The First Poet Laureate of Mars

by T E Olivant

  But still. That was the heart of the problem. Because she was good at some things, like hacking into communications software or working out the psychology of lazy old men, she always got complacent. Overconfidence, she was slowly beginning to learn, was worse than no confidence at all.

  “Nearly there,” Fisher said, a little too close to her ear. Hester shuffled further along the seat. Was there a direct correlation between people who came into your personal space and general villainy? She had decided there was.

  With a pang her mind went back to Derek. Yes, he’d seemed to be a bit of handsome fool, but she had never expected him to be a proper bad guy. She had let her judgement become clouded. Ever since her stupid plan to get herself to Mars she had dropped her guard. And look where it had got her.

  “We’re here. I suggest you follow me closely. This area is still under construction.”

  A security guard with some sort of stun gun barred their way for a second, but Fisher scanned his palm and the man moved aside.

  “I suggest you do not try anything stupid like running off,” Fisher said, “the guards are rather trigger happy. We take our security very seriously on Utopia.”

  “Utopia?”

  “Just wait and see.”

  They were walking down a gradual ramp that was lined by metal sheeting. One or two people walked past them in overalls, but they kept their heads down, making sure they stayed out of Fisher’s way. Interesting.

  They came to a huge set of doors and this time there were two security guards. Once again, Fisher scanned his palm. The palm scanner would be easy enough to hack, Hester thought, but the guards would be a little trickier.

  The doors slid open and Fisher held out his hand.

  “After you. Enjoy the view.”

  She smelt it before she saw it. Clean, wet air. And then a vision of green. Hester was standing at the edge of a central shaft, something like where they had placed the artificial sun in the Martian colony. Except here they had recreated the Earth.

  Like everyone else, Hester had spent most of her childhood lusting after the old images of Earth. Videos of wide, grassy areas, blue seas, mountains taller than the Martian colony was deep. As a child she had felt an almost physical ache that she could never go there. It seemed doubly cruel to be stuck on a Satellite where she could see the Earth every day, but never go there. The frozen, dead planet below her seemed to bear no relation to the nirvana of the past.

  And now there was this place. How had they done it? There was even a waterfall flowing down from the top of the shaft to a pool below. Trees reached up into the air for tens of meters, their leaves luscious and shining. It was ludicrous. It was beautiful.

  To her embarrassment her eyes began to fill with tears. She turned away.

  “It catches some people like that the first time,” Fisher said, and Hester could have slapped him for his dismissive tone. How dare he look upon something like this and use it to make snide jibes at her. If she hadn’t decided what sort of man he was before, she had now.

  “What is this place?”

  “Just what it looks like. The next stage of human habitation. The advancements made for the colony above Venus have been reconfigured for our own private paradise.”

  “People will live here?” She would give anything to live here. So would every other human being she had ever met.

  “We built it for the Augments. Alcedine Tower is aging badly. They wanted a new base. We made an agreement to build it with their assistance.”

  “But… this place, just for the Augments? They wouldn’t fill half of it.”

  “Haven’t you heard? The Augments have decided to expand. They voted on it just yesterday. Their numbers were dwindling so they are going to recruit three hundred new souls. Those lucky few will get to enjoy everything you see before you. And their human friends, of course.”

  “The Augments on the Council are not the friends of humanity,” Hester said, although she could barely form the words. This utopia should be available for everyone, not just the Augments. She thought of her friends back on the Earth Sats, children dreaming of running on grass instead of aluminum. They deserved this more than anyone.

  “Why am I here?”

  “We have had a security breach. Actually, there have been minor breaches for years. We’ve had our best techs on it but they haven’t discovered who it is. Two years ago, we decided we needed a thief to catch a thief.”

  “Two years ago?”

  “Around the time you entered a certain poetry competition?”

  “But how –”

  “I don’t have time to explain. I want you to go after the hacker straight away. I have a console waiting for you.”

  “I don’t understand. Why the urgency? I mean, you’ve already built the place. Why are you so concerned with security right now?”

  “Because we’re moving to stage three.”

  “And what is stage three?”

  “Power transference.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Fisher looked at his datapad. “It’s really not relevant for you. Look, the Merchants are offering you a deal. You find the hacker and your record is expunged. All the smuggling, all your little youthful misdemeanors, all gone. As easy as that.”

  “And throw someone just like me onto thin ice? No way.”

  “I thought you would say that. So I’ll throw in a little sweetener. How about if you also get all this.”

  He waved his hand at the building around them.

  “You mean… you’re giving me one of the slots. I could live here if I do what you say?”

  “People would kill for less. All we want is information on the hacker.”

  People would kill for less, Hester thought. She closed her eyes and listened to the leaves rustling in the breeze. I would kill for this, she thought.

  “All right. My answer is yes.”

