There was, however, nothing to stop them projecting fearsome aug layers around themselves. The demon-cloaks made them look much larger than the hopper. Each was a grinning, ghoulish head, styled in Chinese fashion, trailing banners of luminous fire behind it. As the drones whipped around the descending hopper, harassing it but never quite coming into contact, their fire-tails tangled into a whirling multicoloured corkscrew. One demon was a pale, sickly green, another a frigid blue. The third was the liverish red of a slavering tongue. Their eyes were white and wild, furious under beetled brows. They looked like Pekinese dogs turned rabid and spectral.
‘Cease your descent,’ a voice said, cutting across the cabin. ‘Do not attempt to land. You will be escorted back into neutral Lunar airspace. Immediate failure to cooperate will be construed as hostile action. Hostile action will be countered with sanctioned military force.’
The corkscrewing demons were getting closer now, spiralling ever tighter around the hopper.
‘Do what they say,’ Gleb pleaded.
‘Just words,’ Chama said. ‘Nothing I wasn’t expecting.’ But at the same time he reached up and touched his neck ring, as if to reassure himself that the helmet really was engaged and pressure-tight.
‘Cease your descent,’ the voice said again. ‘This is your final warning.’
‘I think they mean it,’ Sunday said.
‘They’re bluffing. Last thing they want to do is shoot down some idiot tourist who just happened to key the wrong coordinates into their autopilot.’
‘I think, by now, they probably realise they’re not dealing with an idiot tourist,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Guess that’s possible,’ Chama admitted.
The blue demon rammed the hopper. As the demon veered away, apparently undamaged, the hopper went into a slow tumble. Chama released the joystick, letting the avionics stabilise the vehicle. They didn’t do much good. Just as the hopper was regaining orientation and control, another demon would come in and knock it back into a tumble. The knocks were becoming more violent, and the ground was rushing up towards them like the bottom of an elevator shaft. The demons were coming in two and three at a time now, jackhammering against the hull. The tumble was totally uncontrolled, the ground spinning in and out of view several times a second.
Chama started saying something. It might have been, ‘Brace!’ but Sunday couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that an instant later Chama wasn’t there. Where the seat had been was an impact cocoon, a cushioned, mushroom-white adaptive shell that had enveloped both the seat and its occupant in an eye-blink.
Everything went blank. There was a moment of limbo and then she was back in her apartment again. Only for another moment, though. The ching bind had been interrupted, but not severed. She fell back into the golem and the golem was out of its harness, lying in a limb-knotted tangle against one of the equipment modules on the opposite wall. The hopper was back to solidity now, no longer a neon sketch of itself. Jitendra’s head and torso phased in out of view, cross-hatched with cartoon static to indicate bandwidth compression. Gleb flickered. Geoffrey’s golem was hanging out of its harness.
‘That went well,’ Chama said.
The impact cocoon had folded itself away and Chama was unbuckling. Upside down, he dropped at Lunar acceleration onto what had been the ceiling. Jitendra resumed solidity. Geoffrey extricated his golem from its harness. Sunday tried to move her own proxy body and found her blue metal limbs working normally.
‘They took us out,’ she said, amazed.
‘Tactical disablement,’ Chama replied, thoroughly nonplussed. ‘Very well done, too. We’re still airtight, and the collision was within survivability parameters.’ He grabbed a yellow handhold and propelled himself across to the hopper’s door. ‘Hold on – I’m venting. No point in saving the air now.’
The air fled the hopper in a single dying bark, dragging with it a fluff cloud of silvery dust and spangling human detritus. Moving in vacuum now, Chama operated the door’s bulky release mechanism. The door opened onto a view like a late Rothko: rectangle of black sky below, rectangle of dazzling bright Lunar ground above.
The golem’s vision system dropped software filters over the scene until the ground dimmed to a tolerable grey.
Chama was first out. He sprang through the door and fell to the surface, landing catlike. Sunday followed, Chama already bounding to the other side of the hopper by the time her golem touched dirt.
