Dark Side Page 6

“Quite.”

  “I would offer to get my man here to help you with your bags,” Ulysses said, jerking a thumb towards Nimrod, who was already struggling to control a trolley piled high with his master’s holiday wardrobe, “but I have a feeling it would only offend.”

  “Oh, Mr Quicksilver,” the dark-haired young woman fawned. “You must forgive my outburst. It has been a trying time for all of us, has it not?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And, besides, I would not presume. We already owe you a debt greater than any we could ever pay. I would not dream of troubling you further.”

  “So, what’s next for you?” Ulysses asked, intrigued by this foul-mouthed young woman and her hen-pecked partner. He glanced meaningfully at the trunks and packing cases again. “Staying long are you?”

  “Oh, you know. Just a few days, until our connecting flight to the outer solar system gets here.”

  “Ah, I see. Doing the Grand Tour, are you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well let’s hope that you make that connection.”

  “What do you mean?” the woman asked, suddenly suspicious.

  Ulysses smiled. “All I meant was, after what happened on our jaunt to the Moon, I wonder whether they’ll still be flying.”

  “You think flights might be suspended?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not the expert. All I’m saying is that I’d find yourself a decent hotel and enjoy what Luna Prime has to offer for the time being, that’s all. I hear the Island of Winds is worth a visit, and you don’t want to miss the Peaks of Eternal Light either.”

  “Thank you,” the young man puffed as he struggled past, pushing his own laden trolley before him. “We’ll bear that in mind.”

  Ulysses gave him an appraising look. What was in those cases, he wondered.

  “Perhaps we’ll see you around.”

  “Perhaps you will,” the young man replied noncommittally.

  Having bid farewell to the determined young couple, Ulysses turned to his own travelling companions.

  “Now, seeing as how we’re all going the same way,” Ulysses said, “why don’t we travel together?”

  “Very well,” Emilia said, “and on our way you can give us your suggestion for the top ten sights we ought to see whilst visiting the Moon. After all, you have been here before, haven’t you?”

  The party of four made their way through the Luna Prime spaceport terminal. Much of the city was built above ground, contained within super-strong glass and steel domes, but there was always a portion of the lunar cities that was buried beneath the layers of dusty regolith, gouged out of the calcium-rich, granite-like rock of the Moon’s surface.

  With the material required to create the vast domes in short supply on the Moon itself – there was plenty of silicate material from which to create the glass but little in the way of iron deposits – it made sense to limit how much of the lunar colonies needed to be above ground, when the early colonists had been able to dig into the crust itself. It made even more sense in the case of the Bedford-Cavor Spaceport, when the landing pads had to be on the surface but where the support buildings, which were small by comparison, could be as unobtrusive as possible.

  Beneath the spaceport Ulysses, Nimrod, Emilia and old man Oddfellow entered a vast, low cavern, cut out of the rock under the terminal itself. All about them transport vehicles – everything from steam-cabs to multi-wheeled juggernauts land-trains – were collecting the newly arrived travellers and unloaded cargos, ready to take them on the next leg of their journey. Most would doubtless be heading into Luna Prime itself, but others would be passing through, heading on to one of the other colonies, riding the transit tunnels to Tranquillity or Serenity City.

  Emilia stifled another gasp.

  “I know, it’s quite something isn’t it?” Ulysses said. “The first time you see it, I mean.”

  The roaring of engines and honking of horns, combined with the stink of coke and kerosene, was almost overwhelming in the restricted space of the cavern.

  From the concourse in front of them various cabs and other vehicles were already setting off, following the route that would take them onto the main thoroughfare and from there to Luna Prime.

  Huge droids clanked by, transferring cargo containers onto some of the larger vehicles waiting nearby – engines idling, smoke-stacks belching soot and heat into the air – while street-hawkers, who had set up shop at the entrance to the spaceport, gave those just disembarked from the Apollo XIII their first taste of the kind of poorly-made tourist tat that they could expect to be bombarded with during their stay on Earth’s most popular emigration destination.

