Red Planet Blues

THIRTY-NINE





Doubtless Huxley would have the body moved before I could make it back to Shopatsky House. And I was so tired, if I did run into him there, even he might get the jump on me. Yes, I wanted revenge—but I wouldn’t get it if I didn’t get some sleep.

But sleep didn’t come easily, not in a bed I’d shared with Diana. I took some melatonin, which usually puts me out, but it didn’t work. Instead, I mostly lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, which had a slowly rotating fan hanging from it.

My gut was churning, and my head was whirling—it was an odd sensation; I think perhaps it was what they call feeling guilty. If I hadn’t sent Diana to see Lakshmi, she’d still be alive, still waiting tables, still writing poetry, still laughing and smiling and thinking about a better tomorrow.

Even if Huxley was on the take, even if Diana’s body was now disposed of, I’d find some way to make Lakshmi Chatterjee pay—or, on the slim chance that she’d been telling the truth (I suppose there was a first time for everything), I’d make whoever had done it pay.

I got up in the morning, showered, and was eating synthesized bacon and eggs when my phone started playing its ringtone. I looked at my wrist; the ID said “NewYou.” I accepted the call, and Horatio Fernandez’s face appeared. “Alex, I’m worried. Reiko was supposed to be here almost half an hour ago, so I headed over to her place, just to see if she was okay. She’s not there.”

“She took something to help her sleep last night. Maybe she’s just out like a light.”

“No, no. She’s gone. The door had been broken open, and the place was empty.”

“Damn!” I’d assumed she was safe, what with Willem Van Dyke and all three meese dead. But—

Christ. Lakshmi Chatterjee. I’d warned that bitch not to go back to the Alpha—but maybe she thought if she had my client as a hostage, she’d be able to get away with it. One good day raiding the beds there would make her insanely rich, after all; I wouldn’t be surprised if she was planning to head back on the Kathryn Denning with a steamer trunk full of fossil loot as soon as that ship was ready to go.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see if I can find her.” I said goodbye, then called Mac, who had just gotten into the police station.

“Morning, Alex.”

“Mac, Reiko Takahashi is missing again. Her place was broken into. I suspect she’s been taken outside the dome. Can you check for me?” There were only four airlock stations; Lakshmi had to have taken her through one of them. I could have hoofed it to each one, but that would have taken all morning, and the security guards didn’t have to take my bribes, but they did have to answer Mac’s questions.

“I’ll get Huxley to check,” Mac said.

“No!” I said. Then, more calmly, “No. I’d take it as a personal favor, Mac, if you could make the inquiries yourself.”

“What’s going on, Alex?”

“Oh, you know me and Huxley.”

Mac frowned dubiously.

“Please, Mac. I’ll owe you one.”

While I waited for Mac to call back, I got ready to go out the door. I was just doing up my shoelaces when my phone rang again.

“She went out of the north airlock,” Mac said. “And she wasn’t alone. She was with that writer-in-residence woman, Ms. Chatterjee.”

“Ah. Did they rent a Mars buggy, by any chance?”

“No,” said Mac. I was relieved; that meant they couldn’t have gone far, and—

“No,” Mac said again. “They drove up to the airlock in one, and they took it outside.”

Oh, crap. “What color was it?”

“The buggy? Jesus, Alex, I didn’t ask. What difference does that make?”

“None. When did they leave?”

“They logged out of the dome at 5:57 a.m.”

I looked at my wall clock; four hours ago. And if they were outside the dome, they weren’t the NKPD’s concern.

“Thanks, Mac. I’ll be in touch.” I shook the phone off. Shopatsky House was near the north airlock, and I’d bet solars to soy nuts that the Mars buggy Lakshmi had taken Reiko outside in was white with jade green pinstripes—the one I had conveniently left running on the front lawn of the writing retreat.

If it had only been Lakshmi heading to the Alpha, I’d have been half tempted to just let her drive right on out there. The deposit was still guarded by a row of land mines, and I’d shed no tears if she was blown sky-high. But Reiko was my client, and I couldn’t take having another one of those die on my watch.

I made another phone call. Juan Santos looked like he’d gotten even less sleep than I had. “Hey,” I said, “you’re a hacker. You must have a way to shut off your Mars buggy by remote control, no?”

