Joker Moon Read online

  With today’s launch, I have not been following the events in New York City closely, though I know both Malachi and Theodorus have. There is an illegal colony of jokers squatting on Ellis Island, which they’ve renamed the Rox. They’ve been there for months, at least. Their leader has incredibly powerful mental powers.

  They say he is a child, and physically enormous. No wonder Theodorus is fascinated by him.

  Whatever he is, he’s earned the enmity of the Great and Powerful Turtle, New York’s anonymous hero. The Turtle destroyed the bridge—to save it, no doubt—fighting a joker associated with the terrorist Twisted Fist movement, though what they have to do with the Rox is unclear. All of the news out of New York is unclear.

  There are more soldiers in and around the city now than there were during the Swarm invasion five years ago.

  However powerful the jokers on the Rox might be, I do not think they will be there much longer.

  Within That House Secure

  V

  IT WAS IN THE autumn of 1995, when she was twenty-seven years old, that Mathilde Maréchal—engineer, designer, prodigy, mathematical savant, hell, maybe a bona fide genius—learned to read a balance sheet. She did so against her will.

  “Don’t tell me again what I’m looking at,” she told the timid woman who, for some arcane reason having to do with a recent reorganization, technically reported to someone who technically reported to someone who definitely reported to Mathilde. “Tell me why I’m looking at it.”

  The year’s strain of influenza had hit Charleston hard and Witherspoon Aerospace harder. Luckily, jokers seemed immune to it. Unluckily, 50 percent absenteeism meant taking up slack in areas not even tangentially related to Mathilde’s usual responsibilities.

  “It’s the labor and consumables discretionary budget for the Stormwings,” the woman said again, as if that wasn’t written right across the top of the legal-sized printout she’d placed precisely at the center of the conference table. As if she wasn’t repeating herself for the third time since Mathilde had found her skulking in her empty outer office. Mathilde’s secretary was home sick, too.

  “You just did it again. I told you not to tell me what I’m looking at and you did exactly that.”

  “I … well, that is…” The woman took off her glasses and began furiously polishing them with the ragged hem of her sweater.

  “Okay, let’s start over,” Mathilde said, and seeing the woman brighten and point to the identifying line at the top of the ledger again she held up her hand. “Not from the beginning. Well, yes, from the beginning, but we’re going to skip some things that have been well covered. What’s your name?”

  In mute answer, the woman extended her name badge on a retractable line. JESSICA SHERMAN, WITHERSPOON AEROSPACE, EMPLOYEE #1141. And then a series of letters and numbers that probably told people better versed in that sort of thing than Mathilde exactly what department Jessica Sherman worked in.

  She nodded, and the woman let go of the badge. It snapped back against her collarbone with an audible thwack and she winced.

  “Okay, Jessica. The scheduling software routed me your appointment with … with whoever it was your appointment was originally with.”

  “Mr. Baker. This would have been the third time I’ve taken this to him. He keeps telling me it’s nothing.”

  “Mr. Baker, okay. I don’t know Mr. Baker. Is he in accounting?”

  Jessica blinked. “He’s your accountant. That is to say, he does the internal books for Stormwing Operations. You’re the division head of Stormwing Operations.”

  Mathilde took a deep breath. What the woman said was true, but Mathilde left day-to-days to the organizational whizzes Malachi had hired as her assistants after Theodorus overheard her complaining that she never got to actually engineer anything anymore. “I also lead the speculative design team, and that takes up most of my time.”

  “You’re very busy, everyone says.” Jessica spoke in a rush. “But it’s the labor and consumables discretionary budget, you see. Mr. Baker won’t hear me out and the discrepancy is getting larger every month.”

  “Aha!” Mathilde said, admittedly a bit loudly, and Jessica jumped in her chair. “Sorry,” she added. “But we’re finally getting somewhere. There’s a discrepancy. So something is operating outside of tolerances or however you money people put it.”

