PRAISE FOR MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER
“Martin Shoemaker is a rare writer who can handle the challenges of dealing with future technology while touching the human heart.”
—David Farland, New York Times bestselling author
“Martin Shoemaker’s ‘Black Orbit’ is a more conventional Analog adventure, and a very good example of such . . . A really solid story.”
—Rich Horton, Locus Online
“[‘Bookmarked’] is an exceptional example of how to discuss deep moral and philosophical issues while maintaining a tight narrative that brings the reader along. This story will be added to the required readings for my SF classes.”
—Robert L. Turner III, Tangent Online
“In ‘Brigas Nunca Mais,’ Martin L. Shoemaker presents one of the best tales in the issue. A framed narrative about a love relationship told through the voice of the groom at a wedding on board a space ship, this tale delights by featuring dance as a central image and metaphor . . . A very enchanting story.”
—Douglas W. Texter, Tangent Online
“What I did particularly enjoy [about ‘Murder on the Aldrin Express’] was the excellent character development, and the heart and emotional depth brought to the story by its romantic aspect.”
—Colleen Chen, Tangent Online
ALSO BY MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER
The Last Dance
Today I Am Carey
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Martin L. Shoemaker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542091404
ISBN-10: 1542091403
Cover illustration and design by Mike Heath | Magnus Creative
For Jack McDevitt,
inspiration, mentor, and friend.
You asked for “The Adventure of the Martian Tomb,”
and the rest followed.
CONTENTS
MAP
1. THE ADVENTURE OF THE MARTIAN TOMB
2. SHIVA
3. CONSEQUENCES
4. EXPEDITIONS
5. THE EDGE OF THE CREVASSE
6. MISSING PIECES
7. NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN
8. THE SQUAD ROOM
9. THE NEW ROUTINE
10. TROUBLE IN THE RANKS
11. THE FIRE
12. THE CRIME SCENE
13. GRAFT
14. PORT SHANNON
15. TABLE OF ORGANIZATION
16. WARRANTS
17. HORACE GALE IN CUSTODY
18. ARGUMENTS
19. INTERVIEWS
20. AMBASSADOR AAMES
21. THE LONG DAY CONTINUES
22. ANOTHER CORPSE
23. DINNER WITH MARCUS
24. THIRTY-NINE HOURS
25. GALE’S STORY
26. RAIDS
27. DAMAGE CONTROL
28. JURISDICTION
29. ENTERING BOOMTOWN
30. THE BLOCK
31. EMERGENCY MEDICINE
32. THE HOLDOUT
33. RETURN TO THE TOMB
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1. THE ADVENTURE OF THE MARTIAN TOMB
When I squeezed down to the bottom of the crevasse, there was no doubt about it: Simons was dead. I tapped my suit comm and called up to the top where Nick waited, “Helmet’s cracked, Nick.” I didn’t describe the desiccated skull behind the shattered plexi. There was no need to. Nick had spent far more time on Mars than I had, and he had seen his share of corpses.
“Photograph everything, Rosie,” Nick called back. “Let’s not have anyone doubt our thoroughness.”
“Space it, Nick, I know how to do my job,” I replied with a sigh; but I smiled as I said it. Nick and I had competed since our first meeting, when I had been the new recruit from Brazil and Nick had been the arrogant spacer from America. After all these years, sparring with Nick over an investigation was just a pleasant game. Our spats spiced up the romance and kept things interesting.
But then I remembered that in this incident, we had a dead Mars settler on our hands. Jacob Simons, age thirty-seven, had gone out on a scientific mission and had never returned. On Mars, past a certain number of days missing, you are presumed dead. But São Paulo Mutual wouldn’t pay Simons’s widow on a presumption. At best, they would pay her a fraction of the policy value, enough to keep her in air until she got her life in order.
So Nick and I had volunteered to search for Jacob. It had not been easy. Mars is more complex geologically than people of Earth assume. In some places vehicles and people leave easy-to-follow tracks in the sand; but in others, long stretches of rock show no signs of passage. And frequent dust storms can bury tracks in minutes. If Jacob had stayed with his crawler, we could have tracked that by its transponder; but he had set out on foot and seemed to have deviated far from the course he had registered in the expedition office. It had taken Nick and me three days to confirm his half-buried tracks and to trace them back to this small offshoot of the West Candor Chasma system of valleys and crevasses.
So now we would be able to bring back Jacob’s body, and Althea would be able to file for full survivor benefits. Not that that would make up for losing Jacob. Althea and Jacob were one of the closest couples I’d met on Mars. But at least there’d be something to help support her while she tried to rebuild. Maybe even something to invest in a fund like the Red Planet League and get some continuing income.
I videoed the body from every angle, dictating notes as I did so. Nick watched through my helmet cam. The crevasse blocked my signal from reaching Maxwell City. If Jacob had called for help, no one would have known. But Nick was straight overhead, so he could pick it up. He made suggestions as I worked, and I pointed out that I was already ahead of him on most of them, while acknowledging when he made good points.