He yawned, then, “Sorry. Yeah. I was thinking about that. You left it running at Shopatsky House, right? I figured I should go collect it this morning. The excimer battery should last for weeks, but—”

“Lakshmi has taken it outside the dome.”

“Hell, Alex. I can’t afford to lose that vehicle.”

“I know, I know. I’ll get it back for you. What’s the remote shutoff code?”

He told me, and my phone recorded it. “But if you’re using your phone to send it, you’ll have to be within a hundred meters or so for it to be picked up,” he added.

“Right, okay. And the code to turn it back on?”

He told me that, too.

“Thanks.”

“Alex, I need—”

But I shook the phone off, grabbed my gun, and ran out my apartment door.



* * *



It would eat up half a day getting to the Alpha by Mars buggy; that would never do. And although O’Reilly and Weingarten’s descent stage could fly there quickly, assuming it had enough fuel left, I’d have to get the damn thing hauled onto the planitia first, and that would take forever. And so I went to see the one person I knew who had every luxury item, including an airplane: Ernie Gargalian of Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.

“Mr. Double-X!” Gargantuan exclaimed as I came into the empty store.

“Hey, Ernie.”

“I hear you’ve had some adventures of late, my boy.”

“Oh?”

“They say you’ve recovered Simon and Denny’s third lander.”

“Who would ‘they’ be?”

“I keep my ear to the ground, my boy.”

I suspected if Ernie ever actually adopted that posture, he wouldn’t be able to get back up. “Well, yeah,” I said.

“There might be a market for it.”

“For the ship?”

“There’s a collector for everything,” he said. “Would you like me to see what I can arrange?”

“I guess, sure. So, listen, can I borrow your airplane?”

Ernie had a hearty laugh, I’ll give him that. “By Gad, my dear boy! You do have gumption.”

“You can’t spell gumption without P-I.” Actually, maybe you could—but you’d have to do it phonetically.

“And just where might you take my plane, Alex?”

“To the Alpha Deposit.”

Ernie’s demeanor changed instantly. “You know where it is?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. When do we leave?”

I’d expected this to be the price I’d have to pay. Rory wouldn’t have liked it—but Rory was dead. Reiko, on the other hand, was probably still alive, but quite likely wouldn’t be for much longer. “Right now,” I said.

Just then a customer tried to enter. “No, no,” said Ernie, hurrying to the door. “We’re closed.”

The customer—a woman in her forties—pointed at the laser-etched sign. “But the sign says . . .”

“A typo!” declared Ernie. “I’ll get it fixed.”

Crossing the room had been enough to set Ernie to huffing and puffing; there was no way he could walk all the way out to the edge of the dome; his plane, I knew, was parked outside the north airlock, coincidentally the same one Lakshmi and Reiko had exited through. But a man of Gargalian’s stature—literal and figurative—did not trifle with public transit. He went into his back room and emerged floating on a hoverchair—and I saw that he’d also fetched a rifle.

It was a tight fit to get the hoverchair out through the shop’s doorway, but he did it. I followed, and he spoke a command that locked up his store.

The chair zipped along so quickly that I was huffing and puffing myself by the time we got to the north exit. Ernie had a surface suit stored there that looked like the bag Phobos had come in. It was a struggle for him to get into it—it was a struggle for him to do pretty much anything—but he eventually managed it.

I had to rent a suit yet again. This time, it was the shade of green people used to associate with money. Ernie’s was deep purple; he resembled an enormous eggplant in it.

Ernie’s plane was one of three currently parked here. It was dark gray and had a gigantic wingspan—close to forty meters, I’d say. The front part of the cockpit looked like it had originally been designed to hold two side-by-side seats but had been modified for a single double-wide chair. I was relegated to the back; the habitat was teardrop-shaped, tapering toward the rear, so there’d only ever been one chair there. Once we were inside, Ernie set about powering up the plane.

Not only did you need big wings to fly on Mars, you needed a long runway to take off. The one here was a solid kilometer of Isidis Planitia that had been cleared of rocks. We made it almost to the end before I felt us rising.