  Jessica brightened. “Yes! Well, no, that’s not a particularly apt analogy, but yes, there’s a discrepancy!”

  “And it’s getting larger every month.”

  “Yes!” said Jessica. She seemed genuinely happy.

  “And what is the discrepancy?”

  Jessica leaned in, as if she were about to share a secret. “It’s actually quite mysterious.”

  “I do love a mystery,” Mathilde lied. “Do we have any suspects? Do we think Mr. Baker is cooking the books? Skimming?” She’d reached the edge of her appropriate vocabulary. “Erm, looting?”

  Now Jessica looked shocked. “Oh, no, I’m sure there’s nothing like that going on. Everything balances out at the bottom, of course, and the affected vendors say we’re paid up, and nobody has complained to payroll, though of course, why would they complain because if anything the technicians are getting paid more than is budgeted, but then that raises the question of how since the budget didn’t account for their overtime but there’s no shortfall recorded so—”

  Mathilde reached over, pulled Jessica’s name badge to the limit of its retractable line, and let it go. Thwack. “Vendors are being paid,” she said. “Technicians are being paid. Nobody is complaining. What’s the problem?”

  Jessica rubbed her collarbone, her lower lip sticking out just a bit. “It’s what they’re being paid for. As near as I can tell, we’re buying more fuel than is accounted for in the budget, and paying technicians to use that fuel … somewhere. But their pay for using it isn’t in the budget, either. And even though those costs add up to some pretty significant amounts, there haven’t been any shortfalls. It’s like money is magically appearing to cover work nobody is doing using supplies nobody purchased.”

  Well, that … that was interesting, in fact.

  “You make it sound like the Stormwings are being used for unscheduled flights.”

  Jessica shrugged. “That would seem to be the most logical explanation, if the only discrepancy was in their operational budgets.”

  Mathilde felt like the meeting could be going better, but she didn’t know exactly how.

  “There’s another discrepancy?” she asked.

  “Oh, my, yes, quite a large one,” said Jessica. “An expenditure. It’s been accounted for, but it’s not been explained. At least, not in a way that I understand.”

  “Lack of understanding seems to be going around,” said Mathilde. “Why don’t you show me this other discrepancy. Maybe I can explain it.” Who knew? Maybe she could.

  Jessica reached into the overstuffed valise in the next chair over and brought out an overstuffed portfolio. As she started to open it, it slipped from her grasp and a sheaf of papers spread across the gleaming conference room table like a deck of cards dealt by a careless magician. Jessica gasped and began gathering the papers, giving each a glance as she did so, murmuring apologies.

  While she waited, Mathilde idly picked up the sheet closest to her and ran her eyes down the columns, across the rows. This one was labeled MISCELLANEOUS and one entry had been highlighted in yellow by someone who wasn’t particular about drawing straight lines. Slightly annoyed by the imprecision—imprecision always annoyed Mathilde at least slightly—she started to hand the paper over to Jessica, who was now going through the stack in front of her in some confusion. But then Mathilde stopped, actually reading the entry.

  Flavian Finnegan Mitchell. $1,000,000.00. Extraterrestrial real estate.

  “Is this it?” Mathilde asked. “Does this mean somebody spent a million dollars out of my budget on whatever ‘extraterrestrial real estate’ is supposed to mean, and hid it in miscellaneous ex
penditures?”

  Jessica brightened. “Yes! Yes, that’s it! And extraterrestrial means off the planet, so—”

  Mathilde held up a warning hand. “You know I’m a rocket scientist, right?”

  Jessica nodded, clamping her mouth shut.

  “So odds are pretty good that I know what the word extraterrestrial means, right?”

  Jessica nodded again.

  “But I did not know that there was such a thing as an extraterrestrial real estate transaction. For such a transaction to take place, someone would have to own some off-planet real estate in the first place, and as far as I know, nobody does.” Yet, she added to herself.

  “I researched that!” exclaimed Jessica. “You’re absolutely right. There’s no governing body of law for such a transaction. So it must mean something else.”

