by David Ryker
“Weekend clothes?” Ward raised an eyebrow, catching it.
“Yeah, like weekend clothes, for when you go places on the weekend.” She seemed even more disbelieving of his ignorance than usual. Maybe she just didn’t like the way he was staring. Maybe it wasn’t him — but rather just the staring. She was definitely something to look at in that dress. He imagined what her mother might have looked like in it, too. He still hadn’t seen a picture of her, but he guessed to produce someone who looked like Arza, she wouldn’t have looked any worse in the dress herself.
“That’s my stuff,” Arza said flatly, adjusting the fabric around her midriff. It was a little loose — not even noticeable unless you were looking at her like Ward was. “There’s a jacket in there, too,” Arza continued, looking up at him. Her long golden earrings, little sequins on impossibly thin chains, shimmered in the sun. “Put it on.”
Ward tore his eyes away and split the bag down the zipper, pushing Arza’s trousers and holster aside, fishing for his outfit. He dragged out a double-breasted blazer with red lapels. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“It’s a pilot’s jacket — if you walk in there dressed like you are right now, you’ll be asked to leave. Trust me. Just put it on and carry the bag. When we’re onboard, you can change back. But for now…” She looked him up and down and bared her perfect teeth apprehensively. “Appearances, you know?”
Ward dropped the bag and slipped off his jacket. “You’re not ashamed of me, are you, Arza?” he said playfully. Or at least semi-playfully.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, checking the corner. “But you don’t exactly fit in.”
“And you do?” he said cuttingly, pulling his arms into the constricting sleeves.
“Dressed like this I do,” she said, not defensively, but with a tone that told Ward she thought he was indeed being stupid, and probably a bit petty, too. He reined it in accordingly.
He pushed his jacket into the duffle and shouldered it. “Okay, after you.”
“Right — you should walk behind me. You’re the driver, remember.”
“Sure thing, madam.”
She fired him an icy glance and then sauntered off toward the door. He was happy to follow behind as the driver. At least this way, he wouldn’t have to engage with any stuffy, shoved-up-their-own-asses ‘celebrities’ and other rich idiots. And the view wasn’t half bad, either.
It took them nearly thirty minutes to work their way through the club, which, as well as being the only place in this hemisphere that a private orbital service ran from, doubled as a hotel, bar, restaurant, golf course, hunting range, and country club. Inside the main building, corridors sprawled out in every direction. Ward read the signs disbelievingly. Swedish Spa. Mediterranean Terrace. Caribbean Pavilion. Soho Social Club. Las Vegas Casino. Icelandic Hot Springs. Roman Baths. Olympian Pool. He wasn’t sure which were restaurants, which were bars, and which were other things. The place was huge, like a labyrinth, and at every turn, three-piece-suited, stuffy, jowled men with wispy hair and beautiful women laughed and cajoled. They all had drinks in hands, thick blue curls of cigar smoke swimming above their heads. Jazz music was playing from somewhere Ward couldn’t see, but it was omnipresent, and always at a constant volume.
The hallways were all hardwood floored and vaulted with intricate moldings and chandeliers.
Arza moved fluidly from one group to another other where she had to — or where she was recognized, at least. “Erica!” they’d cry. “Is that you? You look wonderful! How’s your father?” they’d say, as if rehearsed, and then kiss her on each check, place their arm around her waist, or their hand on her lower back, or if they were especially drunk or lecherous, lower. Ward held fast, and she kept shooting him looks that conveyed a please don’t punch anyone sort of message. He did his best not to.
When they’d finally oozed past all of the rich folk, she led him toward a bar. He hadn’t had a decent drink in a long time, and he’d never felt like he’d needed one more than he did right now. Arza pulled up a tall stool next to a curved granite top. She crossed her legs and her left knee cut into her right calf, her foot wagging to the smooth jazz, her skin like poured honey.
A bartender appeared and Ward went to take the seat next to her. She glared at him — maybe for the bartender’s benefit, or because she forgot who she was. Or maybe because she was showing exactly who she was.
