by Paul Preuss
He pulled himself effortlessly through the cabin to the airlock aft and checked its panel lights. “Pressure’s fine, Mr. Noble. I’m opening up.”
“About time,” came the answering voice on the comm speaker. “I catch you in the head again?”
“Things to do forward, sir.” The pilot spun the wheel and pulled the hatch open. He floated back toward the nose of the plane as Noble emerged from the airlock. Noble sealed the airlock and followed the pilot toward the flight deck.
Noble slipped off the jacket of his dark pin-striped suit and secured it in the locker opposite the head. As the pilot strapped himself into the left seat, Noble climbed into the right. Noble was a square-built man with a sandy crewcut, his handsome face made rugged by wrinkles he’d acquired in two decades of drilling and construction on Mars.
“Did the meeting go well, sir?” The pilot, without prompting, was already running the prelaunch check.
“Yes, the laser drills and the truck parts will be offloaded today and come down to us on tomorrow’s freight shuttle. The textiles and organics will have to go bonded through customs. Should be three days or so.”
“That’s not crowding the launch window?”
“No, it’s not. It’s precision timing. Rupert assures me Doradus will be loaded and cleared for launch on schedule.”
“Well, sir, no problem then.”
“No problem.” Noble rearranged his silk tie under the harness. “By the way, the Space Board investigator is here. Quick trip.”
“I saw the cutter starside as we came in.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Should I be?”
“She’s famous. Getting to be their star. Let’s see”—he ticked off the examples on his fingers—“solved the Star Queen case. Got Forster and Merck off Venus. Saved Farside Base.” Noble raised an eyebrow. “Maybe the Martian plaque will be next.”
The look on the pilot’s face was curiously mixed: part pleasure, part something else. “Ellen Troy?”
“Right first time.”
The pilot nodded and resumed his flight check. “If you’re all set for launch, sir, I’ll notify traffic control.”
4
The gossamer Martian atmosphere extends much farther into space than does the air near gravid Earth; the wind began to whistle over the wings of the Mars Cricket soon after the shuttle left Mars Station, falling planetward. It would not stop even when the shuttle rolled to a halt on the ground, for on Mars the wind is eternal.
After what seemed a too-short trip the shuttle’s tires walloped fused sand and the craft slid unimpeded across the desert floor. Sparta bent her head to peer out the tiny oval window for a first close-up peek at the landscape of Mars.
Nearby, it was an astonishing blur.
Spaceplanes and shuttles land hot on Mars. Supersonic aircraft must be wedge shaped, and even with swing-wings forward they stall easily in the thin atmosphere, despite the low gravity. So runways are narrow lines across the red sands, thirty kilometers long and aligned with the prevailing winds, with ranks of barrier nets across their ends.
Farther from the blurred runway Sparta could resolve a plain of shifting dunes stretching to the base of distant bluffs. The banded bluffs were steep and high and everywhere in shadow, except to the east, where only their tops were in sunlight; their line stretched across the horizon, glowing vibrant gold at their ragged crests, deepening to royal purple in the open shadows below. At this longitude evening was approaching, and the twilight sky was a peculiar shade of burnt orange in which pale stars were already twinkling.
Minutes passed, until at last the shuttle perceptibly slowed its headlong rush, finally braking to a smooth stop well before it needed a barrier, letting its pointed snout droop toward the ground. Its wings, carbon black when cool, still glowed orange in the Martian twilight.
A ground tractor fetched the shuttle from the runway and towed it slowly toward a distant cluster of low buildings. The freshening breeze blew wisps of pink sand across the taxiway. Except for blue runway lights and the distant green gleam of the passenger terminal, there was no hint of life in the dusty expanse. Then Sparta caught sight of figures moving across the sand, people wearing brown pressure suits, hunched against the wind. She had no idea what their business was, but in their postures she read the cold, and she shivered.
Inside the terminal the air was warm. She stepped lightly from the docking tube; she weighed no more than forty pounds, and here she was strong enough to lift a desk or jump all the way across the little terminal building, which was no bigger than an ordinary magneplane station on Earth.
