Red Planet Blues

THIRTY-SIX





Juan Santos looked up at me, piecing it together. “Diana?” he said. “My Diana?”

“Yes, yes,” I replied. “She’s at Shopatsky House right now.” I headed through the descent stage’s open airlock door and scrambled down the exterior ladder; Juan followed. As soon as we were both out on the shipyard grounds, I swore. “It’ll take forever to get to Shopatsky House from here by tram.”

“We won’t take a tram,” Juan said. “We’ll take my Mars buggy.”

“It’ll take even longer to go get that.”

“It would if the buggy was still outside. But it’s not. I had it brought in for a thorough cleaning after I got it back from you—I’ve never seen mud on a buggy before.” It was impossible to wash a car outside the dome; the atmosphere was too thin for sonic cleaning, the low air pressure caused water to boil away, and the ubiquitous dust dirtied things up again immediately anyway. “The sonic car wash is just inside the south airlock,” continued Juan. It meant running in precisely the opposite direction from where we wanted to go, but he was right: using his buggy would get us to the writing retreat much faster than the tram would. I thought about calling the NKPD, but I didn’t want a repeat of the fiasco that had occurred at the Kathryn Denning.

We ran to where the buggy was parked; it was indeed now clean, its white body glistening and not a speck of dirt obscuring its jade pinstripes. Juan was about to get into the driver’s seat, but I said, “Let me.” He frowned, but went around to the other side. He knew I’d been to Shopatsky House before.

I put the pedal to the metal. The lack of streamlining on Mars buggies was no impediment out on the surface, but in here I could feel the drag on the cubic habitat cover. Still, we were making great progress, and were soon on the heels of the very hovertram we’d have otherwise taken. I swerved around it. If the tram had had a driver, said driver might have given me the finger, but the computer that ran the thing seemed to take my maneuver with equanimity.

As I cut in front of the tram, a pedestrian was crossing the street ahead of us. It was hard to tell at the speed we were going, but he looked biological—meaning I might kill him if I hit him, instead of just knocking him flying. I slapped the flat of my hand against the center of the steering wheel, and—

Holy crap!

The sound almost burst my eardrums. Apparently a horn designed to be used in a thin atmosphere shouldn’t be used in a thick one. The guy in front of me leapt a good meter and a half straight up.

“Sorry!” Juan shouted at the guy. “Sorry!”

We continued on, the dome getting higher and higher above our heads as we made it closer to the center.

“Stop! Police!”

It was a cop in a blue uniform. I ignored him; the worst thing he could do is give chase on foot.

But in the next block, another cop caught sight of us. Why is there never a police officer around when you want one, and they’re everywhere when you don’t? This guy was more ambitious than the first cop. He stepped into the middle of the street and stood, legs spread, in our way. He had a gun, and he held it in both outstretched hands aimed right at us. I hit the horn again, spun the buggy in a one-eighty, then took a right-hand turn onto the Third Circle. The cop didn’t fire—probably didn’t want to deal with the paperwork that followed a weapons discharge—and if he shouted anything after us, my ears were still reverberating too much from the horn blast for me to make it out.

This close to the center, the curvature of the concentric roadways was obvious, and I had to bank the buggy so much that the left-hand wheels actually lifted from the ground. More people were crossing the street in front of us, and I careened right then left then right again to miss them—one by just centimeters.

This route took us by NewYou. I tried to look in the showroom window as we raced past, but there was too much glare. After hurtling along a quarter of the arcing road, we took off down Third Avenue, heading out toward the dome’s edge again. Suddenly a dog—one of the handful on the planet, an honest-to-goodness Mars rover—was chasing us. We bipeds could manage a good clip in this gravity, and quadrupeds could move like the wind. This one—a lab, it looked like—was running at a speed a cheetah on Earth would have envied, and—

“Son of a bitch!” I yelled—rather aptly, I thought. The damn thing had leapt onto the buggy’s short hood, making it hard to see what was up ahead.

“Slow down!” Juan shouted.

I stole a glance at him. He looked terrified—but whether over what I was doing to his buggy or what was about to happen to us, I couldn’t say. The dog was yelping something fierce, but seemed to be enjoying the ride. I craned my neck, trying to see around his bulk. We hit something small in the road—rubble or rubbish of some sort—and the car bounced, and Juan let out a yelp of his own.

This wasn’t the street I wanted to be on, so I made a hard left at the next intersection, but there was a hovertram dead ahead. I slammed on the brakes. The buggy started spinning. The dog decided this was a good time to get off, and he did so. I was pressed over into Juan’s side in a way that pushed the boundaries of a good bromance. When the car stopped spinning, we were facing in precisely the wrong direction. I did a quick U-turn, then headed on toward Shopatsky House, out at the rim. We were on the correct radial artery now—and it looked like smooth sailing for most of the rest of the way. Ah, the open road! All this rig needed was stereo speakers blaring out classic 2040s rock ’n’ roll.

I ran the buggy right up onto Shopatsky House’s fern-covered lawn and popped the canopy. Juan and I jumped out, and we bounded over to the building, sailing three meters with each stride. I left the buggy running, just in case we needed a fast getaway.

I thought about kicking the front door in, but that’s actually hard to do, and my ankle couldn’t be fixed as easily as Pickover’s had been. And, anyway, I didn’t have to do it. If Lakshmi had been as busy with underhanded stuff as things seemed to indicate, she wouldn’t have had time to replace the back window I’d so carefully removed earlier.

I gave Juan the spare gun I’d brought for him, and we ran around to the rear, me taking out my own gun as I did so. Juan probably wasn’t the best choice for backup—he was a thin guy with typically underdeveloped Martian musculature—but he was better than nothing. I motioned for him to stay out of sight; I wanted Lakshmi to think I’d come alone.

There weren’t any winds or precipitation under our dome; the main reason for fixing the window would have been to keep nasty folk out, but with the window hidden back here, facing toward the dome’s edge, no one probably even knew that it was gone. I crouched low and made my way over. I’d hoped to overhear something that would give away the situation within—either “actually, for your rhyming scheme, you need a word with emphasis on the penultimate syllable” or “and so, before you die, it’s only fitting that you know exactly how I plan to take over this entire planet.” But instead I heard precisely nothing, and so I rose up enough to peek into the hole where the window had been.

The room had been straightened a bit since my struggle with Lakshmi—but only a bit. I clambered over the sill and entered the house, holstering and then unholstering my gun as I did so. I walked out of that room into the living room, and there was Diana. She was seated at one end of the cushioned green couch and had a serene look on her round face. Her makeup was tasteful, her brown hair was up, her brown eyes were open, and, all in all, she looked perfectly fine—except for the bullet hole in the middle of her forehead.