Ceres

  “Simple,” Mohammed said. “She chewed her way out of uppermost strap. This I think I could not do, myself.” He bared his teeth which were very large, white, and shiny. “Also climbed all the way through ship while you are making with vigorous landing maneuvers. She must be strong.”

  Beliita shook her head. “Strength, is nothing. She must have will of iron.”

  “Or teeth of iron,” Manzel suggested. Nobody laughed.

  “In any case, friend Aaron, we have determined is not your fault. Two dangerous criminals are loose in Coprates City. We would rather you help us find them than berate—is this the word, ‘berate’?—than berate you for what you could not foresee. Four inches wide of zylicon belt! It makes my poor teeth ache just to think of it for too long!”

  Manzel glanced up at the 3DTV screen—the volume was turned down all the way—where coverage of a baseball game was being interrupted by news, apparently, that the City of Newark was finally under way again. Photographs showed the ship under tow by a cluster of asteroid hunters. No doubt Wilson Ngu’s Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend was among them.

  The channel then went back to baseball.

  “Mohammed, Beliita,” he said. “I think I know how to catch our criminals.”

  ***

  “Here we go again,” said Shorty.

  Wilson hung in the control dome of Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend, his engines hot, but at zero acceleration relative to the space liner, all of his senses on high alert, wondering if this was ever going to end.

  Scotty said, “Pipe down! Keep the frequency clear!” They were having some trouble with a strange, pulsing interference across all bands.

  “What?” Mikey asked. “So we can hear them holler ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!‘ as they come in? We’ve tried talking to them and they won’t play.”

  Shorty laughed. “What he said.”

  Two ships about the size of Wilson’s—hunters’ ships, maybe even pirates’ ships—were presently braking toward the City of Newark. Sensors of his own and the other seven vessels in his makeshift fleet, spread wide for the best resolution, were fairly sure that one of the newcomers was actually an oldcomer, Pimble S. “Fatty” Pharch’s Lilac Waffle.

  Not for the first time, Wilson shook his head. “Why Lilac Waffle?”

  It was impossible to be absolutely certain, of course. Six very powerful hybrid thermonuclear engines—the spacegoing equivalent of swift coastal cutters and big oceangoing tugboats combined—pointed directly at the observer and bathing his electronic instrumentation with fragments of disassembled atoms, tended to confuse them. Wilson thought he might have seen the other guy’s subatomic signature before, as well, but he hadn’t been keeping a record of such things—until now.

  Mikey was right, of course. Even as he’d prepared his battered ship as best he could for combat—not much could be done; she wasn’t even remotely any kind of fighting ship—Captain West had tried continuously to communicate with the pair of vessels about to arrive, but there had been no reply. At the urging of his comrades, Wilson had tried, too, in his capacity as “commodore” of the little hunters’ fleet.

  It was possible to see them now with the naked eye, two bright stars so close together that they almost looked like one. Projecting their course and changing velocity, his ship’s computer told him that they’d stop here, at this arbitrary line in space along which they were all still plunging toward Mars at a horrific velocity, rather than speeding past, after having delivered bombs and bullets, rays and beams.

  Wilson had his doubts. He didn’t know how good a tactician Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend was—although she regularly beat him at every kind of combat game he could download from the SolarNet. Braking to a stop—relative to the spaceliner, of course—might be just the way to attack, if you didn’t know any more about tactics than your ship’s computer.

  He’d prepared as well as he could, he thought, putting all seven hunters in a disk-shaped formation between the liner and the oncoming ships. He occupied the center of the disk because he had the most powerful weapon, his particle cannon. As he’d learned, an engine’s plasma flare was a pretty good defense against it, but show him any other part of another ship, he’d slice it off and cut it up for French fries.

  They’d even put to good use the five plastic explosive bombs Shorty had found in the City of Newark’s engines, five of the hunters having loaded them into their chainlink launchers, exactly like torpedoes. They had been adjusted to detonate from the heat of impact.

  Wilson had requested that Scotty be the only user of lidar among them, relaying his results to the rest of the ships, because seven sets of returns would be impossibly confusing for men and machinery. For the same reason, Merton would be the only user of active radar on this day.

