The December Protocol

by Devin Hanson

  Mostly, Min didn’t want to die in some back-alley koshing. If he was going to die, he’d prefer to go out in a blaze of glory.

  Angeline would have to hold on for a few more days. Min wouldn’t do her any good if he died on the way.

  Min boarded the tram an hour after he placed his call. Calling the vehicle a tram always amused Min. Where he had grown up, a tram was a truncated train, pulling its power from overhead lines. The tram that went between Cydonia’s clusters had more in common with a railgun than a train. Superconducting magnets held the tram in fixed levitation, and the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere let the trams reach speeds upwards of two thousand miles an hour.

  He settled into one of the gimbaled seats. The other passengers boarding the tram filed in and strapped themselves into seats around him. A young mother with a squalling baby was last on board and hurried to get herself and her baby situated.

  Min watched her with a sort of hopeless lassitude. The two hour trip to the next cluster was looking to be miserable. Babies never took the acceleration and deceleration well. Since the whole trip would either be speeding up or slowing down, the baby would probably be bawling the whole time.

  A conductor passed through the tram cabin, checking safety straps and making sure there wasn’t anything loose that would end up banging around the cabin. “Tram is departing in five minutes,” he kept repeating in a bored monotone. Min doubted it. The conductor had been in their cabin for longer than a minute and he was still saying the same thing.

  His tablet pinged inside his jacket. With a sigh, Min pulled it out and thumbed it on. Enrique had come through. A dossier on Anton Engel filled the screen and he flipped through it, trying to get a general grasp of who Engel was before settling down to read the fine print.

  Anton had been a low-grade thug-for-hire. He had been picked up a few times in association with mild criminality. A few years in the ice mines seemed to have cemented his career path, and afterward he was seen in the company of more organized crime. His known associates were into illegal narcotics, military-grade surplus, importing embargoed cargoes and kidnapping. Nothing had stuck on him, and then for two years he had fallen off the grid.

  The next time Anton showed up in official records, he had received his first treatment of the Womack Process. That was two years ago. A crook like Anton normally would have been hard-pressed to make payments on his treatments. Desperation would have made him search out bigger game and lack of patience would lead to him making mistakes and getting caught. Min had seen it happen time and again. Prison time usually put the final nail in the coffin for men like Anton. No stable income, no savings, and no way a cluster was going to foot the bill for his treatments. Most of the time, there was no need for the death penalty. After a month in prison had gone by, the guard came by the cell to find the prisoner very, very dead. Problem solved.

  Anton had managed to escape that particular dwindling spiral. Not only was he managing to stay ahead of his treatment payments, he was doing it without any overtly criminal activity. And he managed to have enough liquid assets to buy imported alcohol on top of that.

  A man like Anton didn’t have a particularly wide skill set. He was a criminal by nature and by training. He could work a protection gambit or break someone’s kneecaps, but he lacked the intelligence and motivation to engage in anything long-term. That meant he was acting as someone’s attack dog.

  The more Min thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Anton had seen the girls in the Redstone and had acted on impulse to kidnap them. He might have standing orders to keep an eye out for likely victims, but it was unlikely his employer had him tasked solely with acquisitions.

  Min reached the financial breakdown report and was unsurprised to discover that all credit deposits had been by unregistered chip. There was no financial trail to follow up the chain of command.

  A klaxon sounded and after a moment, Min felt himself pressed gently back into his seat. The seats in the cabin all spun on their gimbals, orienting automatically so the passengers were facing straight ahead. Gradually the pressure grew. The baby started wailing in distress and Min grit his teeth. Who brought their baby on a tram? Honestly.

  After a few minutes, the acceleration eased down to a barely noticeable pressure. The tram had reached its cruising speed. If the tram had been traveling through atmosphere or been built to run on wheels, the vibrations would have been unbearable for passengers. Since the tram was a maglev on Mars, all Min felt was a slight vibration through hard surfaces, barely enough to comment on.

