Tindal glanced behind him. The boy and the girl were awake, or almost: the waifs were sleepy and bewildered and frightened. Also sober, judging from his ability to walk and her ability to ignore the trash already littering her carpet.
“Are those minors?” Rolfe shouted. “Are you fucking crazy? You want to get me sent to prison?”
Tindal, still kneeling, said, “I can explain.”
The Rolfes swept past him and screamed at the siblings, “Get the hell out of my house! Both of you!” The kids, shocked, didn’t move. A Rolfe seized the girl’s arm, and she yelped in pain.
“HEY!” Tindal said, and scrambled to his feet. He pushed through two of the Rolfes and yanked at the shoulder of the one who’d grabbed the girl. “Don’t touch her! Or him!” He placed his body in front of the kids. “They’ve had a really rough day.”
“You brought them into my house?”
“That depends,” Tindal said. “Can you lure someone accidentally? Or does ‘lure’ imply an intent to—”
“Get them out,” Rolfe said. “Now.”
Tindal turned to the boy and girl. They looked at him with wide eyes. “Children?” he said, with as much dignity as he could muster. “Come with me.”
He put his arms around their shoulders and walked with them to the front door. The pack of Rolfes followed behind, barking the whole way.
On the porch, Tindal turned to the Rolfes and said, “Can I just say again how glad I am that you’re all okay?”
“And stay the fuck out!” They slammed the door, but it bounced open again. That door was always trouble. The Rolfes were forced to close it slowly.
Tindal stood on the lawn, feeling. . . what was the word? Hungry. He’d forgotten to eat again. The funeral party—now a resurrection party, after the stoned Tindal had been rolled away—resumed at even greater volume.
“We’ll be going now,” the girl said.
“Are you going to call our folks again?” the boy asked. This was the first indication that he remembered anything from his life as a micro human.
“Are you kidding?” Tindal said. “They’re the worst parents in the world.”
“They beat you up,” the girl said, studying his face.
“I get the feeling they do that a lot,” Tindal said. “Look, you can’t go back to them. You’ll stay with me till you find a place. No arguments. End of story.”
The boy raised his eyebrows. “You’re kinda homeless, too.”
“Who, me? Rolfe will forgive me. He always does. We just need to let him cool off. He’ll love having you.”
The siblings exchanged a skeptical look. The boy started to say something but was interrupted by a single Capitan storming out of the house. “What did I miss? Is everybody okay?”
“We’re going to get something to eat,” Tindal said.
“Oh,” El Cap said. “Kebab?”
The four of them walked through the nighttime streets under the light of twin moons, following a white bird that guided them to the second-best döner kebab in the city. I should really ask the children their names, Tindal thought. Then the food arrived, and the thought evaporated in a haze of steam and spice.
NUMBER NINE MOON
Alex Irvine
ALEX IRVINE (alexirvine.blogspot.com) is the author of A Scattering of Jades, One King, One Soldier, The Narrows and Buyout, as well as licensed work in the DC, Dungeons & Dragons, Foundation, Independence Day, Marvel, and Supernatural universes among others. His short fiction has appeared in most of the major magazines, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s, and in many anthologies, and has been collected in Rossetti Song, Unintended Consequences, and Pictures from an Expedition. He lives in a 160-year-old house in Maine where there is not a level floor to be found, with four kids, two dogs, one bird, and one snake.
THEY CAME IN low over the abandoned colony near the eastern rim of Hellas Basin, deciding which landing spot gave them the best shot at hitting all the potential motherlodes in the least time. The Lift was just about done, and everything on this side of Mars was emptied out. The only people left were at the original colony site in the caldera of Pavonis Mons, and they would be gone inside twenty-four hours. Steuby, Bridget, and Marco figured they had twelve of those hours to work, leaving enough time to zip back to Pavonis Mons and pay for their passage back in-system on the freighter that was currently docked at the top of the Pavonis space elevator.