  As they began to make their way to the cab rank, preceded by a clanking of iron feet and the hiss of leg-pistons, a massive automaton stepped into their path.

  Emilia started.

  “You looking for a ride?” came a female voice from somewhere in the vicinity of the droid’s head.

  Ulysses looked up at the twelve foot-tall Juggernaut-class droid. Sitting behind the robot’s half-dome head in a cabin constructed from chipboard, canvas and corrugated iron was a young woman – practically little more than a girl, to Ulysses eyes. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she wasn’t yet out of her teens.

  She was pretty – in a coquettish, child-like way, but not yet beautiful – but any feminine charms she might possess – other than those of her large almond eyes, upturned button nose and rosebud lips – were hidden beneath denim dungarees and an oil-stained shirt. A camel hair jacket lay on the seat beside her. The sleeves of the shirt had been rolled up to the elbows, exposing soot-stained forearms and elbows themselves stuck with sticking plasters.

  The girl’s hands were hidden within thick, padded leather gloves and her shock of near platinum blonde hair was currently being kept out of her soot-smudged face by a pair of goggles that had been pushed up onto the top of her head.

  “We are, as it happens,” Ulysses called back. “Why, are you offering?”

  “Certainly am!” the girl said excitedly, lifting her heavy steel-toe-capped boots off the control console and strapping herself into the driver’s seat. “Where you headed?”

  “The Nebuchadnezzar. Do you know it?”

  “It’s all right, Ulysses,” Emilia said, pulling him away from the colossal droid and its petite handler. “Our ride – as she so charmingly put it – is already here.” She pointed.

  The limousine was pulled up at the kerb-side, half-hidden by the bulk of the opportunistically-positioned taxi-droid. A suited and booted chauffeur waited, smiling patiently, ready to open the door to his passengers and load their luggage into the boot.

  “Oh.” Ulysses said, disappointedly. After all, a Rolls Royce was his London run-around. Limos he had done to death. Re-conditioned salvage droids? Now that was another matter entirely.

  “All expenses paid, remember? With all the frills.”

  “Ah, yes. Of course.”

  “And it looks like there’ll be plenty of room for you and Nimrod, and all your luggage, as well as ours,” Emilia pointed out.

  Ulysses hesitated for a moment, his eyes lingering on the huge droid before giving the girl an apologetic smile. He turned back to Emilia.

  “That would be very kind of you,” he said. “Nimrod, give the driver a hand with our luggage, would you, there’s a good chap?”

  “Of course, sir,” Nimrod replied, his expression of aloof disinterest never wavering for a second.

  “And then it’s Luna Prime, here we come!”

  THE FIGURE WATCHED the Quicksilver-Oddfellow party climb into the waiting limousine, and saw the disappointment in the young girl’s face.

  He smiled to himself. The pieces were slowly fitting into place. It was all coming together as it should, now.

  Running a hand through his mop of untidy hair and adjusting the patch over his right eye, he hefted his pack onto his shoulder and then, as the car pulled away with all safely ensconced on board, stepped out of the shadows.<
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  Nearby, Chapter and Verse were getting into a steam-cab of their own, refusing the cabbie’s help and insisting on loading their many heavy bags themselves.

  He watched them for a moment, a look of resigned hatred in his eyes. Turning away at last, he wiped the grimace from his face, running a hand over the course grey stubble covering his chin, and made for the droid-cab. The robot’s shoulders drooped as if in disappointment. The name ‘Rusty’ had been stencilled in large yellow letters across its rust-red chest plate.

  “’Scuse me, miss, but did I hear you say that you’re accepting fares to the city?”

  The look of distracted disappointment on the girl’s face was instantly transformed into a cheery smile.

  “We most certainly are,” she declared, beaming at him. “Where do you want to go?” she asked as she lowered a ladder to the ground, that he might climb up to the long padded seat behind the driver’s position.