I’d flown in small planes on Earth but never before on Mars, and I’d been in hibernation when I’d come here, so this was my first aerial view of New Klondike and environs. I craned my neck to see the city as we sped away from it: a large, shallow dome, glistening in the sun—looking for all the world like God had dropped a contact lens. Then there was nothing but Martian landscape stretching to the horizon below and the yellow-brown sky above. I pulled my tab out of my suit’s equipment pouch and dictated the directions I’d gotten from Mudge to the back of Ernie’s great loaf of a head.

The plane moved quickly but silently. I kept looking down, hoping to spot the white Mars buggy. Of course, it was always possible that Lakshmi had headed somewhere else, in which case I’d kick myself for letting Ernie know where the Alpha was, and—

—and there it was, up ahead, tooling along. We were arriving just in the nick of time; they were now just a few kilometers shy of the Alpha Deposit.

Airplanes on Mars need clear open stretches to touch down, just as they did to take off, and although Isidis Planitia was a plain, it wasn’t a plain plain, and landing our plane was going to be a pain. Ernie was circling, looking for a place to set down. Not much sound carried in the thin Martian air, but our giant wingspan would make us impossible to miss if Lakshmi or Reiko happened to look up.

Ernie swore in Armenian, and his massive head swung left and right as he continued to search. Finally, he muttered, “Here goes nothing!” and we started to descend.

The patch of ground he’d picked didn’t have any boulders, at least, but there were still plenty of rocks up to and including basketball size. The plane had the same sort of adaptive wheels that buggies had, although larger in diameter. Still, when we hit, we bounced several times as the wheels encountered rocks they couldn’t negotiate. My breakfast gave an encore performance at the back of my throat.

We skidded a considerable distance, with Gargantuan yelling “Yeehaw!” When we at last came to a stop, Ernie and I dogged down our helmets, and he made the canopy swing open. He needed both hands to climb down, and so he dropped his rifle overboard, then used the rungs built into the side of the plane to lower his bulk to the surface. Once he was down, he bent over—with great difficulty—and picked his rifle back up.

I followed him down, then looked out at the wide expanse of Martian terrain in front of me. Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of the Gold” was running through my head. It was, after all, greed that had driven the Great Martian Fossil Rush, the Great Klondike Gold Rush, and the Great California Gold Rush, and Morricone’s haunting theme captured that madness well.

Juan’s Mars buggy was on the horizon, coming toward us; the plane had landed in a kilometer-wide strip between it and the eastern edge of the Alpha—the edge that was salted with land mines.

I walked out past the wing tip and told my phone to transmit the OFF code Juan had given me.

The white buggy continued to barrel in. At this distance, I couldn’t see if it had green pinstriping; I suppose it was always possible that this was a different Mars buggy.

I told the phone to transmit again . . . and again . . . and again.

The damn thing was still closing, and Lakshmi must have had the accelerator right down to the floor. She was veering to the south a bit, clearly intending to go around our airplane. I had the phone send the OFF sequence once more, wondering if somehow Juan had made a mistake when he gave it to me; he had looked like he’d just woken up, after all, and—

—and, at last, the buggy was slowing. It skittered to a stop about seventy meters ahead of me. I could see movement within the canopy; of course, when the power went off, the life-support shut off, too. I imagine Lakshmi and Reiko were hustling to get their surface-suit helmets on. I had briefed Ernie on the way here, so he understood what was going down. He had his rifle butt against his shoulder and the barrel aimed at the buggy.

I’d put my holster on the outside of my suit. I pulled out my gun and ran toward the stalled vehicle—and the sight of me charging in with weapon drawn had the effect I wanted. Lakshmi popped the canopy on Juan’s car—it opened mechanically rather than electrically, for safety reasons—and she and Reiko scrambled out.

My legs were longer than theirs, and I soon overtook them. We stood facing each other with just five meters of rusty, dusty plain between us. Reiko was in a suit of a darker green than my own and Lakshmi again had on a red one. All of us still had our fishbowls polarized, meaning the women might not have yet identified me; I, of course, could tell which of them was which by their heights.

Behind me, as a glance over my shoulder confirmed, Gargantuan Gargalian was waddling in, and he was now raising his rifle. It looked like Lakshmi Chatterjee’s stint as Shopatsky House writer-in-residence was about to end with a bang.