  “Maybe,” said Mathilde. “Did you happen to research this Flavian character who sold us this mysterious property? Do you know who he is?”

  “I did!” said Jessica happily. “Though it took some doing. As far as I know, his birth name only shows up on his birth certificate, on his driver’s license, and in this ledger entry. I, um…” She colored, apparently embarrassed by something. “I had to ask Trevor, one of the security people, for help with that part. Trevor’s terribly nice, but kind of shy, and—”

  A warning hand. “Who is Flavian Finnegan Mitchell?”

  Jessica collected herself. “He’s Cash Mitchell. The man who flew to the Moon.”

  Entering her code at the entry chamber of the greenhouses should have been enough to alert Theodorus that she had arrived, but Mathilde called out anyway.

  “Hey! Tell your pets that I’m coming through and that I’m carrying a very large shaker of salt!”

  Theodorus’s voice replied from a speaker mounted amid a stand of Chinese fan palms. That was a new addition. “They’re not pets. And none of them are in this wing at the moment. I’m by the strangler fig.”

  Making her way through the enlarged greenhouse was like trailblazing through some impossible jungle. Plants from South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia crowded the narrow walkway she followed. Despite Theodorus’s assurances, she kept glancing left and right for any sign of giant mutant molluscs. The damned things were quiet to be so big.

  It was hard to tell when Theodorus was relaxing. He couldn’t exactly recline in a lounge chair or hit the hot tub. Though he did, she happened to know, have a weak spot for piña coladas. The image of her friend wearing a tropical print shirt and sipping a rum drink from a coconut came to her mind, and Mathilde almost grinned. Almost. She was too angry with him to get distracted, despite whatever her subconscious was trying to tell her.

  If Theodorus wasn’t relaxing, though, he wasn’t tense, either. Unusually, he wasn’t even working. There were no gardening tools nearby, and the specialized rolling rig of keyboards and monitors he used to keep up with his multifarious interests wasn’t in evidence, either.

  “Hello,” he said when she entered the clearing. “I didn’t know you were visiting today.”

  “Something you don’t know. That must be pretty unusual for you.”

  He’d been looking up at the tree that dominated this end of the greenhouse, but now he turned to her. “What is it?” he asked, simply.

  No preambles, then. Well, she hadn’t wanted any. “What are you sending into space, Theodorus?”

  If she hadn’t known how carefully he arranged every expression, she might have thought he looked genuinely confused. “Satellites. Probes. Commercial payloads. Sensor suites bound for the Lagrange points and science packages bound for the asteroid belt. Why are you asking me this? It’s you I depend on to do the sending.”

  She sighed, disappointed. She shook her head, not breaking eye contact with him. “And you think you bought the Moon.”

  His expression changed to something more neutral. “I see,” he said. “Was it Baker? Malachi said from the beginning that hiding the money trail would be the hardest part.”

  “Malachi is in on it?” she asked. “Wait, don’t answer that, of course he is. But no, your Mr. Baker is home with the flu like everybody else. The money trail was uncovered by a woman who works for him, or maybe works for somebody who works for him, or used to anyway, because she just got a promotion and a raise.”

  “Malachi won’t be pleased about that. He’s trying to control personnel costs.”

  “Oh, just shut up, will you, Theodorus? At least shut up with the … the prevarications. You’ve been using the Stormwings, for years apparently, to boost God-knows-what everywhere in the solar system we send cargo and craft. And you’re right, you have depended on me to do the sending. And you depended on me to not notice whatever the hell it is you’re up to, as well, even when you spend a million dollars on a completely specious real estate transaction.”

  “I was going to tell you,” he said. “Quite soon. In the next few weeks, in fact. It’s all scheduled.”

  “Scheduled? You’re keeping a schedule of when to reveal your betrayals?”

  “I wasn’t betraying you. I was protecting you.”

