The Empress of Mars (Company)

by Kage Baker

  “But . . . but . . . cows weren’t meant to live this way,” said Chiring, mopping at his streaming eyes.

  “They have to, if they’re going to live on Mars,” said Matelot. “Aren’t you the delicate one! Like your butter in your tea, do you? Like your strawberries in cream, and milk on your muesli? This is where it comes from. Bloody hell, men weren’t made to live this way either, but—hey!”

  He ran after Chiring, who had turned a camera switch to illuminate the cattle shed with white light and was now striding along between the stalls, filming everything. The startled cattle began lowing, thumping and shifting uneasily in their stalls.

  “Come back here!”

  “No! The world’s going to see this!”

  “Listen you, I went to agricultural college!”

  “What’s he think he’s doing?” a clan member carrying a manure-caked shovel emerged from the darkness and was blinded by the actinic sweep of Chiring’s cam light. “Hey! Ow! Shut the damn thing off!”

  “Get him out of here with that!”

  “I’m bearing witness!” Chiring pointed his camera now here, now there, getting as much footage as he could before the clan members closed in on him.

  “But, my dear, how many cattle sheds have you actually seen?” said Mary, pressing a wet bar towel to Chiring’s nose and hoping the bleeding would stop. “They’re all like that, the world over. The clan’s are reasonably clean. Can’t expect them to have carpets and reading lamps and soothing music piped in, can you, now? Especially not up here on Mars.”

  “I don’t care,” said Chiring, muffled. “I got it all in my camera. People have to know about this. I’ll do a special report!”

  “Not if you bleed out ten pints through your nose.” Mary sighed, wringing out the towel. “Mr. Morton, another towel, please!”

  Mr. Morton edged close, handing out a fresh wet towel. “Oh, dear, Chiring, that’s the worst black eye I’ve ever seen. You know what you want to put on that? A nice piece of raw—” He broke off as Mary turned round to glare at him. “Er. Erm. A nice oatmeal poultice,” he finished meekly.

  Her name was Marsha, because she had been born on Mars, and as far as a cow is conscious of anything she was conscious of all being right with her world. She was warm, she was full, her hooves were dry, and there was still a lot of good juice in the mouthful of clover she had been masticating for the last five minutes.

  Marsha had no atavistic dreams of a pastoral idyll in the gentle pastures of Jersey or Les Plaques, nor racial memories of roaming proud and free in the Pyrenees, while cave-dwelling lesser creatures quailed before her and daubed her noble image on their walls. She had no idea places like that existed. She ate, she slept, she was milked when her udders swelled, she entertained the attentions of a bull from time to time, and now and then dropped a calf. That was it. That was all life held or ever would hold, as far as she knew, and as far as Marsha cared that was fine.

  Then the world blew up. It blew with a deafening bang and a smell that frightened her, and a startling flash of red light, right in front of her nose. Marsha backed up as far as she could go and collided with the gate of her stall. Inexplicably, it gave way with a terrific clatter, terrifying her further and spilling her out backward, and to add to the panic the world had gone on exploding, bang bang bang! Marsha heard the terrified lowing of all her relations as they too sought to escape the noise. She struggled to her feet and, finding open space before her in the darkness, Marsha ran.

  As Marsha ran, so did all the others. The airlock opened before them, but it wasn’t wide enough for the stampede; horns, shoulders, hooves made it wider. Sirens went off and intensified the panic. The herd thundered into Clan Morrigan’s reception area and did not stop, but scattered. Some ran up the Tube into Morrigan Hall. Others broke through the airlock and hit the long straightaway of the outer Tubes, where it was possible to build up real speed, and the incessant sirens goaded them on with fearful shrieking.

  And this was where true disaster struck. In Martian gravity a cow can and will run with the speed of an antelope, and leap as high. Cows were not designed for such athleticism, however. The breadth of pelvis, the pendulousness of the udders all conspire to set up a certain lateral movement that speed, unfortunately, intensifies. Marsha found herself practically flying along the Tube, but—you have to imagine this in slow motion—her udders were bounding sidelong with all the independent deadly momentum of a sandbag, destabilizing her and sending her crashing against the Tube walls, now to the left, now to the right—and all the while her frantic hooves skidded, attempted without success to correct the deadly pendulum motion—and now her horns were spiking the vizio wall to left, and right, and left again, gouging each time deeper, until one punched through and arrested Marsha’s flight—

  At least her head’s flight, but the rest of her kept going, hurtling to the full length of her tail, swinging around in a cataclysmic avalanche of flailing hooves and flanks, straight through the vizio panel into the Outside, depositing her onto the astonished frozen sands of Mars.