Sunday looked back just as Geoffrey’s machine spidered out of the upturned hopper, followed closely by the bobbing, balloon-like head and shoulders of Jitendra’s figment, and then Gleb’s. Jitendra and Gleb were merely moving viewpoints, entirely dependent on Chama and the golems to supply their ching binds with a constantly updating environment. The demon-cloaked drones were still swarming overhead, circling and helixing above the spot where Chama had crashed.
‘This way,’ he said, breaking into a seven-league sprint, flinging his arms wide with each awesome stride. ‘Can’t be too far north of where we came down.’
The golems, built for durability rather than speed, had difficulty keeping up with the bounding figure. Chama had a spade strapped to the back of his suit, of the perfectly mundane common-or-garden type. He must have put it in one of the hopper’s external stowage lockers, ready to grab as soon as they were down. There was something else, too: a grey alloy cylinder, tucked under his life-support backpack.
Some new order must have reached the demons, for they aborted their spiralling flight and rocketed away in three directions, streaking towards the crater wall that marked the effective horizon. But they were not leaving. A kilometre or so away, they whipped around and came back, streaking at man-height across the crater floor, demon-cloak faces tipped forward, eyes glaring, tongues rabid and drooling.
They screamed and howled through the aug.
‘Keep moving,’ Chama called. ‘This is just intimidation. They won’t touch us.’
‘I certainly feel adequately intimidated!’ Jitendra said.
Sunday flinched as the red demon blocked her path, its doglike face as wide as a house. The cloak was nebulous; through its billowing, flaming translucence she made out the hovering kernel of the drone, balanced on spiking micro-jets.
‘Do not move,’ said the same commanding voice that they had heard in the hopper. ‘You are under arrest. You will remain in this area for processing by border-enforcement officials.’
‘Keep moving,’ Chama said again.
Chama had his own demon intent on blocking his progress: the blue one. Chama wasn’t stopping, though, and the demon was actually backing up, not letting itself get too close to what it undoubtedly registered as a warm, breathing, easily damaged human presence. The green demon was fixating on Geoffrey. None of them was paying any attention at all to Jitendra or Gleb, their figments all but undetectable.
But if the blue demon was unwilling to obstruct Chama, the other two had no compunctions about blocking the golems. Some governing intelligence had already determined that these were disposable machines. The monstrous face leered and glared as it anticipated Sunday’s movements, ducking and diving to either side like a keen goalkeeper.
Then, without warning, the demon-cloaks vanished.
A man was standing in front of her now, hands clasped behind his back, with the hovering drone at his rear. He wore a neat platinum-grey business suit of modern cut over a white shirt and pearl necktie. His shoes failed to merge with the soil, their soles hovering a centimetre or so above the dirt. He was young, handsome and plausible.
‘Good morning,’ the man said, agreeably enough. ‘I am Mister Pei, from the Department of Border Control. Would you be so kind as to remain where you are, until this matter can be resolved? Officials will be with you very shortly.’
Another copy of Mister Pei had appeared in front of Geoffrey, presumably reciting the same spiel. There might be a real human being behind these figments, or it might still be some kind of automated response.
&
nbsp; ‘I don’t think so, Mister Pei,’ Sunday said. Whatever trouble she was in now, she reckoned, couldn’t be made much worse by trying to keep up with Chama.
She made another effort to slip past the drone.
‘I must insist,’ Mister Pei said. His voice was firm but pleasant, his words tempered with a regretful smile.
‘Please let me past.’
Mister Pei still had his hands behind his back. ‘I must ask you not to compound matters by disobeying a perfectly reasonable request. As I said, the border officials will be here very shortly, and then processing and debriefing may commence. Would you be so good as to give me your name and location? At the moment we can’t localise you more precisely than the Descrutinised Zone.’
‘Then I don’t think I’ll bother, thanks.’
