Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift - The Best of Alastair Reynolds

I think I understand. The life-support system would have to work much harder to sustain someone who was active. “And now? You did something to the chest-pack?”

“Told it to turn off the distress beacon, and give me enough power to allow for communication. It’s still running very low.”

He is still lying in my arms, like a child.

“You thought I was someone else.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. But it is Soya. Soya Akinya. And you?”

“Luttrell. Michael Luttrell. Can you get me out of here?”

“It would help if I knew where we are. How did you get here?”

“I drove in. The overlander, the thing you’re controlling. Shiga was meant to take control, help me back aboard, drive me home.”

“Do you want to climb aboard? I presume there is a cabin, or something.”

“Just a seat, behind your camera. No pressurisation. Let me try. I’ll feel safer up there.”

I lower him nearly to the ground, then watch as he eases stiffly from my arms. His movements are slow, and I am not sure if that is due to the suit or some injury or weakness within him. Both, perhaps. His breathing is laboured and he stops after only a few paces. “Oxygen low,” he says, his voice little more than a whisper.

Luttrell passes out of my field of vision. My view tilts as his weight transfers onto me. After long moments, his shadow juts above my own.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m good.”

I pan my camera up and down the pipeline. “Which way?”

He takes a while to gather his breath, and even then his voice is ragged. “Turn and follow the tracks.”

I make a wide turn with the overlander. It’s not hard to pick out the furrows my wheels have already dug into the soil. They arrow to the horizon, straight except where they kink to avoid a boulder or slope.

“Away from the pipeline?” I query. “I thought we would follow it, one way or the other.”

“Follow the tracks. You should be able to get up to fifty kilometres per hour without too much difficulty.”

I pick up speed, following the tracks, trusting that they will keep me from harm. “How long will it take us?”

“Three, four hours, depending.”

“And do you have air and power?”

“Enough.”

“How long, Luttrell?”

“If I don’t talk too much…” He trails off, and there is a lengthy interval before I hear him again. “I have enough. Just keep driving.”

Before very long the pipeline has fallen away behind us, stolen from view by the Moon’s curvature. It is a small world, this. But still big enough when you have a journey to make, and a man who needs help.

Luttrell is silent, and I think he is either asleep or has turned off his communications link.

This is when Prakash returns, unbidden.

“Finally,” he says. “Starting to think you’d vanished into workspace.”

“I did not choose this assignment.”

“I know, I know.” I think of him waving his hands, brushing aside my point as if it is beneath discussion. “It was an emergency. They needed someone with basic skills.”

“I have never been called into space, Prakash. Why have I suddenly been deemed good enough for this?”

“Because everyone who really does have the skills is trying to sort out that mess at the Japanese station. Look on it as your lucky day. It won’t count as weightless work, but at least you’ll be able to say you’ve worked with timelag.”

It may not be weightless, I think sourly, but surely working under Lunar gravity must count as something. “We’ll talk about it when I am done. Now I have to get this man to help.”

“You’ve done your bit. The people on the Moon would like you to turn ninety degrees to your right, parallel to the pipeline, and maintain that heading. Once that’s done, you can sign off. The vehicle will take care of itself. The hard part was helping get the body…the man…onto the truck. You’ve come through that with flying colours.”

As if I had done something altogether more demanding than simply scooping a man off the ground.

“Luttrell told me to follow his tracks.”

“And Luttrell is…? Oh, I see. Luttrell spoke to you?”

“Yes, and he was very insistent.” I feel a prickle of foreboding. “What is going on, Prakash? Who is Luttrell? What was he doing out here?”

“How much do you know about Lunar geopolitics, Soya? Oh, wait. That’d be ‘nothing at all’. Trust me, the best thing you can possibly do now is turn ninety degrees and bail out.”

I think about this. “Luttrell? Can you hear me?”

There is a very long silence before he replies. “Did you say something?”

“You were asleep.”

“It’s stuffy in here.”

“Luttrell, try to stay awake. Are you sure there are people at the end of this trail?”

The time it takes him to answer, I may as well have asked him to calculate the exact day on which he was born. “Yes. Shiga, the others. Our camp. It’s not more than two hundred kilometres from the pipeline.”

Three, four hours, then, exactly as he predicted. “Prakash, my broker, says I should head somewhere else. Along the pipeline, to our left.”

For once, Luttrell seems alert. “No. No, don’t do that. Just keep moving, this heading. Back the way I came.”

“If I went the other way, how long before we hit civilisation?”

Now Prakash cuts in again. “Less than a hundred kilometres away, there is a pressurised maintenance shack. That’s his best chance now.”

“And who is the expert now?”

“This is what they tell me. Luttrell won’t make it back to his camp. They are very insistent on this point.”

“Luttrell seems very insistent as well. Should we not listen to the man who actually lives here?”

“Just do as you are told, Soya.”

Do as I am told. How many times have I heard that in my life, I wonder? And how many times have I obeyed? When the Resource and Relocation people came, with their trucks, helicopters and airships, with their bold plans for human resettlement, I—along with many millions of others—did exactly as I was told. Gave up on the old world, embraced the diminished possibilities of the new.

And now I find myself squatting on a dirty mattress, under a creaking corrugated roof, while my body and mind are on the Moon and I am again being told that someone else, someone I have never met, and who will never meet me, knows best.

“Don’t turn around,” Luttrell says.

“You had better be right about this camp of yours.”

Prakash cuts in again. “Soya, what are you doing? Luttrell has transgressed internationally recognised Lunar boundaries. He has attempted to take what does not belong to him. The man is a thief.”

As if I had not worked that out for myself.

I think of the fat full Moon, daubed with the emblems of nations and companies. Only a few thousand people up there now, but they say it will soon be tens of thousands. Blink, and it will be millions.

And I have watched the news and tried to keep myself informed. I know that some of those territorial boundaries are disputed. There are claims and counter-claims. Even our little thumbnail of African soil has not been immune to these arguments.

So this man, Luttrell. What of him? He had driven to the pipeline, not along it but from somewhere else. Maybe he tried to tap into it. Something happened to him. An electrical shock, perhaps, damaging the systems of his suit. He had hoped that help would come from his own people, from Shiga. Instead what he got was me. And while my people—the people who know best—do not exactly want to kill Luttrell, it cannot be said that keeping him alive is their main consideration.

What they want, above all else, is for him not to get home.