  And that, sadly, was the end of Marsha the cow.

  Oatmeal poultice notwithstanding, it was with a certain grim sense of self-righteousness that Chiring sat down to edit his Clan Morrigan livestock feature. The one eye through which he could see was red and tired, due to his having been awakened in the night, like everyone else, by the emergency Klaxons going off. The news that the Tube breach had been caused by a runaway cow only served to strengthen his conviction that the herd beasts of Clan Morrigan were desperately unhappy and in need of humane rescue.

  He was just lifting his mug of tea—without butter, dismally thin and uninspiring stuff but he had sworn off dairy products for the time being—when the party from Morrigan Hall came through the Empress’s airlock.

  “God save all here except that Sherpa son of a bitch!” roared Cochevelou, starting across the room toward him. He was armed with a crowbar. Matelot, flanking him, carried a pitchfork, and Ramsay, on the other side, had a manure shovel. “You’d loose our kine, would you! You’d sneak in and frighten ’em with firecrackers, would you? You lousy stinking pusillanimous vegetarian!”

  “What?” Mary had a moment of openmouthed astonishment before bounding over the bar and into Cochevelou’s way. “You stop right there, Maurice Cochevelou! You’ll do no murder in my house!”

  “Oh, won’t I?” Cochevelou glared down at her. “Oughtn’t I? You’re harboring a saboteur, Mary Griffith!”

  “No such thing!” Mary glanced over her shoulder at Chiring, who had grabbed up his buke and was clutching it to his chest, backing away. “There’s none of mine would commit such black treachery! Would you, Mr. Skousen?”

  “I didn’t!” Chiring cried. The rest of the Empress’s staff and patrons had risen to their feet, watching the scene in astonished silence.

  “Well, somebody did,” said Cochevelou, breathing stertorous as one of his own bulls. “Some clever bastard got in there and wired up this device, see, and a line of firecrackers all down the backs of the stalls, and set ’em all to go off at two in the morning! Nor was that all. This same filthy thieving mischief-making whore’s son cut nearly clean through half the stall gates, so they were held on by merest iron toothpicks, and posing no stay at all to the poor frightened animals. Is it any wonder they got out?”

  “Why would I do a thing like that?” Chiring demanded. “I’m against cruelty to cows!”

  “Look here, Cochevelou, if somebody’s pulled a dirty trick on the clan it’s a damn shame, but none of Mr. Skousen’s doing,” said Mary. “Ramsay, you put that shovel down or I’ll take it away and stove in your head with it. Firecrackers! Where would any of us get firecrackers, anyway? Are you sure that’s what it was?”

  “Certain sure,” said Matelot. “There’s still the wiring and bits of red paper scattered all over the backs of the stalls. And black melted laser-lines and clean edges where the gates were cut near through.”

  “Lasers, you say! And wh
ich of my poor people do you reckon has such lasers?” Mary looked from one surly face to another. “Lasers and timed charges, for hell’s sake. Use what few wits the Goddess gave you, and tell me whether or not this wasn’t a professional job.”

  “I’m a journalist!” screamed Chiring, as his fear gave way before temper. “What do you take me for, a—a secret agent?”

  “And anyroad, he was home all last night, groaning in his bed from the clouting your lads gave him yesterday,” said Mary. “When’s he supposed to have crept out and spent hours and hours wiring up your fancy sabotage?”

  Matelot lowered his pitchfork slightly. “It would have taken a while,” he muttered to Cochevelou. “Maybe it was night before last. There was something up with the kine then, right enough; we heard ’em lowing, but there was no sign of anything wrong when we went to go check.”

  “And he was never in your old cowshed at all before yesterday,” said Mary.

  “Ha! As though you’d have noticed anything wrong anyway, when you keep it black as the pit of hell in there,” said Chiring. “Look!”

  He thrust out his buke for their inspection, with its paused footage from his march along the stalls. One and all stared. They saw overexposed white foreground in sharp relief against stygian blackness. A cow’s lifted tail, a bit of stall, a bit of gate with rusted hinge . . .

