“Means our work here is done,” Jasmeen grinned. “Is time to move on.”
“To Mars?” Llyra’s heart raced. One-third gee! Twice that of the Moon.
“To Mars!”
***
“Step over here for security inspection!” The woman’s voice was sharp.
Not sure exactly what she’d heard, Llyra asked, “What did you say, ma’am?”
“Be quick about it, and save your sexist remarks!” the woman ordered. “We have a schedule to keep!”
Llyra made a point of looking behind her. They were early, and there was nobody in line with her but her coach. Llyra had never seen a balding woman before. This specimen had greasy, thinning, gray hair through which the girl could see more shiny scalp than she cared to. The woman was repulsively fat in a way few Pallatians ever were. She also had a better moustache than her brother Wilson would likely ever grow.
The brim of the military-style cap the woman wore unmilitarily on the back of her head was covered with smudgy fingerprints and gold decorations her grandmother had once told her real soldiers called “scrambled eggs”. The woman’s medium blue uniform shirt had epaulets, with braided gold and navy blue cords hanging from them almost to her waist. And although the shift had just begun—Llyra and Jasmeen had watched the “changing of the guard” as the earlier crew clocked out and the new one clocked in—the armpits of her shirt were already salt- and sweat-stained from the previous day’s work, and she smelled sour.
As the girls complied, they passed between a pair of chromed metal contrivances of about Llyra’s height, a head taller than Jasmeen. An alarm sounded. The security woman and the slight, anemic-looking man who shared her shift, rushed around the rostrum they had been waiting behind.
“Drop your baggage,” the woman screamed at them, spraying droplets of saliva at them. “Hold your arms out at shoulder height—do it now!”
She ran an electronic object down Llyra’s body until it beeped loudly. “What’s this?” she demanded, reaching for the edge of the light coat the girl had decided to travel in. Llyra backed up half a step.
She dropped her arms and turned to face to woman squarely. “Not that you have any right to ask me, but that’s my personal defense weapon.”
“Come here, Missy, you’re going to be adding to our collection!” The woman reached for her again. Llyra noticed she had garlic and alcohol on her breath. The girl backed up another step. Before the woman could advance, Jasmeen, smaller than either one, stood between them.
“Let her alone, cow!” Jasmeen told her.
The woman turned on her heel, faster than Llyra would have expected. “I guess that qualifies you for some special attention, too, dearie!”
She laid a fat hand on Jasmeen’s shoulder. Llyra just had time to notice that her fingernails were dirty. Then there was an explosion of motion, and when it was over, in less than a second, the woman lay on the floor, her huge breasts squashed out sideways by her weight. One arm was on the floor, the other stretched straight upward behind her, being twisted about half a turn farther than Llyra would have thought possible.
Jasmeen’s foot was on her neck and the side of her head.
Llyra bent nearly double to look the woman in the face. “Jasmeen, I think you’re right. She does look just like a cow.” The woman’s eyes were bulging with surprise and terror, as if she were about to be branded.
“You shouldn’t have touched her, you know,” Llyra said to the woman. ”She’s Martian. They like being touched even less than they like being yelled at and ordered around. They probably like being disarmed less.”
Llyra looked up. It appeared they were surrounded by the entire East American garrison in the Moon, guns drawn, shock rods held high. Most of them wore spacelines livery in as shabby condition as the woman’s.
One of them was brandishing a clipboard.
“Go ahead, stupids, do what you have to do,” said Jasmeen grimly, shifting the foot on the woman’s neck a little and pulling harder on her arm. Something popped. Something else crackled faintly. The woman groaned and whimpered. “Your colleague will be dead before I hit floor.”
“And maybe three or four of you,” Llyra added, drawing the ten millimeter pistol she hadn’t wanted to show them, “will be joining her.”
“Hold on! Hold on! One side! One side! Make way! Make way!” The strong tenor voice came from the rear of the crowd, which opened up to allow a short, plump man with curly white hair and copper eyebrows to pass through them. “Everybody stand down now, before somebody gets hurt!”