“Quick visit,” Marco said to no one in particular. “We’re just stopping by. Quick trip. Trips end. People go home. That’s what we’re doing, boys and girls. About to go home, live out our happy lives.”
Steuby really wished Marco would shut up.
“That’s it right there,” Bridget said. She pointed at a landing pad on the edge of the settlement. “Close to the garage, greenhouse, that’s a lab complex...” “Yup,” Marco said. “I like it.”
He swung the lander in an arc over the settlement, bringing it back toward the pad. Nineteen years of work, people devoting their lives to establishing a human foothold on Mars, and now it was up in smoke because Earth was pulling the plug. It was sad, the way people were withdrawing. Steuby always wanted to think of human civilization like it was an eagle, but maybe it was more like a turtle. Now it was pulling its head in. Someday maybe it would start peering out again, but all this stuff on Mars would be junk by then. Everything would have to start over.
Or humanity would stay on Earth, and in a hundred years no one living would have ever set foot on Mars or the Moon or an asteroid.
“Shame,” Bridget said. “All that work for nothing.”
“I hate quitters,” Marco said.
Steuby didn’t mind quitters. He kind of admired people who knew when to quit. Maybe that was a function of age. He was older than both Bridget and Marco by a good twenty years. The older you got, the less interested you were in fighting battles you knew you couldn’t win.
But to be agreeable, he said, “Me, too.”
“They’re not quitting,” Bridget pointed out. “Earth quit on them.”
“Then I hate Earth,” Marco said. “Just kidding. That’s where I’ll end up, when I’m old.”
Nobody knew they were there, since what they were doing was technically illegal. The sun was going down, washing the landscape in that weird Martian blue dusk that made Steuby think he’d had a stroke or something every time he saw it.
“Time to see what the Lift left,” Marco said, for maybe the hundredth time since they’d taken off from PM. Steuby was ready to kill him.
Their collective guess was that the Lift had left all kinds of useful things. People always did when they had to get out in a hurry. In the thirty days since the Mid-System Planning Authority announced it was ending logistical support for all human activity beyond the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, everyone on Mars had started lining up to get off-planet and back under the MSPA umbrella. Even the asteroid miners, as antisocial and hardy a group as had existed since Vinland, were pulling back. Things on Earth were bad—refugee crises, regional wars over water and oil and room to breathe. When things on Earth got bad, everyone not on Earth was on their own. That wasn’t a big deal for the Moon settlements, which were more or less self-sufficient. Much different story for Mars.
“Are we sure nobody’s here?” Steuby wondered out loud. It would be kind of a drag to get arrested in the middle of a planet-wide evacuation.
“I listened to the MSPA comm all night,” Marco said. “Last people out of here were on their way to Pavonis before midnight.”
Since the easiest way off-planet was the space elevator at Pavonis Mons, that’s where the remaining colonists were, hiding out in the caldera until it was their turn to go up. The Hellas Basin settlement, over which they were now circling, was completely deserted. It was newer than PM, so the pickings would probably be better here anyway. Steuby looked out the window. Mars looked different around here. The PM caldera felt like it was already halfway to space because it was so high and yo
u could see so far from the rim, when the storms let you go out on the rim. The Hellas Basin settlement, built just a couple of years ago to take advantage of a huge water supply locked in glaciers on the basin’s eastern slope, was about as far from Pavonis Mons as you could get both geographically and environmentally. Practically antipodal. Where Pavonis was high, dry, and cold, Hellas was low, waterrich, and comparatively warm. Stormy during the summers, when the planet neared perihelion.
Which was now. There were dust devils everywhere, the atmosphere in the area was completely scrambled by magnetic auroras, PM was sucking itself up the space elevator as fast as it could get there, and here were Steuby, Marco, and Bridget thousands of kicks away at HB exploring. Well, prospecting. Okay, looting.
“We’re just here to plunder the mysteries, Ma’am,” Marco said to an imaginary cop, even though the auroras meant they couldn’t talk to any authorities whether they wanted to or not. He put the lander into its final descent and ninety seconds later they were parked on the surface of Mars. There was a sharp crack from below as the ship touched down.
