by Paul Preuss
“Self-interest,” he said. “Without you, I’d be stuck.”
“No you wouldn’t. The whole planet knows where we are. I don’t think you did it just to save your skin.”
“So I’m a bleeding heart.”
“Sure.” She looked at him with eyes full of doubt and suspicion. “What do you want from me, Mycroft?”
“What I’ve got–a ride.”
“And what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an idea of what I’ve gotten myself into. What’s it like here? On Mars, I mean. You’re an old-timer by Martian standards. Excuse me, not old. I meant . . .”
“I’m not old, but I’m a bitch, Mycroft. So’s life on Mars. It’s worth living anyway. We’re building a whole planet out of dead sand. Even the bosses are taking a chance.”
“The bosses? You mean like Noble?”
“Oh, they’ve got their stashes back on Earth if things go wrong–still, they’re taking their chances along with the rest of us.”
“Doesn’t sound like a good union member talking,” he said.
“What union you in?” she asked sharply.
“Yours,” he said, “thanks to Yevgeny.”
“Right enough. In this local we like people who play our game our way. We get rid of the ones who don’t.”
What was that about? “I like Yevgeny.”
“Yeah? Well, I love him,” she said passionately. “Even though he’s an ugly big S.O.B., I love him for what he’s done.”
“Love?”
She looked at him with eyes that were red-rimmed with fatigue. “Not that kind.”
“You loved Darius Chin, didn’t you?”
Lydia’s expression hardened.
“. . . I mean, that’s what I’ve heard around,” he finished lamely.
Lydia threw the remains of her dinner in the disposal chute and turned to climb into the sleeping box. “Tomorrow we’ll make up for lost time,” she said.
She climbed into the box without looking at him. A second later the spare pillow dropped lazily toward him through the lace curtains.
Darkness.
Somewhere in the freezing dark Sparta was sleeping. Her head throbbed with waves of pain, pain that brought whirling, spinning, spiraling patterns of dark color to her vision and a high-pitched ringing to her ears. Something shadowy and desperate flitted by in the sucking spirals, something rich in meaning that continually escaped her because she could not concentrate.
She could not concentrate because of the pain.
Worse than the pain in her head was the pain in her belly. Her diaphragm was a band of fire, clenching her abdomen. Her dreams filled with blood now, and with wet, staring eyes and glistening textures that could have been fur or hair or scales or feathers. She clawed helplessly at her rib cage, unable to reach the gnawing creature within.
She screamed, and screamed again. . . .
XII
Hard light poured into Sparta’s eyes, glistening like the tracks of daylight meteors across the pink sky. It was morning. The light was from the far yellow sun. The meteor tracks were tiny scratches in the plastic canopy of the marsplane.
She was half sitting, held erect by her harness, and her head was resting awkwardly on her shoulder. She raised it–it felt like a cannon ball on the wilted stalk of her neck–but while the cramped muscles of her shoulders protested, she found that much of the pain in her head had been dream pain. The burning in her stomach had subsided until it was not much worse than the aftermath of a spicy dinner. Difference was, she was hungry.
She moved her head cautiously, taking in her surroundings, looking at the canopy under which she sat, perched wingless on a sand-dusted lava slope. She was alone. The instrument screens were cold and dead, and the position of the sun in the clear sky told her no more than that it was morning somewhere on Mars.
A note, written with ballpoint on a scrap of checklist, was stuck in back of the seat frame in front of her.
“We have no communications and are lost to searchers. I am walking in the direction of the nearest habitation. I pray that you recover soon. Your only hope is to stay with the plane. God will be good to us.” Khalid hadn’t bothered to sign it.
Sparta released her harness straps and gingerly flexed her wrists and elbows and knees. Physically she was undamaged, it seemed. She was stiff and her lower back was aching, but her headache had subsided to nothing worse than an irritable sensitivity to light.
She tried the instruments. As many switches and combinations of switches as she tried, she could get only succotash from the screens.
