moment, in a way that was more perceptible than it was visible, the leg right at the front of its body lethargically began to rise.
* * *
Hanna struggled to get his bearings.
He had hit the back of his head on the inner casing of his helmet, something which should have been practically impossible, because the head covering was supposed to be large enough to prevent such accidents. His skull and neck hurt, and his shoulder too had seen better days, but at least the armour seemed to have absorbed some of the collision. He could move his arms still, but the weapon with the explosive bullets had fallen from his hand.
He couldn’t lose his weapon!
Red and yellow circles were rotating in front of his eyes, trying to suck away his consciousness. Half blinded, he stumbled a few steps forwards, fell on his knees, then shook his head and fought against a strong wave of nausea.
* * *
Momoka was just a few steps behind him.
She rushed along, fuelled by hate. Like Medea, Electra, Nemesis, she was the incarnation of vengeance, unchecked by reason, without fear, without any plan. All thought processes were brought to a standstill; her thoughts were ruled purely by the idea of killing Hanna, and she didn’t care how.
Something on the ground caught her gaze.
Something long and light in colour. It reminded her of a gun, but there was no trigger, just some buttons.
It was a gun.
Hanna’s gun!
* * *
‘Try to push the strap down.’
‘Which strap, dammit?’
‘There, that one! Strap, bar, whatever it is!’
Whatever it was, thought Amber, before the rover had been transformed into a pile of debris. A piece of the shaft? The mount from a radio receiver? She pushed against it with all her might while Rogachev pulled at the back of Chambers’ seat. A part of it had wedged itself between the backpack and her suit and was refusing to budge.
‘Hurry!’ shouted Julian.
Rogachev kicked against the backrest with his boot. It gave a little, but the real problem was the twisted bar. Amber looked up and saw the mining machine’s foot rising higher and higher, like something out of a nightmare.
‘Again, Oleg,’ she pleaded. ‘Kick it again.’
The foot was now hovering above their heads. Wheelbarrow-sized loads of dust and small stones hailed down on them. Rogachev cursed again in Russian, which Amber interpreted as a bad sign. She pushed herself against the strap once more, burrowing the tips of her boots into the ground, tensing her muscles, and suddenly the entire thing broke right through the middle. Rogachev grabbed it, pulled the released backrest out from under the backpack and hurled it away.
‘I’ll make it by myself from here!’
In a flash, Evelyn pulled herself out of the rubble and jumped up. They ran away just as the beetle’s leg was making its descent, throwing themselves onto the back seat of Julian’s rover. At the very moment when he drove away, the monstrous foot crashed down onto the wreck and crunched it with such force that their getaway car was jolted into the air for a second.
‘Where to now?’ called Julian.
Amber pointed into the dust. ‘The other side. They must be on the other side of the machine!’
* * *
What a discovery! Momoka bent over, clasped the unexpected instrument of her vengeance and went after Hanna, who had pulled himself to his feet and was staggering away like a drunkard. It had become significantly darker and a hazy shadow had descended on them, but Momoka paid no attention to it. She made a leap and kicked out at the Canadian, knocking him off his feet once again.
Hanna rolled onto his stomach.
No, don’t shoot yet, she told herself. She wanted him to be watching her as she did it. To look at her as he died! Breathless, she waited until he had rolled over, then pointed the weapon at his helmet.
‘You piece of shit!’
She pressed one of the buttons. Then another.
‘Do you see this? Do you see it, you piece of shit?’
Nothing. How did you shoot this thing? Oh, it must be here, a safety measure: the detonator was protected by a shield, so she just had to push it up with her thumb, and then—
* * *
Hanna crawled backwards, staring at the armoured, faceless figure in disbelief. It could only be her. He would have credited Rogachev with the same fighting spirit, but this person was small and petite, unmistakably Momoka Omura, and she was ready to make him pay for Warren Locatelli’s death. She had discovered the safety shield. She was pushing it up. He had no chance of grabbing the weapon in time. He had to get away, put distance between himself and the Japanese woman. Was she screaming at him? Momoka was locked on to a different frequency, but he was certain she was screaming at him, and suddenly he felt unfairly treated. I didn’t kill your husband, he wanted to say, as if that would have changed anything, but he hadn’t killed him, instead he had wanted to spare him and make his death less painful, and now he was going to be punished for that?
His gaze wandered to a point high above her.
Oh God!
Distance! He had to get away!
* * *
‘Through the legs,’ called Amber.
‘Are you crazy?’ Julian was driving alongside the mining machine at high speed. ‘Was that not enough for you just then?’
She leaned back and stared up at the giant. Julian was right. It was to
o dangerous. It was only now, right next to it, that she appreciated how huge the beetle really was. A walking mountain. Each one of its six legs could end her existence with just one blow. The highest concentration of dust was beneath the torso, visibility was nonexistent, and to top it all off, extensive white clouds were breaking out of openings along the torso seam and spreading out rapidly. They made it past the machine and drove around its rear end, from which avalanches of baked regolith were hailing out. They dodged the rain of debris and drove back along the other side.
Back to the monster’s head.
* * *
Momoka wanted to relish the moment as long as she could, so she didn’t press immediately, but instead watched as Hanna crawled away, as if there were still the ghost of a chance he could get away from her. Ha! As if there were even the slightest cause to hope that she would change her mind.
‘Scared?’ she hissed.
He should be scared. Just like Warren had been scared. We need him alive, she heard Julian bleating in her mind, that shitty, stupid arsehole who had lured them here, to the bloody Moon, her and Warren. Alive? Fuck you, Julian! She needed him dead! And she would kill him, now, as he pulled himself to his feet. Sayonara, Carl Hanna. A good moment.
She could barely see.
It was darkening rapidly. What was happening? She leaned back and looked up. Unbelievable! Fucking Moon! This Moon was really starting to get on her—
‘Tits,’ she whispered.
A huge black stomper of a foot hung in the air above her.
Then it came down.
The beetle ended Momoka’s life without giving her the opportunity for inner reflection, something that wouldn’t have suited her character anyway. Instead, in honour of her temperament and her belief that people should die as they lived, she exploded one last time: in the course of her physical compression, Hanna’s weapon smashed against the breastplate of her spacesuit and one of the bullets broke in half. A chemical union occurred between shower gel and shampoo. The projectile flew apart, and the nine remaining ones blew up with it, blasting the beetle’s foot clean away.
This time, an error message was sent to the control centre of the moon base. It informed the crew about material damage to the front left walking apparatus of BUG-24, signifying that the machine was in danger of failure and had to shut itself down, which it did that very moment. It stopped all activity directly after the explosion, but that was of no help. The beetle’s amputation was complete. Overloaded by the loss of the front leg, the middle one buckled too, and the colossal machine began to tilt.