Saturn's Children (16 page)

“Check your parasite feed.”

He flags the view of the corridor heading toward the air lock. It’s half-hazed, and a big droplet clings to the middle of the lens, distorting the view, but a quick bit of visual filtering sets me right. The police drones are flying toward the air lock, escorting—yes, it’s Granita. She’s talking to them. “—not the one I’m looking for, but one of her sibs. Not my fault the bitch smelled a rat.” She sounds annoyed. “You’ll have to do better next time.” The drone is evidently conveying its driver’s excuses. “That’s not good enough! I’ve got better things to do than stand guard over your targets all year. No, I don’t suppose it matters. She could have been useful.”

They get to the air-lock vestibule. “Yes, thank you. I need to proceed to my estates as rapidly as possible—unfinished business. If you have a spare seat, I’ll take it. Yes, I’d love to witness your mopping-up. If you could record it for me, I am sure I can find a fitting use for it—
pour encourager les autres
.” She smiles coldly at the drone, then follows it aboard the police cutter.

I shudder. Dainty feet kick off overhead, leaving behind the
Pygmalion
and the rest of her false flag operation.
Granita must be working for Her,
one of my ghost-selves warns me. I think I know which one it is, now, and I resolve to trust those instincts in future.

A minute later, there’s a furious rattling and banging. Then the docking tube detaches. Almost immediately, the police cutter begins to fall away from
Pygmalion
, sliding past the air lock with the remorseless momentum of a freight train. It barrels down into the blue soupy sky of plasma and disappears in a flicker of lightning. With its high-thrust drive, it can drop toward Mars and fire up the motor just before arrival—getting there hours ahead of us.

“All clear, Big Slow.” I laboriously extract myself from the sack and climb back up to join Bill and Ben on the lip of the air lock. I’m dreading what I’ll find on the other side of it. “You can come inside now.”

I cycle through the lock into stifling heat and humidity. As I strip off my chain mail, I realize it’s over ninety degrees. Spheres of hot water cling to the ceiling, wobbling like improbable steaming jellies before they fall slowly to the floor. One of them breaks off and lands on my shoulder, trickling down inside—it’s not physically damaging, but it’s painfully hot. Maybe the Pink Police were trying to poach the passengers? “Bill. Ben. What do you think?”

“Better get back to our stateroom, Big Slow. I don’t think we’re going to be too popular around here.”

“Um.” I nerve myself: “Pygmalion?”

She replies at once: She sounds distracted. “I’m busy. Go to your room, Katherine.”

“Told you so,” Ben smugs at me. I pretend I didn’t hear him.

Our stateroom is a tip. It’s been thoroughly searched, and there’s nothing quite as messy as a room that’s been turned over in microgravity. I lock the door behind us and contemplate the wreckage with dismay. “It’s only for another day,” Bill (or Ben) reminds me. “Chill out and try to ignore it. They didn’t find us, did they?”

“No,” agrees Pygmalion, startling me. “The decoy worked superbly. I note that they seem to have taken Ford with them. Do you know anything about that?”

“No.” I think for a moment. “I believe she went willingly, though, which implies a degree of collusion.”

“Quite possibly.” Pygmalion is silent for a while. “I think it would be best if you remain in your room until we arrive, then leave discreetly. The other passengers are highly upset, and some of them may assume that you are a police informer if you reappear.”

“Has Jeeves offered to pay, then?” Bill snipes.

“One does not discuss confidential corporate arrangements in public. ” Pygmalion’s snippy put-down is clear enough. (Ten to one Jeeves has paid handsomely for her to collude in smuggling me past the Pink Police.) “This has been most inconvenient. My upholstery is damaged and my passengers outraged—it’s scandalous! But—oh.” Her tone changes. “Oh. No!”

“What’s—”

“They just launched a missile.” She pauses for a knife-edged second. “It’s running directly away from us. Why would they do that?” More seconds tick by. “It just detonated. Ninety-six kilometers away. Most strange.”

I shudder convulsively. It is anything but strange if you are privy to all the facts: a stuffed suit floating in vacuum, drifting ever farther from
Pygmalion
’s air lock, and an RSA cutter with a frustrated captain and an impatient VIP passenger aboard to witness the kill.

Someone
really
doesn’t want my payload to reach Mars!