At his back were half a dozen spaceport security guards, in neat, simple gray uniforms—they wore no helmets or body armor—without a sweat-stain or a thread of lint among them. Each was armed with a .50 caliber semiautomatic pistol and carried a short, fully automatic Remington shotgun with tandem magazine tubes.
“Er, somebody else gets hurt, that is.” As he drew even with the dramatic tableaux that Llyra, Jasmeen, and the unwilling security woman seemed to have struck, he clearly suppressed a delighted grin, demanding in the sternest voice he could, “Just what’s going on here, Ermintrude?”
The woman mumbled something into the carpet.
Llyra reholstered her pistol. Jasmeen didn’t let go of her captive. “They wanted to search us. Take our weapons. This one laid hand on me.”
“And you are … ” He had a suspicion, already.
“Jasmeen Mohammedova Khalidov.”
He nodded. “And you, young lady—no, no, let me guess. You would be Llyra Ayn Ngu, Wilson’s sister and Adam’s little girl. I might have known it—in fact I did know it! I’m Terry O’Driscoll. I run this place, despite what this scurvy lot thinks. Let’s go someplace we can talk.”
Jasmeen released the woman who remained where she was, a liquid stain soaking into the carpet under her hips. O’Driscoll turned to one of his security staff, issued instructions, and then led the girls away.
“We have time,” he told them. “Do you like cappuccinos?”
***
“Attention! United States’ Vessel City of Newark, now boarding on Concourse A-5. United States’ Vessel City of Newark, now boarding on Concourse A-5. Passengers must display their tickets and some valid form of photographic identification, or they will not be permitted aboard.”
The pre-recorded message repeated itself in a pleasant, if brisk voice, using Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, and … he guessed it must be Urdu. If some traveler who spoke Inuit, Serbo-Croatian, or Finnish had been included on the passenger manifest, the spaceline’s computer would have duly noted it, and that language would have been used, as well. It might be fun persuading them to do it in old, dead Cornish sometime.
The individual who thought of himself as “The Fastest Gun in the Moon” hadn’t joined the security inspection line just yet. He never had any trouble, but he preferred spacelines that didn’t require it. The City of Newark was a large vessel, an enormous cylinder of some eighty decks. It was usually a 24-hour task to get everybody ticketed, searched, boarded, and nicely settled in for their four-week ride to Mars.
He’d approved of the plan he’d overheard Llyra and Jasmeen making, to board the spaceship as early as possible, get comfortable in their stateroom—his own was right next door—catch up on their e-mail, watch a movie, order a light supper, and go to bed. It made his job a great deal easier, and in such an enormous ship as this one was, even if it was East American, there would be plenty to see and do tomorrow.
It had always been his habit to hang back in lines like this for as long as he possibly could, in part, until the minimum-wage slugs whose livelihood consisted solely of violating the rights and lives and persons of other individuals were physically worn out—most of them were grossly overweight—mentally exhausted (which never took terribly long), and inclined to make the most entertaining kinds of mistakes.
Today, however, the slugs had made their entertaining mistake a little early, messing with Jasmeen and Llyra. He’d had to duck into the
nearest men’s room, locking a stall door behind him, in order to avoid rolling all over the concourse floor, convulsing helplessly, unable to breathe right, and with tears of laughter pouring from his eyes.
His ribs still ached and would probably bother him all the way to Mars.
Sometimes life could be truly worth living, if only for the sake of the comedy that happened along the way. For the rest of his, he would treasure the golden memory of that slovenly pig’s face squashed sideways into the indoor-outdoor carpeting under Jasmeen’s delicate foot. Or of young Llyra, holding off an entire horde of armed, uniformed bullies with her little pistol. What a pair they’d turned out to be!
He was extremely grateful that the spaceport manager—the father of Wilson’s lost love (how tangled life can get, sometimes)—had arrived just in time, before he, himself, was left with no choice but to interfere. He had a little item with him this morning that electrically fired beryllium copper needles—short bits of hair-fine wire a quarter of an inch long—coated in curare. The magazine held three hundred rounds.
