by Allen Steele
‘Anyway…’ Boggs recapped the bottle and put it back on the bench. ‘We lift off early tomorrow morning. If everything goes well, we’ll get there sometime early on Sunday. It’s mainly a resupply sortie…food, medical supplies, shit like that…but we’ve got a humongous crate that was just dropped from the Lowell that needs to be unloaded and checked out.’
That raised Nash’s attention. ‘A big crate? What’s in it?’
Boggs shook his head. ‘Not a clue. Something for the science team, that’s all I know. Anyway, it’ll help give you a little time to look around. Weather permitting, that means we’ll get out of there by Tuesday morning at the latest. I usually pick up a nice headwind on the way back, so we’ll do okay for the return trip…but we may be cutting it close, depending on the latest nowcast.’
‘Nowcast? What’s that mean?’
Boggs looked at him askance. ‘Didn’t they tell you anything about this place? Marsat II is the low-orbit weather satellite.’ He twirled his forefinger in a narrow circle. ‘Once each half-hour it completes an orbit and sends Arsia real-time pictures of the global weather conditions…a nowcast, as opposed to a forecast. Forecasts don’t do us a hell of a lot of good down here.’
Nash sipped his whiskey. ‘Why not?’
‘Because the climate of this friggin’ planet is too unstable, that’s why. Things change too fast for us to do anything but fly by the seat of our pants. The best we can go by is nowcasts.’ Boggs jabbed a finger at him. ‘But I can tell you this. It may be cozy summer down here near the equator, but up in the northern latitudes it’s coming into winter, and that means it’s dust storm season. Cydonia is right at the western edge of the Acidalia Planitia, and some king-hell bastards tend to kick up there, just like that…’
He snapped his fingers. ‘The Akron’s pretty sturdy, but a hundred-knot duststorm will rip the envelope like cheesecloth, and I’ll be fucked if I’m going to let happen to me what happened to Katsu. If I say we go, we go…and I don’t care if you haven’t done your business with L’Enfant yet.’
‘Hmm.’ Nash looked away, gazing at the window. Phobos and Deimos had already risen out of sight; it was now pitch-black outside. ‘What do you think my business with L’Enfant is?’
Now it was Boggs’ turn to become reticent. He followed Nash’s gaze to the window, speaking more softly now. ‘I dunno. Sam told me that you were just supposed to gather covert info for a report back to Skycorp, that’s all.’ He hesitated. ‘But if it involves somehow…y’know, terminating his command, then I’m all for it. The motherfucker’s running a bottle short of a six-pack, y’know what I mean?’
‘And that bothers you?’ Nash asked. Boggs looked at him sharply. ‘I mean, you’re down here now. There’s no way he can get to you even if…’
‘Hey hey hey,’ Boggs interrupted angrily. ‘I used to fly the Burroughs out of Cydonia, pal! I’ve still got friends up there!’
He took a deep breath, visibly forcing himself to calm down. ‘Look, maybe I’m stuck here because of a moral obligation to fulfill Katsu’s contract, but those guys…I mean, they stayed because they took on a job and they mean to finish it. It’s no secret that Shin-ichi can’t return to Earth because his ticker couldn’t take the stress, but he could have come back to Arsia and taken over as senior scientist. And as for Paul and Tamara…shit, either one of them could go back home and get any fat university job they wanted, no problem. But they want to get to the bottom of this Cootie business, and they’ve risked their asses to do just that. I’m goddamn proud of ’em.’
Once again he reached for the Jack Daniels bottle. ‘But Terry L’Enfant…that’s one scary person, and so are the flatheads he’s got with him. Two months ago I was up there on a supply run. We only had the Akron half-unloaded when I got a nowcast report about a big dust storm developing in Amazonis. That’s a long way off, sure, but I didn’t want to take chances, so I told Shin-ichi that I was going to get out of there now, leave the area and come back to drop the rest of the supplies when I was sure that everything was copacetic.’
