Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  “Hey, asshole, I didn’t volunteer to be in anybody’s goddamned army. I was coerced, if you’ll remember, and you all just assumed I was going along. But I had as much right to leave here as you had to stay.”

  “You were making restitution for an act of attempted piracy,” Wilson said. “But never mind that, you’re right, you weren’t in any army. None of that is important now. How did you end up working for NDE?”

  Fatty took a huge bite of a Danish, an enormous gulp of heavily sugared coffee, swallowed, and sighed. “I checked the security recorder. The last two survivors—I didn’t know it at the time—had come down here to board their escape vehicle. He was carrying her, and she looked to be in pretty bad shape.”

  “So you did what?”

  “Hey, I tried to do my duty and apprehend them—I sent them a text message ordering them to come back.”

  That statement brought sounds of disbelief from his listeners, along with several loud, obscene comments calling his veracity into doubt.

  Wilson held up a hand. “An encrypted text message. So what happened?”

  “He offered me money—a whole lot of money—if I let them go.”

  “And even more if you would sabotage the liner behind them?”

  Pharch held his chin up. “So what if he did? It was one side or another in a war. I had a chance to choose which side I’d be on, is all.”

  “Who’s ‘he’?”

  “I don’t know. A very neat, tidy kind of guy, from the recordings, dark, wearing a white suit—or what had been a white suit, anyway. I don’t know who he was. She was a platinum blond with a bad head wound and a ruined eye.”

  Wilson nodded. “Krystal Sweet. What happened then?”

  “He e-mailed me the code for Pallatian warehouse certificates for five hundred ounces of gold, and said there’d be another five hundred waiting for me when he heard that the charges had gone off. I had to supply my own explosives.”

  “So you traded the lives of three hundred innocent people, lives you had no conceivable right to trade, for five hundred measly ounces of gold and the possibly empty promise of five hundred more? What was the idea? Wasn’t this spaceship headed for a big show on Phobos and Mars?”

  “That was the idea,” Fatty replied. “Knocking out the engines would ensure there was no easy way to alter the course to Phobos. They didn’t count on you guys—on us—and I sure wasn’t gonna tell him. I just called my ship to the small lock, planted the charges, and got away as fast as I could.”

  Wilson looked at Swede. He could tell the man was thinking, “But not quite fast enough,” but he didn’t say it, and Swede rose in his estimation.

  Wilson took a deep breath, dreading what was coming next—nobody else knew what was about to happen—but also looking forward to how he would feel afterward, no matter how it ended. He needed to cleanse himself. He didn’t want his parents or his sister or his grandmother—or Jasmeen—to think of him as they were probably thinking of him now.

  “All right, Pharch, I believe you. And I’m also in your debt—your moral debt, I mean. My family doesn’t believe in torturing people.”

  Shorty rushed to his side. “What’re you talking about, Commodore? You didn’t—”

  “Sure, I did. He thought that if he didn’t talk, I’d let him die as slowly and painfully as it’s possible to die, short of an operating theater. It’s a moral debt I can’t live with—that I refuse to live with.”

  Suddenly Llyra and Jasmeen were in the atrium, fighting to get in. Reluctant to injure their leader’s sister, the hunters let the girls in.

  “Wilson Ngu! What do you think you are doing?” Jasmeen seemed more upset than Llyra, probably because Llyra understood and would do the same.

  He took Jasmeen gently, by the upper arms. It was the first time he’d ever touched her, except by accident, or a chaste little peck on the cheek every New Year’s Eve, and he was surprised by the firmness of her muscles—and the feeling of electricity that tingled through him.

  “I’m trying to repair a damage that I’ve done. My sister will explain.”

  She looked down at Pharch with contempt on her face. “But he is just—”

  “A human being with rights,” Wilson finished. “Rights that I have violated. But even forgetting that, Jasmeen, there’s a hole inside me for having done it, and I have to repair that, if I want to go on living.”

  She nodded. “I understand,” she told him, looking up through long, dark lashes, tears trembling on her lower eyelids. “Is perfectly Martian.” She put her hands up on his forearms. “Please to go on living.”