The building was oddly charming: it was a long barrel vault of green glass, improbably arched, its interior surface cast in intricately slick and watery designs, its streamlined outer surface polished by the wind. Iron-rich green glass was a favored building material on Mars, and low gravity permitted virtuoso feats of architecture. Unlike brick, which needs water for its manufacture (much less cement, which needs quantities of fossil sea creatures as well), glass requires only sand and solar energy. Even a little thickness of glass screened the ubiquitous ultraviolet radiation that impinged on the Martian surface. Thus an entire Martian style had arisen, an oddly light and delicate style for a frontier culture.
Sparta did not linger to admire the terminal building’s miniature glass cathedral. She stayed just long enough to watch Blake and his big, boisterous new friend Rostov walk off in the direction of the shuttleport hive. They’d climbed aboard the Mars Cricket showing every sign of intoxication; while the Russian was belting out a soldier’s colorful drinking song, Blake had been imitating a balalaika—or so his thrummy-drumm-drumm noises were intended, as he’d loudly announced to the passengers.
Most unlike Blake. He wasn’t a drinking man.
Shortly after she’d spotted them at the Nevski Garden, datalink access had identified Rostov and provided her with his resume. Yevgeny Rostov was a high-level operative in the Interplanetary Socialist Workers Party, currently the business manager of the Pipeline Workers Guild, Mars local 776. Sparta wondered how Blake had managed to make such an interesting connection in so short a time.
Unless Rostov, not Blake, had made the connection…
Given that Blake’s cover had made him out to be virtually indigent, the shuttleport hive was the only place for him. Sparta, traveling expenses paid, had a reservation at the Mars Interplanetary Hotel. She grinned. Too bad for Blake, but he was the one who’d wanted to work underground.
Among the two dozen shuttle passengers were a few businessmen and engineers, but most were gaudily coiffed and coutured tourists of the type who could afford the money and time required for a grand tour of the planets. Sparta followed the pack past the exchange desk to the luggage chutes. “Direct transportation to Mars Interplanetary Hotel! Premier accommodations on Mars! Visit Phoenix Lounge! Best view of spectacular natural wonders and entertainment nightly…!”
A robot trolley squatted in the mouth of the main corridor, a jolly pink light revolving on the mast above its open seats, its voicer squeaking: “Visit Ophir Room! Lavish gourmet fare! Swim in largest expanse of open water on Mars! Only three thousand dollars per night, per person, double occupancy! World Express and major bank slivers accepted! Limited number of rooms available to late registrants…” by which the trolley meant that the hotel wasn’t full.
The trolley repeated its spiel in Russian, Japanese, and Arabic while fumbling tourists climbed aboard. Sparta was in no hurry to arrive at the hotel. She stood by watching as the loaded robot vehicle trundled off down the slanting corridor on its rubber tires. She shouldered her duffle bag and began walking slowly along the underground corridor.
She went through two pressure locks and arrived at a curving slab of dark glass in the wall. Overhead, the shuttleport runway ended in a cliff. The corridor through which she was walking had brought her through a short tunnel to the side of that cliff—and what she saw through the clear glass of the vista point was so
beautiful it brought tears to her eyes.
What she saw was the standard holocard picture of Labyrinth City, set in a tiny corner of the Labyrinth. Like any famous view, the local residents took it for granted and, in fairness, anyone no matter how aesthetically responsive would sooner or later have filed the view with the familiar—that was human nature. But at this moment it was new to Sparta.
She wiped her eyes, angry at the stab of emotion that left her feeling vulnerable. Why does a person cry, confronted with unexpected beauty? Because sudden beauty is a reminder of what we believe we have lost, whether or not we ever really had it. At least we had—before our lives got too far down the line—the potential. Here Sparta was presented with a glimpse of paradise, a perfect world that once was or might have been, but now never would be.
Overhead, Phobos was moving against the stars as slowly as if in a processional. That close dark moon was no wider than a fourth the width of Earth’s moon seen from Earth, but for all its inherent blackness it was a beacon in the Martian sky. And even at its slow pace Phobos was a hustler, orbiting Mars once every seven and a half hours, rising twice each day in the west and setting in the east.
