Red Planet Blues

  One of the landing legs was aligned with the airlock door, and had ladder rungs built into it. I climbed up and cycled through the airlock.

  “Welcome back,” Mudge said, as soon as I was in. “Can I be of assistance?”

  “You defeated the overrides before so that both the inner and outer airlock doors could be kept open simultaneously,” I said. “Do that again, please.”

  “Done.”

  I heard a faint calling of my first name. I headed back into the airlock chamber and saw Juan Santos wandering among the hulks. “Over here!” I shouted through the open door and waved.

  He caught sight of me, jogged over with the typical Martian lope, and climbed the ladder. I made room for him, and he stepped inside, put his hands on his hips, and looked around the circular chamber. “Like a page out of history,” he said.

  “Or a cage with a mystery.”

  “You should leave the poetry to the lovely Diana,” Juan said. His face took on a wistful look as he contemplated his favorite waitress, but after a moment, he narrowed his eyes. “The computer is still active?”

  “I am,” said Mudge. “Can I be of assistance?”

  Juan stretched his arms out, fingers interlocked, until his knuckles cracked. “Okay,” he said into the air. “Now listen carefully. Everything I say is a lie.” He paused, then: “I am lying.”

  “Puh-leeze,” said Mudge.

  Juan looked at me and shrugged good-naturedly. “It was worth a try. Is there a terminal I can use?”

  “In there,” I said, pointing to one of the four rooms on the lower level. Juan entered, and I slipped off my phone and placed it on a piece of equipment, with the lens facing him, just to keep an eye on him. The whole point of coming back here was to get the secret Mudge must now know—the precise map of how to get between the Alpha and New Klondike, and, therefore, the reverse—and I’d be damned if I let Juan extract that info for his own uses. Of course, there was no reason to think he suspected Mudge, or I, knew where the Alpha was; the wreck of Weingarten and O’Reilly’s second lander had been salvaged from Aeolis Mensae, and he probably assumed this one had been recovered from somewhere equally far from the mother lode.

  I climbed up the interior ladder; I wanted to give O’Reilly’s space suit a more thorough examination for signs of foul play. But it wasn’t in the room we’d left it in. Well, the ship had come crawling out of the mud, fallen over, rolled around, flown halfway across Isidis Planitia, gone from vertical to horizontal to vertical again, and been hauled by a tractor. Being tossed around like a rag doll wasn’t quite the fate one of the richest men in the solar system had anticipated, I’m sure.

  “Mudge,” I said into the air, “what happened to Denny O’Reilly’s body?”

  “A combination of eating too much and not exercising enough.”

  “I mean, where is it now?”

  “In the room on your right.”

  I entered that wedge-shaped compartment, and—

  And that was odd. Yes, O’Reilly’s suited body was in here, sprawled on the floor, but the cupboard doors were hanging open. I was sure they’d been closed when I left the ship. I suppose they could have been knocked open during the flight, but—

  I entered the next room. Its cupboards were open, too. As were the ones in the next chamber, and the next one. There could be no doubt: someone had searched the ship.

  “Alex?” called Juan from below.

  I hustled down the ladder, entered the chamber he was in, and stood behind him. “Yes?”

  He swiveled in his chair to face me. “I’ve unlocked the computer.”

  “That fast?”

  “Sure. Like you said, it’s a forty-year-old machine. Most security systems get hacked within weeks of being released. Ask it whatever you want.”

  I’d wait until I was alone to get the instructions to return to the Alpha. “Mudge,” I said, “the ship has been searched since I left it. Did someone beside Dr. Pickover enter?”

  “Who is Dr. Pickover?” asked the computer.

  “Rory. The person who flew here with you earlier.”

  “Yes. After this ship was hauled through the airlock by a tractor, someone came aboard.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Biological or transfer?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Damn. No, he wouldn’t. Transferring had been something for only the insanely rich that long ago.

  “Male or female?”

  “Female.”

  “Age?”

  “Perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine.”

  “Skin color?”

  “Brown.”

  “Eye color?”

