Red Planet Run (3 page)

Her:
I swear by my shaker table
I’ll be as good a wife as I am able.
Though Wally ain’t exactly stable,
In the good stuff he’s cape-able.

Me:
Wally, take her for your wife.
Erma, take him for your life.
Live with love and never strife
And hide all the kitchen knifes.

I felt silly as hell, especially when I looked up and saw Helen Ricadonna watching from the front of the crowd.

“With the authority vested in me by the League of St. Joseph, I now pronounce you husband and wife, with all the rights and responsibilities granted to members of the League and signatories of the Charter. There is no law but the law of the League.”

“There is no law but the law of the League,” the crowd repeated.

I closed the handbook. “Congratulations, Wally and Erma. Don’t forget to rerecord your claims with the Star Guard.”

A cheer went up, Birdie crossed the last item off the signup sheet, reopened the bar, and a thirsty crowd swarmed inside to drink the health of the newlyweds. I fought my way out of that damn robe while Helen bought us a pitcher of beer, and we retired to a dark corner. I poured carefully in deference to the low gee, and took a long, long drink that required an immediate refill. Birdie’s beer was better than most found on Ceres, an asteroid notorious for its lack of hops fields, and it was cold. Life could hold no more.

“Well, that was romantic,” Helen said, jerking her head toward the happy couple now heading for the door.

“That’s one word for it. Most of the marriages I perform nowadays are more a matter of establishing joint rites of survivorship than promoting romance.”

She studied her glass. “Remind you of anything?”

“No,” I lied.

Ignoring me, she said, “It reminded me of your wedding to Caleb. Kate’s Place, remember? The whole bunch of us half in the bag, except you, because you were pregnant and Charlie wouldn’t let you anywhere near a shot glass. Uhura and Natasha attended on the trivee. We stopped the party in mid-swing, and Frank witnessed your vows like he was conducting the band on the
Titanic.
He was afraid a husband and babies would slow you down on your way out here.”

I studied my glass, admiring the light refracting around the spout. “How is Frank? And speaking of marriage, what would you call yours and Frank’s? Business or romance? Or maybe just a pooling of data?”

“Stop snarling at me,” she said, mildly enough.

“What are you doing here, Helen? You’re supposed to be chiseling money out of the First Bank of Terranova to finance the next World. And where is Frank?”

“I left him holding the fort at Terranova.”

“So, what, you just came out for a friendly visit?” I drained my glass.

Helen watched me refill it a third time. “You’re pouring that stuff down like it tastes good. Take it easy.”

“Judging is dry work.”

“So it seems, but I’d prefer you sober to hear what I came here to say.”

“And what’s that?”

“I want you to go to Mars.”

Helen Ricadonna had always been a past master of the non sequitur but this was going a bit far, even for her. “You want me to go to Mars.”

“Yes.”

There was a pause while I listened to the babble around me and looked at Helen, her hair, completely white now, standing up as usual in a corona all around her head. I wondered, not for the first time, if she cultivated the likeness to Einstein. Her ego was certainly up to the task. I drained my glass and signaled Birdie for another pitcher. “You may not want me drunk, but I’ve got the feeling I need to be to listen to what comes next.” The pitcher arrived and I poured. “You want me to go to Mars,” I repeated.

“Yes, for a year, a Martian year. The ship has already been built; in fact, it’s en route to Outpost as we speak. ETA is two weeks. It’s an interesting design; I think you’ll like it. It’s an airship.”

I stared at her. “An airship? What, like a dirigible? What did they call them—zeppelins?”

“No, this one’s soft-sided.”

My glass paused in midair. “You mean a
balloon?”

“Well, yes. Two actually, one inside the other. The cabin’s a toroid.” Her ephemeral smile came and went. “I know how much you like toroids.”

A balloon. “I see.” I drank. “Mind telling me why you want me to go to Mars in the first place?”

She had a one-word answer ready and waiting. “Cydonia.”

“Cydonia.”

“Yes, Cydonia. You do know where and what Cydonia is, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, aping her tone of sweet reason. “I know where and what Cydonia is; it’s a bunch of ruins in the northern hemisphere of Mars, first sighted in the next-to-last decade of the last century, confirmed by Eurospace’s Endeavor IV probe three years ago, best guess is E.T. built it five hundred thousand years ago, plus or minus a century, function unknown, builders unknown, so what?”

