And the three dragon models were taking the bodies, the guns, just taking them away, and Carole wondered where the guards at the door had gone, who had suborned or bribed or killed them. And all the while Jennifer was just setting up something with her tablet so that the big screen came on suddenly, showing a view on a room from a high corner.
Thompson.
Carole started away from the screen. If it had been at a regular angle, looking at him across a desk like one of his addresses, she wouldn’t have been able to face him. She was looking down, though, as if he was at the bottom of a pit.
He wasn’t alone, sitting in a bare room with a man she recognised as one of his regular legal team. An attack dog, was how other lawyers described the man, though he was human enough.
Wiley did something and there was sound, the lawyer’s low voice, Thompson’s grunt replies. Carole knew the situation instantly, felt a sudden pang that she wasn’t there for him. Because the lawyer was talking to him all wrong. Because Thompson needed her to intercede, to be the buffering layer between his naked ego and the world. In the next moment she loathed herself for the thought, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a part of her.
The lawyer broke off mid-sentence, hand lifted close to his ear to indicate he was receiving a communication. Wiley was grinning, five years younger in that moment.
“He’s finding out that Mars is finished for him,” she explained.
“Mars…?”
“His retreat. He sent his mind there, the man who would be God-king, right? You know this more than anyone, Carole. You were there through all the planning he did with the late and unlamented Doc Felorian. But we had a secret weapon on Mars, it turns out. There’s nothing left of him on the red planet except bad memories. Look, he’s being told so, now.”
Carole could see the lawyer trying to spin it as something they could use, but Thompson was on his feet instantly, slamming his meaty hands against the table, the bang coming to her distantly, the flinch running through her only an echo of how she’d once felt. He was raging, furious. Practically foaming. “What about her?” he was demanding. “They should have fixed her by now! Get her! Stop her!” Eyes bulging as though he was about to go into cardiac arrest.
I’m the ‘her’, Carole thought numbly. And one last part of her tried to suggest that she should want herself fixed, if Thompson said to fix her, but she confronted it and it shrivelled inside her and was gone.
“We’ve sent word, of course, to say his goons got theirs, rather than getting you. Look, this is it coming through now. All properly anonymous but he’ll know.” And Wiley’s grin was wide and spreading, weirdly infectious.
Thompson was staring at the desk, fingers crooked as though trying to claw into the metal surface. The lawyer was saying not to admit anything, not to speak about things that would put his legal counsel in an awkward position, but Thompson wasn’t hearing him. Thompson was digesting the news that Carole was still out there, very much alive and very much going to ensure that the last of his veils and lies would be stripped away.
She watched him roar at the lawyer until the man just backed out of the room and away. She watched him try to pick up the desk, but he could barely shift it. She watched his puffy, crimson face as he bellowed and screamed and attacked the walls, a festering knot of fear and hate with nobody left to do its bidding. And, after a minute of this, she felt that he was growing further away, or perhaps just growing smaller, becoming something minuscule and irrelevant, like a dying germ under a microscope. Something she’d been immunised against. Something she’d been purged of.
She sat on the couch, still watching. The smile that slowly made its way onto her face wasn’t like Wiley’s grin, or anyone else’s, but just her own.
28
JIMMY
Some time after, Danny Boyd calls me up and invites me to a little gathering he’s having. A soiree, you might say. Stargazing, only ’cos what we’re watching is on the other side of the planet it’s all through screens. But then I spend enough time slogging about outside on Mars. Some nights it’s good to stay in.
He treats me weird, does our Danny Boy. Like I saved his life and sanity or something. He was the first and the last, after all. He was the top of the Thompson pyramid. He lived in that hell longer than anyone. And mine was the first face he saw as a free man, poor bastard, and so somehow I get the credit. Even though my job was involuntary bear storage and transport.
Involuntary Bear Storage and Transport: The Jimmy Marten Story.
Anyway, it’s been almost a month and Hell City survived. Who’da put money on it? Damage all fixed, even that big hole in Cashiers, and everything back to normal. For better or worse, because a lot of people reckoned we’d stuck it to the man and it was all clover and communism from there on. Except the man we’d stuck it to wasn’t the same as the man who paid our wages, and so after the dust cleared (always takes a while here on Mars) we somehow amazingly didn’t have a Glorious Worker’s Paradise where every comrade was equal. We just got back to work.
Well, I mean, almost. I mean, I don’t know if Dan the Man wrangled something back home or if he always had the leeway and never used it or if he’s being what they call economical with the truth, but he’s made a few changes. There’s a whole slice of the upper levels of the city, that were in their shrink wrap finest before everything kicked off, that he’s opened up for living space. No more nooks. Bit of room, bit of privacy. Can have a couple of guys over and watch the game. But mostly it’s just what it was before, and some day we’ll be done and Hell City will be handed over to the folk back home who paid for it. And we’ll get to see if we, the Martians, get turned back into Earth people to go home and enjoy our completion bonus. Or if we even want to. I don’t even want to think about acclimatising to the gravity and the pressure and the sunlight. Sounds like hard work to me. Might just stay on.
