Red Planet Blues

THIRTY-ONE





If a ship needed dry-dock repairs it was hauled inside, but most vessels that came to Mars were never brought into the dome—rather, they were prepped for turnaround out on the planitia. Mac and I started walking the 500 meters to the Kathryn Denning. Bertha had said earlier that the ship’s cargo—which presumably consisted mostly of people in hibernation units—was being offloaded. It looked like that had been completed; we could see the wheel ruts made by the vehicles that had been involved.

Also visible in the dust were footprints. There were two sets of large running shoes and a smaller set of work shoes, but no space-suit boots. The meese had indeed disposed of Reiko at some point; I hoped she was okay.

From the look of the tracks, Rory had been walking in front, with a moose behind and to either side of him. I doubted he’d been leading the way, though; rather, they’d been propelling him along, and—

“See that?” I said over the suit radio.

“Aye,” replied Mac.

The tracks told the story. Rory had tried to run: you could see the place where he’d leapt up, and where he’d impacted ten meters farther ahead. The meese had leapt as well, and there were clear signs that they’d all ended up tussling on the ground. And then for the rest of the way, there were only the two large sets of tracks, but one had adopted a shorter gait; I assumed a moose had picked up and carried Rory—who might well have been screaming and kicking—from that point on.

The spaceship was a stubby spindle, with its front and rear points lifted above the ground. Cargo hatches—some open, some closed—were visible, and there was a ramp coming down from what looked to be an airlock door. We walked closer, and I shined my suit’s chest light up at the hull, which was a yellowish beige.

Along the bow, in script letters, were the words Kathryn Denning. My light was hitting the hull obliquely, revealing just beneath and behind that name some slightly raised lettering that had been painted over; under normal full-on lighting conditions I doubt it would be visible at all, and if I hadn’t already known it said B. Traven, I probably couldn’t have made it out.

A spaceship was a good place for a hostage-taking: it was designed to survive micrometeoroid impacts, which meant it could take a hail of bullets, too. It also had its own life-support system—and it could take off if need be.

Mac walked up the ramp, which was pretty steep, and he tried the door. It was locked. Mac told his phone to get him the New Klondike office of InnerSystem Lines; this close to the dome, his phone worked fine, and I could hear his conversation over our shared radio link.

The phone rang four times, and I thought perhaps everyone had gone home for the day. But then a woman’s voice said, “InnerSystem. How can I help you?”

“I’m Detective Dougal McCrae of the New Klondike Police Department, and this is an emergency. I’m standing outside the Kathryn Denning, and need access to the interior.”

“Just a second,” said the woman, then: “I’m told I need an authorization code word from you.”

“The code word is ‘jasper,’” said Mac.

“Yes, right, okay,” said the woman. “Well, to get in, you just need to punch in the master skeleton-key combination code on the keypad next to the airlock; it’ll open any door on the ship, including the airlock one. Let me know when you’re in position, and I’ll recite it to you.”

The keypad was behind a hatch helpfully labeled “Keypad” in English; there was also some Chinese, which doubtless said the same thing. Mac opened the little hatch and said, “Go.”

“Five zero four,” said the woman, then, “three two nine, three one seven, five one zero.”

Mac pressed keys and the door slid about fifteen centimeters to the left; presumably it had been spring-loaded but held in place by the lock. The slight displacement revealed a recessed handle. Mac put his gloved fingers into it and pulled the outer door the rest of the way, revealing a chamber no bigger than an old-fashioned phone booth—something I’d seen in plenty of movies but never in real life.

Mac was still carrying the disruptor as he entered the tiny chamber. I pushed myself inside. It belatedly occurred to me that the surface suit Mac was wearing was probably bulletproof. I wondered if the plain one I’d chosen was similarly equipped.

Mac turned around and pulled the outer door shut. He then pressed the one large button on the airlock’s left wall; it was labeled “Cycle” in English, and again presumably the same thing in Chinese. I couldn’t hear air being pumped into the chamber, but I felt the growing pressure of it on my suit. When the pressure reached that of the ship’s interior, a green light went on above the inner door, and, for good measure, it popped aside fifteen centimeters, revealing a recessed handle just like the one on the outer door.

Mac shimmied around—it really was meant to be a one-person airlock—and pulled on the handle, sliding the door all the way aside.

He still had the tracking device, but it was hard for him to operate it and hold the disruptor, so he handed the tracker to me. I tried to use finger gestures on the display to zoom in, but it wasn’t responding to the touch of my glove. Since we were now at normal air pressure, I pulled off my right glove and tried again. The dot indicated that Rory was about thirty meters toward the stern, and I gestured to Mac that we should start walking in that direction.

The interior of the ship was well lit—in fact, too well lit. We tended to keep things a bit dimmer on Mars, since we only got about one-quarter of the sunlight Earth did. I found myself squinting. But I also peered around, trying to picture the horrors that had occurred aboard this ship all those years ago, and my mind started playing tricks. I was still breathing the same bottled air I had been out on the surface, but it now had an iron tang to it, as though it smelled of blood.

I assumed the meese hadn’t counted on being tracked here and so wouldn’t be expecting us. Still, the broadband disruptor wasn’t easily aimed. If they’d kept Reiko rather than Rory, Mac could have fired the disruptor blindly into a room. But we couldn’t risk taking out Rory, too.

Mac and I walked stealthily down the corridor, me in true gumshoe fashion and him in flatfoot mode. We soon heard voices up ahead and made an effort to be even quieter. The voices were muffled not because they were coming from behind a closed door—they weren’t—but rather because Mac and I were still wearing our fishbowls. I undogged the fasteners, lifted mine off, and tucked it under my arm.

In reality, the air inside the ship did smell different: it was musty and stale. Without the helmet, I could hear the voices more clearly. It must have been the two meese: they had the same thick-and-slow speech Trace had had. They occasionally interrupted each other, which was strange and hard to parse: two identical voices overlapping.

Rory, if he was still with them, wasn’t saying anything. I consulted the scanner and tried to judge the location the voices were coming from. It looked like the meese and Rory were now in separate rooms: the two thugs sounded like they were ahead but to the left and Rory was showing as ahead and to the right. I indicated that Mac should head off to immobilize the meese, and that I’d rescue Dr. Pickover; my phone had recorded the lock-override code that had been dictated to Mac and could play it back to me if I needed it for another door.

Sure enough, the little corridor we were in had come to its end, and there were two doors in front of us. The one on the left had its door open, and I could actually see the broad back of one of the meese through it; he was wearing the same clothes as before. The door on the right was closed. It had a sign on it, and although I couldn’t make out the writing the symbol above it was clear: a caduceus; this was the sickbay.

I put my glove back on and looked at Mac. This was almost too easy. If Rory was safe behind the closed door on the right, Mac could take out the meese on the left, then we could spring the professor and be on our way. Except for one thing: Mac probably thought the kidnappers deserved due process, blah, blah, blah. Fine; he could use the disruptor to hold them at bay until the cavalry finally finished with the riot and showed up.

We didn’t have a lot of time to think. The meese hadn’t yet detected us, but if either of them happened to look out the open door of the room they were in, they’d see us. And so, while we still had the element of surprise, Mac shifted the disruptor so that he was holding it like a shield, and he surged forward, shouting through his surface suit’s speaker, “NKPD! Freeze!”