by Devin Hanson
The main dome of the habitat was largely open, with life support machinery isolated against one wall. Opposite, a short bar provided a scattering of stools. A collection of entertainment consoles huddled in the center. Min ignored the heads turning to look at him suspiciously and made his way to the bar, releasing the clasp on his helmet as he walked.
“We’re not looking for any trouble around here,” the man behind the counter said with a pointed look at Min’s pistol.
“Neither am I,” Min lied. “I’m on my way east, just stopping by to top my tanks and refresh my scrubbers. A bite to eat wouldn’t go amiss either.”
The man relaxed. “That we can provide. You don’t have the look of a miner about you. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing so far south?”
“I don’t mind,” Min said easily. “So long as you don’t mind me not saying.” He gave a smile, taking the sting from his words.
“You a hunter?” one of the men at the bar stepped off his stool and walked over to loom over Min.
Min was a natural-born Earthman. A long life spent in low gravity had made him taller than he would otherwise have been, but he was still barely over six feet tall on a good day. The miner in front of him was seven foot six, at least. Min eyed the miner and ran a hand through his hair that was damp with sweat. Hair that was bone white, without a trace of pigment.
“Why don’t you sit yourself back down before you get hurt,” Min said quietly. “I ain’t here for you, gweilo.”
The miner held Min’s gaze for the space of a held breath then dropped his eyes. “Fucking wujin,” he muttered.
Min turned slowly, sweeping the room with his gaze. The miners who had been watching him turned back to their drinks and games. Slowly the murmur of conversation picked back up.
The man behind the counter set a bowl of yeast noodles down in front of Min, along with a collection of bottled sauces. “I don’t want violence in my habitat,” he said.
Min slid a credit chip across the counter to the man and mulled over the offered spices before selecting one that promised a garlic and ginger flavor. “I’m not looking for violence. Just my mark.”
“We’re all law-abiding folk here.”
The chopsticks separated with a pop and Min held the man’s eyes for a moment before bending his head to eat. He didn’t dignify the patently false statement with a reply. Ice miners were often criminals, knowing that cluster law enforcers couldn’t be bothered chasing them above ground. But the petty nickel and dime bounties offered for most criminals wouldn’t bring a wujin hunter to the ice fields, and the man knew that as well as Min did.
“What’s your name?” Min finally asked.
“Vito Nataniel.”
Min nodded, forgetting it as soon as the man had finished speaking. “Well. I imagine you want me gone. Which suits me, as I don’t want to be here.” He waited for Vito’s hesitant agreement before continuing. “The mark I’m after is dangerous. Multiple homicides, kidnapping, extortion,” Min ticked off the crimes on his fingers. “The kind of person who would slit every throat here and claim their ice without so much as a blink.”
“Like I said,” Vito said, “There ain’t nobody here like that.”
Min sighed. He held up another bite of noodles. The sauce he had chosen glistened along the strands. Abruptly he lost his appetite and pushed the bowl away. He fumbled inside his suit for a moment before coming out with his tablet.
Vito flinched then cursed softly to himself. Min raised an eyebrow at him and thumbed the tablet on. He spun it around so Vito could see it. “I’m looking for this person.”
Min read the truth in Vito’s eyes before the man flicked his gaze up to meet Min’s gaze. “I don’t…”
“Save it. Where can I find her?”
Vito glanced toward the back, where one of the smaller huts joined to the main habitat, then jerked his eyes back to Min. Sweat was starting to bead on Vito’s forehead.
“Out on the ice. In one of the far tunnels. I’ll give you coordinates.”
Min tapped his tablet with a finger absently, wondering at Vito’s lies. The man was so transparent Min could probably guess his birthday after a few questions. “As you say,” he said calmly, putting the tablet back. “I still need to fuel my buggy and change out my filters before I go.”
“You’re using standard?” Vito turned away from the bar and started rummaging through baskets of recharged filters and coming up with a suitable pair.