  Chapter 37

  Tolly had reluctantly taken Cybill’s advice and left Alcedine by the next shuttle. He hoped that the young Augment would manage to keep their cool. But then they had managed to maintain a front for years.

  At least now he knew where he had to be. He needed to get to the Merchant base and see for himself what was going on. The time for subtlety was over. The tremor that started at his neck and made its way down to his toes suggested that he needed to move quickly.

  He checked the datapad he had borrowed from Derek, but there was no message from Hester. That was not surprised as he had warned her to stay off the network, but he couldn’t help wondering what had happened. There were so many things beyond his control, and he was losing what little grip he did have on reality. And right in the middle of it he had thrown Hester. At least she had the actor with her. Those muscles had to be good for something.

  Cybill was another problem. He was certain they were on the edge of giving themselves away, but there was nothing he could do for them. At least, not directly. When he ground his thumbs into Rowhan’s eyes, then he would think about how he was helping out the other Augment.

  He checked his datapad. When he had calculated the rate of his descent into incapacity, he had allowed himself twenty-four hours. There were now nineteen remaining. He decided he would return to the actor’s apartment and give Hester an hour to show up. If she didn’t come back then it was time to find himself a shuttle and head for the Merchant base. What was the worst that could happen? Well, they could shoot him out of the sky, but at least that would get rid of his terrible headache.

  His head was spinning as he walked, and he was struggling to stay in the present. The worst memories were the earliest. The memories of a child who was nothing more than human.

  “I don’t want to go, mother.”

  His mother’s face ashen and closed.

  “The man will take care of you.”

  A glance at his brother and sister. Too many of them for the room on Sat One that had only ever been designed for one person.

  “Don’t make me go.”

>   The moment when she had turned her back…

  He snarled at the pain, earning him some odd looks as he shuffled past. The h-men weren’t scared of him because he was an Augment anymore. They were scared because he was crazy, shuffling along and talking to himself. Give up, they were probably thinking. What is the point in living like that?

  “Not yet,” he whispered out loud. “Not time yet. Just a little more living to do.”

  Somehow, he had managed to make his way back to the actor’s apartment and now he slumped against the door, resting his head against the cool metal. Damn it, what was the key code again. He shrugged and pulled the panel off the wall. An alarm sounded, but he knew these systems and he pulled out that wire too. Then he let himself in.

  He must have dozed for a while on the sofa because when he came too someone was grabbing his arm.

  “Where’s –”

  He didn’t have time to finish the thought before he was pushed to the side.

  “I’m sorry,” Derek said as he hauled Tolly onto the floor and clipped plastic restraints around his wrists. “I need a bargaining chip. And you’re it.”

  Chapter 38

  The room that Hester had been placed in was hot and smelled of male sweat. This might have been due to the two Merchant guards who were doing their best to look menacing while they stood by the door. Fisher had disappeared, demanding ‘results within an hour’. That was just fine. Hester didn’t need him standing over her shoulder.

  The guards too were unnecessary. Where exactly was she going to go? She was trapped, but strangely she was feeling better than she had done for a week. When she had been pretending to be a poet she had never forgotten for a moment that she was a fraud. But now, with the console in front of her, she knew exactly what she had to do, and she knew she was the best person in the solar system to do it.

  And yet… She had to tread carefully. This was her opportunity to access the secret files of the Augments and the Merchants. Yes, she had to find the hacker, and quickly. But that didn’t mean that she couldn’t do a little hacking of her own, while she was there. She glanced at the reflection of the guards in the monitor. They were looking down at the feet or up at the ceiling. Anywhere other than her screen. This told her that they had been hired for their muscle, not their tech skills. In which case she should be able to do what she liked with only minor precautions.

  First to take a look at the job the Merchant’s had brought her here for. Fisher had given her a file with a list of the security breaches. Hester scanned the list. They were familiar. In fact, they were a little too familiar. One of the earliest breaches, dating back more than two years ago, was a security leak in the planetary surveillance files. There were several maps and survey reports taken from a familiar sounding area of Mars, the Syrtis Major Planum.

  Not only that, someone had accessed the surveillance system on the maintenance floor of Alcedine Tower. Exactly where the picture of her and Tolly had been taken.

  Hester massaged the knot at the back of her neck. The hacker that Fisher and the rest of the Merchants were after was the same person who had sent them the datasticks.

  A thought struck her and she scanned the list once more. No, there was no mention of a leak of material that could coincide with the video Derek-the-asshole had been sent. If she assumed that the datasticks were all from the same person, what did that mean? Could they have stolen the file without being detected? It seemed unlikely: the data that Fisher had given her suggested they had little trouble discovering the thefts after the fact, they just couldn’t work out where the attacks originated from.

  So how had the other hacker got hold of the Council file. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the video. It had been shot from just above table height. Almost like the person filming had been sat at the table with all the other Augments.

  That was it! The video could only have been taken by an Augment. Well, that narrowed things down a little.

