by Brian Smith
“Maybe too much so,” Kusaka replied thoughtfully. Still, he knew he shouldn’t be surprised. Companies had been trying to make synths more lifelike since the day the first one rolled off the production line—it was only a matter of time until someone succeeded. After all, “it was just an engineering problem.”
***
Captain Michael Ashburn relaxed in his new cabin aboard Thuvia, relishing the view of Mars out of his very real viewport and enjoying the other little conceits of being a vessel’s master. Kusaka Shiguro and Ty Forester had gone back Mars-side some time before. Thuvia had since adjusted her orbit away from the Phobos shipyards and into a company-owned orbital dock within which she would complete the final phase of the acceptance process. Jerry Sommers, whom Ashburn had succeeded in luring away from Captain Xiang and Dejah Thoris, was overseeing the details, along with Gina Jackson, Ashburn’s first officer.
After his earlier faux pas with Campbell, Ashburn was half expecting the private call when it came through via the Marsnet. He put a privacy seal on himself and the cabin before answering it—he didn’t want to be overheard, and with the privacy seal he wouldn’t be disturbed for anything less than a crisis.
“Captain Ashburn,” he answered, savoring the sound of it on his tongue. Captain! He could still hardly believe his good fortune. Truth was, he’d earned it. Even if he never made it to Alpha Centauri, he’d certainly built a good life for himself.
“This is . . . uh, Kevin MacDonald. It’s been some time, captain. Congratulations on your new ship.”
Ashburn rolled his eyes at what he considered a ridiculous subterfuge; the call was audio-only. “Thank you, sir. What can I do for you?”
“I just wanted to verify your manifest for Titan, based on information that came to me earlier.”
“Yes, sir,” Ashburn answered. He paused a moment, and then added: “I thought you knew.” He ought to know, Ashburn thought to himself. The authorizations have “Janus Industries” stamped all over them!
“I must have crossed streams with my assistant. Can you send me a copy of the manifest? By courier, captain—not through the Marsnet.” Even though this was all some sort of weird corporate shell game that Ashburn didn’t totally understand, he knew he was speaking to the de jure CEO of Janus Industries. If Bill Campbell wanted a copy of the manifest, he was entitled to one. Ashburn agreed, but Campbell wasn’t done. “Captain, when are you scheduled to burn for Titan?”
“It’ll be about a week. We have to put the ship through ‘conformity’: it involves completing our own delivery inspection, then loading our standardized auxiliary equipment, company software, hull markings, and so on—basically the process of turning a new hull into a company vessel. The same needs to be done for the ship’s boats as well. I’ve also got a couple of crew positions left to fill, but that’ll be done long before the rest is. Once we complete conformity, we take on the Titan payload and burn up-well.”
“Scratch what I said about a courier,” Campbell said. “I’m currently over at Gateway. Can you send one of your boats to fetch me back over to your ship? I want to talk to you in person and ask you a favor, but not over the Marsnet. My apologies for asking you to use your ship’s boats as my personal ferry—I’ll pay all the overhead.”
“Consider it done,” Ashburn replied.
Crap. Another “request” from Campbell. Here we go again.
Nuevo Rio
Amazonis Mensa, Mars
Bill Campbell went straight home after being dropped back at the north spaceport complex by one of Thuvia’s boats following his meeting with Captain Ashburn. He poured himself a scotch and sat down in his favorite lounger, pulled up the Marsnet on his oculars, and accessed the newsfeeds.
He checked his Omni Systems subsidiary, the one manufacturing the new and improved synths. According to the newsfeeds and stock reports, the synths were already immensely popular; production was being carefully regulated to keep them in high demand, and the profit margins were sky high. According to OURANIA’s reports made through Dr. Shu on Titan, Aberdeen Astronautics had already filled its own needs for the Gateway complex and the other Aberdeen-owned Phobos shipyards.