“Nice going,” Steuby said. “You broke the pad.”
Marco shrugged. “Who’s gonna know? You find me a concrete slab on Mars that doesn’t have a crack in it. Steuby, what was it, ten years since we were here before?”
Steuby nodded. “Give or take.” He and Marco had worked a pipeline project on the lower slopes of Pavonis. Then he’d gone back in-system. He preferred the Moon. Real Martians wanted to get away from Earth. Steuby preferred to keep the Earth close by in case he needed it. “Bridget, you’ve been here before, right?”
“I built some of the solar arrays on the edge of the Pavonis caldera,” she said. “Long time ago. But this is my first time coming out to Hellas. And last, looks like.”
They suited up and popped the hatch. Bridget went first, Steuby right behind her, and Marco appeared in the hatchway a minute later, after doing a quick post-flight check on the lander’s engines. “Good morning, Barsoom!” he sang out.
Marco was three steps down the ladder when they all heard a grinding rumble from under the ground. Steuby felt the pad shift and scrambled backward. The lander started to tip as the concrete pad cracked and collapsed into a sinkhole that opened up right at Steuby’s feet. Marco lost his balance and grabbed at the ladder railing. The sinkhole kept opening up and the lander kept tipping. “Marco!” Bridget shouted. “Jump!”
He tried, but he couldn’t get his feet under him and instead he slipped, pitching off the ladder and falling into the sinkhole as the lander tipped right over on top of him. The whole scene unfolded in the strange slow motion of falling objects in Martian gravity, dreamlike and all the more frightening because even slowed down, the lander tipped too quickly for Marco to get out of the way. He disappeared beneath it as its hull scraped along the broken concrete slabs.
Before it had completely come to rest, Steuby and Bridget were clambering around the edge of the sinkhole, where large pieces of the concrete pad angled under the toppled lander. Steuby spotted him first, face down and not moving. He slid into the dust-filled space underneath the bulk of the lander, Bridget right next to him. Together they grabbed Marco’s legs and tried to drag him out, but he was caught on something. They could pivot him around but not pull him free. “Marco,” Bridget said. “Talk to me.”
The dust started to clear and Steuby saw why Marco wasn’t answering.
The ladder railing had broken off and part of it impaled Marco just inside his right shoulder blade. Blood welled up around the hole in his suit and ran out from under his body down the tilted concrete slab. Now Marco turned his head toward them. Dust covered his faceplate. He was moving his left arm and trying to talk, but his comm was out. His voice was a thin hum and they couldn’t understand what he was saying. A minute later it didn’t matter anymore because he was dead.
“Marco,” Steuby said. He paused, feeling like he ought to say something but not sure what. After a while he added, “Hope it didn’t hurt too much when we pulled on you. We were trying to help.”
Bridget had been sitting silently since Marco stopped moving. Now she stood up. “Don’t talk to him, Jesus, he’s dead! Don’t talk to him!”
Steuby didn’t say anything.
All he could figure was that there had been some kind of gas pocket under the landing pad, frozen hydrates or something. They’d sublimated away gradually from the sporadic heat of a hundred or a thousand landings, creating a soft spot, and when Marco set down their lander, that last little bit of heat had weakened the pad. Crack, tip, disaster.
“What are we going to do?” Bridget asked in a calmer tone. It was a reasonable question to which Steuby had no good answer. He looked around. They were at the edge of a deserted settlement on Mars. The only other people on Mars were thousands of kilometers away, and had neither the resources nor the inclination to help, was Steuby’s guess.
He shrugged. “Probably we’re going to die.”
“Okay,” she said. “But let’s say we didn’t want to die. What would we do then?”
COMPARED TO THE Moon, everything on Mars was easy. It had water, it had lots of usable minerals that were easy to get to, synthesizing fuels was no problem, solar power was efficient because the thin atmosphere compensated for the distance to the Sun. . . as colonizing projects went, it was a piece of cake. In theory.