Min checked the filters, confirmed the carbon dioxide-adsorbing media had been refreshed and replaced his suit’s nearly spent filters with the new ones. Vito was watching him intently, his dark eyes narrowed.
“What?” Min asked testily.
Vito’s eyes flicking to something behind Min was all the warning Min had. He spun, one hand darting to the pistol on his belt. There were four of them, greasy-haired and long-limbed. They wore suit liners, stained in the arm pits and crotch from long hours of sweating in cheap suits. The gun in Min’s hand gave them a half second of pause, then they lunged forward with long, bounding strides.
Guns in habitats were a bluff, more often than not. Even a shot that struck a man dead center still had a chance of going through the target and ripping open the habitat fabric. Only a man with a death wish actually fired a gun without a suit on. Min had a suit, mostly, but his helmet was sitting on the bar five feet away. Even if it had been in reach, there was no way he could properly suit up before his assailants reached him.
Vito shouted, his words lost in the drum of adrenaline inside Min’s head. While Min lived with a constant, itching death wish, he wasn’t quite ready to die. Min’s pistol came up and the eyes of the assailant nearest him widened in disbelief. Then the gun barked and a storm of monomol fragments ripped his face to tatters with a shrieking howl.
The man tumbled to the floor wailing, his hands clutched about the ruin of his face. The other three saw their companion go down and fear was plain upon their faces. Min felt a surge of admiration tinged with contempt. Charging a man with a monomol gun was tantamount to suicide, but the men were already committed. While the effective range of a monomol round wasn’t much more than ten yards, there was nowhere in the habitat they could run to that would be safe. Surrender was their only sane option, but still they came, with the hope they could overpower Min before he brought them all down.
Min fought the kick of the pistol’s muzzle and dragged it around to the left. The sights lined up with a wide open screaming face and he pulled the trigger, already turning his head to find the next target. A great weight slammed into him from the right and Min went down in a tangle of limbs.
Somehow, he kept hold of the pistol. Min crashed into the bar, knocking the remains of his yeast noodles flying. One of the miners was on top of him, both long-fingered hands knotted together and raised over his head, already swinging down toward Min with crushing force.
Monomol fragments were notoriously poor at penetrating even the moderately tough material of suit liners, but at point-blank range the round came out as a nearly solid slug of metal. Min pulled the trigger and the round tore through the miner’s suit liner and liquefied the man’s chest cavity. The force of the round slumped the man sideways and tangled his legs with Min’s.
Before Min could turn his head to locate the last of his assailants, a heavy boot kicked the gun from his hand and sent it skittering across the floor of the habitat. The last of the attacking miners pulled back his boot again, this time aiming at Min’s skull.
The deadweight of the lung-shot miner pinned Min down and he couldn’t do anything but throw up an arm to partially deflect the blow. The kick numbed his arm from the elbow down. Min kicked the dead man off of him and rolled to his knees just in time to catch another kick across his jaw. Stars burst in his vision, and before he could do anything else, the long arm of the miner wrapped around his throat and pulled tight.
When Min had learned to fight on Earth, his size had been an advantage. Tall for a Ch
inese, at six foot three, he had learned how easy it was to subdue his smaller opponents. After coming to Mars, Min found the tables turned. The low gravity lengthened the natives’ bones and more often than not, Min found himself pitted against men and women more than a foot taller than him.
Though long years on Mars had lowered his muscle mass, Min was still substantially stronger than the natives. Even so, the miner had him in a headlock that he would never be able to break out of.
Min’s vision pulsed black around the edges as the miner’s arm cut off the blood flow to his head. He struggled weakly for a moment and felt his hand brush against one of the chopsticks from his overturned bowl. With the last of his strength, Min grabbed the slim polymer stick and slammed it down on the miner’s knee.