  Hester’s lips moved as she scanned through more and more records. Now that she had a piece of the puzzle, it was all starting to unravel. The Augment’s from Mars all lived in Alcedine Tower. The network there had some peculiar identifiers, mainly because of its upgraded security. It meant that when Hester looked at the activities on the system at the times of the breaches she could pick out anything unusual with an Alcedine footprint.

  And there it was. Every time there was a breach from Fisher’s list there was an Alcedine code hidden away in the network stream. The tech experts hadn’t found it because it wouldn’t have occurred to them to look for an Augment. Without that piece of information the identifiers were lost in a galaxy of information.

  Could she go further and find out which Augment was the hacker? There were some tricks she could try. First, she accessed the station logs of which Augments were on Mars at the time of each attack. As there were nearly a dozen breaches over three years, that narrowed the field considerably. Only thirty results.

  If only she had a list of who was allowed to vote in the Augment Council. Then she could have narrowed it down further. But the most confidential Augment files must have been stored elsewhere, probably in physical storage that a hacker like, well… her, wouldn’t be able to access.

  She did come across a list of dietary requirements for a certain Poet Laureate Commencement Ceremony. This listed the names of seven Augments. Now, was it too much of a leap to assume that the Augment that took a picture of her and Tolly together must have followed them from the ceremony? Hester thought it was a fair gamble.

  She cross-referenced these twelve with the list of thirty Augments who had been on Mars at the time of each attack. The computer returned one name.

  Hester stared at it for a fraction of a second before she clicked on something else and cleared the screen. She glanced up at the two guards, but they seemed to be focused on their datapads. All right. Now she knew who the hacker was.

  Cybill. The Augment she had seen at her Commencement Ceremony. Hadn’t they been following Rowhan around? She found it hard to remember the different Augments, but she knew that Rowhan was the one who had arranged Tolly’s memory wipe. So how could Cybill be the hacker?

  Hester checked the time. She had taken thirty-five minutes to find the tracker. Now she had the rest of the hour to erase every trace of her search. She must make sure that no one could recreate the steps she had taken. Otherwise she would be putting Cybill in danger.

  She smiled as she used the console’s security clearance to delete all the relevant traces. As if she would ever send a fellow hacker down just to live in a pretty colony with a waterfall. Fisher would be angry when he found out. He might even kill her. But she had talked her way out of trouble before, she just had to hope she could do it again.

  She had burned away all evidence of Cybill within ten minutes. She cracked her knuckles. There was something else she wanted to check out. Fisher had mentioned something about power transference. Then he’d changed the subject. Hester was enough of a fraud to know when other people were hiding something, so she did a little digging.

  Nothing on the open network, but she was on site in Utopia now. It only took five minutes to break down their security and locate Ant. S. Fisher’s personal message account. The words ‘power transference’ brought up twenty results. She clicked on the most recent one.

  And gasped.

  “You found the hacker?” One of the guards asked.

  “A false alarm. I’m nearly there,” Hester managed to say, although her throat was starting to constrict. Power transference was exactly what it sounded like. Utopia needed massive energy reserves to run its generators. And now she knew where they were going to get the power from.

  Hester kept herself perfectly still. She didn’t want the guards to see her anger. She checked the time. Now she had ten minutes for her own pleasure. Time to cause a little trouble.

  Chapter 39

  “You are a terrible human being, do you know that?”

  “Yes,” Derek said.
“I am aware of that.”

  “Hester will kill you,” Tolly said. He tried to twist his neck so that he could glare at the actor but from his position on the floor of the shuttlecraft it was impossible.

  “Probably.”

  “But you’re going back to save her anyway?”

  “I’m going to swap you for her. I’m sorry that you’re getting the shitty end of the deal, but it’s the only way I can see to get out of this mess.”

  “Where exactly are you taking me?”

  “To the underground colony the Merchants have been building. They call it Utopia, and believe me, that’s exactly what it is. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. They’ve built a whole ecosystem. When I first saw the waterfall, I nearly lost my mind.”

  “Worth betraying the girl for?”

  He winced. “This is real life, not a movie, Tolly. I didn’t betray her. At least, not deliberately. I was involved with the Merchants long before I ever met Hester. I had no idea how this was going to all pan out.”

  “From where I’m lying, you don’t seem like a good person.”

  “You are leverage. I’m going to get Hester back before she does something really stupid. As far as I am concerned you are expendable.”

  “You could have just asked for my help.”

  “What if you’d said no? Don’t pretend you care about Hester. You have used her to get back at the Augments. You’re just as bad as me.”

  Tolly grunted. The man might have a point, but he didn’t have time for self-recriminations. In fact, judging by his vital signs he didn’t have much time for anything. He was starting to enter the first stage of shock. His heart was beating too fast and his breathing was shallow. He was starting to really miss his augmented hormones, but he had lost all control over that part of his brain now. He was rather surprised he was still conscious.