Luckily this turned out to be the case, and he staggered into a room just in time to see everyone shouting, Zhou ordering everyone to freeze but none of the others able to achieve that status even if they had wanted to, and Bo trying to get at Chan Qi past some local officials, while Qi was trying to slap him in the face but missing. Dhu was shouting to Bo, and Fred was yelling at both of them in English, his face beet red behind a pair of black-rimmed spectacles.
“Everyone stop!” Zhou Bao yelled at the top of his lungs.
For a moment everyone stopped, though all of them but Zhou were teetering this way and that. Zhou had his Taser gun pointed at the ceiling, but it still had the deadly look of any gun, so they were all working to bring themselves to a halt of some sort or another.
“These people are under arrest!” Bo said furiously.
“You don’t have any jurisdiction here,” Zhou told him coldly. “If you try to coerce anyone in my charge I’ll have to shoot you with this, and people shot by Tasers in this gravity have a tendency to flail around and injure themselves, sometimes quite badly. So let’s avoid that and stay still. I’m the police equivalent at this station, so I’ll be taking these two people back into my custody, and I’m ordering you visiting officials to stay here in this room while I sort this out.”
“We need to be there,” Dhu said.
“I need to be there,” Bo said.
“I’ll call you on the intercom after I’ve checked this out with my own superiors down at the Peaks. You hold still right here until then.”
He gestured at Qi and Fred, glanced briefly at Ta Shu. “Get out into the hall.”
They scuttled out as quickly as they could, banging around as if in zero g itself. Zhou aimed his Taser pistol right at Bo as they did so, then slipped out after them. He closed the door and punched the door pad hard enough to throw himself back a bit, apparently locking the door.
“Come with me,” he said grimly, and led them down the hall. As they crashed into each other and the walls after him, he turned and hissed “One at a time!” with a look of disgust at their clumsiness. But even he was bounding down the hall like a drunken kangaroo, his speedy shuffle temporarily lost. The moon was simply not made for human hastiness.
At the end of one long hall he directed them into another room. Doors in the other wall slid open onto a tram car.
“Off you go,” Zhou said. “This is the emergency return train, it will get you down to the pole faster than any other way we have here.”
“But what do we do when we get there?” Qi demanded. “Who will meet us?”
“I don’t know, but it won’t be Bo and Dhu. I’ll call ahead on my private line and tell Inspector Jiang you’re coming. Best for you to get with Inspector Jiang and his local security, and hope for the best after that.”
“What if Jiang is with Bo and Dhu on this?” Ta Shu asked.
Zhou shrugged. “I doubt that will be the case. Let me think about your next step while you get on your way. I’ll talk to you en route and let you know what I’ve set up.”
Qi started to object, but Zhou waved her off. “Later! For now, be quick. The sooner you get to the big base, the more options we’ll have.”
Qi saw the sense in this, and turned and went through the door into the tram. Fred followed, then Ta Shu, and when they were seated and strapped in, the tram jerked forward and off they went.
The tram they were on was floating over a piste laid in as straight and flat a line over the landscape as they had been able to build. On Earth they would have been inside hyperloops. Here the moon gave them a near vacuum to move in, but they had to either hew to a straight line or risk flying off the piste. In a couple of places, where the line had to take an unavoidable swerve, the train slowed to a crawl, but most of the time it floated along at a rocketlike speed that nevertheless included no vibration or noise, so that looking out the windows was like looking at an image on a screen.
Then for a while they skirted the edge of a long drop into the South Pole–Aitken Basin, and could see part of its immensity. Ta Shu found himself so amazed by its size that he was startled out of his focus on his young friends and the general trouble. From rim to floor the drop was thirteen vertical kilometers, meaning about forty-five thousand feet, and for a few minutes they could see that drop for what it was. He was reminded that some impacts were so violent they changed everything, even the axis of the world. This feng shui perception, mixing geology and deep time into a history of everything, overwhelmed him: they were in it, they were part of it even now, or especially now. A bang like this could happen to them.
On they flew, moving at jet speed a centimeter above the ground, over the piste and its euclidean line. In another hour they would reach the Peaks of Eternal Light and be thrown back into their troubles. Qi and Fred were squabbling about this already. How can we make a plan when we don’t know who will be meeting us? Haven’t you ever heard of contingency plans? It was obvious they had spent a lot of time together. Maybe too much time. And Qi was very near term with her pregnancy. Ta Shu watched them bicker, wondered what they had become over their time together.
Eventually Fred pursed his mouth unhappily and stared at the floor. Suddenly he glanced up at Ta Shu. “So you’re back,” he noted.
“Yes.”
“What about your mom?”
“She died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry to hear,” Qi added quickly, giving Ta Shu a shocked look. She had forgotten why he had left Fang Fei’s refuge, he saw, and was surprised now that he didn’t look more changed by what had happened. She had thought he would be visibly shattered. She was young.
“Thank you,” he said to her. “She had a good life.”
“Why are you back?” Qi asked.
“I was trying to help you.” He looked at her and smiled a little. “I’m not sure it’s working.”
She shrugged and looked away. “Thank you for trying.”
“It was Peng Ling who sent me.”
She frowned at that.
Then his wrist vibrated and he looked at his pad. No message, but then the pad’s speaker said, “Zhou here. Listen, the tram you’re on will stop a station short of Eighty-Five Percent. It’s called Worsley Station. Unless there’s some kind of interdiction, it should be the first place your tram stops. You’ll be picked up there by an American rover, and they’ll drive you to that new base of theirs that landed down there a while ago.”
“To the Americans?” Ta Shu said.
“Yes. You need to go there and ask for political asylum for Qi. For Fred it should be just his own country’s ordinary sovereignty. This is your best option. If you continue on to Eighty-Five, you’ll be detained immediately. It looks like Bo and Dhu have more authority up here than I thought they did. Inspector Jiang says he has been overruled, and can’t control the situation. He’s hopping mad.”
Ta Shu thought about it. “Does that mean you’re in trouble too?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got my colleagues there at Eighty-Five, they’ll make my case for me. These people can’t just come up here and do whatever they want. But I don’t know how they took control at Eighty-Five, so I’m not sure what’s going on right now. Could be Red Spear has gotten more people back up here. Best if you get in with the Americans and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll give you a call when we’re there.”
“Good, I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
So when the train stopped at Worsley Station, they got off into a little concrete-walled room and headed for the locks, passing by some strangers who fortunately seemed entirely concerned with their own business. This was a new station to Ta Shu, and he was interested to see that it didn’t have the kind of crowd control evident in the big stations closer to the pole. This one appeared to be too small for that, was maybe even a private station.