Boggs opened the whiskey bottle, but didn’t drink from it. ‘That was fine with Shin-ichi. He understood…but one of the goon squad overhears this and he tells L’Enfant, and the next thing I know L’Enfant’s in the control cab, ordering me not to lift off without his permission. I get pissed off and tell him that nobody tells me how to run my ship…’
He imitated a pistol with his left hand and leveled it straight at Nash’s forehead. ‘And then L’Enfant pulls a gun on me. Points it right at my skull and tells me that if I don’t follow his instructions, he’ll plaster my brains all over the seat. Those words, exactly.’
Boggs dropped his left hand and raised the bottle in his right. ‘That’s a dangerous son of a bitch.’
Two torpedoes streaking through moonlit water…
The memory came, uninvited and obscene, to Nash’s mind. ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ he whispered to himself.
Boggs halted in mid-sip. He gulped the whiskey in his mouth and peered at Nash. ‘You know something about him?’
Nash shook himself out of his reverie. ‘No,’ he lied. ‘Nothing that isn’t part of the public record.’
Before the airship pilot could ask anything more, Nash took a step away from the bench. ‘Thanks for the drink, but it’s time for me to hit the sack…maybe you should, too.’
‘Yeah. Maybe so. I’m bursting the twelve-hours-between-bottle-and-throttle rule as it is.’ Boggs put the top back on the Jack Daniels and screwed it on tightly, then bent to pick up the mugs. ‘Just one more thing, Augie…’
‘August. Nobody calls me Augie…and from here on, I would prefer it if you called me Andy Donaldson. Okay?’
‘Sorry.’ Boggs grinned at him. ‘I don’t like it when anyone calls me Waylon, either. Except maybe…’ He stopped to belch into his fist. ‘What I wanted to ask is, what’s Miho doing back here? On Mars, I mean.’
That was a good question: Nash had almost forgotten about her. She had disappeared shortly after the lander’s touchdown; although she was also staying overnight in the condo, he had not seen her since their arrival. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Why don’t you ask her yourself?’
Boggs looked down at the bottle in his hands and shook his head. ‘Naaw…that wouldn’t be a good idea.’ His voice was thickened, either from the liquor or with emotion, or both. ‘We used to get along but…well, it’s personal.’
‘Sure. Okay.’ Nash gave Boggs a slap on the arm as he walked away, heading for the stairwell to the condo’s upper levels. ‘See you in the morning, fella. Stop drinking and get some sleep.’
‘At oh-seven hundred. We copy.’ Boggs sounded like his mind was elsewhere; Nash looked over his shoulder to see the pilot carrying the near-empty bottle and mugs back to the Mars Hotel. He hoped that Boggs wouldn’t spend the night in there. Nash was qualified to fly an airship, all right—but not on Mars, and certainly not something as unholy large as the Akron. If he had to take over the left seat because the pilot was too wobbly to…
As he looked back around, he caught the briefest glimpse of an elongated shadow, cast by an overhead source of light, flitting across his path.
Nash quickly looked up; for an instant he saw a form darting across the third-floor balcony. His first impulse was to dash to the stairs, then he heard a bunkhouse door open and shut.
He relaxed. It was much too late now, and he couldn’t tell which door had been used. Someone had been eavesdropping on his conversation with W. J. Boggs; that much was certain, and he had a strong suspicion whom it had been.
‘Goodnight, Dr. Sasaki,’ he murmured.
11. The Flight of the Akron
THE TUNNEL HAD been bored straight through the wall of a large impact crater on the north-western periphery of Arsia Station. The tunnel was narrow, its low ceiling lined with electric lamps; it vaguely resembled the gallery of a coal mine. As he walked through it, Nash could feel a vibration through the soles of his skinsuit boots.
There was a faint metallic clanking, conveyed even through the thin atmosphere, which managed to penetrate his helmet, but it was not until he reached the end of the tunnel that he discovered the source of the sound.
The airship hangar had been built inside the crater. The floor was paved with marsbricks on which had been painted a large white circle; high above, floodlights positioned around the rim illuminated the vast area. As Nash stepped through the hatch, he saw that the aluminum roof of the crater was slowly being accordioned back in two louvered sections: this was what was causing the metronomic clanking noise. As the slatted roof parted, the floodlights automatically switched off as bright morning sunlight washed into the hangar. This, though, was not what instantly grabbed his attention, causing him to reflexively suck in his breath.
