Linda spun and dived for the chopper’s cockpit. She could have been floating on the moon: the scene was a frozen tableau. The man in the left seat was half out of it, twisted toward her, swinging his arm toward her at the rate of one millimeter per century; the body that slumped out of the other seat was presumably that of the legitimate pilot. Linda–in case she should ever meet him again–dispassionately recorded the usurping pilot’s looks and the strange smell of him, half cologne, half adrenaline, noting calmly that she had seen him at least once before. Then she plucked the pistol–a .38 Colt Aetherweight with flash suppressor–out of his unwilling hand.
She moved with the grace and sureness of an acrobat, leaping into the seat, taking hold of the controls. She shoved the throttles forward; the turbines rose in pitch and the rotors accelerated. She twisted the pitch control, and the armored machine shuddered and rose half a meter from the ground. Expertly she let it spin where it hung on the axis of its own rotor shafts, just a quarter turn, until it faced the attackers on the roof of the house, presenting those unseen gunners with a slender target. She stopped it there and squeezed the triggers of the Gatling guns.
In the stark white beams from the chopper’s floodlights she saw her father’s body lying facedown in the grass. There were other bodies in the grass, not moving, those of the guards. She pushed the chopper’s nose down and the heavy craft stuttered forward, roaring and blowing, until it was hovering almost on top of her father, its steel skids bracketing him.
She spoke aloud to the helicopter. “Snark, this is L.N. 30851005, do you acknowledge?”
A handful of bullets sprayed the chopper’s nose, crazing the armored cockpit glass–somewhere in the shadows to the right, there was another gunner. The Snark jerked right and its starboard Gatling gun screeched; the tree from which the bullets had been fired exploded in tatters.
She jumped out of the command seat, into the cabin. “Mother, help me.” Together she and her mother–a strong and slender woman, her hair as black as her husband’s–wrestled the limp bodies of the hijackerpilot and the gray woman and rolled them through the open door. The gray woman tumbled out after the man and bounced from the skid to lie motionless beside him in the grass.
“Stay back. Inside,” Linda said to her mother, as she jumped out and landed lightly on both feet, flexing deeply, diving and rolling under the chopper in a continuous series of precise actions. The noise and the wind buffeted her ears, but she could separate the boom and shriek of the chopper from the shouted voices nearby.
The chopper suddenly shifted where it hung in midair, and she saw shapes running at the edge of the lawn. But no bullets came out of the dark, and the Snark, following its orders to the letter, did not fire. Crouched on her knees, she hauled her father by his shoulders, and he did what he could to help, pushing at the muddy lawn with his good right leg; she saw that he had lost his shoe. For fifteen seconds she was exposed as she pulled him under the skid.
As Linda poised to jump after him she felt the blow to her hip. There was no pain, but it was as if someone had hit her and pushed her to the ground, and when she tried to jump up again, nothing happened. She felt nothing in her leg and could not move.
Tracers tore at the chopper and bounced from its skin and whined away from its rushing rotors. With her uncanny eyesight Linda saw her mother fall back through the open door and saw the armored door slam closed behind her, as the Snark took steps to protect its human cargo. In seconds the helicopter had vanished into the hazy night sky.
The gray man flinched, and Linda looked up ruefully at the face that pushed into the tightening circle of her consciousness, the face of the gray woman; she stood beside Laird, her long gray hair spilling in tangles, a silenced pistol in her hand. That’s who had shot her, Linda realized–after Laird had told the others to hold their fire. Shot her because Linda had not taken the time, had not had the will, to kill her first.
“No more talk from any of you.” He looked down at Linda with the hardest eyes she had ever seen, even in his hard face. “This one is so much unenlightened meat. We’ll put her away somewhere she can’t be found. Then we’ll start over.”
The gleaming white ship fell swiftly toward Mars, a sleek cutter emblazoned with the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space Control. It was falling tail-first toward Mars Station; its fusion torch had been extinguished at the radiation perimeter, and the ship was braking itself into parking orbit on chemical rockets alone, maintaining a steady one-gee acceleration.
Shielded against heavy radiation in every wavelength, its hull had no windows opening upon the universe. The young woman stood before the wallsized videoplate in the wardroom, watching the view from the stern, where black Phobos slid across the pale orange disk of Mars–a moon only twenty-seven kilometers long seen against a planet only 6,000 kilometers away. “Potato-shaped” was the cliché people had used to describe Phobos for over a century, but no other phrase captured the essence of its form so succinctly: pitted, lumpy, black, Phobos could have been a fine russet spud freshly dug from Idaho’s volcanic mud.
The woman who watched this intimate spectacle called herself Sparta. It was not her real name. It was her persona, the mask she showed only to herself, and Sparta was a secret name, secret from everyone but herself. To most people she was known as Ellen Troy–Inspector Troy of the Board of Space Control. Which was not her real name either. The people who knew her real name held her life in their hands, and most of them wanted to kill her.
To those who did not know her, Sparta seemed young, beautiful, intelligent, mysteriously gifted, strangely lucky. She was in fact powerful beyond casual comprehension. But to herself she seemed frail, her humanity crippled, her psyche constantly on the edge of dissolution.
Now she’d been yanked out of the normal course of her life once again–if her life could in any sense be considered normal–to be thrust without preparation into a situation which would require her complete alertness and total concentration, a peak performance that was to be demanded after two weeks of suffocating shipboard imprisonment on this cutter. Given the present alignment of the planets, an EarthMars crossing in two weeks was as close to instantaneous as even a Space Board cutter, the fastest class of ship in the solar system, could get . . . two weeks during which Sparta had nothing to do but study the meager information on the unsolved case that awaited her.
“Because I love that stuff. I love
The Iliad
enough that I got through even Alexander Pope’s awful translation.” He smiled back at her. “A woman who calls herself Ellen Troy,” he whispered, “really should read it at least once.”
Blake Redfield–his real and quite public name–was one of the few who knew that her name was not Ellen Troy. He was one of the few–perhaps the only one of those who knew the truth–who did not seek to kill her for it. If at times Sparta thought she loved Blake, at other times she was afraid even of him. Or perhaps of her love for him.
Bright points glistened on the edge of Phobos’s biggest crater, high-rimmed Stickney, eight kilometers across. Sharply limned against the midlatitudes of Mars, Stickney was an iron-black chalice against a golden mirror. Eighty years ago the first human expedition to Mars had landed on Phobos, and for several decades the moon had served as a base for the exploration and eventual settlement of the Martian surface. “Looks like it was built yesterday,” Blake said. “Hard to believe it’s been deserted for half a century.”
On the videoplate Phobos was already sliding away; off in the far corner of the screen Mars Station emerged from the crowded field of stars–it being the reason Phobos Base was deserted, no longer of practical use. The station was a big bottle of air that rotated fast enough to provide substantial artificial gravity on its inner surface.
They watched in silence until Mars Station blazed as bright as the sun and the black moon had dwindled to a void in the star field. Sparta turned to Blake. “What we talked about before . . . I’ve thought about it some more. I want you to stay on Mars Station until I’ve completed the investigation.”
Perhaps Blake had played into her hands. The side of her that loved him had its own motivation, for she wished him to survive even if she did not. The side of her that wanted him out of her life, that wanted all things human out of her life, could dispense with him easily. But as she knotted the black belt around the rough cotton of her gi, she knew that she would have to fight him handicapped.