Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

“It’s not ‘too’ anything, dear Miss Khalidov,” he’d told Llyra’s coach. “I welcome the question, especially from one as beautiful and gracious as you happen to be. Since I was just a little boy, you see, I always wanted to see Mars—especially a Martian baseball game. I had been a Diamondbacks fan back in Tucson. Nobody plays baseball in the Moon, I don’t know why. But you know how it is, I’m sure: somehow I never managed to get around to making this particular excursion before now.”

  “Diamondbacks?” Jasmeen blinked. “I have never seen baseball game, even at home on Mars. Is diamondback not some kind of poisonous big snake?”

  The Captain, who’d been listening to the conversation, laughed. “Big snake totem. I was a Colorado Rockies fan, myself, when I was a kid, until the team moved to Juneau and became the Malamutes. I never quite got over that one—baseball on ice. I’m told they have a dome there, built exactly like the one on Pallas and the one they’re building on Ceres.”

  “Is not dome on Pallas, is sky. Rockies. More totemism?” asked Jasmeen, winking at him. “You are not saying mountain range moved to Alaska.”

  “Yes,” he said, enjoying her banter, “I am not saying that.” A uniformed crew member appeared at his elbow with a folded scrap of a note. “Excuse me, ladies, it appears that I have to make a happy announcement.”

  West stood up at the table, resplendent in his white captain’s dinner jacket, and tapped his water goblet with a spoon. “Ladies and gentlemen, while you may not notice it when it happens—in fact I sincerely hope you don’t notice it—I’m told we are just about to initiate Turnover, since we’re now halfway to our destination. From that point on, we will be decelerating until we reach our berthing on Deimos.”

  There was polite applause and chatter. Captains of passenger liners apparently took pride in smooth turnovers. It was a good thing to take pride in, thought Llyra. This one should be even better than the one aboard Beautiful Dreamer what seemed to her like so long ago.

  “Now fill your glasses,” said the Captain, “and make sure we don’t spill—”

  As if on cue, masked, black-clad figures appeared in each of the doorways to the dining room, two at the elevators, one on the spiral stairs to the forward lounge, one at the entrance to the kitchen. The intruders were armed with a variety of bullet and directed energy weapons.

  A young woman strode forward among the tables, submachine gun on her hip, pale hair streaming. She was not masked, but was also wearing black.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Krystal Sweet. I represent Null Delta Em, an organization I’m sure you’ve all heard of. I’ll be taking over from the good Captain for the rest of this voyage, but if you all behave like good little hostages, I’ll be delighted to let him live. I may need him anyway, to drive this big tin can exactly where I want it.”

  She took another step forward. “However, just to convince you that NDE means business—” She shifted to one side, seized a middle-aged man at one of the tables by his collar, and quickly dragged him off his chair toward the center of the room. When he reached inside his jacket for something, she stepped on his arm. Everyone could hear it break.

  Without another word or wasted motion, she shot him through the temple, spraying the people at the tables to her left with blood and brains.

  Some of them screamed until she waved her submachine gun in their direction. “Now don’t you nice folks get all upset,” she told them. “That wasn’t one of your fellow passenger, that was only one of the drunken bums—I mean, so-called ‘Space Marshals’—that this vile corporation has spared absolutely no expense at all to hire for your protection.”

  Stooping slightly, while remaining alert, Krystal went through the dead man’s jacket, extracting a bulky automatic pistol of some kind. “We know that there are three other individuals like this aboard. They will, of course, be turning themselves and their weapons over to us in the next three minutes, or I’ll just have to pick somebody else to kill.”

  Two bulky men stood in different parts of the room, opening their jackets with their left hands to reveal their issued weapons. A woman also stood and held her purse up. Krystal nodded to her people, who disarmed the Space Marshals and shoved them back into their chairs contemptuously.

  “Very nice,” said Krystal. “Now I’m going forward to the flight deck while my friends keep you company. If the good Captain will join me … ?”

