Red Planet Blues

THIRTY-FIVE





Iwalked slowly over to where Mac was standing, and we stood wordlessly for a time: two weary biologicals in surface suits amid four dead transfers lying there on the Martian sands in nothing but street clothes.

Finally, backup arrived in the form of Huxley, Kaur, and another cop, rumbling out onto the surface in a pressurized van. Mac conferred with them, and the three newcomers set about photographing the bodies and taking various scanner readings and measurements. While they were busy with that, I took Mac up into the Kathryn Denning and showed him the corpse of Willem Van Dyke.

There wasn’t much to say, and so Mac and I barely spoke. I left him inside the ship, taking readings with his scanner, and I trudged slowly down the ramp. All of this action had taken place by the south airlock. I had plenty of bottled oxygen, and so I decided to walk around the dome to the west airlock—just to clear my head a bit, and to avoid human company.

It was a little over three kilometers to that airlock, and I shuffled along, raising dust clouds as I did so, like Pig-Pen in the old Peanuts animated cartoons. After about a kilometer, I decided to try calling Reiko Takahashi again, and I was relieved when her lovely face popped up on my wrist.

“You’re okay?” I asked into my fishbowl’s headset.

Her orange-striped hair was mussed. “Exhausted,” she said. “My God, it was terrifying.”

“But you’re okay now?”

She nodded. “How’s Mr. Pickover? Have you found him yet?”

She’d had enough of an upset for one day; I’d tell her later that Rory was dead. “He’s with Detective McCrae right now.”

“Oh, good.”

“Rory said he created a diversion so you could get away.”

“He did indeed, the sweet old fellow. He started singing ‘God Save the King’ at the top of his lungs—or, well, at top volume anyway. Those two giant jerks were mortified, and I managed to run off.” She paused. “If you see him, won’t you thank him for me?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Look, I’m still pretty shook up. I’m going to take something and go to bed.”

“I don’t blame you. But can you let Fernandez know you’re okay? He’s been worried, too.”

“I’ll call him now,” she said, and she shook off from her end.

I continued walking slowly. My shadow, falling to my right, walked along with me. The silence was deafening.

I had genuinely liked Rory Pickover, strange little man though he had been. He’d had something I’d seen all too rarely on Mars: selfless devotion to a cause rather than to personal gain.

The dome was on my right. I was walking about thirty meters away from it; I had no particular desire to make eye contact with anyone within. Earth was hanging above the horizon, brilliant and blue. My phone could have told me which hemisphere was facing me right now, but I didn’t ask. I liked to think it was the side with Wanda on it. And although I couldn’t tell what phase it was in, I wanted it to be a crescent Earth, with the part Wanda was on in nighttime, too. I wanted her to be looking up, looking across all those millions of kilometers, at the red planet in her sky. I wanted her to be thinking of me.

I continued slowly along. For the first time ever, in all the mears I’d lived here, I felt heavy.

When a man’s client is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your client and you’re supposed to do something about it. And it happens I’m in the detective business. Well, when someone who’s hired you gets killed, it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.

Of course, the killer hadn’t gotten away with it. Uno was dead. Still, Pickover had come to me for protection, and I’d failed him.

I’d never get paid for the work I’d done on this case, but that didn’t matter. And there was no one to bill for any further work. But Rory had wanted to track down the fossils Weingarten and O’Reilly—and no doubt Van Dyke—had sold on Earth, not for gain, not for profit, not to line his own pockets, but so they could be described for science, for posterity, for all time, for all humanity.

And there were surely other paleontologists who could do that work, if I could locate those fossils. Maybe there’d even be a previously unknown genus amongst the specimens. And maybe whoever described that new form in the scientific literature might be persuaded to name it Pickoveria.

I arrived at the western airlock and left the police-department surface suit there. My office was near here, and I walked over to it. I went up to the second floor and made my way down the corridor. Once inside my office, I used the sink at the wet bar to wash my face and hands, and then I collapsed into my chair.

I sat for a few moments, thinking, then called Juan Santos on my desktop monitor. Juan’s wide forehead and receding chin appeared on the screen. “You put a lot of kilometers on my buggy,” he said.

I tried to rally some of my usual spirit. “A shakedown. Good for it. Keep it running smoothly.”

“You could have at least filled the gas tank.”

“It doesn’t have a gas tank.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Hey,” I said, “at least I brought it back in perfect condition.”

“You mean I just haven’t found the damage yet. Not surprising, considering how much mud it was covered in.”

“You wound me, Juan.”

“Not yet. But if I can find a baseball bat . . .”

This could go on for hours—but I wasn’t in the mood. “Look,” I said, “I’ve become acquainted with a computer that’s almost forty years old. Problem is, files on it are locked to someone long dead. Can you help me out?”

“Do you know the make or model?”

“No, but it was installed in a Mars lander.”

“That long ago?”

He was going to find out soon enough, anyway: “It was installed in Weingarten and O’Reilly’s third lander.”

“And you’ve found the computer?”

“More than that.”

“You’ve found the ship?”

“Uh-huh. The descent stage.”

“Where is it?”

“I had it brought to the shipyard. I was hoping you could meet me there.”

“All right.”

“In about half an hour?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“Thanks,” I said and broke the connection. I got a spare gun from the office safe and brought it and my usual piece with me as I headed over to the hovertram stop. I had a sinking feeling that we hadn’t seen the last of the day’s excitement, and if Juan was going to be my backup, I wanted him armed.

A tram pulled up, and I hopped on. I changed trams at the transfer point outside the Amsterdam, a classy gym that appealed to nicer people than those I liked to hang out with, and took another tram to the stop closest to the shipyard. I got off and hustled over to the yardmaster’s shack, but Bertha wasn’t there. Still, it was easy enough to spot the descent stage, sitting vertically on its stubby trio of legs, with the airlock on the side and the access hatch on top, and the whole thing streaked with mud. I headed over to it.

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.”