  Wilson could only nod and, reluctantly, let her go. He cut the duct tape holding Fatty to the chair. “Stand him up.” There was a fine line, he knew, between doing what he believed right, and appearing to aggrandize himself at the expense of someone’s life.

  Never mind that maybe the life needed expending.

  After what had happened, what now seemed like a lifetime ago on Ceres, and what had happened at the spaceport in the Moon—both events recorded for the entire Solar System to see—he didn’t want to be remembered, no matter how it came out, for what he was about to do. Planning ahead, he’d asked the Captain to make sure no surveillance cameras were running.

  West had refused, saying that neither of them owned history.

  Casey and Merton now stood either side of Pharch, almost holding him up. The man knew that he was probably about to die, and he seemed to be having trouble controlling his fear. Yet who knew, the young asteroid hunter thought, in Pharch’s position, what he himself would do? It never occurred to Wilson that he was constitutionally incapable—too honest, decent, principled—to ever find himself in Pharch’s position.

  “I want all the duct tape taken off him,” Wilson told his two new friends. “Every scrap, even when it doesn’t seem like it’ll make a difference. I don’t want anyone saying later he was restrained in any way.”

  Wilson’s wishes were law at the moment. He wasn’t sure he liked that. He had, however, even asked the Swede to give the man back his boots. Pharch was well rested. He’d been fed and had something to drink. His suit was taking care of any other necessities he may have had.

  Wilson heard himself say, “Give the man his gun.”

  A shudder went through the people crowded into the airlock and the atrium behind it. Nobody wanted Pharch to have his gun back except for Wilson. Pharch’s former partners in piracy finally drew their own weapons as Scotty handed Pharch’s long-barreled particle beamer to him.

  In addition to the airlock door, there was a big window, into which Wilson’s sister and her coach had forced their way. Now Llyra had her eyes shut—he knew her; she’d open them before the shooting started—and very unMartian tears were streaming down Jasmeen’s face.

  “Keep that down at your side until you’re given the word,” said Scotty.

  “How do I know it’s even loaded?” Pharch demanded. Clearly, he wanted to inspect the gun. “Or that you haven’t sabotaged it in some way?”

  Scotty drew his own weapon and held it out, butt forward. “Take mine.”

  “Thanks—I will!” Pharch reached out for Scotty’s weapon. Scotty didn’t let go of it until he had Pharch’s weapon firmly in hand in exchange.

  “Okay, Pharch, here’s how it’s going to be.” Wilson reached to the chest pocket of his suit, grasped the Herron StaggerCyl .270 REN, and tossed it to Marko. His great grandfather’s Grizzly swung at his right thigh. “I want this to be beyond fair. You’ll have your gun in your hand. I’ll have mine in its holster, with the safety-strap fastened down. The Captain agrees that if you kill me, you’ll fly away a free man.”

  “Now why do I have trouble believing—”

  “Shorty’s going to do the counting. He’ll count down from three, say ‘Fire!’ and count back up to three. You can shoot any time after the word ‘fire’, but after the second ‘three’, the duel’s over, No one can fire.”

  “What if nobody fires?”
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  “Unlikely, but given the occasion, we’ll just start over. You ready?”

  “I—”

  “Shorty?”

  “One—!”

  “Wait, wait!” Pharch exclaimed. “I won’t play! Something’s fishy here! Something’s rotten! I won’t let you salve your conscience for torturing—!”

  “Fine.” Wilson said abruptly, and turned on his heel as if to walk away. Pharch swiftly raised his weapon, leveled it on Wilson’s back, and—

  Wilson kept turning on his heel, thumbing off the safety strap, wiping the safety with his thumb, and got a shot off before Pharch could. The man’s arms flung wide and his back arched as he was thrown against the stainless wall behind him. For just an instant, Wilson could see the wall through the hole his slug had torn through the man.

  Pharch slid to the floor and it was over.

  ***

  “Things are going to start changing around here,” Julie explained patiently to the girl in the grease-stained food service uniform. Her nametag, cluttered with colorful but irrelevant stickers, said “Amee”. “If you truly want to keep your job, you’ll have to start changing, too.”