Campbell didn’t need to lay off any of his human workforce—the thought would never have occurred to him. Human labor was still the most valuable, expensive resource off-Earth, and a smart boss hung onto whatever human capital could be retained. No, as a larger number of synths gave him greater production capacity, he’d either build more torchships at the same rate or build fewer ships on accelerated schedules, and his human employees would see increased opportunities as supervisors, shift foremen, and so on.
He’d also begun a program to retrofit his existing yard facilities with the technological improvements OURANIA had engineered for Gateway, and when that program was finished, a new class of third-generation commercial torchships would go into production based on the Daedalus design. The one thing the solar system was screaming for was torchships—there would never be enough of them, not in his lifetime or for the foreseeable future.
As for the new synths, it appeared he was going to be fabulously wealthy from that venture as well—wealthy enough that he planned on making sizable contributions back into the Crandall Foundation’s coffers. Before all else, he was a trustee and board member, and the work of the foundation was his work. Hell, he might even decide to fund Daedalus out of pocket when the time came, and let the foundation keep its matching funds. While the people around him were scratching their heads over his stop-and-start delays, he himself wasn’t worried. He still had in his hip pocket a torchship design far more advanced than the one Hardesty & Hardesty had come up with on Luna, and with his new dock facility and Omnisynth workforce he could build her in half the time it normally took. That in turn gave him the leeway to give his friend Dmitri Federov the time he needed to work on his “pie in the sky” gravity drive. More time for Federov, and for OURANIA.
OURANIA, he sourly repeated the thought to himself.
Campbell took a drink of his scotch and grimaced, calling to mind the load manifest Captain Ashburn had showed him. It had been there, writ plain as day: all the materials needed to restart the Janus manufacturing plant and commence building the updated cores OURANIA had requested—and repeatedly had been denied. There was a hell of a lot of other materiel in the order as well, stuff that served no purpose he could discern but that he suspected someone could—that someone being OURANIA.
What bothered him more was that, according to the data, the authorization for the purchase and transport of payload had come from Shu. Funding was an unknown—he hadn’t paid for the stuff, either through Janus Industries’ accounts, Aberdeen’s, or any other holdings of his. That meant OURANIA had to have engineered something in the markets the same way that funding was achieved for Omni Systems. That one puzzled him, though: isolated as OURANIA was from outside networks, the computer couldn’t have done it on her own. Shu might have pulled it off, but not without his finding out—not with only one external communications channel linking Janus Station with the rest of the solar system, along with his security arrangements.
There was also the matter of Shu’s going behind his back on this without his permission. It was completely out of character for her, but everything in the data work looked correct: her electronic signatures, her authorization codes, her authentications. Janus cybersecurity was the best money could buy—comparable to current military systems, if not better. Since most of the outside world didn’t even know Janus Station existed in the first place, the odds against a system hack—for purposes clearly suiting OURANIA—were ridiculous.
Something’s rotten in bloody Denmark, man, he told himself.
Soon enough he should have some definitive answers, one way or another. Campbell’s first impulse was to invite himself aboard Thuvia for the trip to Titan, but he couldn’t keep doing that all the time and still maintain the façade about Janus Industries the way he’d done in the past. Ashburn would be on his way soon enoug
h, and he’d reluctantly agreed to do what Campbell had asked. There had been conditions, though: Forester needed to be briefed in—fully—on whatever was going on at Titan. Ashburn hadn’t asked too many questions himself, but he was stubbornly adamant on that point—it was clear the new captain’s main concern was to not be seen going behind his employer’s back. Campbell had agreed, but he knew Thuvia wouldn’t return to Mars for quite a while once she burned up-well; he figured he had a little time on that score at least.
Campbell shut down his feeds, removed his oculars, and went to bed. He lay in the dark for a long time with his hands behind his head, staring blankly at the ceiling. He was so used to having instant access to any piece of information that it took him a while to figure out what was really bothering him.
Finally, when he was drifting off, it hit him: Nobody sent me the manifest information or the materiel orders—it doesn’t show up in my own Janus Industries data files. My learning about it was by pure, random chance. If Ashburn hadn’t slipped and casually dropped the comment about a payload for Janus Station earlier today, I never even would have known about it! At all!