He missed the knee, but the chopstick tore through the suit liner and stabbed deep into the man’s lower leg, scraping along the tibia. The miner threw Min off him with an outraged yell and Min rolled away, coughing and straining for breath. Min’s vision cleared and he staggered to his feet just in time to see to miner lunge at him again.
Instincts drilled into him endlessly on the practice floor made Min drop his shoulder and turn the impetus of the miner’s charge against him. With one hand, Min grabbed the loose liner at the miner’s shoulder and let his own unstable legs collapse. The charging miner bowled him over and Min kicked out as he fell, flipping the miner into the air.
Min rolled to his feet and found the miner lumped upside down against an entertainment console, his neck twisted to one side.
“Freeze, man!”
Min turned slowly, his hands spread to either side. Vito had Min’s pistol aimed at him in shaking hands. The clientele of the habitat had come running from all corners at the first gunshot, and now stood in the background watching with varying degrees of shock on their faces.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Min urged, his voice calm and quiet, if a little rough around the edges from his recent bout of choking.
“Fuck you, I’ve got the gun now. And I said to freeze!”
Min stopped his slow walk forward. “I’m a marshal,” he said. Moving slowly, he reached into his suit and drew out his badge of office, a silver embossed image of Mars. Chinese characters and Spanish script ran around the circumference, giving the motto of the marshals in two languages: Justice through Action.
A susurrus swept through the room and Min nodded at Vito. “Put it down. If you pull that trigger, you’re a dead man.”
Min met Vito’s eyes over the sights of the pistol and he waited, wondering if this was the moment when he would finally die. The tension in the room grew until Min could feel it crackling between them, then Vito let out a choked sob and let the pistol’s muzzle swing down to the floor.
Min closed the distance to Vito and caught the pistol before it slipped all the way from Vito’s hand.
“Alright, I think it’s time you started talking,” Min growled as he holstered his pistol angrily. He felt shaky with excess adrenaline.
Vito turned to walk back behind the bar and stumbled over one of the miners, his boots skidding in the blood that pooled around the corpse. By the time Vito was back to his usual position behind the bar, his face was mottled with green and white.
“I’d say I’m sorry,” Min said, “but I’m not. This could have been avoided if you had been honest with me in the first place.”
“I thought you were after a bounty,” Vito muttered, pouring himself a glass of water with shaking hands. “Didn’t know you were a marshal. You going to arrest anyone?”
Min rolled his shoulder, feeling the beginnings of a bruise on his back from where he had hit the bar. “Why would I arrest someone?” he asked. “Pour me some of that, would you?”
Vito stopped with the glass halfway to his mouth and slid it over to Min before pouring himself another glass. “Isn’t that what marshals do? If I held a gun on a marshal in a cluster, I’d be in irons before I could count to ten.”
“This look like a cluster to you?” Min asked wryly. “If I arrested everyone with a record or poor crisis management reactions, I’d have half the population of the mining camps dragging behind my buggy. And then I’d have to explain why the yearly ice shipment was cut in half.” He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “Like I said before, I’m only interested in the bounty.”
“Didn’t know marshals collected bounties,” Vito said.
“We do the work, we get the reward,” Min shrugged. “But we’re not paid to bounty hunt. My mark killed a marshal after escaping custody and disappeared. A facial scanner got a ping down here a few weeks back, so I was sent to collect. With a body bag if I had to. The reward is just a perk.”
“It’s like that, huh?”
“It is,” Min said. “So I’ll ask you again. You seen my mark?”
Vito let his head sag forward. “Out on the ice. I swear,” he said hurriedly, glancing up to meet Min’s glare. “I’ll send you true. I don’t want any trouble with the marshals.”
“I’m calling it in before I leave,” Min warned. “If I don’t make it back, it will go poorly for you.”
“It’s the right place. I promise.” Vito’s face blanched. “But, uh, I should get you some new CD scrubbers.”
Min’s face darkened.