  “Brown.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Brown.”

  “Straight or curly?”

  “Straight.”

  I thought about asking if she was hot, but I doubted Mudge would have an opinion. Of course, there were hundreds of women on Mars who fit that description, but I’d lay money he was describing Lakshmi Chatterjee.

  “The woman was alone?” I asked

  “Yes,” said Mudge.

  “Did you overhear her speak to anyone—on her phone, maybe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was she talking to?”

  “I don’t know, and I could not make out the voice.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Hello.’ There was a pause, then she said, ‘Absolutely.’ Another pause, then—”

  “Did she say anything important?”

  “I don’t know what qualifies.”

  “List all the proper nouns she used in her phone conversation.”

  “In the order she first used them: Shopatsky House, Dave Cheung, Persis, Isidis Planitia, Dirk, Lomax, Mars—”

  “Stop. What did she say about Lomax?”

  “‘If we can’t take Lomax out, then we need an insurance policy.’”

  “Continue the conversation from that point on.”

  “There was another pause, then: ‘No, Dirk saw them together at The Bent Chisel; they’re clearly an item, and she’s coming to see me in a couple of hours; she’s tailor-made for the part.’ Another pause, then—”

  “Stop.” I looked at my wrist phone; it was 2:08 p.m., and Diana’s appointment had been slated to start at 2:00. My heart started pounding. “Juan, we’ve got to go. Diana’s in trouble.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Juan Santos looked up at me, piecing it together. “Diana?” he said. “My Diana?”

  “Yes, yes,” I replied. “She’s at Shopatsky House right now.” I headed through the descent stage’s open airlock door and scrambled down the exterior ladder; Juan followed. As soon as we were both out on the shipyard grounds, I swore. “It’ll take forever to get to Shopatsky House from here by tram.”

  “We won’t take a tram,” Juan said. “We’ll take my Mars buggy.”

  “It’ll take even longer to go get that.”

  “It would if the buggy was still outside. But it’s not. I had it brought in for a thorough cleaning after I got it back from you—I’ve never seen mud on a buggy before.” It was impossible to wash a car outside the dome; the atmosphere was too thin for sonic cleaning, the low air pressure caused water to boil away, and the ubiquitous dust dirtied things up again immediately anyway. “The sonic car wash is just inside the south airlock,” continued Juan. It meant running in precisely the opposite direction from where we wanted to go, but he was right: using his buggy would get us to the writing retreat much faster than the tram would. I thought about calling the NKPD, but I didn’t want a repeat of the fiasco that had occurred at the Kathryn Denning.

  We ran to where the buggy was parked; it was indeed now clean, its white body glistening and not a speck of dirt obscuring its jade pinstripes. Juan was about to get into the driver’s seat, but I said, “Let me.” He frowned, but went around to the other side. He knew I’d been to Shopatsky House before.

  I put the pedal to the met
al. The lack of streamlining on Mars buggies was no impediment out on the surface, but in here I could feel the drag on the cubic habitat cover. Still, we were making great progress, and were soon on the heels of the very hovertram we’d have otherwise taken. I swerved around it. If the tram had had a driver, said driver might have given me the finger, but the computer that ran the thing seemed to take my maneuver with equanimity.

  As I cut in front of the tram, a pedestrian was crossing the street ahead of us. It was hard to tell at the speed we were going, but he looked biological—meaning I might kill him if I hit him, instead of just knocking him flying. I slapped the flat of my hand against the center of the steering wheel, and—

  Holy crap!

  The sound almost burst my eardrums. Apparently a horn designed to be used in a thin atmosphere shouldn’t be used in a thick one. The guy in front of me leapt a good meter and a half straight up.

  “Sorry!” Juan shouted at the guy. “Sorry!”

  We continued on, the dome getting higher and higher above our heads as we made it closer to the center.

  “Stop! Police!”

  It was a cop in a blue uniform. I ignored him; the worst thing he could do is give chase on foot.

