Free The Luna Deception by Felix R. Savage Page A

them?”
    “You want me to give up Mozart and Beethoven?”
    “You want to stay alive? Do it.”
    Mendoza shut down his network connection. For good measure, he blinked off his HUD. Blind. No clock display in the corner of his eye. No playlist. No feed updates. No comms icon reminding him that “You have five voicemails from Derek Lorna! You also have 16 emails from Derek Lorna!”
    With his vision cleared of icons, outside suddenly seemed big . The sweep of Shackleton Crater’s skirt was a rocky sea with glass boats stranded on its swells. Sunbleached mini-crater rims gnawed at the black sky, eroded by billions of years of micro-impacts and exposure to the solar wind. A half-remembered quotation popped into Mendoza’s mind: We live by grace of the ground we stand on. He had been born on Earth, but now he was on Luna, alive by the grace of this battered ball of rock.
    If this was blindness, he could get used to it.
    Then something moved in the long shadow of the water tower.
    “Father! Watch out!”
    A maintenance bot crabwalked out of the storage area beneath the tower. Size of a tiger, six-legged. These bots could fold up their legs and use the sucker pads on their elbows to climb the outsides of domes. People called them window cleaners. Despite their homely function, it could give you a nasty shock to see one of those things peering in at you through the glass.
    The bot took something out of its cargo pannier and whipped it at Mendoza and the Jesuit like a throwing star.
    “Susmaryosep!” Mendoza yelled. The missile fell short. He broke into a hopping run. Another missile sailed past him. A flat brown hexagon. It didn’t explode. He glanced back.
    Fr. Lynch wasn’t following him. He stood his ground, facing the bot.
    Flash. Another missile exploded in a cloud of brown powder.
    Mendoza’s leading foot hit the ground. He threw his weight backward, flailed his arms, overbalanced. Righted himself and bounded towards Fr. Lynch. Before he got there, the Jesuit’s laser pistol flashed again. Mendoza’s suit overreacted by blacking out his faceplate.
    The bot pranced on, a shadow in the darkness. Its arachnoid head sank. Ploughed into the rock. Its rear legs kept running, so that it was pushing its head along the ground like a shovel. Its midlegs hinged to reach into its pannier. It hurled missile after missile.
    Father Lynch fired another pulse into the bot and then turned and ran. Mendoza reversed direction to keep up.
    Missiles shattered harmlessly ahead of them
    And then behind them.
    “Head for the Evans Square airlock,” Father Lynch yelled over the radio.
    “Jesus God, Father!”
    Angling his stride to brush Mendoza in mid-bound, Father Lynch passed him the other pistol. “Don’t look back now. But there are more of them coming. If you have to shoot, aim for their batteries.”
    At the apex of his next bound, Mendoza looked back. Half a dozen bots breasted the nearest rise. Their cutter and splarter appendages undulated in time with their seesawing gait.
    However, the men outpaced the bots, which were not made to leap but to scuttle safely over the landscape. The Evans Square airlock stuck out of the dome’s wall. While Father Lynch worked the valve, Mendoza faced the terrain whose beauty he had so recently admired. He could smell his own terror.
    The airlock opened. The two men scrambled in.
    “Welcome back!” said an automated voice over the radio link. “Did you have a nice walk? Please wait for the air pressure indicator to turn green before removing your helmets!”
    They struggled out of their sharesuits and stuffed them into the USED locker. Father Lynch had his cassock on. He hid the pistols in an inner pocket. They ducked out of the airlock into an alley behind the public toilets at the end of Evans Square.
    Mendoza inhaled fresh-ish air, smells of curry and chicken poop. “Jesus. Sorry, Father. But Jesus! Were those bots attacking us?”
    “No, that was the finals of the Bot Frisbee