  Idly, Min flipped through the pages of the dossier. A picture caught his eye and he tabbed back to it. The image was of a known associate, a Spanish gweilo by the name of Lucien Talbot. There wasn’t anything remarkable about the man, really. Nothing that would explain why Min’s eye had caught on him. Skinny build, perhaps broader in the shoulder than your average gweilo. Not particularly handsome, though who knew what women saw in men anyway, and Min was no judge of that particular quality in others. The man had bushier eyebrows than average, and was sporting an ill-favored tuft of wiry hair on his chin.

  It wasn’t a memorable face. Min examined the photo for a minute, taking note of any minor defining characteristics that might help him spot the man later.

  Up ahead in the cabin, the baby finally stopped crying and Min glanced up from his tablet. The gimbaled seats were laid out in two rows, two on either side of a central aisle. The spaces between the seats were generous, making sure that each seat was free to spin as needed to face the acceleration or deceleration forces. There wasn’t anything Min could see from his seat but the backs of the seats in front of him and the man seated across the aisle.

  Min glanced that way, and, like a perfect idiot, did a double take. Seated across the aisle from him was the man in the photograph. He had cut his hair, and the ugly facial hair had been shaven, but it was unmistakable. Lucien saw Min recognize him and for a moment, the two of them stared at each other.

  Lucien broke the silence. “Shit.”

  He ripped the safety harness off and sprang from his seat. Min’s hands darted to his harness. By the time he had fought free of the webbing and secured his tablet, Lucien had popped the forward cabin door and had vanished.

  Min ran up the aisle and caught the door to the reinforced accordioned passageway as it was swinging shut. He caught a last glimpse of the woman with her baby, her eyes wide with fear, and then he was through.

  At the speed the tram was traveling at, it had to go in a perfectly straight line. Even a gradual deviation of course would have flung the passengers around inside the cabin like dice shaken in a cup. Fortunately, there was nothing in the Martian geology that prevented the tunnel borers from making a perfectly straight tunnel from cluster to cluster. Still, minute changes in atmosphere, microscopically misaligned magnets and a host of other flaws made the tram vibrate. In the cabins, the whole floor was magnetically suspended and the chairs were designed to absorb what little vibrations made it through.

  There were no such luxuries in the passageway between the trams.

  Cold gripped Min and he gasped for breath as if he had just plunged into a freezing lake. The vibrations from the unsuspended floor of the passageway almost knocked him from his feet. His vision blurred and his teeth rattled together. He staggered and gripped a handrail. Almost instantly his hand went numb to the elbow, but it gave him enough stability to yank the next door open and fall through to the next cabin.

  Shrieks at the forward end of the cabin drew his attention and he saw Lucien struggling with the conductor. Metal flashed and the uniformed man staggered back, clutching his stomach with red blossoming between his fingers.

  Min forced himself to his feet and drew the pistol at his side. The nerve endings in his hand were tingling still from the brief grip on the handrail. Awkwardly, he switched hands and held the gun up left-handed.

  “Freeze, Lucien!”

  A female passenger saw him holding the gun and screamed.
It wasn’t an unreasonable reaction. A bullet punching through the shell of the tram could depressurize the cabin at best. Far more likely, the bullet hole would shred open under the escaping atmosphere, tearing the cabin apart and killing everyone on the tram in an instant. Min still had monomol rounds loaded in the pistol, but the woman didn’t know that.

  Lucien turned and saw the gun. His face went pale and he bolted for the door to the next cabin. Min cursed and ran after him. Left-handed, he wasn’t sure he could hit Lucien at that distance, and even if he did, the monomol round would get mostly absorbed by the man’s clothes.

  Min reached the door and hauled it open. Knowing what to expect this time, Min jumped across the passage to the next door and crashed through it. Instinct more than anything else made Min turn his forward momentum into an awkward tumble to the ground. A poly crate smashed into the wall where his head had been, showering him with bits of shattered poly and printed plastic parts.

