reMix

Chapter Two Walk/Don’t Walk

Even Lars thought of himself as the ratboy. Though the fact was that Lars had only ever been one-third of the ratboy, but the newsfeeds didn’t know that. They thought the ratboy was one psychotic little scavenger camped out in the heating ducts and service tunnels of Planetside Arrivals. But the feeds were wrong about that, as they were wrong about most things. Psychotic, yes. Scavenger, ditto. It was little that was way off target.

The ratboy was famous. You could buy tri-Ds at tourist booths in both Arrivals and Departures. Lars had one, stapled to the wall of his bunker — in fact he was looking at it now. The picture showed a thin blond boy with spiky hair crouched near a vidbooth. It didn’t look anything like him at all.

For a start, his hair was dark brown and flopped round his head as if it had been crudely hacked off with a molywire knife, which it had. His brown eyes bulged from a face wide enough to look square. Add heavy lower canines and a protruding lower jaw and even Lars could work out that when it came to looks he’d been dealt a lousy hand. Unfortunately, luck hadn’t bothered to add intelligence or a sunny disposition to make up a counterweight.

He was the last third of the ratboy left. Causley had been the first to buy it, caught in a blow-out, breath vacuum-sucked from his body in an airlock accident. That was what happened if you used tunnels reserved for tourist luggage. Which had left Lars and Ben, except Ben came up with a raid on LunaWorld: Ben was always coming up with shit like that.

Usually he had the sense not go through with it, but not this time.

Somewhere between Planetside Arrivals and LunaWorld, Ben lanced the bolts off a service hatch and slid down into the rough-hewn tunnel below. The tunnel was unlit, slung along its black walls with long snake-loops of obsolete optic fibre. The prints of crepe soles in the dust said some guy had been there before them. But this was Luna, no dust shifted unless it was made to. It could have been a hundred years since the tracks were made, or it might have been that morning.

Lars had slid down behind Ben, protesting. He’d still been protesting when a suited-up, distant WeGuard kicked Ben’s leg out from under him with a burst of ceramic. It wouldn’t have happened if Lars had been doing his job, but he’d been too busy sulking to read off the infrared. That was how Ben got caught.

The “fight” lasted all of three seconds, which was how long it took the guard to rip open Ben’s lungs with another burst. Sucking chest wounds are rough enough when there’s air around. Remove the oxygen and add in a near-vacuum and Ben never stood a chance. Roughly 350 million alveoli ruptured like exploding bubblepak and the inside of Ben’s lungs turned to foaming red sponge.

Lars was in there and rolling across the floor towards Ben before he realized what he was doing. Slugs hit the rock face around him but nothing landed. Ignoring Ben’s frenzied thrashing, Lars dragged him down the tunnel, away from the guard.

As soon as Lars could, he took a tiny side tunnel, pulling Ben after him, levering off a hatch to drop down another level, tossing Ben down ahead of him. As soon as Lars felt safe, he stopped and reached into the pocket of his bubble suit for a lightstick. Twisting the precious tube, Lars saw by its bioluminescence that Ben was already neatly vacuum-packed. The void had pulled the air out of Ben’s face bubble, sucking it down his throat and out of his ruptured lungs, sealing the mask to Ben’s face.

Blue eyes were open and stark behind the soft clear Kevlar. It was way too late to take Ben to a hospital, even if Lars had had credit to pay the fees. Shit happens and then some idiot in a uniform wants you to fill out the forms. That wasn’t the way Ben and Lars worked.

Reaching into his other pocket, Lars pulled out his molywire knife and did what he’d always promised Ben he’d do, if it came to it. But first he tied Ben off at the neck, just under the other boy’s chin, so the vacuum didn’t get any more of Ben’s blood. Lars didn’t know if that made sense or not, it just seemed like a good idea.

Ben’s head came away clean, molywire slicing through vertebrae, gristle, veins and arteries. It wasn’t effortless, but it was still a lot easier than Lars was expecting. And when he looked at the severed neck, Lars was proud that the cut was clean, the edges of the jugular and subclavian veins all neatly sheared. Only the voice box was damaged and that wasn’t serious — at least, Lars hoped it wasn’t.

He wrapped the head tight in cloth cut from Ben’s suit and knotted it at the corners. Not ideal, but Lars figured it would have to do, at least until he could manage something better. Only something better never turned up, so Ben’s head was still wrapped in tattered Kevlar. But these days Lars kept the bundle in an ice bucket, which was what he called the Matsui coldbox he’d lifted from some tourist’s luggage.

