The Empress of Mars (20 page)

“Let them dare!” she shouted. “Just let those cowardly BAC bastards dare! But they
won’t
dare, because they’ve always been underhanded pusillanimous bureaucrats, look you, and haven’t the guts to break the law openly.”

“Very good,” said Mr. De Wit. He turned to Ottorino and said, “I will explain this to her. In the meanwhile we can set up a watch schedule, two men at all times, and we should also mount a watchcam in the Tube.”

“You agree with me, then,” said Ottorino. “It is very like the Old West, isn’t it? This is what the settlers had to do. Except for the camera.”

Mr. De Wit gave him a sidelong smile. “It’s what the Romans had to do, too, out at the edges of their empire. Once upon a time there was an Older West, you know. A frontier with savages, and cattle thieves, and sudden death. Even scalping, son of Rome. Londinium was built all the same.”

But the foundations of Emporium di Vespucci went unmolested, and its precast shell rose into place on schedule. The attempt, when it came, was much more simple and direct.

Mary and Cochevelou were in the Empress, celebrating the arrival of the new machinery from Third World Alternatives, when the lock hissed and a moment later Devin and Padraig hurried in. Their eyes were wide as they unmasked and hurried close to mutter in Cochevelou’s ear. He got to his feet, stifling a shout.

“What is it?” Mary demanded. Cochevelou gripped her arm.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, in a shaky voice. “Just a little stroll down to look at the allotments, eh?”

The dead man wasn’t visible from the edge of the field; he lay flat between two rows of broad bean trellises, facedown. His arms were drawn up with his hands near his face. He wore the most generic of psuits, brand new and featureless. There were little holes all over the back of the psuit, as though someone had burned through it in multiple spots with a soldering iron, and red flesh already going black underneath. Lying alone, a few feet in front of him, was a butterfly net. It was empty.

Mary stared. She had seen plenty of dead men in her time on Mars, but generally they were blue and frozen solid.

“What the bleeding bloody hell,” whispered Cochevelou. “Who is he? Turn him over, boys, and let’s have the mask off.”

Devin and Padraig obliged, gingerly. Everyone winced. Because the field was not in a vacuum there had of course been no exotic eye-bursting decompression, like in old films about space, nor the actual vein-bursting distortion that really would have happened Outside; only the eternal rictus, the silent scream of a very bad death.

“I don’t know that man,” said Mary.

“I don’t either,” said Cochevelou.

“Nor me,” said Devin and Padraig at the same time.

“Anybody know he’s here, besides you two and us?” said Cochevelou. They shook their heads.

“But what could have killed him?” Mary murmured. No one had an answer. One after another they turned their heads, their gazes drawn inevitably to the red world on the other side of the vizio. They had thought they knew every way in which Mars could end a life. His own carelessness, a faulty psuit or faulty machinery, or storms, or distance, or madness, were all enough to stop a human heart; but there had never been a hostile intelligence in the cold passionless stone. Had there?

Mary shivered and stepped over the dead man’s right arm, stooping down to pick up the butterfly net. “What do you suppose he—” she began, and froze. She heard the deep angry vibration, like a cat’s purr. Turning her head, she saw the black thing clinging to the underside of a leaf.

It was perhaps the size of a hummingbird. Its wings clicked, whirred.

Mary stood slowly, keeping her eye on the black thing. “What is it?” asked Cochevelou. Mary turned her head with caution and realized what was missing from the scene. No gold lights whirling, no blue or red.

“There aren’t any biis,” she said, as quietly as she could. “He wanted to catch some biis. That was what the net was for. And there’s something right down there I’ve never seen before, and I think it killed him.”

Cochevelou grunted. He held out a hand. “You come away from
there, quick,” he whispered. “What’s it look like? A snake or something?”

“No,” said Mary, taking his hand and stepping forward. Devin and Padraig were backing away slowly. Cochevelou turned to glare at them.

“If this isn’t the bastard who sabotaged our cattle pens, I’m not my mother’s son. You two, go fetch an irrigation pipe,” he ordered. “A forty ought to be big enough. And not a word to another living soul, or so help me I’ll kill you with my two hands.”

They ran without question. By the time they returned with the pipe, Cochevelou had taken the corpse by its feet and dragged it out to the end of the row. They stuffed the body into the irrigation pipe. “What good is that going to do?” muttered Mary.