Anyways, I head on over to what’s going to be some corporation’s big meeting room, that’s got a skylight giving onto the canopy-blurred stars, and that’s got the biggest screen I ever saw. Danny’s there, and he’s got a select little gathering. There’s Sugar, Murder and Marmalade, and there’s about nine bears’ worth of space between them and Rufus and some of the Posse. There’s a bunch of Admin staff and the heads of some of the work crews. There’s Brian Dey too, the useless bastard. Given that his cover got blown, I guess he’s here in his formal capacity as ambassador. Saint Bees’ apostle to the Martians.
We’re here to watch the rockets.
It’s quite a show, a round hundred of them shooting off one by one from hidden silos beneath the Martian surface, on the other side of this world. I don’t get any sense of scale but Brian tells me they’re not big. They’re carrying a handful of frozen cyborg bees and a crapton of data, so most of what we’re seeing is engine and reactor fuel. And they don’t even need much of that, because it’s easy to get shot of Mars and its weak-sauce gravity, and once they’re in space they’ve got ion drives or some damn space nonsense to get them across the Great Empty the slow way. Because Bees doesn’t care about time. “Bees got all the time the universe got,” as Brian says.
“So she went without you?” I ask him, and he laughs in my face, which I guess is what I deserve.
“Nope. Bees upload me ’fore the troubles,” he tells me. “Me, Mariah, Judit, we on all those rockets right now. We goin’ to the stars, man.”
“But…” Danny Boy’s handed out some booze, something home-grown and punchy, and so I’m fighting to wrap my head around what he’s saying. “But you’ll never know what they find out there.”
“True ’nuff,” Brian agrees philosophically. “I never know, but I know that I know, that other I. Best I gon’ get.”
I do something then I’ve not done for a couple of weeks, because I’ve been going cold turkey in a way, though not from drugs. I wait for Honey to say something, in my head. She’d have an opinion, like she always fucking did. She was an upload, after all. And she’d been many uploads
, for just a short amount of time. She had it all, and she gave it away.
And of course there’s nothing from Honey.
Sugar’s looking at me with bright eyes. “You’re thinking about a bear. You get her look, when you do. About the mouth.”
I shrug. “Maybe.”
“Don’t be so sure she’s gone,” she says flatly.
“Jesus, don’t tell me that.”
“I’m just saying, I keep good eyes on the dataflow in Admin. Better than Boyd over there. My livelihood, right? Something was rummaging through comms history recently. Pretty damn thorough but didn’t cover its tracks quite well enough. Or didn’t care enough to.”
“Meaning what?”
Sugar looks sidelong and then leans in. I’m maybe the only guy in Hell City short enough she doesn’t have to stand on tiptoe to whisper in my ear.
“Honey came in as data. She got logged somewhere. Or if not here, at point of transmission. Maybe a copy clogging a buffer somewhere. Some Honey from after she got shot, before she hit Mars. So maybe Bees took her to the stars after all. We’ll never know.”
“Stars I’m fine with. So long as she ain’t here.” Because we owe Honey everything, and if she came back it could cost us it all.
Danny comes over and claps us on the shoulders. And he’s Big Chief Admin but he’s OK, is Danny. OK so long as he thinks he owes me, anyway. He doles out more of the rotgut and slips me a tab of Stringer because Admin is high-stress and he and I see eye to eye about just how to take the edge off that. ’Cept he gets his slipped into the shipments from Earth, rather than the shit they brew here on Mars. How the other half live, eh?
And we watch the rockets, Earth’s ambassadors to other stars, that will be centuries in transit, arriving long after we’re all dead. And years after that before they report back to a fully functional Hell City, to the new colonies we’ll probably be building on the moons of Jupiter or somewhere, with workers even more fucked up than they made us. And Bees will use what she finds out there to make more Bees and make more rockets, and there will be bug-eyed aliens out there, but they’ll be our bugs. And maybe I’ll ask Brian if I can get a seat on the boat, for the next wave of launches. I reckon I’ve earned it. I reckon I have sufficient Bees-credit to buy a ticket out, even though I’ll also stay right here on Mars.
We watch the rockets launch, we shirkers and criminals, lawmen and administrators. It feels weird, thinking about where they’re going. Feels like we’re taking one giant step; like we’re growing up.
About the Author
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY was born in Lincolnshire before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. He subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor and has trained in stage-fighting. He’s the author of the critically acclaimed Shadows of the Apt series and his novel Children of Time was the winner of the 30th Anniversary Arthur C. Clarke Award.
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