Frontera
Page 14
The Russian ship, visible only as a shadowy sphere-and-cylinder through the dust, hovered longer than it had to, touching down as gently as a pebble on a river bottom. And why not? Molly thought. They’d been perfecting their soft landings while the US was still dropping their Geminis and Apollos in the ocean—even if some of those landings had been blatant fiascos, like the Voskhod-2 mission where Leonov and Belyayev sat all night in their dead spacecraft, two thousand miles off course, fighting wolves and snow.
As the dust settled, Molly could make out the hideous pale green of the ship’s hull—“landlord green” Blok had once called it—and see where the CCCP arid red rectangle had been clumsily painted out and replaced with the Aeroflot logo. The paint had blistered and flaked so badly in the heat of reentry that most of the lettering was gone.
Kane, beside her, was visibly unsteady. His ragged breathing hissed through the comm channel like a distant waterfall. He should be in sickbay, she thought, but there was no time to do anything for him now.
The hatch of the lander swung open.
Blok and two of the others ran forward to help. Molly watched as the first of the white-suited figures climbed down the ladder, and Blok reached a hand to help. The figure rested its weight on Blok’s shoulder, nodded, and walked away without help.
A second cosmonaut came out of the hatch and started down the ladder, then did something that Molly found odd. The Russian shut the hatch and punched a series of numbers into a ten-key pad in a recessed panel.
Locking it? Molly thought. What were they afraid of, thieves? She didn’t like the implied mistrust and secrecy. Was there some kind of weapon on the ship that they needed to protect?
“Zdravstvuyte, tovarishch—” Blok said as the Russian reached the ground, but his arm was pushed away. The figure straightened and stood on its own; glancing first at the crowd near the airlock, then once again at Blok.
“Hello, Blok,” said a woman’s voice, her English flavored with a sort of dry, European rasp.
“Colonel Mayakenska?” Blok seemed awed, even a little frightened. Molly recognized the name; Mayakenska had been one of the higher-ups in the Institute for Medium Machine Building, the Russian equivalent of NASA, but the Soviets had managed to keep her exact position obscured by disinformation.
“So you haven’t forgotten me.”
“Of course not, how could—”
She waved him silent. “I’m afraid it’s only Mademoiselle Mayakenska now.” She caught up with her fellow cosmonaut, and the two of them walked away from the ship with their heads up, their steps even and nearly in rhythm.
Molly knew the effort it cost them to put on such a show of strength, and it made her uncomfortable. She also didn’t like the fact that Mayakenska insisted on speaking English, an attitude that struck her as both condescending and overly theatrical.
Blok introduced her to Mayakenska, and Mayakenska in turn introduced Valentin, the other crewman. Neither of them offered to shake hands, and Molly contented herself with a formal nod to each of them, a gesture nearly imperceptible outside her RX suit.
“Are you in command, then?” Mayakenska asked, and the choice of words and the tone told her that this was as bad as it could be, that this was where the end truly began.
“My husband is,” she said. A cold lump lay in her stomach; she suddenly hated the inhuman taste of the compressed air she breathed. “If you’ll come inside—”
The airlock door opened behind her and she heard Curtis’s voice. “Okay, Molly, I’ve got it.” He stepped out and stood in front of the Russians, blocking, as if by accident, their way into the dome. “My name is Curtis,” he said. “I’m governor here. Welcome to Frontera Base.”
Kane came back to life. He shifted away from her, legs spread, and through the tinted visor of his helmet she could see his black eyes focus on Curtis.
Christ, she thought, I want away from here. She tried to visualize herself in a sleek ship, headed out toward Titan, Mars shrinking to a point-source in the screens, the stars closing in around her. It was a vision that had eased her before, but now she could no longer believe in it. Three heavy cables were looped over the fins of the ship, dragging it back, and on the ends of the cables were Curtis, Kane, and Mayakenska.