‘It would be in your ultimate interests. Your accomplice will be detained shortly. Any assistance you can give us now will be taken into consideration when we evaluate the penalties for your trespass.’ He smiled again, bringing his hands around to beckon for her cooperation. ‘Who are you, though, and where are you chinging from? We will discover these things in due course, so you may as well tell us now.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to join the dots yourself, Mister Pei.’
‘Is that an unequivocal statement of non-cooperation?’
‘It sounded like one, didn’t it?’
‘Very well.’ Mister Pei looked over his shoulder and nodded. The drone shot through him, straight at the golem. It tore off an arm and blasted the rest of the golem into the soil, where it lay twitching and useless. There was no pain, just an abrupt curtailment of sensory feedback. For a moment Sunday was looking up at the sky, until Mister Pei loomed into view again, bowing over her.
‘I regret that it was necessary to take this action, but you gave us no choice.’
The drone pushed through him and spun until its gun barrel was pointed straight down at her useless body. The muzzle flashed, then everything went black.
She expected to return to the stack-module. Instead her point of view shifted to Chama’s, looking down at a pair of gauntleted hands scooping aside Lunar soil with the plastic-handled garden spade. Chama was kneeling, breathing heavily. He had commenced his excavation in the middle of the area of disturbed ground and had already cut a trench big enough for a body. The suit would be assisting him, but it was still costing Chama much effort.
A duplicate Mister Pei was standing by the dig, remonstrating with Chama as another drone loitered nearby. ‘I must ask you to desist. You have already brought trouble on yourself by trespassing on our territory, and by refusing to cooperate in your detention. Please do not compound matters by performing this unauthorised excavation of Chinese soil.’
Chama dumped a pile of dirt on the side of the trench. ‘Or what, Mister Pei? You’ll shoot me, like you shot the golems? I don’t think so. I’m being observed, you know. There are witnesses.’
‘We are well aware that others are participating in this severe breach of interplanetary law,’ Mister Pei said. ‘Rest assured that the full weight of judicial process will be brought to bear on all offenders. Now please desist from this activity.’
‘I’m still here,’ Gleb said.
‘Me too,’ Sunday added.
‘So am I,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Present,’ Jitendra said enthusiastically. ‘Cosy, isn’t it, inside Chama’s helmet?’
Mister Pei looked aside as the two other drones caught up with the third and triangulated themselves around the digging man. There was only one Mister Pei now: the other figments must have been deemed surplus to requirements. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The border officials.’
A dragon approached, snaking its way through the vacuum as if following the contours of invisible topography. It was crimson and serpentine and abundantly winged and clawed, its face whiskered and vulpine. It belched flames. Some kind of suborbital carrier lodged inside it, a rectangular vehicle with six landing legs and downward-pointing belly-thrusters.
‘Very melodramatic, Mister Pei,’ Sunday said.
‘Think nothing of it. It is the very least we can do for our honoured foreign guests.’
‘It might be an idea to dig a bit faster,’ Sunday said.
A moment later she really was back in the apartment, transfixed by a bar of sunlight cutting across the coffee table. Geoffrey, Gleb and Jitendra were standing there like sleepwalkers, their minds elsewhere. The interlude lasted a second, and then she was back with Chama.
‘I dropped out for a moment there,’ she said. ‘I think they’re squeezing bandwidth again. Did anyone else feel it?’
‘For a second,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I guess we shouldn’t count—’
And then he was gone.
‘Gleb and Jitendra have disappeared as well, so it’s just you and me now,’ Chama said. ‘For as long as the quangle holds.’
‘They’re taking this more seriously than I expected. Have you hit anything yet?’
Chama didn’t answer, too preoccupied with his digging. Mister Pei looked on, shaking his head disappointedly, as if he could envisage a million more favourable ways that this sequence of events could have unfolded, if only everyone had been reasonable and prepared to bend to the iron will of state authority.
