by Allen Steele
The question appeared to startle her—she blinked and her hands moved nervously—but only a little. ‘Sure,’ she said without looking at him. ‘There’s much down there that I want to see. The new excavation, what has been discovered about the aliens…’
‘And your mentor, Dr. Kawakami…’
‘Yes.’ She nodded ever so slightly. ‘And him, too.’
Nash opened his mouth to speak again, but she closed her eyes once more and tilted her head slightly away. She was clearly uninterested in keeping up her end of the conversation.
Through the windows, Mars slowly hove into view, sharply canted on its side. Nash glimpsed the long, meandering scar of the Valles Marineris and, to its left, the pockmark which was Arsia Mons. Down there, somewhere between the Noctis Labyrinthis and the beginning of the volcanic highlands, was Arsia Station. He looked over at Sasaki again, but her eyes were peacefully closed, her hands still clasped together. He watched her for a moment, waiting for her eyes to open again, but Sasaki didn’t budge.
Nash cast his attention once again on the windows. He was almost certain that Sasaki was hiding something, but she wasn’t going to talk about it…at least, not right now.
Fine. That was okay by him. Nash settled back in his couch for the long ride down. He could wait until they had landed.
Then he would make it his business to pick her brain.
‘Okay, okay,’ Jeri Beauchamp said, steadily watching the blip on the XYZ axes of her computer screen. ‘Now swing it twelve degrees south, two degrees east…’ The blip obediently moved closer to the center of the three-dimensional axis. ‘There you go, Lew, you’re on the dime. Looking good there…’
‘Roger that, TRAFCO,’ Lew Belotti’s fuzzy voice said in her headset. ‘Main chute jettison in five seconds. Mark five…four…three…two…’
Jeri glanced up from her screen, seeking the Sagan through the wraparound windows of the traffic-control cupola. Past the tilted black-glass rows of the solar farm to the south, the lander was rapidly descending on its three main parachutes toward Landing Pad Three. A second later the candy-striped chutes snapped free and floated away on the cool summer wind. At the same moment, its descent engines flared and the landing gear spread outward from the oblate heatshield as the Sagan gradually dropped its last few hundred feet toward the pad. She could already see the scorchmarks on the fiat side of its hull, caused by atmospheric friction during aerobraking.
‘Gonna do it right on the dime and give you nine cents change, honey,’ Lew said. The ground crew were already unreeling the hoses to drain the last of the fuel into the depot tanks.
Jeri smiled to herself: the same old brag. ‘Give it to me in the Mars Hotel after you land, handsome,’ she replied. And he undoubtedly would. Lew liked to bring down nine shiny, newly minted pennies, which he would fish out of his pocket and drop, one by one, into the palm of the traffic controller who guided him through atmospheric entry and landing. A dumb ritual, but considering the unique difficulties of landing on this world, one to which he was entitled. Now, as long as he didn’t get drunk in the bar and try to get into her pants again…
She heard footsteps on the cupola ladder behind her, but she didn’t turn to look until she felt a presence looming over her shoulder. ‘The lander from the Lowell?’ a wheezy voice asked.
Jeri winced. No, Sam, she thought, it’s a scoutship from the Cootie invasion fleet. Better run back downstairs and protect the booze supply…‘That’s it,’ she said evenly. She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Any messages you want to send?’
Sam Leahy paused to massage his unshaven double chin. There was a slight reek of beer on his breath; the station’s general manager, as usual, had been spending his afternoon in the Mars Hotel. ‘Nuuh…’ he started to say, then quickly changed his mind. ‘Yeah. There’s a passenger…uh, Andrew Donaldson. Tell him I want to see him in the bar.’
That figured. Sam rarely did business in his office; he should simply make it official by having his desk lugged down from his office and setting up shop in a corner of the Mars Hotel. ‘Before or after he gets cleaned up?’ she asked.
Another pause. The irony had missed him completely; Sam was obviously thinking over the choice. ‘Yeah…uh, after he takes a shower. But it’s important that he sees me.’ He stepped back, relieving her from his obnoxious breath. ‘Remember to tell him,’ he added. ‘It’s important. I gotta talk to him. Right?’
