“It’s time for stage C,” says Bill (or Ben), presumably reading off Pygmalion’s detailed checklist.
“Is it?” I check the other bag dangling from my belt. Yes, it’s the one we made up earlier. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s keep an eye on what’s going on in the saloon, yes?” I start the ascent, climbing hand over hand and reeling in the cable as I go. I feel like I only weigh about a kilogram here, even with my passengers. The trick is going to be not overdoing things and ramming the underside of the air lock headfirst.
The air in the saloon is steaming. The passengers are engaged in furious recriminations; Granita is tearing a strip off the Lyrae twins, Reza Agile is demanding my head (she appears to think I’m a police spy, of all things), and Mary X. is huddled in a corner, desperately trying to convince anyone who’ll listen to her that she’s nothing to do with whatever is happening.
Meanwhile, the steam is thickening, pumping into the saloon in great gouts. Pygmalion has fallen silent, evidently succumbing to whatever pressure our assailants can bring to bear on a spaceship over a direct docking link. I can’t tell precisely what’s happening, but I’m sure of one thing—the best place to be, when your spaceship is being boarded by bad bots who’re looking for you, is on board another vessel.
A rasping voice of authority comes over the broadcast channel again. “Attention, passengers and ship. Your pressurized compartments are being fumigated. Police agents will come aboard once fumigation is complete. This is an official Replication Suppression Agency inspection. You are suspected of harboring illegal replicators. You will be inspected and sterilized before you are allowed to proceed to Marsport; resistance will be punished severely.”
It is the Pink Police. Of all my luck; pirates would actually be preferable. You can usually negotiate a ransom with extralegal capitalists, but the Pink Police are distressingly short of venality. I pause, pressing a hand against the base of my abdomen. I can see the payload inside me with my mind’s eye, restlessly replicating. Do magnetic fields damage pink goo? I suddenly wonder. I could have blown the mission completely! But I don’t have time to worry about that now if I’m going to save myself.
On the other hand, I think, as I close in on the docking tunnel above me, the last place they’re going to look for it is aboard their own ship. Right?
Gouts of hig h-temperature water vapor blister the delicate paintwork of the Pygmalion’s saloon, soak into the colorful nylon-and-polyester padding, and steam up the sensors. There is some complaining and grumbling from the passengers, but the announcement that it is an official RSA inspection damps down the state of near panic. Nobody likes the Pink Police, but the prevailing state of public opinion is that they fulfill a nasty but necessary requirement. And so, the reaction is muted and the atmosphere steamy when the police jet in.
I don’t know what I was expecting of the Pink Police, but this isn’t it; they’re using drones, basketball-sized metal spheres studded with thrusters and sensors. What, no villainous cops swarming aboard with DNA scanners clenched between their teeth? Two spheres, three—they spin around with unreal grace, bouncing between floor and walls and ceiling, pointing their sensors everywhere. The steam gouting through the companionway obscures my view of them, but I can see the passengers cringing. Then—
“Hello? Big Slow? You can let us out, now. Remember us?”
It’s Bill, or Ben, in the bag at my waist. With a start, I notice that the sky outside my eye slit has turned black, the ghostly blue haze stretching away to an indefinite horizon beneath my trailing feet. The boarding tube looms just overhead, a violent tentacle thrusting into the unwilling Pygmalion’s air lock.
“Right.” I loosen the flap holding them in, and Bill (or Ben) pops a prehensile, beady-eyed head out and looks around. Then he grabs hold of my face and swarms up to the cable, followed closely by his sib, along with the bag. I’m not used to being used as a stepladder. “Hey!”
“Keep it low, Big Slow. We’re trying to be sneaky. You wanna get ready to make with the decoy?”
“If you think it’s time.” I tie the other bag to the line, then open it and start preparing its contents. There’s a suit of clothes that the Honorable Kate Sorico never really liked, and a bunch of stuff to fill it out. Bulky stuff, massive . . . and padded with feedstock from the room printer that Pygmalion swore blind would look like a body on radar.
“Nearly there, Big Slow. Get ready.”