  The girl was close to tears. She wiped a dirty hand across her eyes, smearing them with kitchen grime and mascara. “But ma’am, I don’t—”

  Julie said, “I know you don’t, dear. You’re East American, aren’t you?” The woman looked around at the daunting task that lay before her.

  “Yes, ma’am, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The judge said if I came out here—”

  Julie shook her head. “This is Mars, dear, or as close as you can get without actually being there. We don’t care why you came. Many of us came out here for similar reasons. I did. You might think about being a Martian.”

  The girl nodded dully. “Yes, ma’am, I—”

  “To begin with, I’m not ma’am, I’m Mrs. Ngu. Or maybe even Julie. Now I want you to throw every bit of this so-called food away, as quickly as you can. Clean the air filters and then set that system on full. Take everything the food was in—the coffee maker, too—and run it through the dishwasher, twice, on the high medical sanitizing setting.”

  “Yes, ma’am—Mrs.—Julie.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll find you some help if I have to go down to the loading floor. While the kitchen is disassembled, scrub every square inch of it with soap and disinfectant. Scrub and mop this floor, as well. I’ll get somebody to work on those nasty tables and chairs and railings.”

  Seemingly content to have something specific to do, Amee hurried off into the kitchen area. Julie strode over to the table where Adam and Ardith were sitting. She had her computer open, going over the radiation being generated by the Drake-Tealy Object orbiting Pallas, and the signals coming from the Cometary Halo. From time to time, she received long-delayed messages from Sinclair, aboard the Billie, as well.

  Adam sat close beside her, looking over her shoulder. His mother hadn’t seen him happier since thirty seconds before she’d caught the pair of them in the boat house—twenty-one or twenty-two years ago—and pretended that she hadn’t seen them doing anything untoward.

  She always thought of it as an extra birthday present she’d given him.

  Adam looked up. “Anything we can do, Mom?” He knew that she had asserted proprietorship of the place so she could receive Llyra and Jasmeen in a manner she felt proper. Honey Graham had taken Mohammed and Beliita to a meeting room. He wished her a lot of luck. He’d often watched Mohammed lead reporters in four-cornered circles, telling them nothing, learning everything they knew, and sending them home confused but happy.

  To avoid the reporter’s badgering and prying, Manzel had found a dirty baseball cap to put over his bandage, drifted back, away from the Khalidovs, and was scrubbing away as if he had been a janitor all his life. From time to time, he turned around, looked at Adam, and grinned.

  Julie shook her head, indicating her daughter-in-law. “She’s doing science,” she told her son. “Take care of her while she does it and we’ll clean around you. I’m going down to the cargo floor to see if anybody wants more money than East American is paying them.”

  She went back the way they’d come, retraced her steps, almost to the airlock where her rented shuttle was docked, and then followed a tape line on the floor until she finally reached the cargo handling area. It was extremely noisy, with large metal objects bashing into one another, and machinery of various kinds straining to move heavy containers. Not surprisingly, it was cleaner here than on the passenger level.

  “Lady!” someone shouted. “This is a hardhat area, not a scenic route!”

  She looked up to see a thickset individual in bluejeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and a yellow titanium hardhat. He was on a level a few feet above her, operating one of the noisy loading machines. He had five o’clock shadow that was very nearly blue, and was smoking a big cigar.

  “Then give me a hardhat, if you’ve got a spare!” she shouted back. “I’m Julie Segovia Ngu and as of just about an hour ago, you work for me!”

  The man blinked, stopped his noisy machine—she saw a union pin attached to one of his suspenders—and started to dispose of his half-smoked cigar.

  “Don’t waste that!” she told him. “It costs too much to ship them out here.” It wouldn’t forever—there would be tobacco farms on Mars next year.

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Ngu?”

  “Julie. I’ve got a load of catered food coming up from Maxwell’s, and I need some volunteers to help me overhaul the restaurant and kitchen. I’ll pay half again whatever they’re paying you now to help me.”

  “The cargo will get delayed … Julie.”

  “An hour to help me, another hour to share the meal. What do you say?”

  He started climbing down from his machine. “Hey, boys!” he shouted into a comm button attached to his other suspender. “Come and meet the new boss-lady! We got ourselves a special assignment!”