She checked to see that her pressure suit was sealed. She hit the rugged switches that controlled the air pumps; they at least were still functioning. The plane’s apparent electrical failure wasn’t total. Maybe some of its other critical systems were still operative.
When the cockpit was evacuated she moved to lift the canopy, but as she did so the pain in her belly came back. Gasping, she fell back. She left the canopy sealed and undisturbed.
She knew intimately the place of the pain, the locality of the layered sheets of polymer battery that had been grafted beneath her diaphragm, the place from which they sent surges of electrical power to the oscillator surgically implanted in her breast-bone and the superconducting ceramics that coated the bones of her arms.
Like some biological creatures–but unlike humans–she was sensitive to the electromagnetic spectrum from the near infrared into the ultraviolet. Like a few other species of naturally evolved living things–but unlike humans–she was sensitive to electric and magnetic fields of much higher and lower frequencies, and of almost vanishingly weak fluxes.
Unlike any natural creature, she could transmit and receive modulated beams of radio frequency.
Whether this peculiar and artificial power, foreign to her body and unwanted–not asked for or agreed to by her, and put into her at a time she could not even bring to memory–had now been permanently destroyed, she did not know. All she knew was her terrible pain.
She tried to reconstruct what must have happened. At first she remembered only soaring above the endless desert. Khalid had said something that had disturbed her . . .
. . . that he knew her, that was it. And something else–that someone was trying to kill her . . .
And then the pain.
She did not have the one benefit radio could have conferred in her present desperate situation. A brief burst of targeted microwaves, however faint, would have appeared as a small, bright blip in the sensor field of an orbiting satellite, pinpointing the exact position of the downed marsplane. She had been deprived of the ability to make such a blip, and she did not think that was by chance.
From what she had seen it appeared that the marsplane must have been crippled by a powerful broad-frequency pulse that had fried the onboard sensors and computers–and at the same time had ruptured Sparta’s only nonbiological function. Until she inspected the plane she would not know whether the source of the pulse had been onboard or beamed from outside. Nor would she know whether it had been planted and triggered by a person unknown or by Khalid himself.
Why had Khalid taken the plane apart? To keep it from being destroyed by the wind. Why would he bother, if he only wanted to kill her? Because, of course, a tragic accident must seem perfectly accidental.
She lay back in her harness and concentrated on the fire under her heart, trying to dispel it by entering it. But too soon the pain overwhelmed her conscious mind, and she slipped back into fitful sleep and lurid dreams.
Swirling signs tantalized her with elusive meaning . . .
Midday. Lydia Zeromski’s marstruck drove north.
To the west a huge shield volcanco, Ascraeus, rose from Tharsis into the Martian stratosphere. On Earth nobody would have noticed it, not from this angle; one can stand on the side of Mauna Loa, the largest volcanic mass on Earth, and not notice anything more impressive than nearby trees and rolling hills and a mildly tilted plain, so gentle is its slope. Here on Mars the
much bigger volcano made its presence known only by the lava flows and raveling arroyos at the hem of its skirt.
Lydia had reassumed her customary taciturnity. The morning had passed in silence except for the now-familiar whine of the turbines, transmitted through the truck frame. Blake sat on his side of the cab, brooding.
There were no more cards in his deck. He’d tried charm. He’d tried competence–gone so far as to save her life, probably–but nothing was going to make her loosen up. Lydia Zeromski was a tough cookie.
Blake slouched in his harness listening to the hissing turbines and the grab and scurry of the treads against the sand. He’d assimilated some novel sensations on this trip. He’d slowly learned the different feel of rock and lava and sand and desert quicksand and rotten permafrost, each texture translating itself into subtle superimpositions of vibration as they passed beneath the traveling treads. Now he became aware of something new–a rhythmic heave and rumble quite out of synchronization with the rhythms of the treads.