  “There’s your problem,” announced Manco, pointing to the screen. “Is that a laser cut?”

  Cochevelou shouldered his way forward and stared at the screen a long moment. “Shite,” he said at last. “That’s what it is.” He turned slowly and regarded his men, and Mary could practically hear the whistle as his wrath came to the boil again. “Those gates were cut through Tuesday night, and neither of you two college boys noticed yesterday!” He swung the crowbar, but Mary caught his arm.

  “Enough of that! You know well enough who it must have been, don’t you? The dirty old BAC. And what would they like more than to see us snarling and striking each other, eh?”

  Cochevelou controlled himself with effort, working his shoulders. “You’re right. Truer words were never uttered aloud.” Matelot and Ramsay, meanwhile, were backing slowly toward the airlock. Cochevelou rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Mary darling, I owe you an apology.”

  “You certainly do. And you owe our Chiring another,” said Mary acidly. Cochevelou looked at Chiring with distaste.

  “Apologize,” he said.

  “Accepted,” said Chiring with his nose in the air.

  No trace of an intruder was found on the clan’s surveillance cameras when their data was examined, nor were there any other clues as to who might have sabotaged the cattle pens. Marsha’s frozen corpse was hauled back in, wept over, and duly recycled. The breach in the Tubes was swiftly repaired, and all telltale evidence of the stampede cleaned up.

  Three cows remained missing when all had been tallied afterward. There were rumors, a week or two later, that the Excelsior Card Parlor was offering steak dinners to its high rollers, but nothing was ever proven.

  CHAPTER 17

  More Trouble

  “But I don’t know anything about business,” said Mr. Morton, somewhat uncomfortable. He eyed the lenses of Chiring’s holocam, focused on him and recording his every hesitancy for the ages.

  “Bless you, dear, you don’t have to,” said Mary. “Just you do what you know how to do best, and we’ll take care of all the dirty little inartistic details for you. Just thumb here, if you please.”

  Hesitantly, Mr. Morton applied his thumb to the text plaquette’s touchscreen. It registered his print, beeped, and flashed an acknowledgment.

  “And Morton Construction is in business!” Mary yelled in triumph, and waved a signal through the Tube to Manco, who switched on the concrete mixer. A breathless moment and then the bubblegum–strawberry shake–flamingo pink cement of Mars began to spew out, into the trenches that had been dug for the foundation of the Emporium di Vespucci. Manco and the contract laborers Mary had hired stood there watching a long moment, before moving in with their rakes.

  “History in the making,” said Ottorino. He turned to Chiring and, in passable PanCelt, said “Picture, please?” Then he caught Rowan by the hand and posed with her, twirling his mustaches to points. Chiring steadied and focused the holocam, shot, and there they were, for the board of directors of Importatori Vespucci and future generations both to marvel at, looking through the Tube at a hitherto-empty bit of land adjacent to Dead Snake Field: Mary with her arms folded, gloating. Mr. Morton, wringing his hands as he watched the precast sections of wall being maneuvered into place by the Haulers. Ottorino posing with leonine dignity, Rowan on his arm looking skeptical.

  And both Giulio and Giuseppe would think, whenever they saw the holo, That big fool. They never said it aloud, however; for within six hours of the announcement that they were opening a branch on Mars, Importatori Vespucci’s stock had shot up agreeably. And it could not be denied that their baby brother had married a beautiful girl.

  “Now,” said Ottorino, as they tramped all together back up the Tube at day’s end, “please tell Mamma Griffith that we must set up a schedule of watchmen.”

  Mr. De Wit nodded and obliged. “But whatever for?” asked Mary. “It’s right above Dead Snake Field, on my own land! And nothing anyone would want but a lot of construction gear. And anyone runs off with that is going to be pretty bloody easy to trace. I can deal with a few thieving clansmen, let me tell you.”

  “The enemy won’t come to steal things,” said Ottorino, when her reply had been translated. “They will want to put obstacles in your way. Damage the foundations. Break the walls. Think of what they did to the clan’s cattle, yes? This is how it goes, when the big companies are trying to stop the settlers.”

  “You’ve seen all the right movies, haven’t you?” remarked Mr. De Wit. He turned and translated for Mary, who looked outraged.

  “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.