Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

Juan stretched his arms out, fingers interlocked, until his knuckles cracked. “Okay,” he said into the air. “Now listen carefully. Everything I say is a lie.” He paused, then: “I am lying.”

“Puh-leeze,” said Mudge.

Juan looked at me and shrugged good-naturedly. “It was worth a try. Is there a terminal I can use?”

“In there,” I said, pointing to one of the four rooms on the lower level. Juan entered, and I slipped off my phone and placed it on a piece of equipment, with the lens facing him, just to keep an eye on him. The whole point of coming back here was to get the secret Mudge must now know—the precise map of how to get between the Alpha and New Klondike, and, therefore, the reverse—and I’d be damned if I let Juan extract that info for his own uses. Of course, there was no reason to think he suspected Mudge, or I, knew where the Alpha was; the wreck of Weingarten and O’Reilly’s second lander had been salvaged from Aeolis Mensae, and he probably assumed this one had been recovered from somewhere equally far from the mother lode.

I climbed up the interior ladder; I wanted to give O’Reilly’s space suit a more thorough examination for signs of foul play. But it wasn’t in the room we’d left it in. Well, the ship had come crawling out of the mud, fallen over, rolled around, flown halfway across Isidis Planitia, gone from vertical to horizontal to vertical again, and been hauled by a tractor. Being tossed around like a rag doll wasn’t quite the fate one of the richest men in the solar system had anticipated, I’m sure.

“Mudge,” I said into the air, “what happened to Denny O’Reilly’s body?”

“A combination of eating too much and not exercising enough.”

“I mean, where is it now?”

“In the room on your right.”

I entered that wedge-shaped compartment, and—

And that was odd. Yes, O’Reilly’s suited body was in here, sprawled on the floor, but the cupboard doors were hanging open. I was sure they’d been closed when I left the ship. I suppose they could have been knocked open during the flight, but—

I entered the next room. Its cupboards were open, too. As were the ones in the next chamber, and the next one. There could be no doubt: someone had searched the ship.

“Alex?” called Juan from below.

I hustled down the ladder, entered the chamber he was in, and stood behind him. “Yes?”

He swiveled in his chair to face me. “I’ve unlocked the computer.”

“That fast?”

“Sure. Like you said, it’s a forty-year-old machine. Most security systems get hacked within weeks of being released. Ask it whatever you want.”

I’d wait until I was alone to get the instructions to return to the Alpha. “Mudge,” I said, “the ship has been searched since I left it. Did someone beside Dr. Pickover enter?”

“Who is Dr. Pickover?” asked the computer.

“Rory. The person who flew here with you earlier.”

“Yes. After this ship was hauled through the airlock by a tractor, someone came aboard.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Biological or transfer?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Damn. No, he wouldn’t. Transferring had been something for only the insanely rich that long ago.

“Male or female?”

“Female.”

“Age?”

“Perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine.”

“Skin color?”

“Brown.”

“Eye color?”

“Brown.”

“Hair color?”

“Brown.”

“Straight or curly?”

“Straight.”

I thought about asking if she was hot, but I doubted Mudge would have an opinion. Of course, there were hundreds of women on Mars who fit that description, but I’d lay money he was describing Lakshmi Chatterjee.

“The woman was alone?” I asked

“Yes,” said Mudge.

“Did you overhear her speak to anyone—on her phone, maybe?”

“Yes.”

“Who was she talking to?”

“I don’t know, and I could not make out the voice.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Hello.’ There was a pause, then she said, ‘Absolutely.’ Another pause, then—”

“Did she say anything important?”

“I don’t know what qualifies.”

“List all the proper nouns she used in her phone conversation.”

“In the order she first used them: Shopatsky House, Dave Cheung, Persis, Isidis Planitia, Dirk, Lomax, Mars—”

“Stop. What did she say about Lomax?”

“‘If we can’t take Lomax out, then we need an insurance policy.’”

“Continue the conversation from that point on.”

“There was another pause, then: ‘No, Dirk saw them together at The Bent Chisel; they’re clearly an item, and she’s coming to see me in a couple of hours; she’s tailor-made for the part.’ Another pause, then—”

“Stop.” I looked at my wrist phone; it was 2:08 p.m., and Diana’s appointment had been slated to start at 2:00. My heart started pounding. “Juan, we’ve got to go. Diana’s in trouble.”

Juan Santos looked up at me, piecing it together. “Diana?” he said. “My Diana?”

“Yes, yes,” I replied. “She’s at Shopatsky House right now.” I headed through the descent stage’s open airlock door and scrambled down the exterior ladder; Juan followed. As soon as we were both out on the shipyard grounds, I swore. “It’ll take forever to get to Shopatsky House from here by tram.”

“We won’t take a tram,” Juan said. “We’ll take my Mars buggy.”

“It’ll take even longer to go get that.”

“It would if the buggy was still outside. But it’s not. I had it brought in for a thorough cleaning after I got it back from you—I’ve never seen mud on a buggy before.” It was impossible to wash a car outside the dome; the atmosphere was too thin for sonic cleaning, the low air pressure caused water to boil away, and the ubiquitous dust dirtied things up again immediately anyway. “The sonic car wash is just inside the south airlock,” continued Juan. It meant running in precisely the opposite direction from where we wanted to go, but he was right: using his buggy would get us to the writing retreat much faster than the tram would. I thought about calling the NKPD, but I didn’t want a repeat of the fiasco that had occurred at the Kathryn Denning.

We ran to where the buggy was parked; it was indeed now clean, its white body glistening and not a speck of dirt obscuring its jade pinstripes. Juan was about to get into the driver’s seat, but I said, “Let me.” He frowned, but went around to the other side. He knew I’d been to Shopatsky House before.

I put the pedal to the metal. The lack of streamlining on Mars buggies was no impediment out on the surface, but in here I could feel the drag on the cubic habitat cover. Still, we were making great progress, and were soon on the heels of the very hovertram we’d have otherwise taken. I swerved around it. If the tram had had a driver, said driver might have given me the finger, but the computer that ran the thing seemed to take my maneuver with equanimity.

As I cut in front of the tram, a pedestrian was crossing the street ahead of us. It was hard to tell at the speed we were going, but he looked biological—meaning I might kill him if I hit him, instead of just knocking him flying. I slapped the flat of my hand against the center of the steering wheel, and—

Holy crap!

The sound almost burst my eardrums. Apparently a horn designed to be used in a thin atmosphere shouldn’t be used in a thick one. The guy in front of me leapt a good meter and a half straight up.