  But in the next block, another cop caught sight of us. Why is there never a police officer around when you want one, and they’re everywhere when you don’t? This guy was more ambitious than the first cop. He stepped into the middle of the street and stood, legs spread, in our way. He had a gun, and he held it in both outstretched hands aimed right at us. I hit the horn again, spun the buggy in a one-eighty, then took a right-hand turn onto the Third Circle. The cop didn’t fire—probably didn’t want to deal with the paperwork that followed a weapons discharge—and if he shouted anything after us, my ears were still reverberating too much from the horn blast for me to make it out.

  This close to the center, the curvature of the concentric roadways was obvious, and I had to bank the buggy so much that the left-hand wheels actually lifted from the ground. More people were crossing the street in front of us, and I careened right then left then right again to miss them—one by just centimeters.

  This route took us by NewYou. I tried to look in the showroom window as we raced past, but there was too much glare. After hurtling along a quarter of the arcing road, we took off down Third Avenue, heading out toward the dome’s edge again. Suddenly a dog—one of the handful on the planet, an honest-to-goodness Mars rover—was chasing us. We bipeds could manage a good clip in this gravity, and quadrupeds could move like the wind. This one—a lab, it looked like—was running at a speed a cheetah on Earth would have envied, and—

  “Son of a bitch!” I yelled—rather aptly, I thought. The damn thing had leapt onto the buggy’s short hood, making it hard to see what was up ahead.

  “Slow down!” Juan shouted.

  I stole a glance at him. He looked terrified—but whether over what I was doing to his buggy or what was about to happen to us, I couldn’t say. The dog was yelping something fierce, but seemed to be enjoying the ride. I craned my neck, trying to see around his bulk. We hit something small in the road—rubble or rubbish of some sort—and the car bounced, and Juan let out a yelp of his own.

  This wasn’t the street I wanted to be on, so I made a hard left at the next intersection, but there was a hovertram dead ahead. I slammed on the brakes. The buggy started spinning. The dog decided this was a good time to get off, and he did so. I was pressed over into Juan’s side in a way that pushed the boundaries of a good bromance. When the car stopped spinning, we were facing in precisely the wrong direction. I did a quick U-turn, then headed on toward Shopatsky House, out at the rim. We were on the correct radial artery now—and it looked like smooth sailing for most of the rest of the way. Ah, the open road! All this rig needed was stereo speakers blaring out classic 2040s rock ’n’ roll.

  I ran the buggy right up onto Shopatsky House’s fern-covered lawn and popped the canopy. Juan and I jumped out, and we bounded over to the building, sailing three meters with each stride. I left the buggy running, just in case we needed a fast getaway.

  I thought about kicking the front door in, but that’s actually hard to do, and my ankle couldn’t be fixed as easily as Pickover’s had been. And, anyway, I didn’t have to do it. If Lakshmi had been as busy with underhanded stuff as things seemed to indicate, she wouldn’t have had time to replace the back window I’d so carefully removed earlier.

  I gave Juan the spare gun I’d brought for him, and we ran around to the rear, me taking out my own gun as I did so. Juan probably wasn’t the best choice for backup—he was a thin guy with typically underdeveloped Martian musculature—but he was better than nothing. I motioned for him to stay out of sight; I wanted Lakshmi to think I’d come alone.

  There weren’t any winds or precipitation under our dome; the main reason for fixing the window would have been to keep nasty folk out, but with the window hidden back here, facing toward the dome’s edge, no one probably even knew that it was gone. I crouched low and made my way over. I’d hoped to overhear something that would give away the situation within—either “actually, for your rhyming scheme, you need a word with emphasis on the penultimate syllable” or “and so, before you die, it’s only fitting that you know exactly how I plan to take over this entire planet.” But instead I heard precisely nothing, and so I rose up enough to peek into the hole where the window had been.

  The room had been straightened a bit since my struggle with Lakshmi—but only a bit. I clambered over the sill and entered the house, holstering and then unholstering my gun as I did so. I walked out of that room into the living room, and there was Diana. She was seated at one end of the cushioned green couch and had a serene look on her round face. Her makeup was tasteful, her brown hair was up, her brown eyes were open, and, all in all, she looked perfectly fine—except for the bullet hole in the middle of her forehead.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  My heart was jackhammering, and my eyes were stinging. I took a step toward Diana’s body, but then Lakshmi’s voice said, “Freeze.”

