by Allen Steele
“Leave them to me. They’re no doubt docking at Port Deimos. Their ship will be watched from the moment it docks, and anyone who leaves it will be followed. At some point, I’m sure they’ll find a way to meet up with Newton.”
“Okay. Then what?”
Another pause. “They’ll be deterred. If necessary, they’ll be liquidated. Except for Newton.” A wry chuckle. “I think I’d very much like to meet someone who calls himself Captain Future. He may be interesting.”
“I’d rather just have him eliminated, but … well, it’s your choice.”
“Indeed it is.” Another pause. “Is this all?”
“It is,” Corvo replied. “I’ll be seeing you again soon.”
No response. Another moment went past, and then there was a faint beep signaling that the transmission had been terminated at its source. The Magician of Mars didn’t believe in long good-byes—or indeed, any at all.
Corvo let out his breath, settled back in his chair. Even after all these years, he still felt uncomfortable speaking with Ul Quorn. Which was a strange and unsettling thing, regardless of the man’s reputation as a cold-blooded gangster.
After all, a father should never be afraid to talk to his son.
PART FIVE
The Search for the Magician
I
Few people at the Wells Interplanetary Spaceport at Xanthe Terra noticed the arrival of the Solar Coalition Guard shuttle from the Vigilance. The coming and going of military spacecraft was a daily occurrence; one more ship mattered little. So only the ground crew watched as the delta-winged shuttle came in for a landing, its VTOL engines skipping up the red dust that had blown across the tarmac from the surrounding desert.
Once the shuttle was safely on the ground, a tractor towed it to the government side of the sprawling port, where SCG and IPF ships rested on the apron or within enormous hangars. The engines were still ticking when the spacecraft finally came to rest outside a hangar. A ladder was pushed into position, then the starboard hatch opened with a sigh of overpressurized air.
Men and women marched down the ladder. A few were in uniform, but most of them wore casual clothes and carried duffel bags, signifying that they were off-duty military personnel taking shore leave for a few days. All except a small handful of aresians wore goggles, half-face airmasks, and backpack oxygen-rebreathing units, along with parkas, gloves, and warm boots. Only Mars natives—“Martians” was considered a racial epithet—were able to breathe the planet’s low-pressure oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere without assistance and tolerate the frigid cold that typified even a sunny day near the equator. Even after more than a century of terraforming, visitors from Earth still had to prepare for Mars as if they were climbing the highest peaks of the Himalayas.
While those who’d disembarked in uniform went to the nearby hangar, the rest strolled over to the open tram that pulled to a halt a short distance away. The tram waited until everyone climbed aboard, then drove off across the vast expanse of the landing field toward the glass-sided pillbox that was the civilian terminal.
One individual among the uniformed officers paused to watch the tram as it pulled away. Beneath his parka was the blue uniform of an IPF marshal, and no one could make out the pensive expression on a face hidden by an airmask.
Ezra Gurney couldn’t see the red-haired young man who’d boarded the tram along with the Vigilance crewmen. For the sake of anonymity, the old lawman had avoided speaking to him once they’d come down the ladder from the shuttle. All the same, he wished he’d had a chance to wish him good luck.
Realizing this, Gurney quietly shook his head and turned to walk back to the shuttle for its return flight. The last thing he’d ever expected was that he’d come to trust, let alone even like, the kid who was calling himself Captain Future.
Aboard the tram, Curt watched as it moved past spacecraft of all kinds parked on the field. Most were big, turtle-backed freighters, but a few were shuttles much like the one he’d just departed, carrying passengers bound to or from interplanetary ships parked at Port Deimos. It was impossible to tell which of them was the one Otho and Joan had come down on, but he had little doubt that his friends were already here. It was just a matter of finding them.