  Lucien threw another crate at him and Min rolled to the side to avoid it. The cabin was full of crates of various sizes: cargo being shipped between clusters. The air in the cargo cabin was chilly, several degrees below freezing, but not as shockingly cold as the passageways between the cabins were. Lucien slashed the webbing holding stacks of crates secure and pulled them into the narrow aisle between them, blocking the path.

  Min got to his feet and snapped off a shot. The round went wide and steel shrieked as the powdered round blasted a neat circle of paint clean from the wall. Lucien cried out and ducked away between the stacks of crates.

  “Where do you think you’re going to run to, Lucien?” Min called. He picked his way over the tumble of crates and stood still for a moment, listening. The ever-present rattle and hum of vibration made it impossible to hear anything as subtle as a footstep.

  “They warned me about you,” Lucien called back. “I said we should kill you instead of warning you away, but my employers didn’t want that. They didn’t want the marshals looking for vengeance.” He laughed. “To hell with them. I’m not going to die here.”

  “Who said anything about killing? I’m not interested in you, Lucien. You tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you walk.”

  “Bullshit,” Lucien shot back. “You’re a marshal. Marshals don’t let criminals escape.”

  Min eased forward through the stacks, following the sound of Lucien’s voice. “There’s no percentage in it for me,” he argued. “I’m a wujin, in case you didn’t notice. I’m in this for the money. Bringing you in wouldn’t get me anything.”

  “Doesn’t matter now, I stabbed that idiot conductor. They have my face on camera and the next station will be swarming with police.”

  “So help me out. I’ll bring you out in marshal custody. The locals won’t be able to do a thing about it. Once we’re out of the station, I’ll cut you loose.”

  “Like I believe that.” Lucien’s voice was coming from just around the corner of the next stack of crates. His voice was tight with fear and anger.

  Min stepped forward. He was almost within reach of Lucien. There was a click and the cabin was plunged into darkness. Something heavy slammed into Min and he staggered, barely keeping his balance. The door forward swung open and Lucien was gone.

  “Damn it,” Min growled. He kicked his way free of the crate Lucien had pushed into him and followed the man through the passageway into the next cabin.

  It was a maintenance and emergency cabin.

  Thanks to the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, the amount of tunnel space needed to surround the trams had been cut down to almost nothing, except for a gap above the tram for maintenance vehicles, power lines and such. But exiting a tram via the tunnels required a spacesuit. This cabin had a rack of space suits on one wall, along with various equipment and emergency supplies. In the far corner, an airlock provided access to the roof of the tram. One of the suits was missing from the rack, and Min found Lucien within the airlock, just starting to climb into the suit.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Min cried. “The tram is going over a thousand miles an hour!”

  “What choice do I have?” Lucien demanded.

  “I already gave you a choice! If you go out while the tram’s moving, it’ll be suicide.”

  Lucien ignored him, focusing on getting into the suit. “I started my treatments, Marshal. If I go to jail, I’ll be dead. This way, I at least have a chance.”

  “This isn’t a chance, Lucien. Think of the girls! You helped kidnap them, right? Help me find them and I’ll make sure you get your next treatment. That’s a promise. I’ll pay for it myself.”

  “And after that?” Lucien sneered. “You can’t keep me safe. You think the marshals don’t get their cut of profit from our business? Your own people would gun me down.”

  Min grabbed one of the spare suits and started climbing into it. “Tell me how we can make this work, Lucien. You die out there and I’ve got nothing. If you die, the girls will die.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Lucien finished fastening the chest of his suit and shrugged into the air tank harness. “If I tell you what you want to know, I’m a dead man, Marshal.” He lowered his helmet on and fastened it in place then started cycling the airlock.

  The thump of the vacuum pump drowned out any further conversation. Min watched the gauges swing down and the mercury column rise. The top hatch irised open with a hiss, and Lucien climbed up the ladder and out onto the top of the tram.