Jeri nodded. The lander’s rockets were already stirring up red dust from the distant landing pad. ‘Sure thing, Sam. I’ll get the message across to him.’ And if you’re still conscious by the time the guy finds you, I’ll give Lew back his change. If you can even speak coherently, I might consider letting Lew into my pants…
‘Good. Great.’ Leahy gave her a rough slap on the shoulder and turned back around. ‘Okay…uhh, carry on. I’m sure you know what you’re doing.’ He staggered to the ladder. As the Sagan descended the last few feet and settled on the pads of its landing gear, she heard the general manager bang his head on the open hatch, curse, and miss a couple of rungs on the ladder.
Jeri grinned and tapped instructions into her keyboard, signaling the ground crew to begin the engine-safe operations. No, she thought, I’m probably going to bed alone tonight.
For the first several years, Arsia Station had been a row of modules huddled together beneath the Martian soil, similar in appearance to Descartes Station on the Moon. Indeed, the first settlers had referred to themselves as the Mole Men of Mars.
Yet the base’s personnel had grown more quickly than anticipated. The volcanoes in the Tharsis region had attracted geologists and the vast canyons of the Valles Marineris where Shinichi Kawakami earned his Nobel Prize by discovering microfossils of long-dead Martian lifeforms had lured more exobiologists. Most importantly, the proven capability to manufacture propellants from the atmosphere, plus the ability to extract water from the permafrost at the planet’s north pole, had created an unexpected windfall for Skycorp and Uchu-Hiko. Mars was becoming the gateway to the outer solar system. Even before the permanent population of the planet reached fifty, it had become apparent that Arsia Station could not survive by simply adding more prefab modules. Like Descartes Station before it, Arsia Station was eventually forced to go native and build large permanent structures from local resources.
The first ‘condo-style’ habitat had been constructed at Arsia Station in 2031. A fully-enclosed building, shaped roughly like a bottle laid on its side, the condo was three stories tall and 180 feet in length, constructed of locally-kilned brick and glass, with plastic membranes on the inside to preserve atmospheric integrity and two feet of regolith packed on the outside to provide insulation and radiation protection. At one end of the habitat were the main airlocks, salvaged from the old modules; at the opposite end was a huge, multipaned window of thick Martian glass, allowing light to filter into the spacious atrium on the ground floor. Balconies running along the upper two floors were decorated with hanging plants, overlooking the atrium where small trees were already growing in the carefully-nurtured groundsoil.
Although the third-floor bunkhouses were still cramped, with eight persons sharing a single barracks-style room, they were no longer the only places where a person could relax after a long day in the labs or at the fuel-farm outside. For one thing, there was the rec room on the ground floor which doubled as a watering hole. Like its predecessor in the old base before it, the place was known as the Mars Hotel, the best little bar this side of the Moon.
In fact, it was the only little bar this side of the Moon.
August Nash was rumpled and weary from the flight, but he had managed to grab a shower and put a full meal in his stomach by the time he pushed open the door—a discarded hatch from the original module, with Mars Hotel painted in black handscript across it—and walked down the short flight of steps into the rec room. The first thing he noticed, besides bad lighting cast by the chintzy Japanese paper lanterns which had been hung from the low ceiling, we
re a row of emergency lockers behind the homemade pool-table. Along with its site in a subcellar of the habitat, this confirmed his suspicion that the Mars Hotel had originally been designed as a solar-flare shelter.
Otherwise, the place looked like a frontier dive: a mismatched collection of chairs and tables, including a couple of acceleration couches which had been ripped out of old landers; a makeshift billiards table with a scratched felt cover; marsbrick walls covered with old canvas and decorated with everything from faded travel-agency posters to a pockmarked dartboard. An old Gibson guitar hung on tetherhooks on a wall next to a framed publicity photo of the now-legendary Mars Hotel, the band which had been formed by a trio of early Arsia Station personnel ten years ago and which had even managed to release two albums on Earth before the group’s breakup.
Robert Johnson moaned the ‘Travellin’ Riverside Blues from the battered CD deck behind the bar, itself little more than a couple of lengths of discarded spacecraft hullplate laid across two empty cargo crates. A number of people were hanging around the bar—the old-timers could be told apart because of the peculiar reddish sunburn on their faces but not anywhere else—and as Nash approached, Lew Belotti called out to him.
‘Hey! Andy! C’mon over here and have a beer!’