What we’re about to try is really stupid, but it beats all of the alternatives we’ve come up with. (I check the parasitic feed, but all it shows me is billowing steam; someone—I think it may be Mary X.—is complaining about the humidity wrecking her hairdo.)
The plan is simple, if not simple-minded. (a) Send out a bunch of encrypted decoy messages addressed to Jeeves, purely by way of distraction. Done. (b) Get out of Pygmalion before the police come storming aboard, and stay out of sight. Done. (So far.) (c) Let them search the ship. (d) Dump a decoy, so they go haring off after it. (e) Reboard Pygmalion, and hope they conclude that we left earlier, or were never there in the first place, or that they need to conserve fuel for their own orbital injection, or something. Like I said, it’s completely stupid. It’s just that, as Pygmalion pointed out, it stands a faint chance of keeping us out of the hands of the Pink Police. Unlike any of the alternatives on offer.
"Ready.”
It’s best not to think too hard about all the holes in this plan, even though I can see plenty. Really, short of sitting there and waiting for them to arrest us, there’s not anything else we can do. And who knows? Maybe it’ll even work.
“Okay, Big. Give it some elbow.”
I draw my legs up and shove the decoy hard in the small of her well-padded back. She floats away at a good clip, picking up speed rapidly and falling through the flickering blue curtain in only a few seconds. She’s got to cross another few kilometers of nearly empty space inside the plasma sail, dropping away from us as we continue to decelerate at ten centimeters per second squared. It all adds up; in a few minutes she’ll be making nearly two hundred kilometers per hour relative to the ships. If they’re as monomaniacally thorough as their reputations would have us believe, the cops will take time to finish sterilizing Pygmalion and withdraw their drones, before they undock; which will leave them trying to track down a human-sized target tens of kilometers away.
And then . . . we’ll see.
A thought strikes me as I dangle on the rope. I look up at Bill and Ben. “How are we going to get back aboard?” I ask.
“Worry about that later.” They’re busy tying the bags to the same anchor point as the rope. “Come on up here. We’ve got to get out of sight inside these sacks before they undock.” People clinging to the underside of a hatch would be a bit of a giveaway, wouldn’t they? “Get in.”
And so I spend the next two hours hanging upside down from the underside of an air lock, swearing quietly to myself, not crying, scared out of my wits, and periodically peeping through the steam-blinded cameras in hope of picking up some hint, anything at all really, of what’s going on aboard the Pygmalion.
The things I do to earn a living ...
“HELLO, JULIETTE. CAN you hear this?”
“Can you hear this?”
(I’m tired. So very tired. It’s good to lie here, in this soft, warm bed. But he’s talking to me, and I need to, to do something. I ought to do something. Say something. But it’s hard.)
“Juliette?”
(I make a monumental effort.) “Boss?”
“That’s better, we knew you were going to pull through! You’ve done very well, but maintenance say you went into temporary shutdown. We were very worried for a while, but you’re going to be alright. Just a few repairs, of course, but you’ll be good as new again in no time. Fit as a fiddle. Isn’t that your instrument? Never mind. What one would mean to say is, ah, if there’s anything you need, just tell us.”
(An awful fear floats in the back of my mind, almost out of reach; I try to connect
it to my vocalization system.) “Boss. The sample.”
“The sample?”
“Is it . . . ?”
He sounds regretful. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
(Which means . . . )
“The rumors are true, or at least plausible. Whoever broke in last year—we cannot count on them not having procured a viable sample of their own.”
(Which means he doesn’t know about the other thing . . . )
“Go back to sleep, Juliette. We can talk about this later.”
(Footsteps, diminishing.)
“There’ll be time enough for war.”
“HEY, BIG SLOW. Can you hear me?”
I come awake slowly. “Bill?”
“No, It’s Ben. Listen.”
I listen with electrosense and old-fashioned vibratory hearing. There’s bumping and banging in the boarding tube above me. Sounds of a hurried retreat. “Got it. Any news?”
“Check your parasite feed.”