Campbell didn’t sleep the rest of that night.
Chapter 7
July 2093 (Terran Calendar)
Lone Star Pressure
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
“This place is great!” Diane Hutton said over the general din inside Lucky’s. “How’d you ever get turned on to it?” she asked Jim Ford.
Lucky’s was one of the most popular spots for Terran-born Marsmen, tourists, and enthusiasts of all things “country themed” along the entire maglev line running between Gordi Dorsum and Amazonis Mensa. Situated in Lone Star Habitat, it was a place she’d heard of but never tried until Ford dragged her here for an expensive meal of no-joke-genuine fried chicken—the real thing—not a tank-cloned, vat-grown, or vegetable-based facsimile.
Jack and Donelle Crawford, the owner-proprietors, maintained their own chicken farm right here in Lone Star Pressure. Farming any sort of livestock on Mars was ridiculously expensive and inefficient, and the prices on their specialized “Genuinely Fowl” menu reflected it—they were heinously exorbitant. Still, Hutton had to admit after a few bites that there was no substitute for the real thing. The rest of the menu was sanely priced but used common local ingredients.
Lucky’s was a combination restaurant, sports bar, and club, offering great food along with nightly live music and line dancing; locals joked that the only thing the place needed was a mechanical bull. Lucky’s and establishments like it were a testament that humans remained social creatures—they would still prefer to gather around a table on occasion and socialize, rather than to stay home alone with their snoopers or oculars. It was late afternoon on this part of Mars, so currently only the restaurant and bar were busy.
“I found this place a few years ago on leave,” Ford replied, mopping up a little world-famous Lucky Sauce with a strip of his Texas toast. He grinned at her across the table, thoroughly enjoying life right now. “Take a look around,” he added. “There’s nobody in uniform, but this is actually a popular liberty spot for personnel down from Halsey Station. I know you remember that bunch over there from the MARDET, and those Japanese cats sitting against the far bulkhead are all Nihon Uchū Kaigun.”
Hutton nodded. “I thought some of the clientele looked a little Earth-buff,” she remarked. Not only that, body language was a sure tell. If you watched someone awhile you could see if they were a Marsman or a visitor. Even after they’d been Mars-side long enough to adapt to the lower-g field, nonnatives still tended to overcompensate for Martian gravity occasionally.
Hutton swept her gaze around the room, taking it all in again in a casual but determined way, like a lidar beam making a fresh sweep. She couldn’t help herself—just like the way she was always running her facial-recognition software in the background of her oculars—you never knew when or where a fugitive would pop. She let her gaze linger on Ford for just a moment as she looked around—he was an interesting development, especially the way he’d called her practically before his ship was docked.
Reuben James had remained on station in the aftermath of the assault on 5111 Omega, guarding the asteroid depot against the arrival of any more MIM insurgents or scavengers. Marineris and the remainder of the squadron had moved on, driven by their patrol schedule and a separate, unrelated minor crisis along their patrol route. The battle-damaged Reuben James was relieved by a pair of allied TOA vessels, the Japanese cruisers Fuyuzuki and Akizuki. The Japanese ships were larger and had personnel to spare, so a Japanese prize crew had replaced the Americans aboard Aurora.
Marshal Hutton and the prisoners all remained aboard due to space limitations aboard Reuben James. Consequently, Ford hadn’t seen Hutton again until today, several days after their arrival at Halsey Station. The James was laid up inside the naval station’s repair facility and would be for the next few weeks; this was Ford’s first chance to get Mars-side for a little shore leave. The two long, boring, lonely months since he’d last seen her had been a bit torturous for him, especially knowing she was just over on Aurora during the down-well hard-burn. Reconnecting with her as soon as possible had stood at the top of his priority list, and now here they were.
Today was the first time Hutton had ever seen Ford out of uniform. He had dressed casually in dark shoes and slacks, wearing a fitted blue silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms. His dark hair was Afro-textured, but there wasn’t much of it: a layer on top truncated into a flattop, almost skintight on the sides. It was efficient for shipboard life and well within navy regulations, but Hutton found herself thinking that it really suited him.