“What’s that?” he said, turning to Lydia. For the first time he saw fear in her eyes.
“Flash flood,” she said. She sealed her pressure helmet.
Without prompting he did the same. A flash flood on Mars? Unheard of, but obviously it was nothing fantastic to her.
She leaned on the throttles. The big rig leaped ahead.
They were crossing a wide alluvial fan at the base of the distant volcano, a thin spreading sheet of pebbles and boulders sorted by weight, of terraced sand and packed conglomerate cut through and exposed by intermittent floods of liquid water. Blake, trusting the texts he’d hastily absorbed during his journey to Mars, had placidly assumed these water-carved features to be a billion years old. Looking out the cab of the speeding truck, he now acknowledged what he’d seen but not believed: the sharply sliced contours of fresh erosion.
The huge rig was plunging and wallowing dangerously through the sand, slamming into boulders and spraying gravel from beneath its treads. Lydia had never driven with such abandon.
“We’re not going to make it,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t get to high ground. If we can just get to an island, at least . . .”
“Lydia, how can there be a flood here?”
“Volcano. Outgassing melts the permafrost into a slurry and it rolls down any available channel. We’re in the middle of a big one.” She glanced up from the wheel. “Listen, Mycroft, when I say jump, you jump. Grab a couple of rock bolts and winch cables and get as far forward as you can. Don’t worry about good rock, you won’t find any in this gravel, just get out front a hundred meters or so and shoot the bolts as deep as they’ll go. Tie off. Cross your fingers they hold.”
“That bad?”
She didn’t answer.
She found the midstream island she was looking for a few moments later and pushed the truck up and over its shallow bank. Then she swerved the whole rig around to face upchannel, into the approaching deluge.
“Jump!”
As the truck skidded to a halt he jumped and ran. A second later she was out of her side of the cab and running out parallel lines. He found an enormous basalt boulder and figured that it was worth more than a steel bolt sunk into gravel, so he looped the winch cable around it. He planted two more bolts and tied off the cables.
By now he could feel the ground vibrating under his boots like the magic fingers in a cheap hive bed. He looked upstream.
“Oh, damn.”
A seven-meter wall of slush the color and consistency of melted chocolate ice cream was bearing down the channel, carrying whole boulders with it. He turned and ran for the truck. Lydia was ahead of him. He saw her climb in and struggle to secure the damaged door on her side of the cab, then reach across to his. Nice of her to open it for him.
He jumped nimbly up and over the tread and pulled the door handle. It was struck.
He pulled again. “It’s stuck,” he yelled over the suitcomm. “Get it from in there, will you?”
Through his helmet, through the truck’s bubble dome, through her sealed helmet, through layers of reflection he saw her white and determined face, set in a mask. She did not move to help him.
“Lydia, the door’s stuck! Let me inside!” The wall of mud was coming at him like a miniature flood in a cheap viddie, shot in slow motion. This was no miniature. Billows of steam poured from the improbably high crest of the wave–hot water from the melted permafrost was vaporizing instantly as it was exposed to the dry, thin atmosphere.
“Who are you working for, Mycroft?” Lydia asked.
“What? Lydia . . . !”
Her voice was husky and low, but it sounded plenty loud enough in his suitcomm. “We’ve known about you for months, Mycroft. Are you just a company fink? Or are you one of the STW’s bully boys?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You want inside this truck, fink? Tell me who you work for.”
“Lydia, I don’t have anything to do with the company or the STW.”
“Yevgeny was waiting for you in the yard, Mycroft–he thought you were going to blow up the yard so they wouldn’t send you to the pipeline. But it seems you do want to go to the pipeline. What we want to know now is why.”
Blake looked at the steaming face of the flood, its tumbling wings now spilling around the banks of the shallow braided channels that flanked the midstream island, carving new miniature cliffs in the sand as it came. The agonizing slowness with which it approached was almost more horrible than the onrush of an earthly flood.
