Red Planet Blues

  I cycled through the airlock as quickly as I could, and—

  And whatever combinations of people Mac had chosen to get him and the meese out of the Kathryn Denning hadn’t worked as intended. Berling and Rory were halfway down the ramp that led from the airlock to the ground, Berling still holding Rory’s arm and clutching his skull. One of the meese was sprawled face down about twenty meters to the right—Mac had apparently used the disruptor on him—and the other moose and Mac were facing off against each other about forty meters farther along.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Merely resisting arrest wasn’t cause to use deadly force, and Mac, who ultimately worked for Howard Slapcoff, would be the last guy in the solar system to say a transfer was entitled to less than a biological was; the first moose must have actively attacked him.

  Right now, Mac’s back was to me. He had the disruptor disk aimed at the second moose, and they seemed to be at an impasse: the moose was refusing to move, and Mac’s only recourse would be to kill him if he didn’t.

  Mac and I were still on the same radio frequency, and so I spoke to him. Rory should be tuned in as well, but his captor, Stuart Berling, wouldn’t be able to hear. “Mac, it’s Alex. I’m in the open airlock of the Kathryn Denning behind you. A transfer named Stuart Berling came storming in, and he’s killed Van Dyke and taken Dr. Pickover captive; they’re on the ramp in front of me.”

  There was silence long enough that I thought Mac’s radio must be on the fritz. But then Mac’s brogue came through, punctuated by some static; I wondered if the fact that he’d recently fired the disruptor had anything to do with that. “Aye, Alex, I saw the transfer coming toward the ship. I tried to stop him, but had my hands full with the two goons.”

  “Only one goon left,” I said.

  “You noticed that,” said Mac. He and the moose were now slowly circling each other; I think Mac had started the movement so that he could change his perspective and get a glimpse of me. The transfer he was holding at bay would have already seen me and Berling and Pickover. “One of the goons took the opportunity to run back toward the ship,” Mac said. “He went after the incoming transfer—Berling, did you say his name was? The goon wouldn’t halt, and I had to fry him.”

  “Yeah. He must have figured that Berling was coming after Van Dyke—which he was.”

  Mac and the moose had rotated 180 degrees; Mac was now looking right at me. Berling and his captive Pickover were standing motionless halfway down the ramp.

  “Mac,” I said, speaking again after a pause, “are you in radio communication with the transfer thug?”

  “Aye, I can be.”

  “What frequency?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “Switching,” I said, touching controls on my wrist. Then: “Okay, big fella. This is Alex Lomax. Which one are you? Uno or Dos?”

  There was a pause while he thought—presumably not about what the answer was, but rather about whether to answer at all. But at last, he did. “Uno.”

  “Okay, Uno, I want you to consider something. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the guy you call Actual—the actual Willem Van Dyke—is dead.”

  “You’ll pay for that!”

  “Hang tight. I didn’t do it. But he is gone; sorry about that. And you know Tres got wasted at my apartment, and Dos is lying in a heap over there.” I pointed. “No Actual. No other duplicates. Just you. That means you are Willem Van Dyke. Under Durksen v. Hawksworth, under the laws of just about every country: the biological original is gone and one transfer exists. You are Willem Van Dyke now. Sure, maybe Detective McCrae can pin a few petty things on you, and maybe he can’t—he’d have to prove that you personally, not Dos or Tres, were responsible, and that’d take some doing. But even if he can, you’re potentially immortal now; don’t squander that. We can all walk away from this.”

  Uno had his back to me now, but he stopped and turned around; Mac could have zapped him with the disruptor, but I guess Uno trusted him not to by this point. He was clearly looking over at me—which meant he was looking in the general direction of Berling and Rory, too.

  I thought that if Uno could be won over, he might help in saving Rory; there wasn’t much I could do, armed with a gun, against a strong transfer. And as long as Rory and Berling were locked together there was nothing Mac could do with the disruptor. But Rory was strong, too—and if Uno and Rory both went against Berling, Berling might go down.