  Wilson also had lasers potent enough to shear off slices of stony or nickel-iron asteroids. As with the cannon, he could point to a few pixels on his main screen, and that was where they would direct their energies.

  “Ten miles!” Merton and Scotty sang out simultaneously. That was almost the useful limit of lidar, Wilson knew. The two vehicles were moving, now, at a slow crawl relative to the little squadron and the helpless passenger liner they were protecting. Wilson felt a tingling in his trigger fingers as they rested lightly on the firing studs of his control yoke, and decided that it might be time for a brief lecture.

  “Remember, now,” Wilson told his little fleet. “We need to figure out what their intentions are before we start shooting. After all, they might just be coming to offer help. I know that waiting for the other guy to draw first sucks, but we’re the goodguys. That’s what we do.”

  “Remind me to apply for a transfer,” Casey muttered. “Pay’s better, too.”

  “Hey, amigo,” Shorty answered, deliberately thickening his native Lost Angeles accent. “Be careful—I never said I was no goodguy, man.”

  Wilson said, “No, you never did. But I could tell it by your grammar.”

  “You leave her out of this!” He broke into a fit of giggling. It was funny, Wilson thought, but not that funny. They were all tired and nervous, and trying to deal with it in their own different, individual ways.

  Suddenly, the flares disappeared as the engines were shut off. The hunters blinked their eyes, watched as attitude thrusters turned the newcomers over, and presently two ships hung before them, dead in space, relative to the City of Newark. Lidar indicated that they rested about twenty-five feet apart, cabled together.

  One of them was, indeed, Pharch’s Lilac Waffle.

  The other vessel was equally familiar—to Wilson. It was the Space Viper, Swede Vargas’ ship. Its portside airlock door swung open and a dozen large items of what appeared to be white fabric spilled into space. Each seemed to be about six or seven feet on a side.

  “Hold your fire, guys!” Wilson abruptly shouted to his friends. “It’s the Swede! Swede Vargas! I think he’s trying to show us a white flag!”

  “Yes,” Mikey said. “And he’s got Fatty in an envirosuit, with his arms and legs spread wide, attached by his hands and feet to his navigation dome—just like a kid’s stuffed animal in a car window!”

  “Would somebody give me a hand?” Swede’s voice came over a short range suit frequency. “Those are my bedsheets floating away! We had a little firefight over reaction mass out there, and knocked out both long range transceivers.”

  ***

  Facilities on Deimos were “rudimentary”, Ardith recalled.

  That was what the travel guides all said, Ardith thought, and none of them stressed it nearly enough. Earth held a grudge against Mars it hadn’t forgotten in half a century and didn’t seem likely to forget soon.

  On the flattest surface the little moon offered—it was an unusually dark carbonaceous chondrite that circled Mars every thirty hours, its longest dimension was ten miles, its shortest seven and a half—East American Spacelines and a handful of other interests had grudgingly constructed a radial series of tubes, two dozen altogether, of various lengths an
d diameters, for the transfer of passengers and cargo from incoming vessels to shuttles designed to take them down to the Martian surface.

  One of the few laws still remaining on the Formerly Red Planet forbade the landing of large vessels there. In another time, it had helped the fledgling Martian culture avoid military invasion by its enemies from the Mother planet. These days, it served mostly to keep shuttle operators wealthy, and there was growing pressure to rescind it.

  In the meantime, there was the facility on Deimos.

  At the point where all the tubes came together, like the spokes of a wheel, a simple, cylindrical, barn-like structure had been erected, two high-ceilinged stories tall. It was on the lower level that cargo of all kinds was transported by moving “slidewalk” from one vessel to another.

  Similar transportation for arriving passengers took them upstairs (at several points, Ardith had noticed places where metal detectors had only recently been ripped out; most of the people she saw carried weapons) where there were bathrooms, what were supposed to be quiet waiting rooms, a few locker-like Japanese-style sleeping cubicles, and a mostly-automated restaurant serving execrable food and unimaginably bad coffee at ruinous prices. The place itself was dirty and smelled even worse than the food.