  I froze as much as I could, but I was quaking with fury.

  “Drop your gun,” Lakshmi said.

  I had no proof that Lakshmi herself was holding a gun, but the hole in Diana was pretty good evidence that someone around here was packing. I let my Smith & Wesson go, and it fell gently to the floor.

  “God damn it,” I hissed. “You didn’t have to kill her.”

  “She was dead when I got here,” Lakshmi said.

  “Oh, come on!”

  “She was dead when I got here,” Lakshmi repeated. “I’m not going down for this.”

  “How’d she get in, if you weren’t here?” I demanded.

  “Same way you did, I suppose. Through the rear window.”

  “I’m not buying that,” I said. “And neither will the NKPD.”

  “Persis?” Lakshmi said into the air.

  But there was no response from the Shopatsky House computer. I heard Lakshmi moving around behind me. I imagine she’d ducked her head into the room with the roll-top desk. “Someone took Persis,” she said.

  “How convenient,” I replied. “No record of what went down. But you won’t get away with it.”

  “I didn’t shoot her,” Lakshmi said again. “She was already dead when I arrived.”

  “Bull!” I said. “She had an appointment to see you!”

  “And I was running late for it. She let herself in—through the hole where my window used to be, which she could only have known about because you must have told her. And someone else must have been in here, having gained access the same way—someone who’d come to rob me, I suppose—someone looking for the O’Reilly diary, perhaps. Whoever it was clearly was startled by Diana and let her have it.”

  “It’s a neat story, sister. But it doesn’t hold water.”

  “Mister Lomax,” she said sharply. “I’m a professional writer. My plots most certainly do hold water.”

  “M
ay I turn around?” I asked.

  “All right.”

  I did so. She was dressed in red slacks and a tight-fitting silver top that showed a little cleavage. And she did indeed have a gun—a Morrell .28 revolver that seemed larger than it really was because her hands were dainty. Or maybe all guns look bigger when they’re aimed at you.

  “I should put a bullet through you right now,” she said. “You’ve already broken into my place once before, and now you’re here again.”

  “I’d advise against it,” said Juan calmly from behind her. “In fact, if I may be so bold, I suggest that you drop the gun.” I doubt Juan had heard any of our previous conversation from outside. His tone, although excited, didn’t contain the rage that I knew would be in it if he were aware of what had happened to Diana.

  Lakshmi had nerves of steel, I’ll give her that. “I don’t know who you are,” she said, still facing me, “but you can’t shoot me fast enough to prevent me from firing at Lomax first.”

  Juan was new to this sort of thing. Of course, he should have shot her without announcing his presence—what I get for bringing an amateur along. And I doubted he had it in him to fire at Lakshmi—under normal circumstances, that is.

  “Nobody needs to die here,” I said. You get good at calculating other people’s lines of sight in my game. We were all pretty much in a row: Juan in the room with the missing window, Lakshmi in the open doorway to that room, me facing them both, and behind me, not yet really visible to Juan, Diana’s dead body, seated on the couch.

  I went on: “I mean, nobody else has to die here.” I was speaking to Lakshmi but looking beyond her at Juan. “Diana was a good woman, Lakshmi. You had no right to kill her.”

  That did it. Juan’s normally calm face twisted in rage. Just as he pulled the trigger, I dove for the floor—there was a good chance that the bullet would go right through Lakshmi, after all, and it could have gone on to take me out, as well. The moment she was hit, Lakshmi squeezed her own trigger, but I was already out of her line of fire, and the projectile sailed past where I’d been and lodged in the green couch next to Diana. Juan’s bullet didn’t make it all the way through Lakshmi’s body—which was a good thing; poor Juan wasn’t made of particularly stern stuff, and he’d have been tortured if one of his slugs had gone into Diana even though she was already dead.