  I couldn’t see Uno’s expression from this distance—although I suspected he could see mine, and so I tried a kindly smile. It seemed to work. He nodded—I could make out that much—and slowly lifted his arms into the classic “I surrender” pose.

  “Very good,” I said. Below me on the ramp, Berling was craning his neck to look back my way while still holding Rory as a shield in front of him. I doubted I could as easily talk him into letting his hostage go, but I held up fingers to indicate a new radio frequency—two and five—in hopes that Berling might want to parley for Rory’s release.

  Berling tilted his head, presumably doing something internally that switched radio frequencies. “Okay, Lomax,” he said. “Talk.”

  “We all want to walk away from this, Stuart,” I said. “Think about what’s on the line. You’ve uploaded—you can live forever. You’ve found great fossils, and you’ll find even more—you’re rich.” I paused, wondering if bringing Lacie into it was wise or not, but decided I needed every bit of persuasion I could muster. “And you’ve got an amazingly beautiful wife waiting for you. You don’t need to throw all that away.”

  I wanted some feedback—some evidence that this was making sense to him—but he said nothing and so, after a time, I went on. “And you don’t have to throw it away,” I said. “If Uno, over there, accepts the role of the real Willem Van Dyke, then Van Dyke isn’t dead, see? No homicide. No need for you to take a hostage. No need for any of this. All you—”

  Motion caught my eye. Uno—in the body of Dazzling Don Hutchison—still had his hands held up, but he must have just crouched low, and then snapped those powerful legs straight, because he was flying up, up, up into the dark sky. He kept his right arm bent, but then stuck his left arm straight out from the shoulder; he looked, for all the world, as he flew higher and higher, like he was going to throw a Hail Mary pass. But he wasn’t holding anything in either hand, and—ah—he was actually twisting around his vertical axis as he went up, and now was starting the slow descent. I’m sure he wanted to come down faster, but—

  Yes, he’d angled backward a bit. He was going to come down right on top of Mac. Mac was fumbling to get the disruptor disk aimed up over his head, but soon abandoned that notion and simply scrambled to get out of the way. Even under Martian gravity, having 150 kilos of mass conk you on the head could do a lot of damage.

  As Uno came down onto the planitia, he flexed his knees, and they bore the brunt of the impact. Still, a cloud of dust went up, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what was happening. But soon Uno came barreling out of the cloud, heading straight toward Mac, who was hunched over and scuttling away. And then this Dazzling Don did what the real Dazzling Don had done countless times—he tackled the other player, driving Mac face first into the dirt. Mac landed on the disruptor; Uno pushed himself up off Mac, then grabbed Mac’s shoulders and tossed him aside. He seized the disruptor disk and started running toward me.

  No, not toward me. Toward Rory Pickover and Stuart Berling. “You killed Actual!” Uno said, no sign of exertion in his mechanical voice—just raw fury. I realized that he, too, must have selected frequency twenty-five; even from forty meters away he could make out the finger signs I’d presented to Berling.

  He was closing the distance fast. “Uno, don’t!” I yelled. “Don’t!”

  Uno slowed a bit, but only to get a good look at the disruptor and find its controls. And although I knew from experience that turning it off was harder than it should be, turning it on had never been a problem . . .

  There were now only about fifteen
meters between Uno and the Berling/Pickover pair, still on the ramp. It was my turn to jump. The airlock was higher up than I’d have liked, but I stepped onto the ramp, then leapt off. “Berling!” I shouted, as soon as I’d landed on the planitia. “Let Pickover go. Get back into the airlock! You’ll be safe inside.”

  Berling didn’t move.

  “For God’s sake!” I called. “Lock yourself back inside the ship!”

  He stood there. Of course he couldn’t do that; he could never lock himself in that death ship again.

  Uno had come to a stop now. He held the disruptor in front of him, one hand in each of the grips on the opposite sides of the disk.