The Lowell’s first officer was bookended by a young woman with close-cropped brown hair and a tall, lanky guy with a beard and a George Dickel baseball cap. Behind them, a heavyset man was slumped over in his chair with his head cradled in his beefy arms, passed-out drunk. He was ignored as Belotti’s friends turned to look at Nash.
Lew was already drunk himself; his voice was slurred as he made the introductions. ‘Andy, the beautiful lady on my right is Jeri, the traffic controller who did such a traf…terrfrafic…perfect job of guiding us to a safe landing this afternoon…’
She smiled noncommittally and swatted away the hand which Lew placed on her thigh. Lew barely noticed. ‘And this,’ he added as he took the same hand and grandly slapped it on the shoulder of the man standing next to him, ‘is W. J. Boggs, the legendary, estimable, too-fuckin’-perfect-for-words captain of the good ship Akron.’
W. J. Boggs stepped around both Jeri and Lew. ‘You’re my new first officer, huh?’ Before Nash could reply, Boggs turned toward a short, bearded man who was sitting on a stool on the other side of the bar, reading a paperback. ‘Nuge! A bottle of Jack and two mugs!’
The bartender looked up, then silently laid down the dogeared copy of The Snows of Kilimanjaro and snagged a bottle of whiskey and a couple of ceramic mugs from the makeshift shelf behind him. ‘I’ll put it on the tab,’ Nuge said as he placed the whisky and the mugs on the bar. ‘Just don’t break the mugs again, okay?’ He then returned to his Hemingway.
‘No sweat. Enjoy your reading.’ Boggs picked up the bottle and the mugs, cradled them under his left arm and grabbed Nash with his free hand. ‘C’mon, boy,’ the airship pilot said as he hauled him toward the door. ‘Let’s blow this lemonade stand and go do some flying talk.’
Nash hesitated, then reluctantly nodded his head. He still had to make contact with Sam Leahy; the message he had received upon entering the habitat was that the station’s general manager would be meeting him in the rec room. Yet this Boggs character wasn’t giving him much of a choice…
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘So long as it’s a quick one.’
They went back up the stairs, out the door and into the atrium. Night had fallen; subdued lights along the condo’s interior balconies lent a twilight feeling to the small trees in the miniature park. The atrium was quiet and completely deserted; the only sounds were the whisper of the air recycler and the soft gurgle of water moving through the nearby aquaculture pond. Through the large window at the opposite end of the condo, the irregular pale-orange glob of Phobos was rising in the black sky.
Boggs found a marsbrick bench not far from the Mars Hotel and placed the mugs on it. ‘Didn’t want to leave, did you?’ he asked as he tilted back his cap and unscrewed the top of the Jack Daniels bottle. ‘Sort of looked like you were searching for someone.’
‘Noticed that, did you?’ Nash smoothed out his shirt and watched as Boggs picked up one of the mugs; apparently they had been produced by the same kiln that had made the bricks for the habitat. ‘Actually, I’m trying to find someone named Sam Leahy…’
‘And, actually, your name ain’t Andrew Donaldson.’ Boggs spoke very quietly as he poured a healthy shot into one of the mugs. ‘Your real name is August Nash, you work for a private-spy firm called Security Associates, and you’ve been hired by Skycorp to go up to Cydonia and find out what the fuck’s the trouble with L’Enfant.’
He held out the half-full mug to Nash. ‘Sam told me all about you. Did I leave out anything?’
Nash ignored the proffered mug. He took a deep breath instead, trying to stop the trembling in his hands. ‘Not much,’ he murmured. ‘How much did Sam tell you, or is this all over the station by now?’
‘Relax and have a drink,’ Boggs insisted. ‘Go on. This stuff’s too valuable to waste.’ Nash politely took the mug from Boggs’ hand; the pilot picked up the other one from the bench. ‘Don’t worry about your cover. Besides Sam, I’m the only one who knows about your assignment. You’re going to have to settle for me.’
Nash swished the liquor around in his mug; from the appearance and odor, he couldn’t tell if it had come from a distillery in Tennessee or a still on Mars. He decided to take a chance and tried a tentative sip. Smooth, very smooth: Tennessee whiskey, no doubt about it. ‘I don’t know about that. I was supposed to talk only to Leahy…’
Boggs chuckled as he poured his own shot and put down the bottle. ‘Well, you can try…’
‘I don’t follow you,’ Nash said, shaking his head.