“We have a good deal to talk about,” Mayakenska said. The light was wrong for Molly to see into Curtis’s visor but she could imagine how sexy he would find the Russian’s voice, imagine the slow, predatory smile spreading across his face.
“I’m sure we do,” he said. “Blok will see to whatever you need for the moment—food, a change of clothes, whatever—and we’ll meet a little later at the Center. Blok will show you.”
And that, Molly thought, is what he does so well: strut, posture, and maneuver. I would only have tried to be polite.
Curtis stood aside and let Blok and the two Russians go through the lock first.
“Kane,” Curtis said as the door hissed shut. Molly realized Curtis had switched over to the external speaker on his suit, cutting the Russians out of the circuit. She snapped her own switch to EXT and saw Kane and the three others do the same. “I see you’re up and around.”
The other three, she suddenly realized, were all Curtis’s people.
“What happened to Dian?” Kane said.
“Dian?” Molly said. “Curtis, what’s he talking about?”
“I don’t have the foggiest notion,” Curtis said.
“You killed her,” Kane said. ‘‘You pumped the air out of her house and let her hemorrhage her lungs all over the walls and floor. Because you were afraid she was going to talk to me about something.”
“Oh Jesus,” Molly said. The edges of her helmet seemed to be closing down into a tunnel, as if she were accelerating away at some phenomenal speed.
“Why was that, Curtis? What is it you’re trying to hide?”
“You’re obviously upset,” Curtis said. “Let’s go inside and we’ll get you some help.”
“Curtis.” Molly’s voice sounded distant and faint to her own ears; she still seemed to be falling away from the dome, from Kane, from her husband, even though she could see that she’d hardly moved at all. “Is. Dian. Dead.”
“I doubt it, sweetheart. I don’t think Kane is in any condition to tell what’s real at the moment.”
“Hanai saw it,” Kane said. “She’s one of yours. Takahashi, too. For Christ’s sake, man, this isn’t New York. You can’t just throw the body in some alley and pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Inside,” Curtis said. Molly saw, numbly, that the airlock telltale had flashed green. Curtis was in first, followed by Kane. As soon as she was through the door Molly slapped the mushroom-shaped button to seal them in, isolating Curtis from his henchmen. The gesture was thoughtless, impulsive, but Curtis turned on her in a rage.
“You traitorous little bitch,” he said, or at least that seemed to be the gist of it. He was still patched through EXT and his voice was lost in the roar of compressed air.
Kane pulled his helmet off. The lock was small, less than a meter and a half on a side, and one elbow thumped against the plating of Molly’s suit. He’s crazy, she thought. His eyes were ringed with purple so dark the skin appeared contused, and a wide, white band of sclera showed under his irises.
He shifted nervously from one foot to the other until the inner door opened, and then he shoved past Curtis and ducked through the hatchway. Molly took her own helmet off and followed him, with Curtis right behind her.
The Russians were still getting out of their gear; Blok was handing them oxygen masks and explaining how to use them. Molly began to strip off the clumsy RX suit, her back to the airlock. When she turned around, orange padded cape in hand, she saw Kane standing by the controls, the inner door locked open, the lower half of his body still armored in jointed beige plastic.
“Don’t push it, Kane,” Curtis said. “Shut the door and let the others in.” He hung his suit on the wall and belted on a pair of slacks. Blok, glancing nervousl
y at Kane, hurried the Russians out into the dome.
“Not until I get some answers,” Kane said. Molly suddenly remembered the bundle Kane had hidden in one of the lockers. The thought grew into a bright spot of panic. Could Kane have murdered Dian? Was he going to start shooting now, punching holes through this fragile box of air? She took a small, sideways step toward the locker.
“What am I supposed to tell you?” Curtis said. “We’ve found the lost city of Mars, and we’ve got the Martians in an all-night poker game in a tool shed somewhere? That all those things that look like glaciers up there on Arsia Mons are really single crystal silicon ribbons? What do you want to hear?”