  “Uno, for God’s sake, let Dr. Pickover go! You don’t want to do this!”

  But he did. He must have pressed the twin triggers, because suddenly both Berling and Rory went stiff and then their bodies started spasming and—

  And—Christ!—Berling was still gripping Rory’s forehead, and his hand was clenching.

  The high-pitched whine of the disruptor was barely audible in this thin air, but its effects were obvious. Both transfers looked like they were receiving massive electrical shocks.

  “Stop!” I shouted, and “Stop!” shouted Mac.

  But Uno kept holding down the triggers, and the two transfers kept vibrating, and—

  And I saw Rory’s head being deformed—as if the broadband frequencies coursing through his system weren’t doing enough damage.

  “For God’s sake!” I yelled.

  Uno didn’t seem to know how to turn off the device, but he did twist his giant body, aiming the disk away from Berling and Rory. They both stopped jerking. Berling toppled sideways and fell off the ramp, his limbs stiff. He landed with a small thud and a big puff of dust next to me. Rory fell forward and skidded down the ramp, his partially crushed head leading the way.

  “You didn’t have to do that!” I said. “You didn’t have to take out Dr. Pickover!”

  Uno’s voice had an infinite calmness. “That wasn’t Dr. Pickover,” he replied. “That was nobody.” And then he stretched out his arms and began to slowly flip the disk end over end, and, as it was facing up, he said, “And I’m nobody, too—and with Actual gone, I have no reason to be.” The disk continued to flip around, and the emitter side ended up facing toward Dazzling Don Hutchison’s face. The giant body started to convulse as Uno’s fists clenched shut on the twin triggers. He kept spasming for about twenty seconds as Mac and I rushed toward him from opposite directions. And then he toppled backward, still convulsing as he went down in slo-mo, until he was lying on his back, the disk held up over him.

  Mac loomed in and pulled out the off switch, and suddenly everything was very, very still.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Iwalked slowly over to where Mac was standing, and we stood wordlessly for a time: two weary biologicals in surface suits amid four dead transfers lying there on the Martian sands in nothing but street clothes.

  Finally, backup arrived in the form of Huxley, Kaur, and another cop, rumbling out onto the surface in a pressurized van. Mac conferred with them, and the three newcomers set about photographing the bodies and taking various scanner readings and measurements. While they were busy with that, I took Mac up into the Kathryn Denning and showed him the corpse of Willem Van Dyke.

  There wasn’t much to say, and so Mac and I barely spoke. I left him inside the ship, taking readings with his scanner, and I trudged slowly down the ramp. All of this action had taken place by the south airlock. I had plenty of bottled oxygen, and so I decided to walk around the dome to the west airlock—just to clear my head a bit, and to avoid human company.

  It was a little over three kilometers to that airlock, and I shuffled along, raising dust clouds as I did so, like Pig-Pen in the old Peanuts animated cartoons. After about a kilometer, I decided to try calling Reiko Takahashi again, and I was relieved when her lovely face popped up on my wrist.

  “You’re okay?” I asked into my fishbowl’s headset.

  Her orange-striped hair was mussed. “Exhausted,” she said. “My God, it was terrifying.”

  “But you’re okay now?”

  She nodded. “How’s Mr. Pickover? Have you found him yet?”

  She’d had enough of an upset for one day; I’d tell her later that Rory was dead. “He’s with Detective McCrae right now.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Rory said he created a diversion so you could get away.”

  “He did indeed, the sweet old fellow. He started singing ‘God Save the King’ at the top of his lungs—or, well, at top volume anyway. Those two giant jerks were mortified, and I managed to run off.” She paused. “If you see him, won’t you thank him for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Look, I’m still pretty shook up. I’m going to take something and go to bed.”

  “I don’t blame you. But can you let Fernandez know you’re okay? He’s been worried, too.”

  “I’ll call him now,” she said, and she shook off from her end.

