Sebastian of Mars (20 page)

I bowed. “Thank you, sir.”

He turned to an opened bottle of wine which I
had not brought, and sat unpoured on the table beside an empty
glass.

“Would you like me to replace that with a
desert wine, sir?” I asked.

Distracted, he looked at me. “No. This . . .
will be fine.” His face brightened for a moment. “Is there by any
chance another of those pastries?”

I bowed again. “I think Darwin made an extra,
Captain.”

“Excellent! May I have it?”

“Of course.”

I retrieved the extra pastry, and when I
returned to serve it he was just pouring a glass of wine from the
open bottle, with a trembling paw. The wine was the deepest red I
had ever seen.

I placed the pastry before him, but he only
stared at the wine glass before him.

“I would leave this camp if I were you,” he
said in a funereal voice. He turned to look at me. “Tonight. I told
you I had been given a choice. They will not give you one.”

“Yes, sir.”

I glanced back at the flap of the tent, and
he was still staring at the wine glass, the pastry ignored.

The next morning he was dead.

But Darwin and I had already deserted, just
before the guards came for me.

I
t was remarkably
easy for us to hide. In an army so huge, on the march, it was
impossible to keep track of two unobtrusive cooks. And unobtrusive
was what we made ourselves, all the while edging closer to the
front.

To my surprise, and our luck, once we got
away from the rear our task became even easier. The veteran
portions of this vast enterprise had been moving for months, and a
kind of lassitude had set in. It was as if the center of the beast
was soft. Discipline was still strict, and disobedience met with
the iron hand, but, day to day, boredom was the rule. These
soldiers had seen no real action in quite a while, their main
purpose being to escort a catastrophic weapon and little more. To
them, it was little more than guard duty, and even their officers
had become jaded.

We learned, by sitting in on many late night
card or dice games, that no forces of the second republic had been
engaged for weeks. It was as if they had vanished from the earth.
It was rumored that Xarr was dead or forced into exile, that I
myself was dead.

“The pup had run with his tail between his
legs!” was a comment I often heard at these drunken affairs. I must
admit it made me smile inwardly, that the wine-soused corporal,
unkempt and belching, and who had just taken money from me by
rolling two fives on the bones, was telling this to the very feline
who he spoke of. There was a somewhat grim inner satisfaction it
gave me.

“And where are those louts who guard the
weapon?” I asked this same corporal, late into the same night, when
he could barely stand but had continued to cheat me, for the dice,
it became obvious, were loaded.

He stopped counting his money and stared at
me blearily for a moment, a nearby fire shadowing his drunken
features.

“Eh?”

I repeated my question, and added, “One of
the louts owes me money!” I showed him the surfeit of coins in my
hands. “And if I get it from him, I can play dice with you again
tomorrow night!”

“Ah!” His face brightened for a moment, but
then he looked down at all the money in his paw.

“Got plenty of money! Play!” He swayed from
side to side before regaining his balance.

I repeated my question once more, and he
said, “Ah!” again and then, “That no-good
Finch
and his
bunch! Nothin’ bu’ babysitters!”

“Yes,” I said, seeking to keep him awake.
“He’s the one! Where are they?”

He pointed vaguely over his shoulder. “Tha’
way. Tell ‘im Cheyenne sent you. Owes” – here he paused for a belch
– “me money too.”

And then he fell over, still clutching his
winnings in his palm, and was dead asleep on the ground and
snoring.

So Darwin and I moved in the direction
Cheyenne indicated, carefully, slowly, gambling and sometimes
cooking when a cook was needed, as, in the distance, Olympus Mons
grew daily at the horizon, its monstrous bulk eating up more of the
western sky.

And always, we slipped
closer, closer, to our prey.