“Just the truth. Everybody’s been lying to me since I got involved in this fucking mission and I’m sick of it!” He threw his helmet aside and Molly saw him wince at the answering pain in his ribs. The helmet bounced off the wall of lockers with a booming crash and buried itself in the rack of suits.
“You stupid little punk,” Curtis said.
Kane moved on him.
Turn around, Molly told herself. Walk away. You don’t want to see this, don’t want to have to deal with any more of this macho bullshit. But she couldn’t make herself go.
Kane’s attack was oriental, his legs bent and center of gravity low, his body twisting and turning as he covered the distance between Curtis and himself in two long strides. Even to Molly’s inexperienced eyes he looked weak, off-balance, and she was surprised when he feinted a spin kick, turned in close, and caught Curtis with a fist under the heart.
Curtis stepped back, hurt and out of breath, but he was ready when Kane came at him again. He reached overhead for the long metal bar of the suit rack, levered himself into the air and drove both legs at Kane’s injured chest, spilling a dozen suits off their hangers.
Kane saw it coming and tried to cover up, succeeded only in getting his own fists and elbows driven into his face and stomach. Curtis stepped away long enough to slam the inner door of the airlock and to make sure the light above it clicked to red. Then he finished Kane with a wide, looping punch that caught him just inside the cheekbone and stretched him across the floor.
Molly had no way of knowing how much more damage had been done to Kane’s ribs. He was alive, and lucky for that much; what had he thought he was going to prove?
“You did kill her, didn’t you?” Molly said to Curtis. “She must have been the leak you were talking about. She told Morgan about the new physics, and so you killed her.”
“Don’t start, Molly.”
“Start? Me, start? Dian was my friend. She was part of the project, she was integral, you asshole. You kill her and then you tell me not to start?”
“This is more trouble than you can handle, Molly. I sincerely advise you to butt out of this.”
“Are you threatening me? Are you threatening me, you son of a bitch? Are you going to kill me next?”
The airlock light flashed green in her peripheral vision and the rest of Curtis’s people came through. One of them went to Kane’s body and dumped him out of the lower half of his suit, leaving him lying on the rough concrete in his black drawstring trousers. A second moved next to Curtis, and a third stayed by the door.
Like little robots, Molly thought. Her hands shook with rage and frustration. It’s out of control, she thought. There’s not a thing I can do to stop it.
“What about this one?” asked the woman standing over Kane.
“Put him in Little Juarez,” Curtis said. “Lock him in and dope him to the gills, I don’t care with what. Something to keep him out of the way until I make up my mind about him.”
Little Juarez, Molly thought. So that’s what he calls it, his little pleasure cabin. How demeaning. Did he tell all his conquests about the nickname? Had he told Lena, that morning?
He crossed the room to stand in front of her, massaging his right hand with his left.
“Don’t touch me,” she said quietly.
“I’m not going to,” Curtis said. “I’m just going to ask you to do what I tell you, just for now. At least until we find out what the Russian position is. Okay? Can you handle that? Because everything is falling apart right now and my hands are full.”
“You know what they want. They want the fucking project, same as Morgan does.”
“And I’m not going to give it to them. Okay? That’s what we both want, it’s what we both know is right. So all you have to do is walk in and sit down at the table with me and listen to what the Russians have to say. Okay?”
“Okay,” Molly said, looking away from the pained sincerity on his face. “Okay.”
NINE
HE’D BEEN THROUGH IT all those last nights in Houston. For nine months he’d locked himself away from the rest of the crew and stared at the possibilities, testing himself against them, the way a suicide would test the bite of the razor on his hands.
But now, now that he had committed himself, Reese was afraid.
Verb had left with the diskette. It had taken her only a few seconds with her eyes closed to tell him that Barnard’s Star would be in optimum position for the run at about that night. Her freakish abilities had begun to frighten him more than they impressed him, provoking some kind of instinctive xenophobia.