  I continued walking slowly. My shadow, falling to my right, walked along with me. The silence was deafening.

  I had genuinely liked Rory Pickover, strange little man though he had been. He’d had something I’d seen all too rarely on Mars: selfless devotion to a cause rather than to personal gain.

  The dome was on my right. I was walking about thirty meters away from it; I had no particular desire to make eye contact with anyone within. Earth was hanging above the horizon, brilliant and blue. My phone could have told me which hemisphere was facing me right now, but I didn’t ask. I liked to think it was the side with Wanda on it. And although I couldn’t tell what phase it was in, I wanted it to be a crescent Earth, with the part Wanda was on in nighttime, too. I wanted her to be looking up, looking across all those millions of kilometers, at the red planet in her sky. I wanted her to be thinking of me.

  I continued slowly along. For the first time ever, in all the mears I’d lived here, I felt heavy.

  When a man’s client is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your client and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens I’m in the detective business. Well, when someone who’s hired you gets killed, it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.

  Of course, the killer hadn’t gotten away with it. Uno was dead. Still, Pickover had come to me for protection, and I’d failed him.

  I’d never get paid for the work I’d done on this case, but that didn’t matter. And there was no one to bill for any further work. But Rory had wanted to track down the fossils Weingarten and O’Reilly—and no doubt Van Dyke—had sold on Earth, not for gain, not for profit, not to line his own pockets, but so they could be described for science, for posterity, for all time, for all humanity.

  And there were surely other paleontologists who could do that work, if I could locate those fossils. Maybe there’d even be a previously unknown genus amongst the specimens. And maybe whoever described that new form in the scientific literature might be persuaded to name it Pickoveria.

  I arrived at the western airlock and left the police-department surface suit there. My office was near here, and I walked over to it. I went up to the second floor and made my way down the corridor. Once inside my office, I used the sink at the wet bar to wash my face and hands, and then I collapsed into my chair.

  I sat for a few moments, thinking, then called Juan Santos on my desktop monitor. Juan’s wide forehead and receding chin appeared on the screen. “You put a lot of kilometers on my buggy,” he said.

  I tried to rally some of my usual spirit. “A shakedown. Good for it. Keep it running smoothly.”

  “You could have at least filled the gas tank.”

  “It doesn’t have a gas tank.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “Hey,” I said, “at least I brought it back in
perfect condition.”

  “You mean I just haven’t found the damage yet. Not surprising, considering how much mud it was covered in.”

  “You wound me, Juan.”

  “Not yet. But if I can find a baseball bat . . .”

  This could go on for hours—but I wasn’t in the mood. “Look,” I said, “I’ve become acquainted with a computer that’s almost forty years old. Problem is, files on it are locked to someone long dead. Can you help me out?”

  “Do you know the make or model?”

  “No, but it was installed in a Mars lander.”

  “That long ago?”

  He was going to find out soon enough, anyway: “It was installed in Weingarten and O’Reilly’s third lander.”

  “And you’ve found the computer?”

  “More than that.”

  “You’ve found the ship?”

  “Uh-huh. The descent stage.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I had it brought to the shipyard. I was hoping you could meet me there.”

  “All right.”

  “In about half an hour?”

  “Um, yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  “Thanks,” I said and broke the connection. I got a spare gun from the office safe and brought it and my usual piece with me as I headed over to the hovertram stop. I had a sinking feeling that we hadn’t seen the last of the day’s excitement, and if Juan was going to be my backup, I wanted him armed.

  A tram pulled up, and I hopped on. I changed trams at the transfer point outside the Amsterdam, a classy gym that appealed to nicer people than those I liked to hang out with, and took another tram to the stop closest to the shipyard. I got off and hustled over to the yardmaster’s shack, but Bertha wasn’t there. Still, it was easy enough to spot the descent stage, sitting vertically on its stubby trio of legs, with the airlock on the side and the access hatch on top, and the whole thing streaked with mud. I headed over to it.