“Lydia, all I wanted was a ride to the line head. With you–you in particular.”
“You admit you sabotaged the yard?”
“I’ll explain. Let me inside.”
The first gooey surf was breaking over the island’s prow.
“I figure thirty more seconds, maybe less,” she said. “Explain first.” She ignored the flood, staring at him implacably.
He thought about it for a couple seconds and couldn’t think of anything more that he had to lose. “My name’s Blake Redfield,” he said. “I’m working for the Space Board on the murders of Morland and Chin. I needed to get close to you, to find out about you.”
“You think I’m a murderer?” Her astonishment seemed genuine.
“No, I don’t think that, but you can prove me wrong in about fifteen seconds.”
“They think I killed Dare?”
“You had opportunity, Lydia. You had to be a suspect, and somebody had to check you out. I volunteered.”
She still stared at him through layers of reflecting plastic.
“Lydia . . .”
“Relax, whatever-your-name-is. You’re not going to die.” Still she made no move toward the door of the cab. Keeping her eyes on his, she tilted her chin upstream, toward the approaching flood.
What had been an enormous wall of water a minute ago was now a low-running slurry. It reached the marstruck as Blake watched; wavelets of semisolid slush lapped over the treads and dirtied his boots, but they carried no more force, and before the flood had run the length of the truck it had subsided into a smooth layer of fine ash and dirt. For a while the hot mush, like a pyroclastic flow on Earth, had sustained itself on steam; now all the moisture which had lubricated the flow had evaporated and nothing was left but a deep layer of those fine particles which covered so much of the dry surface of Mars.
Blake looked at Lydia. “Great timing.”
“I improvised. Believe it or not, I wouldn’t have left you out there to die, even if you were a fink. And maybe you are.” She opened her own side of the cab and climbed out. “Help me pull up the stakes.”
It took effort to dig down through the compacted layers of new gravel and ash and uproot the cable anchors, but in a few minutes they had done the work and were back in the cab.
The turbines rose to a scream. The marstruck floundered on across the desert.
Lydia lapsed into her characteristic meditation, f
ixing her eyes on the horizon of the endlessly unfolding landscape. She looked at Blake only once, a few minutes after they had resumed their journey across the alluvial fan. “What did you say your name was?”
He told her. When she said nothing more, he lapsed into his own reverie. He watched the sand hills slide by and thought about how badly he’d botched this assignment he’d insisted on giving himself. Botched it right from the beginning. The reasons for everything that had happened to him since he’d become Mike Mycroft were suddenly obvious.
He knew why he’d been attacked outside Mycroft’s hotel on Mars Station and how Yevgeny had gotten rid of his attackers so swiftly–they were Yevgeny’s own people, and he’d told them he wanted this Mycroft character to himself. That’s why Yevgeny had befriended him, gotten him a job, waited for him in the marshaling yard. Yevgeny had set him up.
They’d known about Mycroft for months, Lydia had said. Which meant that Michael Mycroft was a species of fink–a false identity the Mars Station office of the Space Board had used once or twice too often.
Just before they climbed out of the channeled terrain and moved on into the higher desert, they passed the blackened skeleton of a marstruck which had not made it across these alluvial sands. Looking at its twisted, ragged frame, half buried in sand, Blake wondered if Lydia really would have let him inside had the flood not dissipated itself too soon. Or was she waiting for a better chance to stage the perfect accident?
Sparta hung above the still point of the turning world.
She was a sun hawk, her eyes ten times sharper than any human’s, her ears tuned to the farthest, faintest cry.
There was a bare tree in the desert, and around it the world turned. The world was a desert of drifting sand and plains of smooth, bare stone.
Her sharp eyes saw shapes carved deeply into the barren sandstone, carved so deeply that the shadows in them, pooled there by the low sun, were like ink on the page. Her sharp ears heard the cry from the tree.
Her hawk wings sifted the air and she descended, curious to see more.
