Red Planet Blues

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.