Chapter 1 New career

I took a sip from the drink I always order at the bar. Water.

I raised my hands like I was holding a rifle. "Then I aimed," I said loud enough for the whole bar to hear. "All alone in Aquilas, and I started shooting."

I lowered my voice. "Didn't miss a single shot!"

The people in the bar cheered. Glasses hit metal. Some laughed with excitement. Some called me a hero. And I took another sip from my glass of water.

A man in the corner stood up. Big and drunk staring right at me. He let his beer fall from his hand. It shattered across the metallic floor. "You think you're a hero?"

The noise in the bar dipped slowly. Everyone was paying attention. I smiled and walked towards him. "What did you say?"

His chin lifted, and the muscles in his jaw tightened. "You belong on the dark side!"

For a second, I almost stopped. But then… I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close. His face was inches from mine, and I could see my own reflection split across the dark surface of his eyes, wavering, a little distorted.

"Say it again."

His hand reached sideways for the nearest glass on the table. I hit him before his fingers closed around it. My fist connected with his jaw and I hit him again. Harder. His head snapped to the side and he folded inward, a hand going to his stomach before I'd even brought my knee up, as if his body already knew what was coming. The air left him in a single rush. His legs buckled.

The room erupted, shouting from two directions, movement like a pressure seal had blown somewhere in the structure. Someone knocked a stool into the wall and it floated, slow and absurd, before the magnetic floor caught it and dragged it down with a clunk.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and forced him to his knees. He didn't fight it. His chin dropped toward his chest.

"I am the hero who saved the moon." I said it quietly. Almost gently. "You're just a newcomer."

He didn't answer. Didn't look up. His hands were flat on the floor.

I straightened. Looked at my knuckles. My fist was fine, only covered with a few drops of blood from the drunk man's mouth. I stopped for my own sake, not his.

Two well-dressed men pulled me back. They dragged me outside before I could say a single word.

The street hit me with its manufactured chill. Aquilas kept its temperature five degrees lower during this time of year. The dome I lived on was older than the others in Aquilas or the ones in Gladivea, with their outer panels darkened at the edges and oxidation that no one had gotten around to cleaning. Above the main walkway, a hologram advertisement for Lun-exchange services stretched twelve meters wide.

"Get your hands off me." Pulling away ready to leave.

A hand clamped down on my shoulder. "Our association is interested in working with you."

"No thanks."

The grip tightened. "That wasn't a request."

I glanced over my shoulder. Their faces were serious. "They'll contact you within twenty-four hours," one said. "Refuse… and you'll regret it." Said the other.

“You have served in the war, and now it is time to prevent the next.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There will be a new war, and if we don't act now, all life on the Moon will be eradicated.”

For a moment I believed that. And I hated that.

“Fine, tell them to keep in touch.” I walked away. Hands in my pockets. The corridor between the bar and the residential block was one of the older stretches of Aquilas, and it showed. The wall panels didn't match. Different generations of repair bolted over each other, the older ones darker, slightly warped at the edges. A pipe ran exposed along the ceiling for thirty meters before disappearing back into the wall, which was not how it had been designed, only how it had ended up. Nobody had gotten around to fixing it. Nobody ever did, in this part of the dome.

Above the main walkway a hologram advertisement pulsed from the side of a three-floor building. Lun-exchange rates, My eye-ring caught it and tried to load a targeted version. I dismissed it before it opened.

They said the Moon was supposed to be perfect.

The promise had been made around seventy years ago, after humans returned and planted the first permanent structures in the regolith. The most advanced city ever built. The largest project humanity had ever attempted. By 2100, they said. A path toward greatness.

Before construction had ever properly begun, rival nations rushed to claim their share of the gray, dust-covered world. Lines were drawn where none had existed before. Territories were marked, argued over, and some taken by force. And what began as a dream slowly transformed into a competition, and in this world, competition always leads to war.

I passed under the transit arch between sectors and felt the gravity shift. A blue band of light swept across the walkway at waist height. The panel above flashed green as I crossed. It's a subtle thing, the floor pulling slightly less as I crossed into the transitional zone, my step going fractionally lighter without asking permission. The electromagnetic panels ran cheaper here, in the corridor between districts where nobody important lived. The rich districts ran their panels close to Earth standard. Had for decades. The three families had seen to that.

The Vaelthors, the Grandisfields, the Caelrics. They hadn't fought over territory the way nations had. They'd done something more permanent. One took the gravity infrastructure, one built the domes, one locked down oxygen and water. They didn't own the Moon. They owned whether it could be lived on, which was the same thing stated more honestly.

By 2070 the maps had four nations, each with their own domes, their own checkpoints. The domes themselves were not what the advertising had sold. Lower than the plans called for. Buildings that stopped at four floors because going higher required structural work nobody had budgeted for.

The apartment building came into view at the end of the corridor. Two floors. I glanced up at the projected sky. Deep blue running to black, stars faint behind it. If you didn't look at the edges you wouldn't notice the seam where the dome's curve broke the illusion.