The bartender — a skinny Martian with dark hair and a small mouth, smiled politely at her.
“Sorry,” she said, returning it. “He’s new.”
The bartender flushed a little. “It’s fine, madam. What can I get you?”
“Gin martini, dry and clean with a twist of lemon,” she said easily, twirling her hair around her finger. With her other hand, she slid the gold card across the surface of the bar.
The bartender nodded politely and took it, disappearing for a second.
“I’ll take a beer,” Ward said, holding his hand up to thin air as a joke.
“You’re a driver. You can’t drink,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.
“I don’t know why I can’t just be your guest, or—”
“Because people know me here. They know who my father is, and they won’t look twice at a driver. But anyone else—”
“So you’re worried about them telling your father you’re at their precious club with some dirty human?”
“Dirty? What the hell are you talking about? Jesus, come off it, Ward,” she sighed. “If it gets back to my father what I’m really doing here — which he’ll quickly deduce if someone tells him that they saw you — he’ll realize what we’re about to do, or have just done, and then probably report the ship stolen, and then—”
“He’d do that? To his own daughter?” Ward was a little surprised. She hadn’t spoken of the man much, but he assumed she idolized him by the way she’d acted toward Klaymo.
“You obviously don’t know my father.” She shook her head. “People talk here, Ward. It’s like that — gossipy. Everyone’s talking about everyone. Be glad they don’t see you. That you’re invisible. Me? I can’t be. But if I turned up in my other clothes,” she said, nodding at the duffle over Ward’s shoulder, “then they’d have a field day. The daughter of the magnificent Ferlish Arza — dressed up like some common SB investigator — scratch that, an AIA investigator — your clothes, remember — and at the Helios Club, too! How dare she. My father would never live it down.”
“And any of that matters to you?”
“No, but it matters to him, and he matters to me.”
Ward wasn’t sure he understood, but this was obviously a social circle he wasn’t familiar with. Arza didn’t seem to like it much herself, and kept pulling at her dress awkwardly, but she knew how it worked, and they needed to get through without any fuss, if they could.
The bartender came back and put down her drink. She took half of it in her mouth in one go and swallowed, sighing at length afterward. Ward could smell the gin on the air for a second. Behind them, across the marble tiled floor, a huge set of windows stretched around in a wide circle. In the middle was a colossal pool, mosaiced and glistening. It writhed gently. Some people were swimming lengths, others were sitting on the side, languishing in the sun. Some were playing and laughing. Ward noted an old man with lots of saggy skin and chest hair to rival a Martian bear splashing water on a group of beautiful, olive-skinned women in bikinis. They were crying out with laughter in high-pitched, girlish voices, dancing around him in circles, passing around a bottle of champagne as the old man lurched through the water after them with outstretched, liver-spotted fingers.
Ward grimaced and looked away, turning back to Arza. She was looking right at him, her features set, eyes already a little glassy. They hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and even then she hadn’t eaten a lot. As he thought that, his stomach growled.
“Ward,” Arza said quietly.
He took half a step closer.
“I’ve never done an
ything like this, you know. Going against Moozana is one thing — the SB, too. But… my father? Shit, when he finds out what we’ve — no, what I’ve done, he’s going to… I don’t even know what. That’s why we need to be invisible here.” She was earnest as hell in that moment. Ward could feel it coming off her like heat and hung on her every word. “If we put a foot wrong, or out of place, if anyone thinks I’m here to do anything other than just sit and drink and have a good time, maybe get away for a quiet weekend off-planet, with my father’s blessing, of course, then they’ll call him. My membership is by his grace, and if anything’s out of place — one phone call, and boom. We’re out on our ass and the SB is going to come down on us like a ton of goddamn bricks. I don’t even know what the AIA will do to you.”
He shrugged. “They’d never catch me.”
She smiled a little at that. “We just need to get off the planet as quickly as we can. All right?”