W
hich I found unexpectedly, on the rare morning when
Darwin and I split up, each to meet at a certain spot at noon. It
was like moving through a slow carpet of red, and I had learned
always to look as if I had somewhere to go or someone to meet. On
the rare occasion when I was confronted, my original papers always
seemed to do the trick, because cooks were scarce everywhere. My
only fear was that I might be connected to the late unlamented
captain, but this never came up. This far away from where it had
happened, the attempt on Frane’s life had become, though the
passage of misinformation, a heroic act on her part, as, according
to these ever-changing false accounts, she had stood upon the table
when confronted by her would-be killer, and slain the woman on the
spot, or, in other versions, after a lengthy duel, for the assassin
had been a trained swordsman, and deft in the many arts of killing,
but Frane had outwitted her at every turn. In one version the fight
had gone on for the entire night, Frane deliberately waiting for
dawn to defeat her foe so that the Sun, her equal, could witness
it. It was amazing what damage to the truth the feline tongue could
do, merely by repeating a simple story. It had, in the intervening
days, become a heroic epic, with Frane, naturally, as the hero.

When noon came, Darwin did not meet with me
at the spot we had agreed on. This bothered me, but I did not worry
about him. He had proved much more adept at subterfuge and cunning
than I, and his actions had been an education to me.

I made careful inquiries, slowly widening my
circle through the ranks, but no one had seen the little fellow or
even heard of him.

And then fate intervened, and I found what I
had been looking for since One had sent me on this quest.

Late in the afternoon, I passed a group of
half-asleep guards and heard the name, “Finch” uttered, with near
contempt. The day’s march had ended, and there were rumors (there
were always rumors) that there would be no movement until the
following morning. I had resigned myself to the fact that Darwin
was nowhere nearby, and that I would have to spend a night of
gambling, and discreet inquiry, alone, which was an unpleasant
thought because Darwin was also a better gambler than I.

I sauntered past the guards, and then turned
back, as if a thought had suddenly come into my mind.

“Say, fellows,” I said, as offhandedly as I
could, “you wouldn’t happen to know where
Finch
is, would
you?” I allowed a small measure of contempt to enter my tone when I
mentioned his name.

The tallest of the three of them narrowed his
eyes at me. “Why?”

“He owes me money, actually.”

The tall one twitched his whiskers and waved
a paw in dismissal. “He owes
everybody
money!”

“Yes, but . . .” and I leaned closer,
conspiratorially, and whispered, “this money was supposed to buy
you fellows a good meal. I’m a cook, and when he lost to me at the
bones he promised enough and bargained a good meal for his guards
for even more. If I get him to pay me you boys get . . .”

And I proceeded to rattle off a menu that
made their mouths nearly water, which would actually use up the
scant stocks of Tyron’s spices I had left.

The tall one stopped me and said, pointing,
“Head that way, a half mile. You’ll meet up with the guard on duty.
His name is Morphus. Tell him that Jilly sent you.” He grabbed my
arm, almost pleading. “When do we get this grub? I’ve been chewing
hard tack for a week, and my teeth and belly can’t take it
anymore!”

“Soon, I promise,” I
said, taking my leave of them.

I
t was almost dark
when I found Morphus, and told him Jilly had sent me. He was little
impressed. He and his two companions guarded the single opening in
a ring of wagons, which had been drawn into a wide circle. Each
wagon had at least one guard, sometimes two. I imagined this
makeshift fortress was assembling after the finish of every
march.

I repeated my good meal scenario and Morphus’
interest was ignited. Only this time I said that I had lost a bet,
and had been made to pledge my cooking skills to Finch and his
guards for one evening. I showed them my money, which I said were
to bribe the finest foods in camp.

“I hear you fellows are sick of hardtack, “ I
said, and once again went down my imaginary menu.

“When is this feast?” Morphus asked eagerly.
The other two guards had moved closer to better hear my
promises.

“As soon as I can arrange it. When do you
fellows get off duty?”

Boredom replaced eagerness. “Not for six
hours yet. Then Jilly and his second-raters come on.”

I laughed. “Second-raters?”

Morphus’ back stiffened in pride. “Everyone
knows my bunch is the best Finch has. Half of Jilly’s sad sacks
have been found asleep on duty”

I laughed again. “Why don’t we say tomorrow,
then, before you go back on duty?”

He licked his lips. “Fine! The guard house,
back where Jilly is no doubt sleeping, is the place. The boss’ll
leave us alone there.”