  ***

  “You’re from Earth,” the young man said. It was a statement, not a question. His pale blond hair was cut short, in what was once called a “flat-top”. He wore a beautifully tailored dark gray suit, a matching turtleneck, expensive black leather shoes, and tight black leather gloves.

  The young man stood over him. Luegner, sitting, answered, “Yes, why—?”

  “How recently?” asked the young man, folding his arms in front of him.

  Luegner shook his head. “How recently? Why do you … well, I guess—”

  For the first time, the young man showed emotion. His face screwed up in anger. “How recently, you useless parasitic cretin? Answer the question! Answer it now!” He balled up a fist in front of Luegner’s face.

  “Six weeks! Six weeks! What the hell is this all about?” Luegner sat back in the straight-backed chair they had shoved him into. He wasn’t used to being treated this way. Was the young man from some government?

  In the beginning, he had thought he was being arrested, although by whom, he had no idea. All the policemen in the Moon were privately employed, and were required by one of the few laws that existed here to wear uniforms on duty at all times. This was something else, very bad.

  They hadn’t threatened, injured, or even handcuffed him. Four young men had collected him from his hotel room. All of them were dressed exactly the same way and might as well have been brothers—quadruplets. Only one of them had spoken. None of them had shown him a weapon.

  So far.

  He’d been brought, in a big, black, unmarked Frontenac hovercraft, to an empty storefront near an industrial park just off Grissom Drive. The “For Rent” sign in the window had been thick with dusty cobwebs. He’d been taken into the back where four more young gray-clad men, or possibly six, searched him thoroughly—although they hadn’t taken anything from him except the small pocket pistol he was required by his sponsors to carry at all times, probably, he had reasoned, to commit suicide with. He loathed all guns and resented having to carry this one.

  Guns were for minions to carry.

  By turns, the eight or ten young men had fingerprinted him, toeprinted him, and photographed his face and both retinas. His identification—East American, of course—had been minutely examined.

  The young man nodded. “Six weeks. Not too bad. Almost certainly you’ll be able to survive what’s in store for you. You’re going for a long ride, in a private spaceship, accelerating at one full standard gravity.”

  Luegner bit back an impulse to echo his captor. How ironic, that he’d put Krystal Sweet through something like this recently. He hadn’t liked doing it to her. He liked and respected her. He was the only one he knew who didn’t fear her. In a different life, who knew what they might have been together? However, he liked having it done to him even less.

  He was angry. “Do you have any idea who I am?” he asked the young man.

  “Decidedly. You’re the chief executive officer of Null Delta Em, a terrorist, and a murderer. For what it’s worth, we happen to represent the people who pay your salary and tell you what to do. They say that you’re going for a ride—” The young man hitched the sleeve of his gray jacket back to look at his wristwatch. “—in about twenty-three minutes.”

  Luegner sagged. “Can you at least tell me where?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I can,” the young man nodded. “You’re going to rendezvous with the East American Spacelines’ vessel City of Newark, in midflight to Mars. By the time we get there, it will have been taken over by your people—at least in theory. Their recent record isn’t good. As th
is is the most important and spectacular act ever taken by NDE, it was decided that you should be there to claim responsibility.”

  Luegner gulped. “‘Me’?”

  The young man nodded again. “All of us here will be going along to make absolutely sure that everything happens the way it’s supposed to. As I said, their recent record. After their mission is complete, we’ll give you and all your people a ride back home. Take your gun. Let’s go.”

  Luegner examined his pistol to make certain it was still loaded and operational, earning him a small grunt of approval from the young man. He made a cynical bet with himself about him and his people actually being rescued.

  “You’ll lose,” said the young man, as if he could read Luegner’s mind. “You’re already worth considerable to NDE and its sponsors. After this, you and yours will be celebrities, like Carlos the Jackal or Yasser Arafat or Suheiro Gwenji or Henri McNabb, too valuable to friend and foe alike to waste.”