In reality, Mars was very good at killing people. Steuby looked at the horizon. The sun was coming up. If he and Bridget couldn’t figure something out real soon, Mars would probably add two more people to its tally. Steuby wasn’t ready to be a statistic. Marco, well, Marco already was.
Now the question wasn’t what the Lift had left, but whether they were going to be able to lift themselves or be left behind for good.
“We’ll see,” Steuby said.
Bridget looked up. “See what?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re talking to Marco.”
“No, I’m not,” Steuby lied.
“Here’s a question, since you’re thinking about him anyway. What should we do with him?”
“What do you mean, what should we do? It’s not like we can strap him to the roof.”
She let it go. They started walking toward the main cluster of buildings and domes that made up the Hellas Basin settlement.
PHOBOS WAS RISING, big and bright. Sometimes sunlight hit Phobos a certain way and the big impact crater on its planet-facing side caught the shadows just right, and for an hour or so there was a giant number 9 in the Martian sky. Steuby wasn’t superstitious, but when he saw that, he understood how people got that way.
Number Nine Moon was his favorite thing about Mars. He hoped, if he was going to die in the next few days—and due to recent developments, that seemed more than likely—he would die looking at it.
From behind him Bridget said, “Steuby. Stop looking at the moon.” Marco was the one who had pointed out Number Nine Moon to him, when they’d been on Mars before. “I knew him for a long time, Bridget,” Steuby said. “Just give me a minute.”
“We don’t really have any extra minutes.”
This was true. Steuby climbed up out of the sinkhole. “Come on, then,” he said.
“Where?”
“We can’t walk back to PM,” Steuby said. “Can’t drive. So we’re going to have to fly.”
“Fly what?”
Steuby didn’t want to tell her what he was thinking until he had a little more than moonshine to go on. “Let’s head to the garage over there. I’ll show you.”
THEY SEALED THE garage doors after they went inside. It was warm. Condensation appeared on their faceplates. “Hey,” Steuby said. “There’s still air in here.”
He popped his faceplate and smelled dirt and plants. A passive oxygen system in the garage circulated air from a nearby greenhouse. The plants hadn’t had time to freeze and die yet.
With the dirty faceplate off, he could see better in the dim interior. He found a light switch an
d flicked it on, just in case. “Hey, lights too.”
Now for the real test. Along one wall of the garage were a series of spigots and vents, spaced out over underground tanks. Steuby walked along them, saying silent prayers to the gods of chemistry that one of the spigots would be tagged with a particular series of letters.
He stopped at the fourth and pointed out the letters. “MMH,” Bridget read. “Monomethylhydrazine, right?”
“Yup,” Steuby said. “Also known as jackpot. They must have made it down here for impulse thrusters. Landers would need to tank up on it before they took off again. You know what this means?”
“That we have a whole lot of a fuel that doesn’t work in our ship, which is crashed anyway.”
“No, it means we have half of a hypergolic fuel combination designed to work in engines just exactly like the one built into that rocket out there.” Steuby pointed toward the garage’s bank of south-facing windows. Bridget followed the direction of his finger.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “That thing is a toy.”
“Au contraire, Mademoiselle,” Steuby said. “I’ve seen those fly.”
WHEN HE’D GOTTEN out of the construction business after Walter Navarro’s death and spent his next years fleecing tourists, Steuby had briefly worked on an amusement park project. A woman named Veronica Liu wanted to create an homage to classic visions of the Moon from the days before the Space Age. Lots of pointy rockets and gleaming domes. She’d built it over the course of a year, with rides specifically designed for the Moon’s gravity, and then at the opening ceremony she had put on a big show of landing a fleet of rockets specifically designed to recall the covers of pulp magazines from the 1940s. They were pointy, finned, gleaming—and when the amusement park went under five years after Liu built it, they were sold off to other concerns. One of them was still on the Moon as far as Steuby knew, because she hadn’t been able to sell it for a price that made the deal worth doing.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 20