When we were both satisfied with my work, I shut down the camera, and I called up, “All right, let’s get him out of here. Take him home.”
I had elected to go down into the crevasse. Although Nick is not the tallest of men, I’m still smaller than he is and able to fit into smaller places while suited up for the Martian surface. When we had spotted the body from above, I had swapped out my oxygen pack for just a single small tank. This had made it easier to negotiate the crevasse, but now I had only ten minutes of oxygen left before I was down to suit reserves. That should be enough; but if not, Nick could throw down a spare to me. A tank would be easy enough to catch in the light Martian gravity.
But smaller or not, I was still cautious. I wanted to get away from Jacob’s body before Nick pulled the crawler up closer to the edge. The ground had seemed solid enough from up there, but Mars could surprise you. If anything came crashing down, Jacob was past caring, but I wasn’t. So I crept a good ten meters from Jacob’s body, to where the crevasse started to narrow. Any farther, and even I might worry about getting stuck. I was glad to have a modern Mars suit, so much lighter and more maneuverable than suits from the early days of space exploration. I could never have navigated the crevas
se with another hundred kilos of environment pack.
Nick backed the crawler closer to the edge, unfolded the legs for the winch, and extended the winch boom out over the crevasse. Then he attached a harness to the cable, and he turned on the motor to lower it down. While the harness descended, Nick tested the edge, both with his own weight and with the crawler’s deep radar. When he seemed satisfied, Nick said, “Let’s hook him up.”
I crawled back, watchful for any sign of falling rock or dust. When I saw none and I was sure it was safe enough, I lifted Jacob’s body and slipped the harness around his arms and legs. Then I called up to Nick, “He’s hooked up.”
“Everything free?” Nick called back.
“Yep. I lifted him off the ground, and nothing is wedged.”
“All right, go back to your safe spot, and I’ll haul him up.” Nick left nothing to chance. That was how Nick and his crew had survived on their mission to Mars, the ill-fated second Bradbury expedition. This was one of the things that had first attracted me to him. As difficult as he could be sometimes, he didn’t miss details.
Oh, he missed human details, sometimes. He could be infuriating, not recognizing what someone was feeling or thinking. But he could be attentive in his own unique way. If he knew something mattered to me, it mattered to him. He would never forget, and he’d make sure that any job I needed got done right.
So I went back to my safe spot, and I watched as Jacob’s body rose into the air.
And then I cursed under my breath. I liked Nick’s attention to detail, but I hated it when he was right about something going wrong. Dust started to fall from the crevasse wall, followed by small pebbles. The added weight of Jacob and his suit out on a long moment arm was proving just enough leverage to stress the rock and soil of the crevasse wall.
“Nick—”
“Stay back, Rosie!”
“If you’re going to get him up, you had better hurry.”
“Working on it!”
And then Nick swore, something he usually saved for when things were really falling apart. A single Portuguese word I had taught him: “Porra. Rosie, get out of there. The whole wall’s starting to crumble. It’s going to take the crawler with it if I don’t—”
“Move, Nick!”
They tell me that today, rock climbing is an optional subject for the kids, only for those who elect to attend Martian survival school. But on my first assignment to Mars, it had all been Martian survival school. Now that we had returned, Nick and I still climbed a lot for recreation. With the crevasse as narrow as it was there at my safe spot, it was an easy climb in the light Martian gravity. I could just press against both sides and walk myself up, hands and feet.
Then I felt the wall on the crawler side tremble, and I saw the whole face start to fall. I quickly scrambled for hand- and footholds on the other wall as I shouted up, “Fall, Nick! Move!” I scaled the wall as fast as I could, daring one quick look back as the rocks came crashing down, filling the crevasse. It was a strange thing to watch. Even after all my years on Mars, I still expected such an accident to create a large crashing sound. But my external audio picked up almost nothing. Sound didn’t propagate very far or very fast in the thin atmosphere of Mars. Only the lowest of rumbles reached me across the distance. So I felt more than heard the collapse.
Through the dust, I saw Jacob’s body rising quickly, more quickly than the winch motor operated. Nick had to be driving the crawler away from the edge. So Nick had gotten away. I was relieved.
Even if he hadn’t, there would have been nothing I could do about it. I would have had to walk back to Maxwell City to get help.
No, scratch that idea. I would never make that trip on one air bottle with only ten minutes left. If Nick had not survived, I would not have either. So I was glad my husband was a survivor.
I scaled to the top of the wall, and I stuck my head up. As soon as my helmet cleared the edge, I heard Nick shouting on the comm. “Rosie! Answer, Rosie!”
“I’m all right, Nick.” I pulled myself over the edge, lying on the ground. “I am up.”
“Graças a Deus! I would never forgive myself if I lost the best spacer on Mars. Now get clear.”
I scrambled to my feet, and I made some distance between me and the edge. Then I looked back. Nick was on the far side of the crevasse, leaning against the crawler at a safe distance. He had already folded back the winch legs. Jacob’s body lay on the ground near the crawler treads. “I was wondering if I’d have to come get you,” Nick said.