  Luegner could hardly disagree with that. What his people were about to do dwarfed every terrorist act in human history—put together. This time, the identical young men in gray escorted him out with dignity. There seemed to be at least a dozen of them, maybe more. Waiting for them in the street was a pale gray Clinton town car, the notorious American president’s unmistakable profile incised into the hood ornament.

  Two of the young men sat in front, three in back, one of them on a right-hand jumpseat. The seats were comfortable and Luegner had plenty of room. The big gray hovercraft was followed by another just like it, as it made a U-turn and headed straight for the spaceport. Luegner started to ask the young man another question, but received an answer first.

  “You’ve been checked out of your hotel and your belongings packed. Some are in the back and will come with us. The rest are in storage. You’ll be fine for the trip, which won’t last that long. You’ll be required to wear some special clothes once you join your people aboard ship.”

  “Special?”

  Another nod. “So you’ll look like a space pirate or a terrorist or whatever.”

  “Special.” Luegner considered the word, turning it over with his tongue. “No eye-patch or shoulder parrot or anything like that, I trust.”

  The young man kept a solemn face. “No parrot or eyepatch. Here we are.”

  They had arrived, by a steeply descending underground highway, at the big parking garage of the Arthur C. Clark Grand Concourse and the private end of the spaceport. Two of the gray-suited young men took his meager luggage from the back of the first Clinton. All of them—he thought there might even be more than a dozen—entered the concourse and took the first elevator on the left. At the surface, several hundred feet above the concourse, they entered an airlock—the spaceport’s—stepped through it into another airlock—the spaceship’s—and they were suddenly aboard the vessel that would be taking them all halfway to Mars.

  It was more like a small airliner on Earth, Luegner thought, than any spaceship, with a dozen rows of seats behind a closed crew-cabin door. Through the window he could see a section of streamlined delta wing. In the rear, where they had entered, he saw mountains of gear in tough-looking black boxes, piled up and tied down. The logo stenciled on the boxes looked very familiar to anyone born and raised in East America.

  “WRCH?” he demanded. “You guys are a fucking 3DTV camera crew?”

  The young man shrugged. “Did we ever say or imply we were anything else?”

  ***

  He was incredulous. “Don’t tell me that nobody briefed you about my being here. Well, that’s just typical of this damn outfit, isn’t it?”

  Johnnie Crenicichla shook his head ruefully as he stubbed out a cigarette and lit another—Gallatins he’d bought in Armstrong City, at just one tenth of the overtaxed price they went for back in East America. He’d been awakened by pounding on his cabin door and realized at once what was happening. Luckily, Krystal Sweet had decided to join the stateroom-to-stateroom search for passengers who hadn’t come to dinner, so he’d avoided an unpleasant interlude with her underlings, who had no reason to know that he was in overall charge of this operation.

  He’d napped through the initial phases of the hijacking. Now he went to the bathroom, closed the door, used it for the purpose it was built for, then removed the package from behind the medicine cabinet, carefully reclosing the door to the hidden compartment. He didn’t know why he did that, considering the fate that had been planned for this ship. It was just a silly, unwonted tidiness that was a part of his character.

  Opening the door again, he opened the manila envelope, removed the pistol there and tucked it into his waistband, and took out one more item before he threw the envelope away. It was a high capacity memory stick.

  “You need to get this to the command deck as soon as you can,” he told Krystal. “Did anybody bother to tell you why you’ve hijacked this vessel?”

  Krystal shook her head. “No, sir, they didn’t. I saw … well, you probably know who I saw, just two days before departure. He reviewed my plans without much comment, handed me a data packet with names and pictures of everybody I’d be dealing with, told me to be as ruthless as necessary—he didn’t really need to tell me that—and take over the ship immediately before Turnover. I mean the very minute before Turnover.”

  “And so here we are,” Crenicichla nodded. “Surely they told you that this was to be the most spectacular stunt that NDE has ever undertaken?”

  She shook her head. “I sort of gathered that, though.”

  He held out the memory stick. “Let’s take this to the bridge. Give it to your person there, the flight engineer, and have her enter the data on it into the navigational system. We’ve got a three-hour window to get it done right, and we’ve already used up forty-five minutes of that.”