  “Just into the city will do.”

  “The name’s Billie,” she said as the droid rose to its full height and took its first lumbering steps towards the cavern concourse’s exit. Turning round she offered the man a gloved hand.

  He took it and shook it firmly, feeling the girl return his handshake with a surprisingly strong grip of her own.

  “And this is Rusty,” she said, leaning forwards and patting the droid’s head. “What’s yours?”

  He hesitated before answering. “Wells.”

  “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr Wells. You been to the Moon before, only you look kind of familiar?” Billie asked as the droid strode along the thoroughfare between the chugging cabs and rumbling haulage wagons.

  “Yes, I have,” he replied, a distant look in his eyes. “This is my third visit actually.”

  “Really? And what are you here for this time, if you don’t mind me asking? Business or pleasure?”

  “Neither,” he replied sullenly. “It’s family.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em,” the girl chattered on over the increasing traffic noise and the chugging of the droid’s own motive systems. “What is it they say? You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.”

  “Indeed.”

  And with that the droid-cab stomped off along the Humboldt Highway, headed for the Luna Prime and a date with destiny.

  Act Two

  Moon

  June 1998

  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

  Genesis, ch.1 v.1

  CHAPTER SIX

  Metropolis

  T MINUS 3 DAYS, 3 HOURS, 14 MINUTES, 34 SECONDS

  ULYSSES QUICKSILVER WOKE the following morning to find sunlight streaming in through the windows of his penthouse suite. Of course, sunlight fell from the black void of the sky at certain times in the Moon’s monthly cycle twenty-four hours a day whilst for others, the surface was left in a permanent state of darkness. It was only the self-regulating blinds and hallway lights – and, outside, the street lamps – that helped fool the body into maintaining its usual circadian rhythms.

  Walking to the large, plate glass window opposite the huge bed in which he had spent a very restful night’s sleep, Ulysses gazed out over the spacious parks, plazas and thoroughfares of the lunar city. It truly was a marvel of modern, Neo-Victorian engineering – an astonishing accomplishment.

  There had been a thriving colony on the Moon since the 1950s, the first successful manned flights having occurred twenty years before that. With the development of cavorite, interplanetary travel had become an affordable – and hence realistic – option for the masses, rather than merely the few. Large, established businesses and canny entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to carve out a niche for themselves on this new world. Many made their fortunes in the process and the lunar billionaires were still among some of the richest individuals in the empire.

  There was something reassuringly Magna Britannian about Luna Prime as well. Whereas some of the later colonies had a more cosmopolitan feel – places such as Serenity City and the uber-rich getaway of Tranquillity – Luna Prime had retained its Britishness from the get-go. Omnibuses that would not have looked out of place on any London street trundled along the wide thoroughfares. The Neo-Victorian architecture of the pale grey, mooncrete buildings was reassuringly familiar as well, as were the names of many of the shops he could see, even from here. There was even a branch of Harrods on the Moon. And, after all, where would the British Empire be without Marks and Spencers?

  Luna Prime even had its own dwarf version of Big Ben – only without the Palace of Westminster attached – and a statue of Britannia that graced the painstakingly-landscaped New Victoria Park.

  But this was not London. There was no ever-present pall of Smog hanging over the city for a start. The city streets were wide, the buildings new and in a good state of repair. From his window, Ulysses could not see any signs of the privation that so many millions suffered back home. This was what London might have been, had Sir Christopher Wren had his way after the Great Fire of 1666, or – heaven forbid! – Uriah Wormwood’s plans for forced urban evolution been seen through to their bitter end.

  Ulysses allowed himself an ironic smile. Perhaps this was what Uriah Wormwood had had in mind when he launched his potentially devastating attacks on the city. Perhaps he had planned to remodel London after Luna Prime.

  And, of course, Luna Prime had avoided the disasters that had been perpetrated against Londinium Maximum over the course of the last year or more.