“Speaking of which?” Ward looked around, a few lazy ceiling fans throbbing gently overhead. He could see all manner of things from supermodels relaxing in hot tubs to movie stars playing cards for stacks of cash, right out in the open. But what he couldn’t see was how the hell they were going to get into orbit. The public terminal in Eudaimonia offered a hydrogen balloon and solar sail transport craft, which, while efficient, was painfully slow. Somehow, Ward didn’t see the rich and famous spending a cramped six hours floating into the sky, onboard bar or not.
“The terminal is downstairs.”
“Terminal?” Ward watched as she drained her glass.
“Vactrain. Mag-lev and fusion thrust.”
Ward decoded what she said as the words tumbled out of her mouth.
“Next service leaves at five.”
Ward nodded slowly and looked at Arza, and then at her empty glass. “That’s in twelve minutes. We should go,” he said, looking around for any signs that pointed to it.
She smirked at him and motioned for another drink. “People don’t rush here, Ward. Relax.”
“You’re the one who said you wanted to get off the surface as quickly as possible.”
“And the train won’t leave until five, and then…” She trailed off and laughed to herself suddenly for show, smiling at the bartender who’d just come within earshot and put down a bowl of olives for her, before she turned back to Ward and finished. “Believe me, there’ll be plenty of quickly.”
19
The Helios Solar Club’s private vactrain was probably the most careless use of money that Ward had ever seen.
It was almost as though, because its carbon footprint was so low, that it was just fine to use such a monetarily decadent mode of transportation.
They’d left the bar four minutes before the train was due to set off, and Ward followed Arza as she walked unhurriedly through the dimly lit corridors, the chandeliers, spread evenly along the ceilings glinting in the light from the bulbs hidden among their diamonds. Even though Arza had said that her father had a family membership included with his job title, he guessed you’d still have to be stinking rich to maintain any sort of status there. Ward didn’t know much about her father, or her family, but he assumed that beyond his by-the-bootstraps attitude to working, the man came from money.
Arza gave a few cursory comments to people as she passed, complimenting brooches or shoes, asking whether people had had-work-done, and following it up with an excited “You must tell me who you use!” before strange laughs were exchanged and then left hanging in the growing distance between them.
She cleared her throat after one particularly loud outburst and turned left down a set of wide marble stairs, her heels clacking slowly as she took them one at a time, a quarter on, her dress held in her left hand above the knee, and her right held a little to her side for balance. She’d said there’d be food on the ship, but she had nothing in her stomach just then but gin and olives. Appearances, she’d said. But Ward thought it was nerves. Whether she respected him or not, she was shit-scared of her father finding out what she was doing. Plus, it was a long way to the Gate, and he intended to get a drink the moment they were onboard this luxury solar yacht of hers.
The marble staircase let down into an underground terminal with a large, arched ceiling. Spread across it, flecked with gold and sapphire, was a huge mosaiced mural that depicted Helios’ chariot flying across the sky. It hurt Ward’s neck to look up at it all.
The platform was a mottled and polished stone-tile affair set out like an evil villain’s living room. In the center, a circular bar stood with a liquor shelf in the middle, all glass and lit up, filled with bottles. The top was hammered brass polished to a shine, and the panels under it were all studded red leather. To match that, red-leather studded sofas and armchairs were arranged around brass coffee tables like the platform was some sort of underground speakeasy. A few people sat sipping on drinks, or chatting casually, totally ignorant of the technical marvel on their right.
Nestled against the wall was a vac-train. It was eight carriages long and sleek chrome. The windows were near-invisible from the outside, and though the doors were opened to reveal a plush interior, Ward could see that they’d seal themselves flush against the outside of it.
The front car was duck-billed for aerodynamics, and the rear tailed off in a curved set of fins that helped keep it flying straight. Arza hadn’t mentioned exactly how it worked, but Ward had a fair idea. They wouldn’t be in the Tharsis region if his guess wasn’t at least semi-close.
Arza ignored the bar staff, who were watching closely for any sign of a drink order, and headed for the train.