The apartment door opened to the sound of Matt's voice before I was fully through it. "You're late."

He was in the living area, stretched back in the low chair with one boot up on the edge of the table. The room was small. With walls that had been painted at some point in a pale industrial gray that had since yellowed toward something closer to old bone. The artificial lights in the ceiling were set to simulate late afternoon, that particular amber quality that the systems produced when trying to approximate sunlight and not quite managing it. It gave everything in the room a slightly sepia quality, like looking at a photograph of a place rather than being in it.

"There was a situation at the bar," I said, and closed the door.

Matt tilted his head and squinted his eyes with the expression he'd been perfecting since the training years. Eyebrows lifted, chin pulled back slightly.

"What kind of situation?"

"Let me catch my breath, and I'll tell you."

"Your knuckles."

I dropped my head down. The second joint on my right hand had swelled slightly, more than I'd noticed outside. I covered it with my other hand. "I'm fine."

"I didn't say you weren't." He squinted. “Were you telling your war stories again?” I didn't answer. He dropped his boot from the table and sat up straighter. The motion caused the coffee container on the table's edge to rock, and when it tipped it didn't fall the way it should have. It drifted, slow and slightly sideways, taking a full two seconds to complete a drop that would have taken half that on Earth. I caught it without looking.

Matt watched that happen and made a sound in his throat. "See?" he muttered. "This damn gravity."

"You've lived here longer than most people."

"That's exactly the problem." He took the container back, set it on the center of the table where it was less likely to become a casualty, and rubbed the back of his neck. "You adapt enough to stop hating it but not enough to stop noticing it. Every single day."

He wasn't wrong. The electromagnetic floor in this corridor ran at just enough to increase what the Moon gave by a third.

I sat down and let out a sigh of relief. I explained everything that had happened.

"I still don't understand why they picked you," he said, without particular bitterness. He reached for his coffee container and found it empty and set it back down.

"Neither do I," I said, which was true.

He looked at me sideways. His jaw moved like he was about to say something else, then he decided against it. He stood up, crossed to the narrow kitchen shelf on the far wall, and opened the small storage compartment. Closed it again when it turned out not to contain what he was looking for.

"Something about it doesn't make sense," he said, turning back. "That's all I'm saying."

"You've been saying this for three weeks since you got your job, and now this."

"It keeps not making sense." He crossed his arm. "You might think it's going to be interesting," he said. "Living here. For a while it might even be fun. But then it's just daily life and daily life here is harder than anyone back on Earth thinks it is."

"I could argue with that."

"I know you could." He uncrossed his arms and picked his jacket off the back of the chair. "That's the part I find annoying."

A quiet chime suddenly interrupted the room. A notification flashed across the lens of my eye-ring.

Incoming call. Private response required.

I frowned."I’ll be right back." He raised an eyebrow but didn’t ask questions.

I stepped into the bedroom and closed the door behind me before accepting the call. Three figures appeared. They were seated in darkness, black masks covered their faces completely. Even their voices were distorted by electronic filters.

For a moment, none of us spoke. Then one of them leaned slightly forward. Then the one in the center leaned slightly forward.

"We represent the Men of Moon."

I blinked once.

The name sat in the air. Dramatic. Theatrical.

"Well," I said, "aren't we all?"

The pause that followed was long enough to confirm that my sense of humor was not going to be part of this relationship.

The three figures proceeded. The voice was unhurried, moving through a prepared sequence. Evaluations of my past work, records of my involvement in lunar operations during the conflict years, references to actions I barely remembered or had worked reasonably hard to stop remembering.

Eventually the voice reached the point.

"You have been selected for a special assignment."

A notification materialized in my vision through the eye-ring:

Transport scheduled. Private transit sector.

"A vehicle will arrive shortly near your destination," the voice continued. "You will receive further instructions there." I stared at the three silent figures.

"So let me get this straight," I said slowly. "You contact me out of nowhere, tell me I've been chosen for a spy job, and expect me to just accept it?"

Silence.

Then: "Were you not part of the underground intelligence crews during the Lunar conflicts?"

"Yeah." I said. "I was."

"Then you already understand the nature of this work."

I crossed my arms. "Sure. But usually there's some onboarding. Training sessions. Maybe a manual. You know — like the movies."

The silence had a different quality this time. It was making me uncomfortable.

"There is also something else you should understand."

Another file appeared in my vision.

Fragments of my past. Operations. Reports. Records I had hoped were buried.

"We are familiar with your history, and if you wish to resolve certain outstanding matters with the government, you will cooperate. This is the matter of Moon's survival."

The meaning was perfectly clear. They had leverage. I exhaled slowly and leaned back in my chair.

"Well, I guess I won't be having fun along the way."

No one responded. "We will stay in contact." Then the screen went dark.

I sat alone in the room for a long moment. Then I got up, opened the door, and went back to where Matt was waiting. The only man on this rock who would have noticed if I hadn’t.