  All in all, Ulysses could see why so many of those aboard the Apollo XIII had been travelling with a one-way ticket, and the intention of moving to the Moon permanently.

  Gazing down on the clean city streets, he could see why a move here had been so appealing to his brother Barty as well.

  But, of course, if the tide of immigrants from the Earth continued unchecked, how long would it be before Luna Prime resembled its forebears back on Earth?

  He turned his focus from the already bustling streets below to the blazing white spot of the distant sun. Thanks to the filtering effects of the polarised glass of the atmosphere dome over the city he was able to look at it directly, with no worse consequences than if he had been looking at the glowing filament of a light bulb.

  Possessing effectively no atmosphere whatsoever, beyond the habitation domes of the lunar cities, direct sun would burn the skin from a man’s body, were he not inside a spacesuit, and, if he weren’t, he would probably die of asphyxiation first.

  It was like that on the Moon. It was a world of extremes. A man’s blood would freeze in seconds on the dark side, and yet he would burn to a crisp from intense solar radiation on the other. If it hadn’t been for the sacrifices made by those first lunar explorers – men like Clarke, Bradbury and Asimov – the Earth’s satellite would have remained as nothing more than a lifeless lump of rock orbiting the Earth, rather than becoming the planet’s most popular holiday destination.

  Turning from the window, Ulysses retreated to the bathroom. Having washed, shaved and put on a clean suit of clothes that Nimrod had thought to put out for him the night before, leaving his manservant polishing the remaining five of the six pairs of shoes he had brought with him for his brief sojourn to the Moon, he descended to the restaurant level where a hot breakfast buffet was on offer to all of the hotel’s guests.

  Emilia and Alexander Oddfellow were already there, Emilia getting by on nothing but tea and toast, while the old man battled with a sugar-dusted grapefruit half.

  Ulysses joined them, tucking into a full English, while he and Emilia made stilted small talk.

  “So,” he said at last, as he laid his knife and fork together on his egg-smeared empty plate, “what’s on the itinerary today? How are you planning on spending your first full day on the Moon?”

  “Father wants to visit the Lovell Planetarium,” Emilia said, leaning across the table towards Ulysses, a relaxed smile on her face, “which me
ans I’m all yours for the day, if you want me. I thought you might like to show me the sights, seeing as how you’ve been here before.”

  Ulysses took out his pocket watch and popped it open. “Sounds like a capital idea,” he said, checking the time. “Besides, knowing my brother as I do, I doubt Barty will surface before luncheon. So, what would you like to see first? How about Earthrise over the Caucasus Mountains?”

  “I WANT TO thank you, Ulysses,” Emilia said as the dandy helped her down from the steam-powered carriage later that afternoon.

  “And why’s that, then?”

  “Why? How about Earthrise over the Caucasus Mountains, for starters.” Emilia stepped down from the carriage and hugged Ulysses’ arm tight as they set off along the Pascal Promenade together, their footsteps slow and measured as they dragged their heels, neither of them wanting their time together to end. “It was...”

  “Yes?”

  “Memorable.” She smiled and squeezed his arm again. “I’ve simply had the most wonderful day.”

  “Well the Quicksilver Lunar Tour doesn’t end there, let me tell you,” Ulysses said, inhaling a lungful of the crisp, oxygen-rich processed air. “Tomorrow we order a luxury picnic hamper before chartering a solar yacht and heading out across the Sea of Dreams, returning in time for cocktails at Earthset.”

  Emilia hugged him, clasping him in a full embrace this time. “Sounds glorious. But what about Barty? I thought the whole reason you had come all this way was to see him.”

  Ulysses sighed. “Yes, you’re quite right, and I have to admit that I am feeling a little guilty about my brother dearest. But don’t worry, I’ll make it up to him.”

  “Look, why don’t you drop by his place now, at least for a couple of hours. I should really check on father anyway. We can meet again later, for dinner. How about it?”

  “Sounds perfect,” Ulysses agreed. “Kills two birds with one stone, as it were.”