Beneath Phobos the Labyrinth’s great mesas stood up steeply out of canyons so deep their bottoms were lost in shadow. On the far western rimrock, beyond a thousand baroque spires, a dust storm raged; spikes of lightning stabbed out of its rolling black clouds.
Natural spectacle was not the only thing that had arrested Sparta. Against the shoulder of the nearest mesa a frozen torrent of softly glowing green glass spilled toward the canyon’s gathering shadows: Labyrinth City itself. At the head of the glass cascade were the principal buildings—the Town Hall, the local Council of Worlds executive building, the sprawling Mars Interplanetary Hotel—wind sheltered by a soaring arch of sandstone that would have swallowed all the Anasazi cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. Below the great stone arch, arranged in precipitous terraces, were the town’s shops and houses, trailing off somewhere below in hydroponic farms and livestock barns. Bottommost, glowing brighter than the town above it, was the sewage processing plant.
Sparta lingered long enough to match the sight of the Labyrinth and the city to the maps she had stored in her memory, and then turned away from the vista point and started the curving walk to the center of town.
Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyrinth of Night, was a huge, chaotic patch of badlands—only a fraction of which was visible from any vista point—carved out millions of years ago by the catastrophic melting of subsurface permafrost. Before explorers had landed on the surface of Mars it wasn’t known whether the heat needed to form the Labyrinth had been generated by the impact of a giant meteorite, by a vast volcanic outburst, or by some other mechanism. Whatever had melted the ice, the resulting torrents had flowed northward and eastward in flash floods as great as any in the history of the solar system, into the rift valley of the Valles Marineris, where they had helped sculpt the fantastic cliffs and hanging valleys of the biggest canyon on any of the known worlds—four times deeper than North America’s Grand Canyon, longer than North America is wide.
When the first explorers reached the Labyrinth, they confirmed that it had formed not as the result of an instantaneous event but over tens of thousands of years—instantaneous by geological standards, perhaps, but not in terms of human life. Mars was still geologically active; deep down, and occasionally at its surface, the planet’s volcanic fires still burned. Vulcanism was more common on Mars than 20th century planetologists had suspected. The first active volcano on Mars was sighted within a year of the establishment of a permanent observation base on Phobos.
The Labyrinth’s volcanic heyday was over, and today it was stabler than other regions of the planet. The cliffs were still rich in water ice, which here and there lay exposed in layers. The site included some of Mars’s most spectacular scenery and was only five degrees south of its equator, which made shuttle landings and takeoffs convenient and fuel conservative. Even the temperature was balmy—for Mars. Throughout its short history Labyrinth City had grown simultaneously as a scientific and administrative base and as a tourist attraction.
A fifteen-minute walk brought Sparta through the municipal tubes to the grandiose lobby of the Mars Interplanetary Hotel.
Sparta’s only luggage was the carefully packed duffle bag that rested lightly on her shoulder. Her instinct was to resist the bellgirl who reached for it as she approached the desk, but the social awareness in which she’d been trained, although she’d never felt it a part of her nature, reminded her that the Mars Interplanetary wasn’t exactly a youth hostel. She surrendered the duffle without resistance.
She had not been at the desk half a minute when a man approached; disguising her wariness, she turned calmly toward him as he came too close, pushing into her personal space. His blond hair was cut very short and he had skin of the peculiar burnt-orange color that comes from addiction to a tanning machine. His transparent eyebrows were lifted in a smile over his watery blue eyes, and all his yellow teeth were exposed. Sparta noted the wide gap between his upper incisors. He needed work.
He leaned even closer. “You are Inspector Troy?”
She nodded. Sparta needed no heightened perception to smell the rademas heavy on his breath. It was a common addictive stimulant.
“Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Wolfgang Prott, the manager of our Mars Interplanetary Hotel here.” Prott was a tall man, wearing a shiny suit of some silklike fabric—not real, which would have been worth a fortune—a suit that was expensive enough to border on the flashy. “Please call me Wolfy, everyone does, and it would be odd if you did not.” He held out his right hand.