The effect was transitory, but it would probably have ended his usefulness to his current employer, which would have been too bad. He’d found that he was enjoying this job more than any other in recent memory. It was pleasant to know that those you had been hired to defend—even little girls—were more than capable of defending themselves.
He used the bathroom for its intended purpose, tidied himself up, and peeked out on the concourse. The line of boarding passengers to be violated was back in place, each of its occupants quiet, passive, and sheep-like, just the way the official spacelines of the East American government preferred them. He could even make out the overhead music system playing an upbeat, bouncy version of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”.
It was too bad nobody within the borders of East America knew the words any more. They, and others like them, had been big a part of his home schooling in English Literature where he’d grown up, in Tucson, West America. His mother had almost worshipped the mid-twentieth century poets.
Emerging from the men’s room, he glanced around cautiously, just in case someone was watching him. There were advantages, he supposed, to being as tall as he was, six foot six, but he was far too old for basketball, now, and it could be a real liability, sometimes, in what he always privately thought of as the SVS—”spy versus spy”—business.
He caught sight of the two girls—Llyra and Jasmeen—sitting in the coffee bar across the concourse with the spaceport manager. It had always struck him as odd, having coffee to calm down, although people in the nineteenth century had similarly regarded alcohol as a stimulant.
None of them were laughing it up, but it was clear the girls were in no trouble. Their lives and O’Driscoll’s had been touched, and somehow braided together by the same senseless tragedy, the brutal—and apparently accidental—murder of O’Driscoll’s only daughter and, if his sources were to be trusted, the mother of Wilson’s unborn child.
The Fastest Gun in the Moon deeply regretted what had happened to Fallon, for personal reasons of his own. The responsibility had been his, after all, to protect Wilson’s life, and, by extension, Fallon’s life, as well. All the more so if she were carrying Wilson’s baby, although apparently even Fallon hadn’t known it. And to think she’d been taking Wilson to meet her father for the first time. But even the Fastest Gun in the Moon couldn’t be in two places at once.
He’d spoken with his employer within an hour of the shooting—someone needed to get busy inventing a faster-than-light communication system; he knew that it was at least theoretically possible—and his employer had agreed. Perhaps there should have been a second bodyguard. But it was doubtful much could have been done, even if he’d been there, himself. The only thing now was to watch over the two girls.
And there was good reason to do so. Looking the other way, he saw Krystal Sweet and some new companion or henchman or whatever at the back end of the security line, exactly as he’d thought he might. They probably had some other people around here, too. He’d have made this trip with the girls anyway—Wilson was big enough to take care of himself safe in his little ship—but now he was certain that he’d be needed.
He’d quietly looked into this smelly business of Krystal and Downs going to Mars but staying with the City of Newark and coming right back. Maybe nobody else knew what they had been doing, but the Fastest Gun in the Moon did. Fact was, he’d called in an anonymous bomb threat the next day to make sure that they hadn’t left any little surprises behind.
***
The waitress put their drinks down, accepted their thanks, and left.
“Ah, there’s no help for it, I’m greatly afraid,” Terry told Llyra and Jasmeen with a deep, Celtic sigh. He folded up his phone, having just made several calls with it, and put it in his pocket. “You’ll be having to surrender your personal weapons for the duration of your passage to Mars. I don’t envy you ladies at all, I don’t. Two long weeks of having to depend upon idiots and drunkards for your physical wellbeing.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” Llyra objected. “How can they get away with—”
“They’re a private corporation—at least they are in theory. In plain, despicable truth, they’re a wholly-owned subsidiary of the East American government—and as such, they have the power, if not the right, to make their own rules.”
The three of them were sitting on high stools at a tall table in one of the many bars, restaurants, and coffee shops set conveniently around the perimeter of the main concourse. Llyra and Jasmeen were having mochas (it was Llyra’s favorite), Terry’s was an Irish coffee. He seldom drank on duty but felt the East Americans had driven him to it.