He absently reached up to scratch an itch on his nose before he remembered that he was wearing an airmask and couldn’t get at it. Catching an amused look from the ensign seated beside him, Curt self-consciously lowered his hand. When he swallowed, his ears popped again, a little less painfully this time but still enough to be unsettling. And it seemed like everything was coated with a thin layer of coarse red sand: the tram seats, the tarmac, the spacecraft hulls, the lenses of his goggles. An old joke was that the only people for whom red was a favorite color were aresians because they never saw anything else. There was probably some truth to it.
This wasn’t the first time Curt had been to Mars. However, it seemed like it’d been a very long time since he was fourteen, and back then he’d had Otho at his side as surrogate brother, chaperone, and bodyguard, along with the Brain’s disembodied presence in his ring as an unseen tutor. Remembering this, he decided it was time to check in with the Comet.
—Simon, are you there?
A short pause, during which Curt gazed up at the sky to see if he could spot Deimos. It wasn’t visible, which meant that his signal would have to be bounced along orbital comsats until it reached his ship at Port Deimos. Then the Brain’s voice came through his Anni:
—I’m here, Curtis. Have you landed?
—Yes, I have. Where are Otho and Joan?
—Their shuttle touched down just a little while ago as well. They will find you in the terminal, as planned.
—Very good. I’ll look for them there.
The tram halted behind the terminal, and Curt joined the Vigilance crewmen heading inside. One by one, they walked through the airtight revolving doors that maintained the higher air pressure within the building, dutifully stamping their boots against floor mats on the way in. Then, pulling their goggles and masks down around their necks, they entered the customs queues, where aresians seated in low-pressure booths examined their ID tats and passport folders with the listless boredom of bureaucrats everywhere.
At Ezra’s urging, Curt was posing as Rab Cain again, this time with a new tattoo and a passport issued by the Vigilance’s chief warrant officer. It was a persona that had served him well in the past, and anyone bothering to check would have discovered that it had some history behind it. The passport was a little too freshly printed to be completely convincing, but the aresian customs officer barely glanced at it before waving him through. No wonder Mars had become the abode of radical separatists; immigration officials apparently didn’t care who came and went through the planet’s largest spaceport.
Curt strolled through the customs gate into the terminal lobby. All around him, passengers from recently arrived flights were greeting friends and family who’d come out to meet them, while others waited their turn to board shuttles for Port Deimos. He noted the number of holstered guns worn by both terrans and native aresians and no longer felt quite so conspicuous about having his plasmar on his belt. The legal framework of the Libertarian Commonwealth of Mars posed a strange dichotomy: harsh penalties for criminal offenses, along with posse comitatus laws allowing citizens not only to carry firearms but also to act as their own legal authority. Somehow, the system worked, although accidental shootings and crime-of-passion homicides were frequent and the capital punishment rate was grotesquely high.
Putting down his bag, Curt paused amid the bustling crowd, looking about for any sign of Otho or Joan. Seeing no familiar faces, he bent down to pick up the bag again and was just about to make his way to the nearby maglev station when a hand grasped his elbow. He turned around to find Joan standing there.
“Oh … hello.” All of a sudden, Curt was at a loss for words. “I … I was wondering if—”
Joan flung her arms around him and pulled him close. Curt was taller than sh
e was, so she had to stand on her toes. Given the way she’d treated him aboard the Comet, this was the last thing he expected from her. Curt was still reeling when she whispered in his ear, “Kiss me … and make it look good.”
It was only the second time in his life that he’d ever kissed a woman. Joan made it sound more like an order than a request, though, and there was no mistaking the insistence of her demand. Yet her mouth was pleasantly soft, her body firm and sensual in his arms, and he could have let this go on for quite a while longer had it not been for the hand that came down on his shoulder and the familiar voice beside him.
“Hello, Rab,” Otho said. “Glad you finally made it.”
As Curt turned his head to look at him, Joan gently pried herself from his arms. “We’re being followed,” she murmured. “Play along.”
Now he understood. “Yeah, great to see you again, Vol,” he replied, and Otho nodded slightly. “You, too, uh—”
“Catherine.” Like Otho, Joan wore the sort of fashionable outdoor clothes one would expect of an offworlder visiting Mars: faux-fur lined parka, knee boots, gloves. Both wore rebreathers, airmasks, and goggles, and although they were carrying shoulder bags along with one for him, Curt couldn’t see any weapons. He knew, however, that they probably had guns beneath their coats.