  Min waited impatiently as the hatch closed and the chamber re-pressurized. He fit his helmet on and tripped the spacesuit’s radio microphone. “Lucien, you hear me?”

  “Fuck off, Marshal.”

  “Listen, it might seem like it’s too late for you, but it’s not.” Min climbed into the airlock and started the cycle again. Inside the helmet, the thump of the vacuum pump sounded oddly hollow, like it was underwater. “Help me find the girls. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “You don’t seem to understand, Marshal. I don’t want to help you find the girls. That’s the opposite of what I want.”

  The chamber equalized with the outside pressure and the iris opened again. Min climbed up the ladder and stuck his head outside of the tram. No assignment had ever taken him to the top of speeding tram.

  Above him, the tunnel was a smooth arch. The stone walls passed by in a featureless ruddy blur. Lucien’s suit lights made him visible down the tram. He was walking in the middle, crouched over to keep his balance and the to keep the top of his head clear from the tunnel.

  “Lucien, don’t be stupid, man. Come back.”

  “I already told you, Marshal, not going to happen.”

  Min pulled himself the rest of the way out and the airlock shut behind him. Controls bedded into the roof showed the chamber was re-pressurizing once more.

  “God damn it, Lucien. Don’t make me come after you!”

  Lucien paused long enough to turn and give Min an obscene gesture. He reached the end of the tram segment and started casting about, trying to work out a way to cross over to the next segment.

  On top of the tram, the vibrations weren’t as bad as they had been in the passageway, but not by much. The suit Min was wearing helped deaden some of it, but it made his footing treacherous and made the balls of his feet tingle.

  Moving carefully, Min crept out to the center of the roof. Lucien was standing in a half crouch, but Min couldn’t bring himself to stand up. All it would take was one low-hanging wire, or a maintenance robot, or anything, really, and Lucien would die. The tram was moving so fast that there was no way either of them would be able to see the obstacle coming.

  “Look, man, I know about Anton Engel. I know he’s the one that kidnapped the girls. It wasn’t you. How could you be responsible for that?”

  “Shut up, Marshal. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Was it you who was dancing with Angeline? You know how old she is? She’s fourteen, man. Hasn’t even had her first period.”


  “I said shut up!”

  Min grinned. He had touched a nerve that time. He continued his careful crawl up the tram. Lucien was thirty feet ahead of him now, still trying to figure out how to cross over to the next tram segment.

  “The other one, Jasmine. It was Anton dancing with her, right? Pretty thing, but I bet she wouldn’t give you the time of day. Not a gweilo like yourself.”

  Lucien turned around. “The fuck do you know? You know nothing about me.”

  “To be honest with you, I couldn’t give a shit about Jasmine. You can have her. I’m only interested in finding Angeline.” Min was ten feet from Lucien now. Close enough that he could close the distance and tackle him to the ground. If they hadn’t been on top of a tram going well over a thousand miles an hour, he might have tried it. Instead he pulled his pistol from the webbing on his suit and aimed it at Lucien.

  “Ain’t gonna learn shit if you shoot me, Marshal.”

  “These are monomol rounds,” Min explained. “At this distance they’ll punch right through your suit. Probably not hard enough to do lethal damage, but then you’d have to worry about your air supply. Have you ever seen a man exposed to vacuum before?”

  “No, I–”

  “It’s not the lack of air that kills you,” Min said, overriding him. “It’s the cold. Long before you suffocate, your lung tissue freezes. Then, while your brain is still struggling to stay conscious, your eyes solidify. Your vision locks into place and goes blurry as the aqueous humors crystallize. The last thing you’re aware of is your heart thudding in your chest, trying to push blood through arteries slowly turning to slush.”

  “Jesus Christ, man.”

  “And then you die. It takes roughly thirty seconds. You might try and hold your breath, but your body isn’t designed to handle that much internal pressure. You have to let your air out. Then you’ll try and breathe and the dying begins.”