The USS Akron didn’t look much like its namesake dirigible, which had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off the New Jersey coast in 1933, but it was almost as huge. Over five hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide at its stern, the new Akron was a sleek silver wedge, held aloft just above the hangar floor by the hydrogen gas still being pumped into its internal cells by the ground crew.
A long, spoiler-like rudder rose above and across the stern; at the tapered bow, above and to either side of the bulge of the gondola, were the long canards of its forward elevators. The top one-third of the skin was lined with photovoltaic cells which shone dull-black in the sunlight. Near the bottom of the airship, just behind the gondola, were the small windows of its internal passenger compartment. On the underside of the hull, just behind the passenger compartment, the cargo bay doors were open, while workmen moved in and out of a maintenance hatch beneath the stern. Mounted on each side of the enormous vessel were two swivel-mounted Pratt & Whitney turbofans, dormant for the time being. The ship’s name and its registration number, MA-102A, were painted across the midsection.
Unlike the original Akron, which had been a true dirigible, the Martian airship was a semi-rigid hybrid, combining features of blimps, dirigibles and airplanes. It had a graphite-polymer internal skeleton which had been transported from Earth as collapsed rings and unfolded during construction in the crater-hangar; the outer skin was composed of layers of Mylar and Kevlar. The passenger compartment was modular, contained within the envelope and suspended by cables from the internal skeleton. Since hydrogen was readily available on Mars, but in the carbon-dioxide atmosphere didn’t have its flammable properties which had doomed the Hindenburg a century earlier, it was used as the lifting property; the airship’s delta-like ‘flying wing’ shape lent it greater stability and payload loft than its smaller predecessor, the ovoid Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Nash felt something bump against his calves. ‘Excuse me,’ Miho Sasaki said through his headset as she swung her aluminum case around him. Nash had forgotten that he was blocking the tunnel entrance; he began to mumble an apology and move aside, but Sasaki had already stepped around him and was walking across the hangar floor to the airship. She didn’t seem at all impressed with the giant airship. On the other hand, she had been almost completely uncommunicative during their brief ride from the habitat to the hangar. Perhaps she had something else on her mind today—or maybe she simply didn’t want to talk to him.
He hefted his own case as he heard Boggs’ disembodied voice come over the comlink from the airship: ‘Let’s move it along there, folks. Wind’s beginning to pick up at ground level and I want to get out of here before it gets too hairy.’
‘Coming right along, chief,’ Nash said, understanding what Boggs meant. Most airship accidents occur in the hangar, when wind-shear can catch the envelope and bang it against the doors during launch or landing. Although the crater made a perfect natural hangar for the Akron, protecting it from micrometeorites and dust storms between flights, making a vertical ascent could be a tricky business if the windsock was running high. He began to follow Sasaki across the hangar floor.
Once beneath the massive shadow of the airship, though, he paused near the open cargo bay. When he had exited from the condo’s main airlock twenty minutes ago, he had glimpsed a large payload container in the bed of another rover as it was hauled out to the hangar; serial numbers on the side of the container told him it had come from the Lowell’s cargo lander.
The container was here, but its aluminum sides had now been collapsed and packing materials were strewn across the bricks. A couple of cargo grunts were climbing over and around a massive, lumpish machine, hauling and attaching cables from the bay wrench over their heads. The machine itself was almost invisible within swatches of fiberglass padding stenciled with Japanese characters; all it needed was a bright red ribbon, a bow and a big card reading Do Not Open Till Xmas. One of the grunts carefully climbed off the front of the thing, looked upward into the cargo bay and gave a quick thumbs-up; the cables went taut as the wrench was engaged, and the strange device was ponderously lifted from the floor.
‘C’mon, Andy,’ Boggs said impatiently. ‘Miho’s holding the door open and we don’t have time for dicking around.’
‘Sorry. Coming right now.’ Nash walked to the ladder leading to the passenger compartment and climbed up into the airlock. Sasaki was waiting just inside; when he entered, she touched the keypad control which folded the ladder, then slammed the hatch shut and spun the lockwheel counter-clockwise to dog it.