The dragon gusted overhead, a slow-motion whip-crack. Its wings were leathery and batlike and flapped too slowly for such an absurdly vast creature. It arched its neck and roared cartoon flames. Stretching out multiple claws, it landed and quickly gathered itself into a coiled python-like mass. The dragon-cloak held for a few seconds and then dissipated as a ramp lowered down from the angled front of the border-enforcement vehicle. Suited figures ducked out, each of them with a rifle-sized weapon gripped two-handed and close to the chest. They came down the ramp in perfect lock step, like a well-drilled ballet troupe.
‘I think we’ve made our point here,’ Sunday said. ‘Now might be a good time to consider surrendering.’
Chama’s spade clanged against something. Sunday felt the jolt all the way through the suit, back through the tangle of ching threads linking the sensorium to her body in the Zone.
‘My god,’ she said.
‘Why are you surprised?’
‘I just am.’
‘What is discovered on or beneath Chinese soil remains Chinese state property,’ Mister Pei said helpfully.
Chama worked feverishly. He began to uncover whatever it was the spade had hit, even as the enforcement agents bounded overland from the transporter. They were not cloaked. Their armoured suits and weapons were intimidating enough.
‘Again, I must ask you to desist,’ Mister Pei said.
Chama kept working. The object, whatever it was, was coming into view. It was a rectangular box, lying lengthwise. The drones had moved forward of Mister Pei, peering down to get a better view. Chama hauled the object out of the trench and set it on the ground, between two piles of excavated soil. It was about the size of a big shoebox, plain metal in construction. Chama’s thick-fingered gloves found an opening mechanism with surprising ease and the lid sprang wide. There was something inside the box, lying loose.
Mechanical junk, all gristle and wires.
‘I must ask you to stand up now,’ Mister Pei said as his officials gathered around Chama.
Chama looked up, taking Sunday’s point of view with him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You can arrest me now.’
‘Please relinquish the item,’ Mister Pei said. But Chama was already obeying. He pushed up from his kneeling position, leaving the box and its contents at his feet.
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘Curtail the bind, please. Until you have been debriefed.’
‘Curtail it yourself,’ Chama said.
Mister Pei beckoned to one of the enforcement guards. The faceless guard brought his rifle around with the stock facing away from his body and went behind Chama’s back. Sunday saw the guard loom on the helmet’s rear-facing head-up, saw the stock swinging in like a
mallet. The blow knocked Chama to the ground, stealing the breath from his lungs.
‘I am afraid it will now prove necessary to apply administrative restraint,’ Mister Pei said.
Chama pushed back into a kneeling position. Another of the guards came forward, unclipping a device like a miniature fire extinguisher from his belt. The guard aimed the device at Chama, then lowered the muzzle slightly, correcting aim so as not to impact any vulnerable areas of his suit. A silver-white stream hosed against Chama’s chest, where the material organised itself into an obscene flattened starfish shape and began to push exploratory tentacles away from its centre of mass, searching for entry points into the suit’s inner workings.
Chama strove to paw the substance away, but it globbed itself around his fingers and quickly set about working its way up the wrist, moving with a vile amoeboid eagerness.
‘Looks like it’s going to be lights out for me in moment or two,’ Chama said. ‘You’ll all be good boys and girls until I’m back, won’t you?’
There was just time for one of Mister Pei’s guards to bend down and pick up the box. The guard took out the object that had been inside it and held it up for inspection, dangling it between two gloved fingers. Sunday had a second look at it then. She’d been wondering if her eyes had fooled her the first time.
But it still looked like junk.
And then the ching bind broke and she was back in the Zone.
They were all shaking. Sunday glanced at her friends and wondered why they couldn’t keep it together, not look so visibly nervous in front of Gleb. Then she caught the adrenalin tremor in her own hands and knew she was just as culpable.
‘It won’t take them long to find out who he is,’ Gleb said. ‘Chama’s not one for rules, but he’d still have had to file some kind of flight plan before taking out that hopper.’
Sunday exhaled heavily. ‘I feel terrible. We should never have got you mixed up in all this.’
‘Chama took this initiative on his own; you weren’t holding a gun to his head. And it’s not as if there wasn’t some self-interest involved as well.’