Ford was of African-American descent; his skin tone was only slightly lighter than his hair, darker than her own caramel-cream complexion. He was solidly built, about six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular. Like most modern military, he augmented his workout routines with regulation hormone treatments that doubtless left him fairly ripped under his clothes—right now Hutton was trying to decide whether she wanted to investigate the matter personally. He was interested enough in her—he’d made that crystal clear long before this. Interested enough to invite her out to Lucky’s for real chicken.
Hutton took another bite of chicken dipped in Lucky Sauce and grinned impudently. “You sure know how to treat a girl—I don’t eat the real thing often enough anymore, even when I’m back on Earth. Maybe I’m starting to ‘go native.’”
Ford chuckled. “When real meat grosses you out and you’d rather have the veggie- or fungal-based substitutes, that’s when you know you’ve gone native!”
“Can’t see that ever happening,” she smiled.
Her casual contemplation of Ford and of the potential new twist he represented in her life was interrupted by the arrival of another group, this one in uniform. They were Chinese, CFSN, and running outside the boundaries of their own neighborhood. They numbered about a dozen, and after a moment of semifruitless searching for a place to settle they crowded around an empty table-for-four and went about trying to make that work. Lucky’s suddenly seemed a lot more crowded, and the Chinese spacers made no attempt to be quiet or unobtrusive.
“Well, hell, that’s a new one,” Ford commented. “They must have come over from Magic Dragon Pressure, or maybe all the way from Tongling Habitat in the Orcus Patera.”
“I’m surprised their leadership is allowing them out of CFR-flagged habs right now, given what happened at Tongling,” Hutton replied. “Still, under the current treaty it’s no big deal, right?”
Ford nodded, chewing his lower lip the way he did sometimes when thinking about an unpleasant decision. “No, they’ve got every right to be here,” he said. “I’ve even visited some of the Chinese- and Russian-flagged habs once or twice, just to get the flavor. Maybe we should settle up, head back to toward New A.”
“Why? Those guys and gals aren’t any trouble. They probably just want to check the place out, like everyo
ne else.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they’ll behave—until someone gives them a reason not to. Chinese Navy in a bar with Japanese Navy and U.S. Marines is just asking for it, though, especially after you add alcohol to the mix. I won’t be able to ignore it if anyone starts a fight, and I came down here to spend time with you—not draft myself into the shore patrol.”
Hutton reached across and gripped Ford’s hand momentarily, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t worry, Jim, I won’t let them kick your ass,” she joked with a wry smirk.
He threw his head back and laughed, although the laughter was a little forced.
Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to say, she lamented to herself. Men and their stupid egos. . . . She went for a quick change-of-subject. “How’d the trip back go for you?” she asked. “The prisoners kept me pretty busy on Aurora.”
“I won’t claim that the action we fought was fun or make light of our losses, but I will say it’s hard to go from storming a pirate gunship back to a normal daily routine. Anticlimactic doesn’t even begin to describe it, and there was too much time to think about what I could have done better. Lots of postaction data shuffling to keep me busy, though. What about you? Did you crack the code on how to roll up the MIM and find that Rogan asshole?”
Hutton shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “With all the files your cyber/intel officer bagged, plus the physical evidence, you’d think it would be a snap,” she replied. “So far, it’s been anything but. Based on data I sent ahead, TOA authorities and the CFR raided two MIM hotspots out in Tempe Terra, only to find they’d been tipped—they somehow got word of what we did in the belt, long before the information was public. We’re talking about a couple of off-the-grid habs set up in old lava tubes, the way the original settlers did it to shield against radiation. That made them invisible to satellite imaging as well, conveniently for them. They cleaned out their equipment, their gear, and themselves. When I say they were tipped, I mean they were tipped early—the habs were stripped clean, right down to the airlock fittings and equipment mounts. The hunt goes on, but it’s like chasing ghosts. Whatever else the MIM are, they’re definitely dialed in on the intelligence front.”