‘It’ll be a few minutes,’ she said as she tapped codes into the keypad to begin the pressurization cycles. ‘I expect Waylon can manage by himself.’
‘I guess he can.’ The fact of the matter was that Nash was beginning to feel more like a passenger than a co-pilot. The airship’s avionics were largely computer-controlled, so his alleged role as first officer was academic.
The airlock was small and cramped; with both of them in there, it was like sharing a walk-in closet. Besides the exit hatch to the crew compartment, auxiliary hatches led into the cargo bay and, through the ceiling, into the airship’s envelope. Although he was standing right in front of her, Miho avoided his gaze and steadily watched the digital indicator above the keypad.
Nash let a minute go by, then cleared his throat. ‘Did you sleep well last night?’
‘Quite well, thank you.’ She continued to watch the indicator. He didn’t say anything; finally she turned her face toward him. ‘And you?’
‘I’m a little hung over. W. J. and I shared a bottle of whiskey last night, so…’ He raised his hand and waved it back and forth. Sasaki smiled a little and looked at the panel again. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘you know about that already.’
Her eyes darted back to him. ‘Pardon me?’ she said.
Nash raised three fingers, then touched the appropriate digit on his skinsuit’s wristpad, switching to another comlink channel. Sasaki hesitated, then complied; they were now on a private channel. ‘You know that we were sharing a drink in the atrium,’ he went on, ‘because you were eavesdropping from the third-floor balcony.’
She immediately opened her mouth. ‘No, don’t bother to deny it,’ he added quickly. ‘I spotted you…but not before you heard everything that was discussed. I suppose.’
The astrophysicist glared at him and didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘So you caught me, Mr Nash…’ she began.
‘Damn straight.’ It was pointless to tell her that he had been bluffing; the fact that she had used his real name was confirmation enough. ‘So why don’t we end this charade and you tell me why you’re here?’
Sasaki thought it over for a few seconds. ‘All right,’ she replied at last. ‘Not now, though. Once we’re underway and we’re alone together, we can talk.’
‘Fair enough. At least we’ve got that part settled.’ The dust was almost gone now. Nash glanced at the indicator panel and saw that the LED bar was creeping closer to the green line; he clapped his hands a couple of times and noticed that the sound wasn’t quite as muffled. The pressurization cycle was nearly complete. ‘Switch back to One,’ he said as he reset the comlink to its original channel.
&nbs
p; Boggs’ voice came over the comlink at once. ‘Hey, where did you guys go?’
‘Over to another channel,’ Nash said. ‘I wanted to tell Miho a dirty joke.’
‘Won’t work, buddy. I’ve told her all my best ones and she wouldn’t laugh or anything.’ Nash noticed that Miho blushed when he said that. ‘As soon as you two get out of there, come straight to the flight deck and get yourselves strapped in. Don’t even bother to take off your suits first. The wind’s still rising and I’m getting itchy.’
‘We copy,’ Nash said. At that instant the airlock buzzed; the panel lights flashed green. Nash and Sasaki unlatched their helmets and removed them, storing them in lockers along with their gloves. Miho pulled off her Snoopy helmet and shook out her hair, then undogged the hatch to the passenger section and shoved it open.
The passenger compartment was about the size of a mobile home. A narrow passageway brought them to the gangway leading down to the gondola; Nash caught brief glimpses of the bunks, the galley, the wardroom and the miniature laboratory before Miho led him down into the flight deck. Boggs was sitting in the forward left seat, a headset clamped over his trademark George Dickel cap; he barely looked up as Nash squeezed past him and plopped into the co-pilot’s seat on the right, while Sasaki took the passenger seat behind Boggs. ‘Took you long enough,’ he grumbled. ‘I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have to come back there with a bucket of cold water.’
‘Waylon…’ Miho began.
‘Sorry, kiddo. Don’t mind me. I’m always an asshole before I fly.’ Boggs carelessly dropped the clipboard he had been holding onto the floor. ‘Listen, Nash…shit, I mean Andy…’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ Nash found the straps and buckled them around his waist and shoulders. ‘That’s what we were getting straight back there.’ He glanced over his shoulder at Sasaki. ‘Right, Miho?’