His W’s were V’s, and as she took his moist hand she asked, mocking his thick Swiss-German accent, “Did you say Volfy? Or Wolfy?”
“Volfy or Volfy, it’s all the same to me,” he replied, resolutely cheerful.
Sparta wondered why she’d been rude. She was not habitually sarcastic, not the sort to dislike people at a glance.
“I am here to extend my personal and most hearty welcome,” Prott continued, pushing on. “May I present you, as a distinguished guest, with this brochure explaining the particular luxurious advantages of our establishment?” He released her hand and at the same moment thrust a folder of press releases and publicity holos into it. “And I hope you will now join me in our lovely Phoenix Lounge so that we may enjoy drinks on the house and listen to the enchanting Kathy at the keyboards.”
“Thank you but no, Mr. Prott,” she said firmly. The enchanting Kathy? The man talked like a recorded advertisement, like the hotel’s robot trolley. She realized that she was responding to more than one layer of phoniness in Prott—some layers were deliberate; others seemed compulsive, perhaps psychotic. “I will contact you later to arrange an appointment.”
He seemed unfazed by her rejection. “I understand, you are tired from your trip, you have many important business matters to attend to”—making all the polite excuses for her that she had not bothered to make for herself—“and this is not the most proper time, but soon, and meanwhile be assured that our entire most efficient and friendly staff is at your disposal, and now you will excuse me, I regret that my own pressing business calls me away.” With that rush of words he retreated, smiling fixedly, calling out one final, “What a pleasure to meet you!” as he disappeared into the echoing depths of the hotel lobby.
Sparta turned back to the desk clerk. The clerk—who doubtless had signaled her arrival to his boss—returned her gaze without the slightest suggestion of humor.
Her hotel room was discreetly lit and cool, featuring polished glass and slabs of picture sandstone. Glass, lava, petrified dust: the bounty of Mars…
She fumbled with a bundle of the local paper and put some of it into the discreetly upturned palm of the bellgirl, who promptly left.
The message diode on the bedside phonelink was blinking redly. She addressed the link verbally as she stripped off her uniform jack
et. “Message-board, this is Ellen Troy. You have a message for me?”
“Just a moment…” The voice was that of a human clerk, not a robot. “Yes, Inspector Troy. Would you prefer a direct feed?”
“No. Read it, please.” Why not? The staff and who knows who else had doubtless read it already.
“Dr. Khalid Sayeed of the Mars Terraforming Project called to ask if you would allow him to take you to lunch tomorrow at the Ophir Room. He will meet you at noon, if that is convenient for you. If not, his commlink access is…”
“Never mind.” She knew Sayeed’s commlink number. “Thank you,” she said and keyed off. She went to the window and pulled back the drapes. Rather than the wild and austere beauty of the Labyrinth, she was looking down into a stone atrium, a forest of leggy potted palms and spidery ficus trees and, as advertised, the largest open expanse of water on Mars, the hotel’s Olympic-sized swimming pool. The “lavish gourmet fare” of the Ophir Room was evidently served at poolside.
She studied her reflection in the room’s window. Interesting. First Wolfgang Prott and now Khalid Sayeed. Neither of them knew, or should know, who Ellen Troy was, other than a Space Board inspector.
As manager of the hotel, Prott at least had an excuse—but why would Khalid put himself forward? Would Khalid be coming boldly forward to extend a greeting to the detective who’d been sent from Earth to determine his role, if any, in the disappearance of the Martian plaque and the murders of two men?
Or did Khalid know that Ellen Troy’s name had once been Linda? No one alive knew that, except Blake—and some few others among the prophetae of the Free Spirit.
The spaceport hive was what hives are, a stack of steel honeycomb compartments, each outfitted with a hard bed, enough shelf space to fold your clothes, and an overhead videoplate you could watch while lying on your back. Blake had no intention of spending time there. After he said goodbye to Yevgeny he started prowling.