She stepped in, onto the wooden floor. It was polished hardwood — dark and regal. Ward wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a wooden floor on a train. The walls matched the bar outside, keeping the red studded leather theme going. The chairs were much the same, two on each side of the aisle, though they were front facing and bolted to the floor, despite their best efforts to disguise that fact. Overhead were bag bins, like on most trains, and on the strip of ceiling between them the murals continued, though these were more subdued, done in the rust-and-black style of Grecian vases.
Arza took a seat seemingly at random and Ward pushed the duffle into the locker above it before moving to sit next to her in the seat.
“Woah,” she said, flinching almost as Ward turned around to sit. “What’re you doing? Drivers sit at the back—”
Ward didn’t let her finish before he rolled his eyes and sank into the soft leather with a gentle hiss of escaping air squeezing out of the memory foam. He’d taken one look at the fold-out wall seating in the carriage behind and decided that the charade was now officially over. “I’m done. We’re already on the train, and no one’s going to tell Daddy at this point.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “And even if they did, it wouldn’t matter.”
Someone stepped on to the train and tutted loudly at Ward sitting with the rich folk. He opened his eyes to see an overweight guy with a thick gold chain around his neck, and eyebrows like a horned owl. He was glaring at Ward, his white jacket long at the hems, sagging to his stumpy knees so that there was enough fabric to wrap around his gut. “Uh—” He started to say something derisive before Ward shut him down.
“Save it,” Ward said without moving, letting his eyes close again. He opened his own jacket and touched his belt, the miniature projector that he’d repositioned there from the shoulder of his tac-jacket floating his badge over his thigh. “We’re working.”
Arza smiled awkwardly and apologized before Eyebrows grunted indignantly and went off to find a more suitable carriage.
“Do you know who that was?” she said, the shock in her voice apparent.
“No,” Ward sighed, “and I don’t really care. When is this thing setting off?” He checked his watch. It was already a few minutes after the scheduled departure time.
Though, the second Eyebrows took a seat in the next car — Ward could see him through the windows ahead — the doors hissed shut and seal
ed themselves into the frames. As far as Ward could tell, it was just the three of them on the train, despite the maximum capacity being probably over a hundred.
“They weren’t waiting for him, were they?” Ward said, almost disbelieving, to Arza.
She shrugged with an I-told-you-so look.
He closed his eyes and put his head back again.
“You ever been on a vac-train before?” she asked airily, tightening a seat belt around her stomach before she pulled the straps over her shoulders and secured them in the buckle at her front.
“Not one like this,” Ward said absently, clipping his own in without looking up.
A voice filled the air. The pilot sounded French, but spoke in flawless English. “Welcome aboard this Helios Club Orbital Shuttle. We’ll be departing shortly. Please remain seated for the duration of the journey. We should arrive at the Helios Outer Dock in around fifteen minutes. Weather conditions are balmy — it should be a smooth ride.” As soon as he finished, the message played over again in Martian, with the same French lilt. It sounded butchered to Ward, all throat sounds and tongue clicks, but he wasn’t an authority on the finer points of Martian speech.
Arza looked at his hand around the rest. “Nervous?” she said, a hint of humor in her voice as she stared at his white knuckles.
“No, I just don’t like flying much.”
She scoffed. “What do you like, Ward?”
“Puppies, ice cream, people who don’t ask questions.” He fired her a glib smirk and she shook her head.
“You know, it’s okay to be nervous.”
“I’m not nervous, it’s just that three of the last five ships I’ve been on were shot down.” He looked up as she tried to hide the shock on her face.
“Maybe I should rethink letting you fly the yacht, then.”
“I wasn’t flying those ones.”
“Still, we can’t have shaky hands at the controls.”
“Screw you.”
She leaned her head back and said nothing more as the train started to electrify. The electromagnets along the bottom began to fill with charge and then the tracks did too, floating the whole thing into the air. It wobbled back and forth, and then settled as the current stabilized.