  Julie grinned and led a dozen men and women back with her to the slidewalk. When she got to the restaurant area, it already looked and smelled a great deal better. Adam and Ardith had moved to a table that had apparently been cleaned. She turned to the man with the yellow hardhat. “That’s Amee, over there. Ask her what she needs for you to do.”

  The man nodded. Julie was happy to see that Amee had already recruited a couple of helpers on her own. Two slender blondes, one in braids, one in pigtails, wearing greasy aprons over their everyday clothes, were scrubbing and mopping industriously at the filthy tiled floor.

  Then a shock went through her.

  “Llyra! Jasmeen!” The two girls stood, put down their sponge and mop, peeled off their aprons, and ran to her, both of them throwing their arms around her. Adam and Ardith both got up from the table, laughing.

  Wilson peeked from behind a huge refrigerator. “Can I come out, now?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: THE HOUSE THAT NGU BUILT

  Most individuals simply can’t abide the notion of blind evolution. They desperately want to believe that there’s a Great Plan, even if—judging by the evidence with which a cruel universe presents us every day—it’s a Demented and Evil Plan. They refuse to understand that, if there is no Plan, then human beings are free to subdue the universe, and to make of themselves whatever they desire. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  Ali Khalidov peered into the monitor intently, even going as far as lifting the patch over his right eye. “Why do we not go and join them?”

  “Yes,” Lafcadio Guzman agreed with Jasmeen’s uncle. “Did you hear her say she’s having food flown up from Maxwell’s? I’ve never been to Mars and yet I’ve heard of Maxwell’s!” His lovely wife Eladia was many things, he thought, most of them very nice, but she was not a cook. He stroked the head of his pet seal Roger contemplatively. The animal looked up at him with huge, warm, trusting eyes and made a low, growly noise.

  “Will join them presently,” said Jasmeen’s other uncle, Saladin Uzhakhov. “But just now is for nuclea
r family. Kerosene family later. See how closely Llyra sits to both her parents? Wilson sits close to his father. Jasmeen sits next to Ardith who has arm around her shoulders. Splendid, lovely Julie orchestrates demolition of kitchen with assistance of Khalidov’s tame assassin.”

  “Anti-assassin,” Ali insisted. “Manzel is anti-assassin. Is very different. One is ethical, one is unethical. Is good at what he does, too. Would break his Texas heart if he knew that we know all about him.”

  “Arizona,” Saladin shook his massive head. “Tucson, Arizona. Is our business to know things, Ali,” he informed his colleague. “And we are very good at what we do, too. Is this not so, Lafcadio? But we will not stoop so low to break good man’s southwest American heart, no.”

  “Looks like somebody tried to break his head,” Lafcadio observed.

  “Yes,” Saladin replied. “My second laboratory assistant Wu Yiing Abernathy has cousin who is physician on Mars. She asked her cousin for advice concerning tall, thin male patient from Moon who will not cooperate with bureaucratic data-gathering. Yiing struggles with nosy records on SolarNet for two hours, to no avail, then tells doctor to give it up. Doctor says she thinks she will, anyway was only fish wound.”

  “That’s flesh wound,” Ali corrected his friend with a disgusted expression. He rolled his eyes, then went back to scrutinizing the monitor. Not many people knew—and even fewer would have believed—that the man wore an eyepatch only to guarantee his night vision for the telescope.

  “Flesh wound,” Saladin tried the words on for size. “Flesh wound. Flesh wound. Very good, flesh wound. Makes more sense that way.”

  Deimos barely had enough gravity to hold itself together, let alone anything else, and that not very well. The ship was moored to the rock beneath her, as well as the airlock. Sitting in the pilot’s seat—the flight deck was separated from the rest of the interior by bead curtains kept in place by magnets in their ends—Lafcadio drank red wine from a baggie. The scientists had hot chocolate, augmented with vodka.

  All three were aboard Lafcadio’s ship, the Gay Deceiver, which had powerful engines and was heavily armed, but looked like a pile of junkyard debris on the outside. Inside, the ship was furnished like a luxury hotel. They had tapped into the Deimos facility’s rudimentary security system. The fact they were watching meant that Julie didn’t know about the cameras yet. If she had, she would have torn them out, herself.