“You mean if corporation made rule, ‘fly naked’, would have to fly naked?” It was Jasmeen protesting, while Llyra watched and listened. “I have heard from parents about horrible East American crime rate. One person in, well, one gets robbed or worse at least once in life. What if East American criminal aboard ship attempts to rob us—or worse?”
O’Driscoll laughed. “It appears to me that he’ll be having his arm wrenched out of its socket for him, and his face stepped on. It’d be that humiliating for a would-be rapist. The spaceline management folks will argue, of course, that you’ve no need for self-defense, since they maintain a large and well-trained security staff aboard to defend you.”
“Like large and well-trained security pigs over there?” Jasmeen tossed her head back toward the boarding area they’d just left. “They can’t fight. Weapons handling is to laugh. Smell like hockey players at end of losing season. Would it hurt them sometime to do some drycleaning?”
Terry laughed. “The hockey players or the security people? More importantly, where the blazes did you learn to fight like that, young lady?”
“On Mars from parents and friends of parents. Old revolutionaries who didn’t want kids ever to be threatened by government ’security’ bullies.”
“The trouble is,” he nodded, “they don’t think of themselves as security people, or even law enforcement officers. They think of themselves—”
“As military,” Jasmeen supplied. “They think of themselves as military.”
“You’re quite correct, my dear, and even worse, they’re garrison troops, suffering all of the same deficiencies as garrison troops everywhere.”
“They’d actually like much better to think of themselves as occupying forces,” Llyra observed suddenly. “Wouldn’t they, Mr. O’Driscoll?”
Terry was surprised. Llyra and Fallon would have gotten along well. “Well. whatever they may be or want to be, and however they may smell—”
“Or want to smell!” the girls giggled together.
“I’m afraid that we’re stuck with them as long as East America maintains the only passenger service to Mars. I still don’t understand exactly how that happened. I’m not sure anybody does. But just between the three of us, I don’t believe that their monopoly is going to last them too much longer, no
t if your grandmother, young lady … ” He nodded at Llyra. ” … and the Curringer Corporation’s Sheridan Sinclair have their way.”
Llyra immediately sat up. “Mr. Sinclair is back? Then maybe we could—”
Jasmeen nodded her head. She’d had the same idea, herself.
“I’m afraid not, Miss Ngu. The silly fellow’s still out there among the flying mountains, somewhere, counting asteroids, taking their pictures, and giving them all cute little alphanumerical names. The grand plan, at least as I understand it, is to keep on doing exactly that until they’re finally relieved by the lovely vessel Rosalie Frazier, which only now just left the Earth-Moon complex, headed upsystem.”
Jasmeen nodded. “Yes, we heard of that. So we are having no choice in this matter? Must use Soviet spaceline from hell or stay here in Moon?”
O’Driscoll chuckled sympathetically. “Yes, Miss Khalidov, but I may be able to make it a little less burdensome.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Flight Control, this is Terry O’Driscoll. Oh, hello, Gertie. Thank you, m’dear, we all miss her already. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the thought. Would you please raise Captain Alan West for me, aboard the City of Newark? Thank you, Gertie.”
He waited for a moment, then: “Al you old space pirate! It’s me, Terry O’Driscoll. Have you started your checklist yet, or are you still making improper suggestions to the stewardesses? … What do you mean that they’re all male on this route? What kind of a politically correct way is that to run a spaceline, anyway? You have my extremest sympathies.”
Llyra looked a question at Jasmeen. Jasmeen shrugged.
“Look, Al I need a big favor from you. Could you come down to Boarding Lounge C in a minute? I know it’s a royal pain in the sitter, but it could turn out to be important. And be sure to bring your navigation case with you.”
He hung up, and instantly punched in another number. “Michelle? Crank up your press release program and get ready to send e-mail to every 3DTV outlet in the Moon. Headline it ‘Born and Raised at 1/20 Gravity, Pallatian Skater Defeats Luna’s Best, Now Sets Sights on Mars’.”