“Sorry we’re a little late,” Otho said aloud, dropping Curt’s bag at his feet, “but y’know how it is. Our shuttle was delayed getting here.” As he spoke, the Brain’s voice came through Curt’s Anni:
—Someone has been trailing them ever since they arrived at Deimos Station. An aresian woman, identity unknown.
“That’s fine. No problem at all.” Curt refrained from looking about. Although most of the people around them were terrans, there were quite a few aresians as well, along with a handful of jovians and aphrodites. Like most public buildings on Mars, the terminal was pressurized at a level tolerable to the air-breathing residents of Coalition worlds. “Have you seen anyone we know?”
“Just one.” Joan kept a fixed smile on her face, but her dark eyes were solemn. “Haven’t spotted her in the last few minutes, but I’m sure she’s somewhere around.”
—She means you’re probably being followed.
Curt nodded. “So … where to now?”
“I’ve gone ahead and reserved tickets on the next maglev to Tharsis,” Otho said. “We’ve got a sleeper cabin, two bunks.”
“Two bunks?” Curt raised an eyebrow.
“Best I could get on short notice. The rest of the train is booked solid.” He grinned. “Of course, if you two would care to double up—”
“We don’t,” Joan said coldly.
“—then I’m sure I can get someone to bring me an extra blanket and pillow so I can curl up on the floor.”
“I’ll take the floor,” Curt said, and received a grateful nod from Joan. Obviously the hug and kiss she’d given him were as intimate as she was willing to get. “Very well, if you’re ready to go…”
Without another word, Otho picked up his bag and headed in the direction of the overhead sign pointing the way to the maglev. Curt did the same. The bag Otho had brought him from the Comet was light, but sufficiently heavy to be containing that which he’d asked them to bring. Still playing the part of lover, Joan fell in beside him, even going so far as to tuck her arm around his elbow. Curt had to work hard not to smile. It might only be pretense, but he liked having her close.
However, he couldn’t let her distract him. If someone had indeed followed Otho and Joan all the way here from Port Deimos, then it meant they were suspicious of their reasons for coming to Mars. And since there had already been one attempt on their lives, there was no reason to think that these individuals wouldn’t try again.
It didn’t seem as if anyone was trailing them as they passed beneath the sign and stepped onto the escalator leading down to the underground maglev station beneath the terminal. But Curt failed to notice the tall, dark-eyed aresian woman who watched from behind a column, then kept her distance as she followed them downstairs to the waiting train.
II
Across the southern plains of Xanthe Terra, the maglev train rushed southwest upon its elevated monorail. Six cars in length, with the bullet-nosed cab up front and the bubble-topped observation coach at the rear, the train shot down the electromagnetic track like a quicksilver serpent, a flash of metallic scarlet against the dull red landscape. Aresian sharecroppers tending their fields beneath dewtents glanced up for a moment as they heard the muted rumble of the approaching train, then returned to their tasks after it went by.
From his window seat in the forward sleeper coach, Curt quietly contemplated the scenery. The train had departed the spaceport nearly an hour ago, leaving behind the domed terran colony of Wellston and the nearby adobe barrios of the aresians, and was now traveling through rural countryside. In a little while it would turn west and enter the Lunae Planum and begin the longest part of the journey to the Tharsis region, crossing the equator to skirt past the northern chasms of the Valles Marineris.
Curt was looking forward to that part of the trip. When he’d been here six years ago, most of his time had been spent in the comparatively boring Chryse Plantia, where the Brain had insisted that he and Otho visited the old Viking I and Pathfinder landing sites from the twentieth century. All that he’d seen of the vast rift valley that gouged most of the Martian equator at the western hemisphere was a brief glimpse of the Capri Chasma from his shuttle as it was coming in for a landing. So he was hoping that it wouldn’t be too dark to make out the deep badlands by the time the train reached them.