“Just in case!” Vito said in a rush. “The, uh, old recycled scrubbers sometimes have a shorter life than you might think. I’ll get you a brand new pair! No charge.”
Vito hurried to a storage cabinet and came back with an unopened box of filters. He popped the tape and handed Min a pair of filters still in their factory wrappings. Brand new filters were a luxury most miners couldn’t afford. They recycled their old ones until the element was burned out completely and even then they usually used recycled filters purchased surplus. The new filters were worth several times what Min had paid to have his old ones replaced.
With the new filters installed in his suit, Min felt some of the homicidal rage drain away. Going out to the surface with burned out filters could have been extremely dangerous. At best, he would have been forced to waste huge amounts of oxygen as his suit flushed the used air to keep the buildup of carbon dioxide below fatal levels.
“Any other surprises?” Min asked. “Last chance to come clean.”
Vito shook his head. “Nothing. I swear it.”
“You’re sure my mark is at the coordinates?”
“It’s the registered site,” Vito shrugged helplessly. “They should be correct.”
Min glared, but nodded reluctantly. Less than scrupulous miners would sometimes hijack another claim, even if only for a few hours, and gather up all the loose ice crystals. There was no way to be certain if the mark was there until Min actually went out to the dig site and looked.
“Alright.” Min collected his helmet and secured it into position. His suit automatically started going through a self-diagnosis and he held Vito’s eyes as each system returned green one by one. The last check completed and Min nodded a farewell at Vito. “Thanks for the noodles. And sorry about the bodies.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
Sunday New York Times
April 22nd 2108
EUREKA!
The Helix Rebuild works! Humanity has unlocked the secrets of immortality. In a marvel of genetic extraction, an unfertilized human egg was discovered to hold the key to rejuvenation. The egg has to be an exact genetic match, however. The details beyond that are still classified, but there have been successful human trials running for several years now. Mother’s Day is coming up, gentlemen. There is still time to get your mother the gift that promises eternity.
Min rode his buggy slowly through the knife-edge canyons on the approach to the glacier. From orbit, the polar cap had a clear demarcation. On the ground, nothing could be further from the truth. The gleaming white of the polar cap was really the surface accumulation of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Water ice, the lingering remnant from millions of years ago when Mars had still had water oceans,
was beneath that layer of dry ice. Eons of dust storms and gradual sublimation had mixed in the fine iron oxide dust that was so prevalent on the surface with the water ice.
The result was dozens of yards of mud, frozen rock hard and coated with several feet of dry ice. A miner boring into the glacier to find veins of clear water ice had to tunnel past the mud, and even then the ice was only clean in patches and rifts. Drifts that had been mined for many years gradually grew richer and cleaner until surface pollutants were completely gone. Deeper into the polar regions, clean water ice was closer to the surface, but getting there was prohibitively difficult.
Where Min was riding now, the drifts had been worked for only a few years, and the miners were barely scraping by, year to year. Most of the water they collected was through melting down the mud and filtering the dust out of it. Heating frozen mud from minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit up to a liquid state took a ludicrous amount of energy, most commonly supplied by solar panels.
The drifts Min passed were marked by extensive arrays of solar panels, with fat cables running into airlocks cemented directly into the tunnel openings. The miners worked in shifts. During the short day when the sun was above the horizon, the miners worked with the refining equipment, extracting as much water as they could from the mud while the electricity flowed. After the sun went down, the miners returned to the backbreaking effort of slowly carving at the mud, gathering chips and filings to be melted down once the sun rose again. The miners cut the mud with hand tools, as every watt of energy from the solar panels went into melting free the water.
On a good day, a single miner might chip free enough mud to extract twenty or thirty gallons of water. At the end of the mining season, a miner was lucky to have extracted and purified two thousand gallons of water. At a hundred credits a gallon, that was enough to live frugally through the down season, repair equipment, and hopefully have enough left over to afford a few more solar panels to increase the harvest next season.