‘Did you see the fat drunk at the end of the bar?’ Nash nodded his head. ‘That was Sam. He gets shit-faced like this every night. I doubt if he remembers anything except that he was supposed to introduce you and me…fact is, that’s the whole reason why the two of you were supposed to meet in the first place…but since I got the whole lowdown from him three days ago during one of his rare moments of sobriety, we can cut out the middleman.’
‘The station GM is a drunk?’
‘Let’s put it this way. When the infirmary’s blood bank was running low and they asked for donations from the staff, Doc Haldeman turned down Sam because he was afraid of getting a high alcohol content in the serum.’ Boggs grinned as he absently played with his mug. ‘That’s the way it is up here. Work by day, get loaded by night. Sam just overdoes it a little, that’s all.’
Nash was stunned by the revelation: not so much by the fact that Leahy was an alcoholic, but the incredible miscalculation SA had made in placing its trust in such a person to perform as Nash’s principal contact on Mars. On the other hand, if Security Associates had enlisted Leahy through Skycorp…
‘How does he keep his job?’ he asked. ‘Doesn’t Skycorp know?’
Boggs grinned, rolling his eyes. ‘The boys in Huntsville don’t know shit about what really goes on up here…at least, not about Sam’s drinking. He handles himself pretty well when he has to call the front office, and no one here wants to blow the whistle on him, cause this way everyone here gets away with murder on company time. That’s why the company doesn’t can him.’ He shook his head. ‘But he’s a good old boy. He ain’t going to tell anyone else about what you’re doing.’
Nash slowly nodded his head. Boggs’ story seemed credible, and it went far to explain how SA had established contact with a drunk. His people in Washington were good at discovering pertinent background information, but they weren’t precognitive. If Skycorp didn’t know about Leahy’s drinking problem and believed that the general manager was trustworthy, then that erroneous information would have been forwarded to Security Associates, and Halprin, acting in good faith on the information supplied by SA’s client, would have asked that Leahy be recruited as Nash’s liaison at Arsia Station.
It was not a good situation—Nash didn’t like the fact that his security had been compromised—but the damage was done and nothing could remedy it now, short of assassinating Leahy. The mission itself had not been dealt a fatal blow. All Nash could hope was that Boggs was correct in his assertion that Leahy wouldn’t spill the beans to anyone else at Arsia Station.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Where do we go from here?’
Boggs rocked back the whiskey shot in one gulp, hissed between his teeth, and put the mug down on the bench. ‘Looky,’ he said softly, ‘here’s what I know. I’m supposed to get you up to Cydonia and back again. You’re supposed to be Andrew Donaldson, my new right-seater…’
Boggs stopped, squinting askance at Nash. ‘By the way, do you know anything about LTAs, or is that just another part of the put-on?’
Nash shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. No put-on. I was a co-pilot on a cargo blimp in the Gulf for two years…’
‘No shit? Anti-sub duty during the second war?’
‘No. I was stationed in Bahrain, but I missed Number Two.’
‘Good for you. I was flying the Macon out of Kuwait during Two. Almost got my ass shot off by a motherfuckin’ Jordanian MIG.’ Boggs grimaced a little. ‘Damn. You’re probably all right, but I wish Skycorp would send me a permanent co-pilot. Since Katsu bought the farm I’ve hardly been able to handle the Akron by myself.’ Boggs impulsively picked up the whiskey bottle again. ‘Hell. Poor fuckin’ Katsu…’
This time he didn’t bother with the mug; he slugged it straight from the bottle. Nash had already been briefed about the demise of the Edgar Rice Burroughs a year ago, when the blimp had been demolished by a dust storm while en route back from a geological survey of Olympus Mons. Katsuhiko Shimoda had been piloting the ship; both he and his sole passenger, a British astrogeologist, had been killed in the crash. Hell of a note, as Boggs might say; Shimoda was supposed to have assumed command of the new Mars airship, the Akron, which was then being built at Arsia Station. Boggs had been scheduled to return to Earth, but when the Burroughs went down, he elected to sign another contract with Skycorp to pilot the new airship in his late friend’s place.