Glancing away from the window, Curt gazed at Joan. The private compartment Otho had managed to reserve was as small as he’d said it would be, with narrow fold-down bunks that doubled as seats during the day and just enough room on the floor to unroll the inflatable matt the conductor had supplied them as the third bed. Otho had gone back to see about making dinner reservations in the restaurant car while Joan opted for a nap.
Sitting across from him, arms folded across her chest and head lolling against a pillow, she seemed very much at peace, and for the moment nothing like the law officer he’d come to expect. Curt watched her sleep, remembering the way she’d kissed him in the spaceport terminal. Yes, she said that she’d done that to give the impression to anyone watching them that they were different people than they really were, but nonetheless he had to wonder. For just a second or two, he could’ve sworn that she was actually enjoying herself …
No. Joan had made it clear to him aboard the Comet that she was an IPF officer, first, foremost, and always. As attracted as he was to her, he couldn’t expect those feelings to be reciprocated. Unless he wanted to be shot down again, he had to learn to respect her as a professional and try to put out of his mind the fact that she was a lovely young woman, however difficult that might be.
Curt looked out the window again. In the distance, at the rim of the Ophir Chasma that marked the western edge of the Xanthe Terra region, an atmosphere factory loomed against the horizon. One of eight dispersed around the Martian equator and at the poles, the factory was marked by fluted, smokestacklike towers rising high into the pink sky. Curt couldn’t see the fumes drifting from the towers, but he knew what they were anyway: chloroflurocarbons, greenhouse gases derived from the carbon dioxide and flourides trapped in the Martian regolith.
Along with the introduction of gaseous nitrogen imported from Titan and hydrogen from Jupiter, the CFCs were slowly, over the course of many years, thickening and warming the Martian atmosphere. With this came the slow melting of the permafrost beneath the ground, which in turn was gradually releasing oxygen and water vapor. Already the primary atmospheric constituents of Mars were oxygen and nitrogen, not carbon dioxide, and while the pressure was still too thin yet for a terran to breathe without suffering hypoxia, for the first time in millions of years, creeks and vernal ponds were forming in the equatorial regions, furnishing just enough surface water to support small-
scale agriculture like the farms the train had just passed.
All this was only the first phase of the generations-long effort to transform Mars into a habitable analogue of Earth. The Solar Coalition’s terraforming operations had begun over a century ago, and while no one knew exactly how long they would last, it was certain that it would be several more centuries before Mars had green forests and blue seas instead of the vast expanses of red desert that still covered most of the planet.
In the meantime, scientists like Curt’s father had succeeded in developing a supporting technology: a genetic subspecies of the human race capable of living on Mars, the aresians doing most of the hard work of ecopoiesis. The same bioengineering process was later used to create colonists for the moons of the outer planets, and later still for the Venusian sky city Stratus Venera, and all for the same reason: it would take the resources of all the planets to successfully terraform Mars, and the best and surest way of supporting human colonies in these uninhabitable places was to create Homo cosmos as their inhabitants.
When all was said and done, Mars was destined to become a replacement for another planet, the one whose global climate had been ruined long ago by the accidental overabundance of atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons that, ironically, were being deliberately cultivated on this world. The aresians were aware of this, of course, and also the fact that, one day not so far in the future, Mars would no longer belong to them.
And this was where Starry Messenger came in.
“Something on your mind?”
Curt looked around to find Joan gazing at him. Sometime in the last few minutes she’d woken up. There was a quiet smile on her face, yet her eyes were sharp and inquisitive. It wasn’t a polite question; she really did want to know what he was thinking.
“Something occurred to me while I was adrift,” Curt replied, and then he told her about how it’d occurred to him that there might be a link between Starry Messenger and the Sons of the Two Moons, and therefore an indirect connection with Ul Quorn. Joan listened patiently, nodding every now and then, and when he was done she sat up a little straighter in her seat.