“So what?” Helen looked as scandalized as an impenetrable shield of dignity and equally unshakable sense of decorum would allow. “Aren’t you interested in finding out exactly what is there?”

I shrugged, mostly to annoy her.

“Star, a lot of the hard data and most of the educated guesses about Cydonia were destroyed when World War Three took out JPL and Houston. But now there is Prometheus.”

I groaned, and wished for the millionth time we’d never found evidence that the Asteroid Belt used to be a planet. “Oh God, not you, too. You and Brother Moses, God help me. I can’t handle another half-baked theory-cum-revelation about the advance guard of heavenly host sent to Terra by the One True God from the One True Planet.”

She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “If there is anything at Cydonia, it may predate what happened on Prometheus. There may be records—”

“Always supposing we could read them.”

“—equipment—”

“Always supposing we could run it.”

“—and evidence that whoever built Cydonia may have destroyed Prometheus.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “Helen,” I said when I could, “that ranks right up there with the Big Lie.” The Big Lie was just that, a fabricated message from the “Beetlejuicers” that Frank and Helen arranged to be intercepted by the Odysseus II deep-space probe back in the eighties when space exploration and colonization were dead in the water, or at the very least becalmed. Frank and Helen decided to send the space program back to sea with a handmade gale that developed into an entirely unexpected hurricane when the real aliens we called Librarians showed up on Terranova.

All experience is an archway wherethrough, the poet said, and yet… for the first time I questioned the consequences of the Big Lie. If we hadn’t gone full-throttle into space, we wouldn’t have built Terranova. If we hadn’t built Terranova, Simon wouldn’t have built Archy to run it. If Simon hadn’t built Archy, the Librarians would not have been intrigued enough to introduce themselves. If the Librarians had not introduced themselves, my niece Elizabeth would still have been with us instead of light-years across the galaxy, enrolled at Cosmos U., separated by space and time from home and family, perhaps never to return.

That untraveled world gleamed less brightly for me after her departure. And to the rest of humankind, space became less a mystery and more a resource. Back before the discovery of a planet predating the Belt, back before the Librarians came to top off the tank on Sol and returned home with Elizabeth, anything went in imagining what was out there. Bug-eyed monsters chased little green men in flying saucers equipped with light-speed and ray guns. After the Big Lie, after Frank and Helen “proved” there really was life in them thar stars, the scales tilted toward resource, and exploitation shifted into high gear. The Librarians’ appearance gave the Big Lie credence; and, more recently, the discovery of evidence supporting the hypothetical existence of a planet orbiting where the Belt was now only confirmed the fact that we were not alone, may in fact have been the sole residents of our own Solar System for less than three thousand years. Much of the mystery was gone, and most of the romance, and I was only just beginning to realize our lives were the poorer for it.

“The Big Lie jumpstarted us back into space, didn’t it?” Helen retorted, but her fleeting smile came and went. Serious again, she said, “Star, there is evidence that Cydonia and Prometheus are connected. We’ve had a team of archaeologists at Cydonia for the last six months, did you know?” I shook my head, and she said, “They’ve been studying the ruins and transmitting their findings to Maria Mitchell Observatory. They’ve found what they think was an observatory.”

“So?”

“So, the instrumentation’s not pointing out; it’s pointing in, toward the inner planets.”

“Toward Prometheus?”

“Tori Agoot thinks so, and he’s not exactly a virgin in the good-seeing business.” She fiddled with her glass, still half full of her first beer. “Three months ago they sent us a message that they think they’ve found what might be a projector of some kind.”

My voice was unintentionally sharp. “A weapon?”

She nodded. “Could be. And they think it’s pointed in the same general direction as the observatory.”

Along with a mesmerizing, often paralyzing gray stare, Helen had a voice with the seductive qualities of all the Lorelei put together. I’d seen Alliance senators tremble, Patrolmen quail, and career bureaucrats throw open the doors to the treasury under the influence of that voice. In the thirty-two years I’d known Helen, since we’d been roommates at Stanford, overseer and slave on Luna, and tyrant and worker bee on Terranova, that voice had lured me onto the rocks more times than I cared to remember, certainly more times than I would ever admit.