  Krystal’s brow wrinkled. “Sir, if I may—”

  He smiled. “Ordinarily, I’d tell you that you don’t need to know. Once we’ve got things set up here the way we like, we’ll be picked up by another ship, taken off and back to the Moon where we can enjoy the fireworks.”

  “But … ”

  “But, seeing as how you’ve done so much for us, and will again in the future, I think it’s only right to tell you and let you enjoy the anticipation.”

  Krystal grinned widely. She loved it. Then, nodding toward the memory stick, said, “Sir, shouldn’t we be getting that up to the bridge?”

  “Right. Just a moment.” He reached for his off-white silk jacket where he’d draped it over a chair, turned it inside out so that it was now a black windbreaker, and put it on. From a pocket, he extracted a scrap of fabric. It was a black mesh bag, which he pulled over his head.

  “I will need to preserve my anonymity for afterward. In a way, I’m standing in for … well, you probably know who, who should be showing up in a couple of hours. He’ll be making the public statement for the cause.”

  Krystal raised her eyebrows.

  “Let’s go,” he told her. Entering the hallway, they nodded to the guard Krystal had been doing her rounds with. She instructed him—it was Brazos—to carry on. The doorway to the service core was directly across from Crenicichla’s stateroom door, one reason he’d accepted this cabin. They entered the elevator and she started to punch the button for the dining room, which was as high as this car went.

  Supposedly.

  He pushed several buttons, and the system bonged its acceptance of the code. “This,” he told her, “will take us straight to the command deck.” He exhaled. It was very odd, seeing and talking through the mesh bag. “Krystal, the reason this is such an important mission is that we’re going to rearrange the Solar System just a little bit today.”

  “Sir?” Her eyes were wide, and for a moment she looked just like a small child talking to Santa Claus. He hadn’t noticed before, but she wasn’t at all bad looking, even cute, if you could overlook the machinegun.

  “That’s right, Krystal. We’re going to prevent our brave Captain and his valiant crew f
rom turning this great luxurious obscenity of a spaceship around, and keep it accelerating toward Mars, instead.” He held up the memory stick. “It’s all right here. Actually, it’ll be accelerating toward one of the Martian moons, Phobos, and not just aiming at the moon itself, you see, but for a specific spot on that moon.”

  “And … ?”

  “And when this ship hits it, there will be a titanic explosion which will slow the moon in orbit, and drop it, if we’ve done our homework right, into Valles Marineris, the warmest, most oxygen-rich, densely-populated region on all of the formerly Red Planet.

  “Barsoom go boom!”

  Krystal laughed, transparently anxious to hear more. He guessed that she was becoming sexually aroused by the plan as he revealed it. That was exactly why Null Delta Em’s sponsors hired people like her. Briefly, he contemplated taking advantage of the opportunity, but decided it would be too much like taking a scorpion into his bed. The elevator car stopped, but he pressed a button to keep its door from opening.

  “It won’t really matter where it hits, though, because wherever it hits, it will kill every living thing on Mars, including all of that goddamned yellow fungus. Together, we will put an end for all time to human efforts to colonize other worlds because, if a small handful of terrorists—assisted by the United States Government and the United Nations—can destroy a world, it’s clearly much too dangerous to colonize.”

  She laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh, I like it! I like it!”

  He grinned and nodded. “I knew you would.”

  ***

  “I don’t think these stanchions that we repaired can take another tenth of a gee, Commodore.” The voice over the radio was strained, in part because the lungs behind it were experiencing eleven tenths of a gee. “I can feel them wobbling hard where they were reattached to the hull.”

  Shorty had been referring to Wilson as “Commodore” ever since they’d cobbled together this little fleet of eight asteroid hunting vessels and pointed them up- and cross-system to rescue the City of Newark, at as high a rate of acceleration as they—and their owners—could tolerate. Marko had argued that technically it was only a task force, not a fleet, and that Wilson only rated being called “Admiral”.