“Till tomorrow, then!”
I sauntered off, losing myself in a huddled mass of anonymous
resting soldiers, and waited for the changing of the guard.

J
illy’s group was
not quite as bad as Morphus had promised, but, as I slowly and
unobtrusively circled the wagons, I noticed one fellow in
particular who looked to be a prime candidate for shirking. Even
during the early part of his shift he abandoned his posture of
at-attention, slouching and, when he thought no one was looking,
leaning against his guarded wagon in an unmistakable attitude of
sloth.

The problem was that Jilly was also aware of
this, and made his own (thankfully regular) rounds, inevitably
stopping at this particular soldier’s position to berate him for
something:

“Harson! Stand up straight!”

“Harson! Stay awake, you fool!”

“Harson! Get that cigarette out of your
mouth!”

And so on. It became regular as clockwork.
Which was a good thing, because it meant than when Harson did
inevitably fall asleep, which he did around five hours into his
shift, there was a small window of opportunity before Jilly found
him thus.

Taking care, I was able to move past the
lightly snoring guard and, on my belly, crawl my way into the
center of this fortress.

I crouched silently on the other side of the
wagon, waiting for Jilly to come by and rouse Harson, which he did,
right on time.

“Harson! You idiot! Do you want me to report
you again?”

I moved off stealthily, with Jilly’s stream
of invective fading in my ears.

There was no light from Phobos or Deimos to
assist me, but the night was crystal clear, with a billion stars,
including the Great Veil, giving me all the illumination I
needed.

At first I saw nothing, a cleared area in the
center and a few smaller wagons encased within the compound. There
were no sounds. I crept to the first of these smaller wagons and
peered into the back.

Two men lay sleeping, one of them
snoring.

The other wagon was empty, but there were
bedclothes flung aside and I pulled my head out just in time to see
a figure making his way toward me from one of the circled wagons in
the darkness. I pulled back and held my breath.

He yawned and climbed up into the wagon,
making it groan, and then, according to his purring sounds of
satisfaction, settled into his bedding.

I waited for his breathing to even, which it
finally did.

On a hunch, I crossed the empty space to the
wagon the feline had come from.

Inside was a long white tube, hinged open
along its length, revealing clusters of wires and something dark, a
long oblong box with dials on one end.

It was not what I had come for.

I pulled my head out, being careful to make
no noise, and moved to the next wagon, which contained a similar
device.

I examined all of the wagons in turn, and, in
the last, found what One had sent me for.

It was a similar long white tube, but hinged
not along its length but at one end. When I opened the cap my heart
nearly stopped, for it was not as One had described it to me. But
then I realized that a second hinged area was present and when I
pulled this up and away I was faced with a row of thin rods set
into a grid with a dial to their right. I quickly did as I had been
instructed, changing the order of the rods, and replaced the two
hinged caps over the end of the device.

There came a sound outside the wagon.

I froze, pressing myself back against the
inside wall as the flap was thrown aside and someone coughed, then
snorted and spit.

The flap fell back into place, concealing me
completely, and I crept to it and peaked out.

A guard was shuffling away, yawning and
spitting on the ground again as he did so.

I waited a full five minutes before climbing
out and making my way back to the wagon with the sleeping
guard.

His post appeared to be empty.

Puzzled, I moved to the next wagon, which was
properly guarded.

I moved back to the original wagon, and
crawled underneath.

I poked my head out, and saw no one.

As I pulled myself all the way out and stood
up, I felt an iron grip on my shoulder, and someone hissed, “Got
you!”

“A
cook
,”
Frane said. “It seems my life these days is complicated by
cooks.”

She bent down, and studied me closely. I saw
the pupils in her eyes dilate. She was very ugly up close, much
older than she had looked at the dinner when Keisha had tried to
assassinate her. There were lines behind the thinning fur of her
face, and pinched wattles of skin beneath her chin on her neck. Her
flesh looked too taut, as if it had been pulled back from her
cheekbones, and there were thinning patches of fur behind her ears
and on the back of her head.