I studied her over the rim of my glass. She could have been lying through her teeth, propounding another outrageous hoax to spur exploration ever onward and outward. On the other hand, she could have been telling the absolute, unvarnished truth. With Helen you never knew. I didn’t really care one way or the other.

“I don’t want to go poking around a bunch of dusty old ruins, Helen, always supposing there actually is anything there to connect Cydonia with Prometheus, which I seriously doubt. Let somebody else do it, somebody who knows what to look for—an anthropologist, more archaeologists, somebody like that. Mother would jump at the chance— ask her.”

Helen focused on the one point in my diatribe she could legitimately attack. “What’s wrong with ruins?”

“What’s wrong with ruins?” For a moment I was stumped, but only for a moment. “Well, for one thing, they’re
old.
” She would have said more. I shook my head. “Don’t. Just don’t.”

Her eyes narrowed on me. “Is this about Caleb?”

It was unlike Helen to be blunt, and it took me a moment to recover. “No. Of course not. How could it be? It’s been almost twelve years.”

She nodded. “And for twelve years you’ve just been going through the motions, just living till you die.”

“Go to hell.” Even my anger lacked force.

She dropped her voice an octave. Her technique was flawless, her tone hushed, each word dropping like a stone into a still pond. “Caleb’s dead, Star. He’s been dead for twelve years. You going to mourn him the rest of your life? You going to sit and feel sorry for yourself forever? Do you believe for a moment it’s what he’d want?”

“You start talking like Mother,” I said through my teeth, “and I’ll take you outside and see how high you can bounce.”

“In vacuum, I’d say pretty high,” she said, bristling. “Take your best shot.”

We glared at each other. My communit beeped.

The feminine voice was hurried but composed. “Star?”

“Perry?” I said, startled. “What are you doing in range? I thought you were downarm.”

“Just got back, and just in time. Somebody’s in the process of hijacking an ore carrier on Ceres. Six dead, a bunch bloody. They’ve taken hostages and are fighting their way onto the landing field. I’m on my way down. Charlie’s with me.”

“I’m on Ceres; I’ll meet you at the hangar. Birdie!” At my shout the little man looked up. “Your laser pistol!” I barked. “Now!”

Birdie had an arm on him like a mass launcher. Pistol and holster sailed over the heads of the crowd and I caught it and checked the magazine on the run. I was across the square, down the tunnel, and at the airlock before I knew Helen was still with me. “You’re not coming with me, Ricadonna.” I grabbed for my pressure suit and began jamming myself into it.

“I sure as hell am not,” she agreed, helping me tug the torso and shoulders up. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” She pulled the helmet over my head and locked it down. I smacked the speaker. “Green board?”

She ran one finger across my chest readout, held up an OK sign, and buckled on Birdie’s holster. Her palm thumped my helmet and I was in the lock and out the other side. A pressure suit bounced up, and I recognized Kevin Takemotu’s grim visage just before the solar sled touched down. His voice over my headset was curt. “Perry, Star, glad you’re here. Charlie, we’ve set up a first-aid station in the square. Mother Mathilda’s in charge.”

“Good.” Charlie’s voice was breathless over the headset, and I relieved her of the suit sealer she was carrying. “Thanks, Star. I’ll let Mother Mathilda handle things inside. I’m going with you.”

“What can you tell us, Kevin?” Perry asked.

“About an hour ago a freighter inbound from 19301Buena Suerte landed at Dock Four. The crew was disembarking when they were attacked by a gang with laser pistols.” He looked at Charlie, his face taut behind its visor, his anger a tangible presence on the commset. “Most of the wounds are clean; I’ll say that much. Hands and feet sliced off like baloney. Glad you brought the suit sealer.”

He turned to Perry. “They’ve got at least two of the freighter’s crew members as hostages. Sandy O’Connor and James Smith have them pinned down outside the ship. That Sandy is some kind of sharpshooter; every time they make a try for the hatch she pops off at them with that laser pistol of hers. She’s nailed three of them so far.”

“Let’s go give her some help,” Perry said. “Weapons check?”