  “Shut up!” she said, shocked to hear her voice crack, angry to feel hot tears at the corners of her eyes. “I don’t want to hear any more lies! This was my work, Theodorus. My work.”

  His great bulk shifted, and for a moment, she thought he was going to approach her, reach out to her. But no, he was turning back to the tree.

  “Did you follow the news from Vietnam last year?” he asked.

  She wiped her eyes and didn’t answer. She recognized his tone, his teaching voice. It meant that he was about to tell her what she’d come to learn. Just not in the way she’d want to hear it. Not in a direct way, no, never that.

  “I’m sure you did. They almost—well, I thought they almost had a chance. A joker homeland. A paradise. But the world wouldn’t let it last, not in Vietnam. Not anywhere. It was always a long shot there, there’s been so much hatred and bloodshed over the centuries. The French against the Vietnamese. The Communists against the colonialists. The Catholics against the Buddhists.” He stretched his arm out and out and out, far longer than a nat could. He rested his hand on the tree.

  “The strangler fig. Ficus religiosa. Sacred to the Buddhists, in fact. They believe the Buddha sat beneath one once and meditated. Didn’t I give you a book with some of his teachings?”

  Mathilde shrugged. She didn’t remember. He gave her books all the time.

  “Quotes the whole way through of course, but here’s one of my favorites. ‘No one saves us but ourselves.’ Isn’t that lovely?”

  “It’s terrifying,” Mathilde said. “What about people who can’t feed themselves, much less save themselves? What about people who can’t even walk? Or speak?”

  “Yes. Yes, what about them? And what about people who aren’t allowed to save themselves?”

  For the first time, she realized that one of the things that frightened her about uncovering Theodorus’s hidden program with the launches was its scope. It wasn’t just that he was doing something that affected her. He was doing something that could conceivably—potentially, probably—affect everyone. And she knew how to answer him.

  “Well, I guess you’ll save them, right?”

  And the gleam in his eye and the tremble in his voice were terrible when he said, “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  Within That House Secure

  VI

  IN THE THREE YEARS since she’d learned about Joker Moon—since she’d been co-opted by it, since she’d joined a conspiracy to found a homeland for jokers on another world—Mathilde had traveled to, at last count, forty-four countries. She had been to installations both secret and public on five continents (annoyingly, she’d somehow never made it to Australia, and while Theodorus had interests in Antarctica they weren’t directly related to the Project). Her French, which she had let atrophy over the years, was now once again perfect, which came in handy in the distressing number of places in the wor
ld where the French had once ruled colonial outposts.

  She had been to Russia and China and every major European capital. She had been to all eleven nations traversed by the equator, and a double dozen nations close to the equator, spending enormous amounts of money, buying vast tracts of real estate, making contacts within high-tech industries and research universities.

  She’d even been to this three-mile-long rock in the South Atlantic before, more than once.

  Stepping off the cargo plane—since every passenger jet in Theodorus’s fleet was busy ferrying people to this meeting, she’d hitched a ride with a load of heavy construction equipment—she looked around and idly wondered about the island’s cartographical status. She herself made few gestures toward keeping her activities secret—that was Malachi’s department—but she was well aware that the true purposes of Witherspoon Aerospace’s enormous flurry of activity over the last few years were well obfuscated. So, the island. Did it still appear on any maps?

  It would appear on old maps, of course, but increasingly, maps were digital. It would probably be impossible to alter or destroy the charts in every library, government office, and shipping company in the world, but Theodorus had people working for him who were very adept indeed at altering and destroying digital information.

  There are probably still plenty of old sailors in this part of the world who know all these lonely islands from memory, she thought. Then, And they’re probably all on Malachi’s payroll.

  The cargo plane had taxied to a hangar far from the hub of the compound before its belly had opened up to let her out and the first of several waiting forklifts on. She looked around for transport and spotted an unattended Jeep. She threw her rucksack in the passenger seat and slid behind the wheel and thought about the last time she was in a Jeep. She wondered if Croyd Crenson was still alive, and thought that he probably was.