“It’ll get him out of the way,” said Cochevelou. “What do you reckon the BAC hired him to steal biis, too? Mr. Bill Nennius, maybe. Get some of their own and reverse-engineer them while my Perrik’s still waiting on his patent registration, eh?”

Mary was shocked into silence. While they had believed the British Arean Company capable of any underhanded trick imaginable, it was sobering to think that out-and-out hostilities, with casualties, had begun at last. All the same . . . “We don’t even know what killed this poor bastard,” she said.

“Yeah, we do,” said Cochevelou, and said no more on the matter until they had lugged the pipe all the way up the Tube as far as the Empress. There they encountered the Brick, just heading out after a late breakfast. He stopped, staring at them.

“What’s the pipe for?” he inquired. The men were silent, staring back.

“If you please, Mr. Brick,” said Mary, “we were just taking this pipe up to bury it. I don’t suppose you know of a nice remote place where this pipe might be safely buried?”

“Something in the pipe that wants burying?”

“Yes, Mr. Brick. I don’t think anyone’s going to come asking questions about it, but it needs to be properly set in the ground.”

“Huh. Quietly, soon, and preferably a long way out somewhere in an unmarked spot?”

“Yes, Mr. Brick.”

The Brick considered the pipe as he pulled on his gauntlets. “I can do that for you,” he said at last.

“How very kind, Mr. Brick.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the Brick. He took the pipe from Devin and Padraig, hoisted it easily on his shoulder, and walked away out the Tube to the Haulers’ depot.

Cochevelou wiped his brow. He turned to Devin and Padraig. “Get down the hill with you,” he said. “Seal off that field. Not a word to anyone about why. I find news of this has got out and I’ll know who to blame, understand?”

“Yes, Chief.” The two ducked their heads hastily, turned and ran. Cochevelou reached out and took Mary’s hand. His own was trembling.

“Be with me. I’ll have to talk to him,” he said.

Yet when they arrived at Cochevelou’s apartments, he gave Mary a shameful pleading look. She sighed and went to the entrance to Perrik’s room, while Cochevelou retreated to the corner and poured himself a stiff drink.

“Perrik, dear, it’s Mary. Something’s happened and I need to speak to you.”

“Someone tried to steal the biis, didn’t they?” Perrik’s voice came from just the other side of the hatch. Had he been standing there, waiting?

“Yes. Someone did.”

“It would have turned out the same if we’d had a high-voltage fence.” His voice was tense, but not frightened.

“Perrik.”

“Yes?”

“Have you made something black?”

A long silence followed. “Was anyone else harmed?” said Perrik at last.

“No,” said Mary.

“You can come in,” said Perrik, and opened the hatch. He looked away from her, walked to the opposite side of the room as soon as the hatch had closed again.

She told him what had happened. He listened, head down, pacing back and forth. When she had finished, he said: “First concern: you don’t have to be afraid of the black ones. They’re the soldier biis. They’ll defend the others. So much for my philosophical experiment.”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to make them. It shouldn’t have been necessary to make soldiers in a perfectly balanced society; it spoiled the balance. But there it is! He didn’t have to die. If he’d run away after the first one hit him, he’d have lived. If he’d just laid down and kept still, they’d have stopped attacking. But he kept trying to catch the pollinators and so they didn’t know what else to do.”

“How do you know that, Perrik?”

“I see what they see,” said Perrik. He tapped a finger against his temple.

“So . . . you have some sort of psychic connection with your biis, then?”

“No.” For once Perrik raised his head and looked at her, with impatience. “They’re robots. I have an implant. It feeds me the data they gather.”

“An implant?” Mary turned to stare, and he quickly looked away. “You did surgery on yourself?”

“It wasn’t hard. I drank a glass of Dad’s whiskey and lay down. The mechanics came and did what I’d programmed them to do. It didn’t even hurt.”

“Oh,” said Mary, a little weakly.

“Thank you for hiding the body. Second concern: I’ll need to prepare. They’ll try again. Where’s Dad?”

“Just outside, dear.”

Perrik braced himself and went to the hatch. He hesitated there a moment, clenching his fists until the knuckles were white; then flung the hatch open. “Dad!”