“Be there by eight-thirty or so,” she told him, and gave him directions to the cave. Had she sensed his distaste? Did it matter? His sudden desire to hug her was as selfish and guilt-ridden as it was artificial. He suppressed it and nodded instead.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Sure.”
Molly would want him to report back to sickbay; Curtis would be even less happy about his wandering around without a watchdog. And then, like the bolt of a rifle sliding home, came the thought: this is it. These are the last hours I’m going to have with other human beings, maybe the last, period.
I ought to get laid, he thought, anyway. But he recognized the impulse as no more than a galvanic response, the frog’s leg of his sexuality twitching under the applied current of some leftover, obsolete sensibilities.
His second thought was that he needed a drink.
He started back toward the Center, depressed by the uniformity and orderliness of the houses around him. In the first season under the dome, nicknames and hand-painted signs had proliferated: “Tharsis Hilton” for the Center, “South Hell” for the unheated garages, “the Blister” for the dome itself. Now, in spite of the red-and-blue neon “Frontera Bar and Grille” sign outside the north entrance to the Center, Reese sensed that things had changed. Curtis’s regime reflected the man’s personal sterility and lack of humor. Reese had seen the cameras that tracked him as he walked, the sort of obsessive power icons that became venerated when true power was slipping away.
He went in under the glowing sign and turned left into the wardroom. In the tradition of American bars, the lighting was minimal, despite the fact that it was barely after noon. He’d brought his Mars Identification and Credit Authority with him from Earth on a sentimental impulse; the MICA card fit into a slot on the far wall and allowed Reese to select a gimlet from the menu. A sentimental drink, he thought, appropriate to the occasion.
As his eyes adjusted he noticed someone else in the room. “Hello?” he said.
“You’re Reese, aren’t you?” The voice belonged to a young woman, Asian, slim, attractive.
“That’s right.”
“Hanai. Do you want to sit down?” She was clearly upset about something; she was on her third drink, and she still had to steady the glass with both hands.
He took his drink and card and sat down at her table. The room was antiseptic as a hospital automat. He could remember when the walls had been covered with handwritten messages: want ads, poems, kids’ art work. Now, from what he’d seen, people did their drinking at home, sometimes even in the fields outside, pulling their masks just far enough from their faces to accommodate the neck of a bottle or the end of a straw.
“Shouldn’t you be with somebody?” Hanai asked.
Stop it, he told himself. You’re just trying to bail out, to load yourself down with some low-grade sexual karma so you won’t go through the gate.
“Something’s wrong,” he said to her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. Then, as if changing the subject, she said, “The Russian ship is landing. Did you know?”
“Russian ship?”
“The one from Earth. It’s probably already here. I’ll be on duty again tonight because of it, I shouldn’t be drinking.” She made no move to put the glass down.
Already here, Reese thought. Of course. That was why Morgan had left him so little time. It was no vague threat but an actual mission, one that Morgan had known about even then.
“Do you know what they want?” he asked Hanai,
She shook her head. “It’s funny. We went so long, thinking we would never see anybody from Earth again. Now all of a sudden you’re all over the place, and we realize we really didn’t miss you at all. You know? Only now it’s too late.”
Reese downed the gimlet, the sour lime juice burning more than the gin. “Are they taking them to sickbay?” he asked, standing up.
“Sickbay’s full. I don’t know what they’re doing with them.” Her eyes stared down into her glass, telling Reese she didn’t particularly care, either.
He reached across the table and gently touched her hair. She jerked her head away, startled. Reese wanted to console her somehow, but all he could find to say was, “I’m sorry.”
He turned left on his way out, intending to cut through the main dining hall to sickbay. Instead he heard familiar voices from one of the meeting rooms off the hallway. The door was open and he could see Molly and Curtis at the far side of the room, their backs toward him. Across the table from them sat three others: Blok, the senior survivor of the Marsgrad disaster, and another woman and man. The woman saw Reese and stood up.