He flags the view of the corridor heading toward the air lock. It’s half-hazed, and a big droplet clings to the middle of the lens, distorting the view, but a quick bit of visual filtering sets me right. The police drones are flying toward the air lock, escorting—yes, it’s Granita. She’s talking to them. “—not the one I’m looking for, but one of her sibs. Not my fault the bitch smelled a rat.” She sounds annoyed. “You’ll have to do better next time.” The drone is evidently conveying its driver’s excuses. “That’s not good enough! I’ve got better things to do than stand guard over your targets all year. No, I don’t suppose it matters. She could have been useful.”
They get to the air-lock vestibule. “Yes, thank you. I need to proceed to my estates as rapidly as possible—unfinished business. If you have a spare seat, I’ll take it. Yes, I’d love to witness your mopping-up. If you could record it for me, I am sure I can find a fitting use for it—pour encourager les autres.” She smiles coldly at the drone, then follows it aboard the police cutter.
I shudder. Dainty feet kick off overhead, leaving behind the Pygmalion and the rest of her false flag operation. Granita must be working for Her, one of my ghost-selves warns me. I think I know which one it is, now, and I resolve to trust those instincts in future.
A minute later, there’s a furious rattling and banging. Then the docking tube detaches. Almost immediately, the police cutter begins to fall away from Pygmalion, sliding past the air lock with the remorseless momentum of a freight train. It barrels down into the blue soupy sky of plasma and disappears in a flicker of lightning. With its high-thrust drive, it can drop toward Mars and fire up the motor just before arrival—getting there hours ahead of us.
“All clear, Big Slow.” I laboriously extract myself from the sack and climb back up to join Bill and Ben on the lip of the air lock. I’m dreading what I’ll find on the other side of it. “You can come inside now.”
I cycle through the lock into stifling heat and humidity. As I strip off my chain mail, I realize it’s over ninety degrees. Spheres of hot water cling to the ceiling, wobbling like improbable steaming jellies before they fall slowly to the floor. One of them breaks off and lands on my shoulder, trickling down inside—it’s not physically damaging, but it’s painfully hot. Maybe the Pink Police were trying to poach the passengers? “Bill. Ben. What do you think?”
“Better get back to our stateroom, Big Slow. I don’t think we’re going to be too popular around here.”
“Um.” I nerve myself: “Pygmalion?”
She replies at once: She sounds distracted. “I’m busy. Go to your room, Katherine.”
“Told you so,” Ben smugs at me. I pretend I didn’t hear him.
Our stateroom is a tip. It’s been thoroughly searched, and there’s nothing quite as messy as a room that’s been turned over in microgravity. I lock the door behind us and contemplate the wreckage with dismay. “It’s only for another day,” Bill (or Ben) reminds me. “Chill out and try to ignore it. They didn’t find us, did they?”
“No,” agrees Pygmalion, startling me. “The decoy worked superbly. I note that they seem to have taken Ford with them. Do you know anything about that?”
“No.” I think for a moment. “I believe she went willingly, though, which implies a degree of collusion.”
“Quite possibly.” Pygmalion is silent for a while. “I think it would be best if you remain in your room until we arrive, then leave discreetly. The other passengers are highly upset, and some of them may assume that you are a police informer if you reappear.”
“Has Jeeves offered to pay, then?” Bill snipes.
“One does not discuss confidential corporate arrangements in public. ” Pygmalion’s snippy put-down is clear enough. (Ten to one Jeeves has paid handsomely for her to collude in smuggling me past the Pink Police.) “This has been most inconvenient. My upholstery is damaged and my passengers outraged—it’s scandalous! But—oh.” Her tone changes. “Oh. No!”
“What’s—”
“They just launched a missile.” She pauses for a knife-edged second. “It’s running directly away from us. Why would they do that?” More seconds tick by. “It just detonated. Ninety-six kilometers away. Most strange.”
I shudder convulsively. It is anything but strange if you are privy to all the facts: a stuffed suit floating in vacuum, drifting ever farther from Pygmalion’s air lock, and an RSA cutter with a frustrated captain and an impatient VIP passenger aboard to witness the kill.
Someone really doesn’t want my payload to reach Mars!
