Sunday shrugged. ‘Not exactly crime of the century, smuggling cheap plastic gems.’
‘And I’m a researcher crawling around on his belly begging for money. The slightest blemish on my character, the slightest hint of impropriety, and I’m screwed.’
Geoffrey was standing now, with his arms folded, striking a pose of imperturbable determination. Sunday knew her brother well enough to realise that he was not likely to budge on this point.
So she wouldn’t push him just yet.
‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen,’ Jitendra said. ‘I know these numbers. I’m sure they mean something.’ He pressed his fingers against his forehead, like a man tormented.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the morning the taxi dropped them at the base of one of the ceiling- penetrating towers, a faceted pineapple with neon snakes coiling up its flanks. In the smoke-coloured lobby a queue for the elevators had already formed. Serious-looking young people milled around, several of whom were evidently well known to Sunday and Jitendra. Hands were pumped, knuckles touched, high-fives made, whispered confidences exchanged. They were speaking Swahili, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Punjabi, English. Some were multilingual, others were making do with earphone translators, usually ornamented with lights and jewellery, or just enthusiastic gesturing. The air crackled with rivalry and the potential for swift backstabbing.
Geoffrey hadn’t sensed anything like it since his last academic conference.
‘It’s a big deal for Jitendra,’ Sunday explained. ‘Only two or three tournaments a year matter as much as this one. Reason everyone’s come out of the woodwork.’ She gave her partner a playful punch. ‘Nerves kicking in yet, Mister Gupta?’
‘If they weren’t, there’d be something badly wrong with me.’ Jitendra was working his fingers, his forearm muscles tensing and relaxing in a machinelike rhythm. He jogged frantically on the spot until their elevator arrived. ‘But I’m not afraid.’
The elevator shot them up through the core of the building, through the ceiling, through metres of compacted Lunar soil, onto the night-drenched surface. They exited in small glass-sided pimple: the embarkation lounge for bubble-canopied rovers, docked like suckling piglets around the building’s perimeter. In all directions, a hundred or so metres apart, the ground was pierced by the uppermost sections of other structures, glowing with lights and symbols, spilling reds and blues and greens across the wheel-furrowed ground. A couple of suited figures trudged between parked vehicles, carrying suitcase-sized toolkits. Other than that, there was a striking absence of visible human activity.
‘Is this where it all happens?’ he asked.
‘Way to go yet, brother,’ Sunday said.
Before very long they were aboard one of the rovers, gliding away from the embarkation structure. The rover had six huge openwork wheels, the powdery soil sifting through them in constant grey cataracts. As the rover traversed a boulder, the wheels deformed to ensure the transit was as smooth as possible. The driver – and there
Soon the buildings receded to a clot of coloured lights, and not long after, they fell over the horizon. Now the only illumination came from the moving glow of the rover’s canopy and the very occasional vehicle passing in the other direction.
‘I thought I’d be picking up full aug signals by now,’ Geoffrey said. With the bubble canopy packed to capacity, the three of them were strap-hanging. His aug icon still showed a broken globe.
‘You’re still in the Zone,’ Sunday said. ‘Think of this as a tongue sticking out, with a little micro-Zone at one end of it. There’s no Mech here, just our stripped-down private aug. Even if the Surveilled World could reach us here, we’d put in our own jamming systems.’
In the absence of airglow it came as a surprise to summit a slight rise and suddenly be overlooking an amphitheatre of blazing light: a kilometre-wide crater repurposed as arena, with pressurised galleries sunk back into its inner wall. Spherical, hooded viewing pods resembled so many goggling eyeballs, linked by the fatty optic nerves of umbilical connecting tunnels. The rover passed through an excavated cleft in the crater wall, then drove around the perimeter.
Geoffrey pushed to the window. Huge machines littered the ground, beached by some vast Selenean tide. Worms or maggots or centipedes: segmented, with plates of deftly interlocking body armour and ranks of powerful tractor limbs running down the lengths of their submarine-sized bodies. They had chewing mouths, drilling probosces, fierce grappling and ripping devices. The ghosts of sprayed-on emblems survived here and there, almost worn away by abrasion where the machines had rolled over on their sides or scuffed against each other. Vivid silvery scars, not yet tarnished by the chemical changes caused by cosmic ray strikes, betokened fresh injury.
The machines lying around the perimeter were being worked on, readied for combat. Service gantries and cherry pickers had been rolled up, and suited figures were repairing damage or effecting subtle design embellishments with vacuum welding gear. There must have been at least twenty machines, and that wasn’t counting those located further into the arena, lying side by side or bent around each other, mostly in pairs. Geoffrey presumed this was a lull between bouts, since nothing much appeared to be happening.
‘I’m guessing these machines weren’t originally made for your fun and games,’ he said to Jitendra.
‘Heavy-duty mining and tunnelling equipment,’ Jitendra said. ‘Too beat-up or slow for the big companies to keep using, so they sell it off to us for little more than scrap value.’
Geoffrey laughed. ‘And this is the most productive thing you could think of doing with them?’
‘It’s a damn sight better than staging
‘This is mine,’ Jitendra said as they drove past one of the waiting combatants. ‘Or rather, I have a quarter stake in it, and I get to drive it when my turn comes around.’
If anything it looked a little more battle-scarred than its neighbours, with chunks nibbled out of its side-plating exposing a vile gristle of hydraulics, control ducting and power cables. Plexus’s nerve-node emblem was faint on the machine’s side.
‘She’s taken a few hits,’ Jitendra explained, superfluously.
‘Do you . . . get inside it?’