  There were a few automated bank tellers and similar conveniences of modern civilization. Having made whatever transactions they didn’t have any choice but to make, passengers were then routed down whatever tube would take them to a ship going wherever it was they wanted to go.

  Mostly away from here, Ardith thought.

  Individuals native to Pallas are known System-wide for a tidiness and cleanliness almost Dutch in character. Ardith was shocked by what she saw here at Deimos. She thought that it must be like having to eat in the restroom of a dilapidated filling station back on Earth.

  “How much do you suppose it would cost us to buy this place?” She was speaking to Adam, who was with her at a circular wrought iron table with a glass top, near a mezzanine rail over which they could watch what was happening on the ground floor. The iron was almost paintless, the glass was scratched and smudged and had chewing gum on the underside.

  They sat close together, holding hands like newlyweds. Each knew that something had changed in their marriage, but each was reluctant to speak of it, or even think about it too much, for fear it might go away.

  “To fix it up, I assume, and make it a pleasant place to stop?” he asked. He was enjoying this time with her—he had enjoyed simply being with her since they were school children—and it didn’t matter, for the moment, why they were here or what they were talking about.

  She nodded. “Something like that.”

  “I can’t say I haven’t considered it, myself,” He shrugged. “The real trouble is that it was built, primarily, for shipping high-tech industrial products off planet, and almost nobody else uses it. If they can, they stay aboard whatever ship brought them here until the last minute, when it’s time to take a shuttle. They hardly see the place.”

  “Then there’s the monopoly East America holds on the Earth-Mars run,” said a familiar voice behind them, “which guarantees shoddy services.”

  They both turned where they sat, and Adam, from courteous reflex, jumped to his feet, coming close to throwing himself into the air. There was some gravity here, he reminded himself, but damned little of it.

  “Mom!” said Adam.

  “Julie!” said Ardith.

  Looking as young as she ever did—unknown to Adam as yet, Ardith had begun considering asking her mother-in-law about this DeGrey rejuvenation process—Julie rushed forward to embrace both of them in turn, then pivoted lightly on her heel and said, “I thought this would be a good place to meet without media attention. Just look who I’ve brought with me!”

  Behind her were Mohammed Khalidov, with his cloth workman’s cap in hand, and his wife, Beliita, in her native Chechen dress. For just a moment, the thought flashed through Ardith’s mind that they looked like a quaint pair of salt and pepper shakers. She shook her head to rid herself of the vision.

  “Mohammed!” Adam said, holding on grimly despite the older man’s vigorous handshake. “Tell me what’s with the peasant dress all of a sudden?”

  Adam had good reason to ask. Respectively an engineer and a scientist to begin with back on Earth, Mohammed and Beliita Khalidov had been part of growing secularist movement within what had once been a uniformly Moslem civilization. Unpopular with the Russians because they were Chechen, they had sometimes suffered as badly at the hands of their more religious neighbors, which had motivated them to help colonize Mars.

  Hanging from Mohammed’s waist was a very unpeasantlike plasma gun. Most of the time, Mohammed dressed as Adam did, in what had been called “engineer casual” for almost two centuries. Beliita favored bluejeans.

  “Partly is joke. Our daughter is always thinking—I can tell this, although she will say nothing—her parents are hopelessly old-fashioned.”

  Beliita added, “Partly is to make our Jasmeen feel happier, after everything she has been through, with something warm and familiar. We often dress like this—our daughter, too—just for the fun, on holidays.”

  A tenet of the secularist movement was that everybody’s holidays should be enjoyed to the fullest. It was an attractive notion, Adam thought, unless you were trying to get a construction project finished on time.

  “That means I’d have to dress up like the Easter Bunny,” he told them.

  “Wilson and Llyra never cared much about Santa Claus,” Ardith explained with a grin. “They used to call him ‘God with training wheels’.”

  Ardith suddenly realized that someone else had come with Julie and the Khalidovs, a man who, despite his unusual height and distinctive appearance, had somehow managed to remain inconspicuous until he wished otherwise.

  She looked at him and said, “And you are … ?”