“Boy?” Cochevelou jumped up from his chair.

“You need to put security patrols on the allotments.”

“I know that.”

“Well . . . you should have had them on before now!”

“Don’t you talk to me as though I was an idiot! You mind your manners, boy, I’m your
father
!”

“Don’t you talk to me as though I were a child!”

Their voices rose, accelerated into all-out battle. Mary, long accustomed to tuning them out once they’d started, let her gaze wander around Perrik’s room. The frame globe in the corner was almost still; lights of many colors clustered there, scarcely moving. Her gaze was drawn to a far table, the only active place in the room. Something white gleamed there, a soft shifting white the color of Luna seen from Earth, streaming out from under the edges of a covered box.

“What’s this?” inquired Mr. Rotherhithe, where he sat poring through his mail on his buke. “What’s this charge Financial is asking me about? Some sort of retainer fee to Ben-Gen Enterprises?”

“Nothing with which you need to concern yourself,” said Mr. Nennius, from the general director’s desk. “If you’ll look at the whole charge, you’ll see it was refunded for delivery failure.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Rotherhithe. “
Failure
, is it? Not a world the Company likes to see in any format, that’s my experience. I’m sorry for you, young man. Notice how the days are stretching into weeks, and Mars still hasn’t turned a profit? Not so easy as you thought it was going to be, is it now?”

“On the contrary,” said Mr. Nennius. “It’s proceeding exactly as I knew it would. However, to keep you happy . . .” He input a series of orders. “There! More kicking the anthill. Something interesting should develop soon.”

It was also possible to ride in an open-air automobile on Mars. Just.

A great deal of preparation was necessary, to be sure: one had first to put on a suit of thermals, and then a suit of cotton fleece, and then a suit of bubblefilm, and then a final layer of quilted Outside wear. Boots with ankle locks were necessary too, and wrist-locked gauntlets. One could put on an old-fashioned aquarium helmet like Mr. Morton, or a snug new Aercapo like Mr. Vespucci, if one had the money; most people at Mary’s economic level made do with a snugly-fitting hood, a face-mask hooked up to a back tank, and kitchen grease mixed with UV blocker daubed thickly on anything that the mask didn’t cover.

Having done this, one could then clamber through an airlock and motor across Mars, in a rickety CeltCart 600 with knobbed rubber tires and a top speed of eight kilometers an hour. It was transportation neither dignified nor efficient, since one was swamped with methane fumes and bounced about like a pea in a football. Nevertheless, it beat walking, or being blown sidelong in an antigravity car. And it really beat climbing.

Mary clung to the rollbar and reflected that today was actually a fine day for a jaunt Outside, considering. Bright summer sky overhead like cream, though liver-dark storm clouds raged far down the small horizon behind. Before, of course, was only the gentle but near-eternal
swell of Mons Olympus, and the road that had been made by the expedient of rolling or pushing larger rocks out of the way, and the long line of unconnected lengths of pipe that had been brought up and laid out.

“Mind the pit, Cochevelou,” she admonished. Cochevelou exhaled his annoyance so forcefully that steam escaped from the edges of his mask, but he steered clear of the pit and so on up the winding track to the drill site.

The crew was hard at work when they arrived at last, having had a full hour’s warning that the cart was on its way up, since from the high slide of the slope one could see half the world spread out below, and its planetary curve, too. There was therefore a big mound of broken gravel and frozen mudslurry, scraped from the clan’s drillbits, to show for their morning’s work. Better still, there was a thin spindrift of steam coming off the rusty pipes, coalescing into short-lived frost as it fell.

Chiring turned and spoke into the holocam, which he had fastened to a boulder with bungee cords lest it blow away.

“A historic moment,” he intoned in Nepali. “I’m standing on the slope of Mons Olympus. Earth astronomers once assumed this giant shield volcano was extinct; the existence of magma chambers was not discovered until the Kutuzov expedition of 2186. As in so many other aspects of its colonization effort, the British Arean Company opted to ignore the possibilities of arethermal energy here. Now that the private sector has taken the initiative, Mars stands poised for major industrial development. To my left you can see the delivery of the first pump for the power station; to my right, the foundations for the power station itself. Arriving to inspect the work, the first great Martian entrepreneur; Mary Griffith!”