Somewhere at the back of Lars’s mind the inconvenient fact that extops were meant to be kept in liquid nitrogen kept trying to break through: chilled down to something like minus 192. Well, tough. A coldbox had to be better than nothing, didn’t it? And besides, when Lars got money, he was going to book Ben into the best cryo facility that the moon could produce...

Lars had known he was at the bottom of the food chain, long before he even knew what a food chain was. When he was five, a fat Russian tourist with heavy fists told Lars that was where he belonged. Back then, Lars had figured it meant he was always going to be the last one in the children’s home to get fed. Which made sense: he always was.

These days Lars fed himself, which was just as well, as there was no one else to do it. Sixteen was the cut-off point for getting the social; after that you were on your own. When he wasn’t ransacking other people’s luggage, Lars lived in the tunnels. Used to be lots of people lived in the tunnels under Planetside Arrivals, but they’d been hosed out five years before in the last really big clean-up. That was how Lars was able to get himself a space.

Not that surviving in Planetside was easy. There were airlocks, of course, and not just between Arrivals and the outlying crater cities. Even inside Arrivals the main streets had bomb-mesh security doors, laser-cut steel with recessed titanium deadlocks. But Lars made a point of finding out each week’s codes for the service tunnels, and then trading them for food. People might not want to live in the warrens anymore, but the tunnels still made the best route from A to Z, especially if you didn’t want any of the letters in the middle to know you’d been past. And a lot of low-end LunaWorld kitchen staff didn’t.

After the big clean-out, most of the old tunnel-dwellers had ended up in Fracture, but then Fracture was 2500 square miles of rock and mud-walled houses thrown up by the CasAdobe virus and they were welcome to it. He’d stick with the five square miles of franchise-heaving, LunaWorld-owned Arrivals Hall.

In the beginning there was LunaWorld, then Chrysler and finally Fracture. After that, the O’Neills took over. Who needed one-sixth G on the surface when they could have full gravity for nothing in an O’Neill? By the time a minor pressure glitch blew a fifteen-mile crack into the 2500-square-mile ceiling that glass spiders had spun across the crater mouth at what became known as Fracture, five other crater cities had been announced. But Fracture finished the building boom.

It didn’t matter that an emergency contingent of Microsoft’s code police had stripped out the glitch and clean-coded the pressure program inside twelve hours. It didn’t even matter that if the roof had blown — and there would have been warning — it would have blown up and outwards, not dumped the water baffle directly on the heads of the crater’s inhabitants. All of whom owned pressure suits anyway.

That wasn’t how the investors, customers and real estate agents saw it. They didn’t see that the water baffle was there to drop radiation down to safe levels, that it was a miracle of equivalence that kept the precious water safely between two vast sheets of glass and roofed in an entire crater. They just saw themselves spending each day looking nervously up at a broken sky. Fracture went out of fashion bigtime.

But all that was long after LunaWorld was built. Back then, it was the Malays who put the lines of credit in place, Beijing who supplied most of the surface work force. While the Americans provided sandrats and franchise holders to fill the cavernous space of Planetside Arrivals once it was dug into the rock and domed over. It was an old idea, sinking a base into the surface and then roofing it: most of the US Antarctic bases had been built like that for years.

Lars knew none of this, of course. All he knew was that his great-grandfather had come from New Jersey, freighted out on ready cash and promises of a better life, back in the days when the Moon was still a frontier. Now the frontier had moved out to Mars and until last month LunaWorld was a trailer-park trash substitute for SonyCorp’s new GinzaGold orbital.

But now there were new flights every day. The Hyatts were full. Bars that hadn’t seen a non-package tourist in thirty years were busy hiring out beds to the highest bidder. Something big was going down: the only problem for Lars was that he didn’t know what. His bunker was too deep for him to be able to splice into a newsfeed, otherwise he’d have wired Ben up permanent, instead of having to find a socket every now and then, when the readout showed Ben’s battery pack was getting low.

He’d seen something interesting today, though. A scowling Earth kid grabbed from a shocked crowd, a WeGuard killed, guns firing. It was more excitement than Lars had seen in... he didn’t know how long. Since Ben died, probably.

Patting Ben’s ice bucket affectionately, Lars used its top to cut himself a huge slice of Jarlsburg. The Norwegian cheese was stale, but Lars didn’t mind. It tasted good enough to him. Besides, it was free. He’d lifted if off a cargo hand who’d scooped it from the luggage of some flax-haired Scandinavian refugee.

In a minute, he’d take a shit behind a pillar in a dead-end tunnel that ran off the downshaft, then he’d come back and wank to the soft glow of a holoporn slab he’d stolen years before. Lars knew each of the girls and all of their moves by heart, but it did for him. That done, he’d probably sleep. It wasn’t a perfect life but it would do.

All the same, he wished he had a newsfeed...