“That will be the day, love,” I said. But I knew he would have if he had had to. “Jacob would be really disappointed in us,” I continued. “Look what we have done to a perfectly good geological site.” Though Jacob ran other experiments under contract, geology was his specialty, his passion.
“I know,” Nick said. “Plus now we can’t finish our investigation. I wanted videos of the crevasse without him in it.”
“Nick, it’s not like it is a crime scene.”
“I know. But accident scene, crime scene, details matter. They always matter.”
“I know.” If Nick was nagging me, he was calming down. I looked around. The crevasse was pretty big. I checked my air. “Nicolau, you will have to toss me a spare air bottle. It will take a while to walk around this crack in the ground. We need to get Jacob’s body back to Althea, so let’s not waste time.”
While Nick drove us back to Maxwell City, I called ahead to let them know that we had found Jacob, and I arranged to deliver the body. In our unspoken division of labor, that was my responsibility. On a good day, Nick could be caring and considerate—if you knew how to read him. On a bad day, he could be utterly unaware of another person’s suffering when he thought it was irrelevant to getting work done. I did not know that this would be a bad day, necessarily, but I had learned that breaking bad news was just something that I did better than Nick did.
As we neared the city, the lifeless sands of Mars gave way to more signs of human habitation: crawlers, a few suited figures, and a scattering of structures. Most of Maxwell City proper lay below the surface, with only a few airlocks, the crawler garage, and the upper three floors of the Admin Center showing above the ground. But far to the south were the control towers and the ground facilities of the largest spaceport on Mars. As I looked, a hopper leaped into the thin Martian air. Hoppers are ballistic aircraft that can launch between points on the Martian surface, with limited course correction abilities. They are one of the fastest ways to travel on Mars, but not cheap. The only faster way is fully powered flight; but Mars’s thin atmosphere made gliding nearly impossible, so powered flight burned fuel the entire way.
Most surface travel was via crawlers like ours: slow but reliable. The city had a fleet of public crawlers for rent, most based in the big crawler garage northwest of town. We pulled into the garage airlock, and then waited for the door to seal behind us and the lock to pressurize. When the cycle was done, we pulled into the main garage. Althea was there waiting for us. With her was Adam Simons, Jacob’s brother and his partner in the scientific survey business. Nick pulled the lever to drop the rear end of the crawler, lowering the wheels so that the rear was practically touching the ground. Then I got out, went to the back, opened the rear door, and wheeled out the stretcher. Once the stretcher was clear, I closed the hatch, and Nick drove the crawler away to its charging bay. He would continue home from there, while I would handle the personal matters.
Adam and Althea came up to me, Althea quietly sobbing and dabbing her nose with a handkerchief, while Adam tried to look stoic. At least I think that is what he was trying, but it wasn’t working. His jaw muscles were trembling.
I held up my hand before they got close. “Althea,” I said, “you do not have to do this. It’s not like anybody else was out there. We know it is him, and Dr. Costello can do a DNA test to confirm. He looks pretty bad. You don’t have to identify him.”
Althea wiped her nose, and then her eyes. She looked at me. “Yes, I do. Wh
en your time comes, you’ll understand.”
I stepped back, and I gently folded down the sheet to uncover Jacob’s face. Althea peered through the cracked plexi, and she began sobbing loudly. Adam pulled her in, held her close to his chest, and nodded to me. I covered Jacob back up.
“He shouldn’t have been out alone,” Adam said. “We were trying to get ahead on contracts.” Then Adam started sobbing as well.
As we stood there, I silently anticipated what would happen next. I knew it would be awkward for me; and then I was ashamed, because my discomfort was insignificant compared to Althea’s pain. But that did not change how I felt, and I was just glad that Nick was not there to get involved.
As if on cue, the access tube opened, and Marcus stepped into the garage, leading a gurney drone. He walked up to us; and in a carefully controlled voice, I said, “Dr. Costello.”
Marcus nodded at me. “Admiral,” he said, using the title I was no longer legally eligible to claim. He didn’t smile. The occasion was not one for smiling anyway, but I had not seen him smile in years. Not at me, anyway.
I turned back to Althea and Adam. “Althea,” I said, “Dr. Costello is here. He needs to . . .”
Althea looked up, tears streaking her face. Marcus finished my thought. “I need to take Mr. Simons now, Mrs. Simons. We have to prepare him for interment.”
Althea buried her face again, but Adam nodded. I held out a tablet to Marcus, and he signed it. Then with my help, he transferred Jacob’s body from the crawler’s stretcher to the gurney drone. He turned back to the tunnel, and the drone followed. The three of us did as well.
“Adam,” Althea said. “He . . .” But she could not put words to what she wanted to say.
“I know,” Adam said. “It’s the rules.”
“I know.” Althea sniffed.
“Mother and Father can’t be here,” Adam said. Of course not. They were on Earth. Months away, even if they left right now, even if there was a vessel to bring them right now. Adam continued, “But they might like to come see a grave someday. Rosalia, Mayor Holmes likes you. Do you think we could get an exception for the burial? Just once?”
The Last Campaign (The Near-Earth Mysteries) Page 1