Whores de Combat

WELCOME TO MARSPORT, Deimos.

A brief factual rundown cannot do the place justice. I’ve been here before (even lived here for a handful of years), but it never fails to surprise. Let me attempt to explain ...

Deimos is the outer of Mars’s two moons, an irregular rocky lump between ten and fifteen kilometers in diameter, depending on where you hold your measuring calipers. It was originally covered in loose regolith, high in carbon, which has long since been recycled for construction materials. A century of solar energy beamed from the big collectors near Mercury powered the rockets that adjusted its orbit, and today Deimos is the anchor weight for the largest surface-to-orbit space elevator ever constructed: Bifrost.

Most of the inner planets have no space elevator at all; Venus and Mercury because their days are unfeasibly long, Earth because its gravity well and debris belts challenge the limits of engineering. But Luna has the L1 lift, and as for Mars—Mars lies on the cusp of the heavily populated, energy-rich inner system and the material-rich outer system. Mars also has Deimos, the perfect construction site and gravitational anchor for Bifrost. And so it was inevitable that Mars, the gateway to the outer solar system, would acquire an elevator like Bifrost, and a city like Marsport to run it.

Most elevators are simple things—parallel tapes traversed by sluggish climbers, drudge laborers whose groaning cantilevers bear the burden of interplanetary freight among the worlds of the outer solar system. But there’s nothing simple about Bifrost. The complex of cables is half a kilometer across, wide enough to anchor a world. Fast express shuttles hurtle up and down with passengers, while the slow, sturdy supertrain scows take weeks to complete a round-trip, lowering refined feedstocks and returning with processed materials, manufactured more conveniently in the turbulent forges of Mars than in orbital facilities— and which can then be exported to the rest of the inner system.

A quarter of a million indentured arbeiters and their aristo overseers, and perhaps a tenth that number of independent souls, work the port facilities: loading and unloading cargo, inspecting payloads, maintaining the infrastructure, untangling problems, and serving those who get the real work done. Once our dead Creators ran ports like this, with names like Liverpool, and New York, and Singapore. Today (as the jester said) everything is automated. Plenty of hands keep the traffic flowing, hour by hour and year by year.

Pygmalion
is tiny in comparison to Marsport: a fist-sized hovercam buzzing alongside a gigantic freight dirigible. I follow her progress as traffic control directs her final approach to a small peripheral docking hub on the poleward flank of Voltaire crater. “You will please stay in your cabin while the other passengers debark,” she tells me prissily. “I will notify you when you may leave.” I think she’s still upset because of the water damage to the saloon ceiling. She’s probably as certain I’m smuggling something as that coldly treacherous aristo Ford, but she stays bought—and Jeeves will pay her well enough. So Bill, Ben, and I wait impatiently until she says, “You may go.” Then we leg it through the dripping corridors and out onto the dockside.

Arrival on Marsport is not subject to customs—it’s a free port, the Pink Police aside. I still recall my bearings from my last visit, over a decade ago. The problem is not so much arriving, as being seen to arrive . . . but I’ve got a solution for that problem.

The Honorable Katherine Sorico emerges from
Pygmalion
fully an hour after the other passengers have left. She’s taken the time to change into a distinctive puffball dress worn over free-fall pantaloons, ruffled and pleated and patched with metallic lace, with warning lights blinking at ankle and cuff. She does not skulk around grimy dockside loading tunnels and container farms, but sweeps along, her servants behind her, and commandeers the first conveyance she claps eyes on (a crew service spider that’s clearly seen better days) directing the hapless arbeiter to take her to the nearest tube stop. She sits stiffly erect, eyes straight ahead, her servants sitting atop the spider’s passenger cage as it scuttles through warrens and alleyways and across debris nets, finally landing just beside the tube hatch. “Summon me a private carriage,” she tells one of her servants; “I want to be settled into the Grand Imperial in time to send out calling cards before evening.”

The servant complies. Only a minute later, the hatch opens. The Honorable Katherine climbs into the padded, compact tube ball, directs her arbeiters to make their own way to her estate, closes the hatch . . . and is seen no more.