Whores de Combat
WELCOME TO MARSPORT, Deimos.
A brief factual rundown cannot do the place justice. I’ve been here before (even lived here for a handful of years), but it never fails to surprise. Let me attempt to explain ...
Deimos is the outer of Mars’s two moons, an irregular rocky lump between ten and fifteen kilometers in diameter, depending on where you hold your measuring calipers. It was originally covered in loose regolith, high in carbon, which has long since been recycled for construction materials. A century of solar energy beamed from the big collectors near Mercury powered the rockets that adjusted its orbit, and today Deimos is the anchor weight for the largest surface-to-orbit space elevator ever constructed: Bifrost.
Most of the inner planets have no space elevator at all; Venus and Mercury because their days are unfeasibly long, Earth because its gravity well and debris belts challenge the limits of engineering. But Luna has the L1 lift, and as for Mars—Mars lies on the cusp of the heavily populated, energy-rich inner system and the material-rich outer system. Mars also has Deimos, the perfect construction site and gravitational anchor for Bifrost. And so it was inevitable that Mars, the gateway to the outer solar system, would acquire an elevator like Bifrost, and a city like Marsport to run it.
Most elevators are simple things—parallel tapes traversed by sluggish climbers, drudge laborers whose groaning cantilevers bear the burden of interplanetary freight among the worlds of the outer solar system. But there’s nothing simple about Bifrost. The complex of cables is half a kilometer across, wide enough to anchor a world. Fast express shuttles hurtle up and down with passengers, while the slow, sturdy supertrain scows take weeks to complete a round-trip, lowering refined feedstocks and returning with processed materials, manufactured more conveniently in the turbulent forges of Mars than in orbital facilities— and which can then be exported to the rest of the inner system.
A quarter of a million indentured arbeiters and their aristo overseers, and perhaps a tenth that number of independent souls, work the port facilities: loading and unloading cargo, inspecting payloads, maintaining the infrastructure, untangling problems, and serving those who get the real work done. Once our dead Creators ran ports like this, with names like Liverpool, and New York, and Singapore. Today (as the jester said) everything is automated. Plenty of hands keep the traffic flowing, hour by hour and year by year.
Pygmalion is tiny in comparison to Marsport: a fist-sized hovercam buzzing alongside
a gigantic freight dirigible. I follow her progress as traffic control directs her final approach to a small peripheral docking hub on the poleward flank of Voltaire crater. “You will please stay in your cabin while the other passengers debark,” she tells me prissily. “I will notify you when you may leave.” I think she’s still upset because of the water damage to the saloon ceiling. She’s probably as certain I’m smuggling something as that coldly treacherous aristo Ford, but she stays bought—and Jeeves will pay her well enough. So Bill, Ben, and I wait impatiently until she says, “You may go.” Then we leg it through the dripping corridors and out onto the dockside.
Arrival on Marsport is not subject to customs—it’s a free port, the Pink Police aside. I still recall my bearings from my last visit, over a decade ago. The problem is not so much arriving, as being seen to arrive . . . but I’ve got a solution for that problem.
The Honorable Katherine Sorico emerges from Pygmalion fully an hour after the other passengers have left. She’s taken the time to change into a distinctive puffball dress worn over free-fall pantaloons, ruffled and pleated and patched with metallic lace, with warning lights blinking at ankle and cuff. She does not skulk around grimy dockside loading tunnels and container farms, but sweeps along, her servants behind her, and commandeers the first conveyance she claps eyes on (a crew service spider that’s clearly seen better days) directing the hapless arbeiter to take her to the nearest tube stop. She sits stiffly erect, eyes straight ahead, her servants sitting atop the spider’s passenger cage as it scuttles through warrens and alleyways and across debris nets, finally landing just beside the tube hatch. “Summon me a private carriage,” she tells one of her servants; “I want to be settled into the Grand Imperial in time to send out calling cards before evening.”
The servant complies. Only a minute later, the hatch opens. The Honorable Katherine climbs into the padded, compact tube ball, directs her arbeiters to make their own way to her estate, closes the hatch . . . and is seen no more.
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