  “Oh, forgive me,” Julie answered for him. Ardith, Adam, this is Aaron Manzel, an old friend of the Khalidovs, who’s been looking out for—”

  Mohammed shook his head. “Not old friend, Julie, new friend. We hired Aaron to look out for Jasmeen and Llyra. After this we became friends.”

  Adam nodded. “You’re the one who threw the—”

  “The table knife,” Aaron answered. “Yes, guilty. It was I. And it seemed like such a good idea at the time. But no matter what I do from now on, that’s what people are going to remember, isn’t it?”

  “You’re damned right, Aaron.” He reached out for the man’s hand. “You killed the sonofabitch who’s been trying to kill my family for the last two years. Whatever Mohammed and Beliita paid you, it wasn’t enough!”

  “Thank you, Dr. Ngu, very much. But It isn’t over, yet. Two of them escaped, and they’re loose on Mars, right now. They may just want to disappear, but it’s more likely they’ll want to finish what they started.”

  Adam blinked. “Finish—oh, I see what you mean. Who are these people?”

  “Johnnie ‘The Fish’ Crenicichla,” Aaron said. “He served as the liaison and ‘credible deniability’ man between the late unlamented Paul Luegner of Null Delta Em, and the Mass Movement’s Anna Wertham Savage. The other is Krystal Sweet, an accessory to the murder of Fallon O’Driscoll. She led the assault on City of Newark.”

  Ardith asked, “How dangerous can they be if they messed that up so badly?”

  “Plenty, Dr. Ngu. It was a good enough plan, they just failed to count on me, or on a ship’s captain who refused to let himself be disarmed.”

  “A common enough error among East Americans,” Julie observed.

  As everyone sat and ordered something to drink—mostly things in baggies, given the lack of local sanitation—they compared notes on what they knew of the hijacking. Some were saying that the entire bridge crew had been massacred, others that the passengers had massacred the would-be hijackers. Manzel set them as straight as he could.

  “On any other ship, the latter would be likely,” he to
ld them. “The problem, of course, is the East American Spacelines tariffs that, in effect, prohibit individual self-defense. But the Captain had a gun, and he returned the weapons that belonged to Llyra and Jasmeen as quickly as he could. As for me, I can make practically anything into a weapon.”

  “Perhaps silliest aspect of gun control,” Beliita observed. “I notice are no more weapons detectors here. Just wires hanging, in front of unpainted sections of bulkhead. What do you suppose is going on?”

  Julie laughed. “I am, among others. East American has partners in this, uh, enterprise. I spoke to them about sharing liability for what happened on the City of Newark. I offered to buy East American out on Deimos and fix the place up, as long as they pulled the detectors out.”

  “See what I mean?” Adam asked his wife. “There’s always some sharp operator—”

  His mother leaned toward him and peered into his face, “Don’t finish that sentence, Sonny, and I’ll cut you in for twenty-five percent.”

  “Thirty,” insisted Ardith.

  “Done. And I’ll bet you have some cute decorator ideas already, dear.”

  “Yes, Julie, I have. They start with several hundred gallons of disinfectant.”

  “Dr. Ngu! Dr. Ngu!” Suddenly there was a commotion at the door they’d entered by. A young woman already familiar to some of them thrust by Manzel and the Khalidovs, a small recording device in her hand. “Remember me, I’m Honey Graham of the Interplanetary Interactive Information Service. Is this a private party, or can anybody jump on in?”

  Together, Julie, Adam, and Ardith groaned.

  ***

  “Gold,” observed the doctor. “How quaint.” He glanced at the coins in his soft, pink palm and put them away in his pocket. He went to the sink to wash his hands and returned, pulling on a pair of syntex gloves.

  Annoyed, Crenicichla frowned. “Is there something wrong with our money, doctor? Or is there something else you’d prefer—blood, possibly, or a pound of flesh? How about our firstborn?” It had taken them most of a day to find this part of town—there was always a part of town like this, except perhaps in Amherst, Massachusetts—an inexpensive hotel that didn’t ask questions, and a physician of ill repute who makes housecalls.