Ten minutes and three private tube balls later, Maria Montes Kuo, an independent plumbing contractor (hairless, in dark coveralls, with specialized optical turrets in place of the bishojo glistening orbs of an aristo), emerges diffidently from a service hatch in a public station, her tool bag strapped across her shoulders.

I’m rather proud of Maria. There is little I can do to disguise the build and height of my archetype, but misdirection and a simple mask can work wonders. With luck, any watching arbeiters will be scanning for Kate; her distinctive outfit was carefully chosen to confuse gait-recognition monitors, and Maria’s facial features to bamboozle eye recognition. It will not work against a determined adversary for long, but it shouldn’t need to—

I realize I am being followed as I drift past a waiting room. He’s almost my size, large for an indentured arbeiter, his face a featureless ovoid, bland and unnoticeable. I check my memory. He’s been following me for almost a minute. I feel a frisson of shock and annoyance at my own ineptitude.
What should I do?

Juliette’s reflexes come to the rescue. I keep moving, looking for an unoccupied shrine—one of those curious rooms of repose that our Creators installed in all public places.

I find the shrine at last. I place my hand on the ideogram—an up-pointing triangle superimposed over the body of a stick figure—and go inside, then switch off the lighting. A few seconds later, the inner door opens behind me.

Juliette takes over just as a tantalizingly familiar voice asks, “Freya?”

I pull my blow, bounce off his shoulders, and recoil toward the ceiling. “Ow!”

“I don’t like the drugs that keep you thin,” he says rapidly. “That was most amateurishly done, Freya, but one is grateful for your lack of proficiency on this occasion. Your phrase?”

“Ouch!” (I spin gracefully into the far wall, trying to center myself again.) “Down in the park with a friend called Five. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Certainly.” The lights flick on as he finds the switch. It’s the faceless arbeiter from the hallway, of course. But the voice is pure Jeeves. I freeze a little, inside: I didn’t take him for one who would harbor aristo tendencies . . .

“What’s the problem?” I hear myself ask.

“A little trouble with the neighbors.” It’s hard to read his voice without any facial cues; it’s creepy to hear Jeeves’s rich-toned voice coming from the featureless arbeiter body. “The RSA are conducting a sweep, and one thought it would be best if none of our associates were caught up in it, so we decided to intercept you before the designated rendezvous.”

Oops.
Alarm bells are clanging in my head. “Did you get my message?”

“What message?”

“The one I sent yesterday from the ship.”

The faceless body freezes still, as if its owner is elsewhere. Then: “No, but your late arrival was noted.”

“Hmm. What about Bill and Ben?”

He stays frozen, his head tilted to one side. I can almost see the expression of surprise. “Who?”

“My two assistants, the ones you gave me ... ” I trail off.

“You had assistants? You were supposed to be traveling unaccompanied. ” Jeeves sounds displeased. “My dear, one suspects that trouble has followed you from Mercury. Inquiries shall be made.”

I’m beginning to be spooked by the nonarrival of my mail, to say nothing of the terrible twosome’s disappearance. “You can say that again. Can you take the consignment from me here?”

“Yes.” He reaches up and opens his head. Inside, there’s a foam-padded chamber of exactly the right dimensions. He extracts a small wallet from it and passes it to me. “Your delivery fee.”

“One moment.” I sniff the air. It’s the traditional 10 percent oxygen / 90 percent carbon dioxide mix, at thirty Celsius: within the cargo’s survival parameters, if I make the transfer quickly. “Alright.” I squat carefully, then simultaneously relax and tense certain motor groups in my lower abdomen. I’ve almost forgotten there’s a foreign object lodged inside me: But now it makes its presence known in a very peculiar, not entirely pleasant way. I reach down hastily and catch the pale brown ovoid before it can drift into a hard surface and sustain damage, then I place it inside Jeeves’s head. The skull closes with a click. “I carried out the activation process three days ago—don’t know if it worked, but if it did, you’ve got eleven days until it goes critical.”

“We shall take excellent care of it from here on,” he agrees. “But now we had better part company. Expect to be searched and sterilized on your way down-well. It would be a good idea to change your identity and lie low for twelve to fourteen days after you arrive groundside. When you are ready, use this rendezvous protocol.” He passes me a stiff card, with tiny print handwritten on it. It smells of azide, primed to combust as soon as I have memorized it. “Good-bye and good luck.”