The Empress of Mars (Company)

by Kage Baker

  “There aren’t any biis,” she said, as quietly as she could. “He wanted to catch some biis. That was what the net was for. And there’s something right down there I’ve never seen before, and I think it killed him.”

  Cochevelou grunted. He held out a hand. “You come away from there, quick,” he whispered. “What’s it look like? A snake or something?”

  “No,” said Mary, taking his hand and stepping forward. Devin and Padraig were backing away slowly. Cochevelou turned to glare at them.

  “If this isn’t the bastard who sabotaged our cattle pens, I’m not my mother’s son. You two, go fetch an irrigation pipe,” he ordered. “A forty ought to be big enough. And not a word to another living soul, or so help me I’ll kill you with my two hands.”

  They ran without question. By the time they returned with the pipe, Cochevelou had taken the corpse by its feet and dragged it out to the end of the row. They stuffed the body into the irrigation pipe. “What good is that going to do?” muttered Mary.

  “It’ll get him out of the way,” said Cochevelou. “What do you reckon the BAC hired him to steal biis, too? Mr. Bill Nennius, maybe. Get some of their own and reverse-engineer them while my Perrik’s still waiting on his patent registration, eh?”

  Mary was shocked into silence. While they had believed the British Arean Company capable of any underhanded trick imaginable, it was sobering to think that out-and-out hostilities, with casualties, had begun at last. All the same . . . “We don’t even know what killed this poor bastard,” she said.

  “Yeah, we do,” said Cochevelou, and said no more on the matter until they had lugged the pipe all the way up the Tube as far as the Empress. There they encountered the Brick, just heading out after a late breakfast. He stopped, staring at them.

  “What’s the pipe for?” he inquired. The men were silent, staring back.

  “If you please, Mr. Brick,” said Mary, “we were just taking this pipe up to bury it. I don’t suppose you know of a nice remote place where this pipe might be safely buried?”

  “Something in the pipe that wants burying?”

  “Yes, Mr. Brick. I don’t think anyone’s going to come asking questions about it, but it needs to be properly set in the ground.”

  “Huh. Quietly, soon, and preferably a long way out somewhere in an unmarked spot?”

  “Yes, Mr. Brick.”

  The Brick considered the pipe as he pulled on his gauntlets. “I can do that for you,” he said at last.

  “How very kind, Mr. Brick.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said the Brick. He took the pipe from Devin and Padraig, hoisted it easily on his shoulder, and walked away out the Tube to the Haulers’ depot.

  Cochevelou wiped his brow. He turned to Devin and Padraig. “Get down the hill with you,” he said. “Seal off that field. Not a word to anyone about why. I find news of this has got out and I’ll know who to blame, understand?”

  “Yes, Chief.” The two ducked their heads hastily, turned and ran. Cochevelou reached out and took Mary’s hand. His own was trembling.

  “Be with me. I’ll have to talk to him,” he said.

  Yet when they arrived at Cochevelou’s apartments, he gave Mary a shameful pleading look. She sighed and went to the entrance to Perrik’s room, while Cochevelou retreated to the corner and poured himself a stiff drink.

  “Perrik, dear, it’s Mary. Something’s happened and I need to speak to you.”

  “Someone tried to steal the biis, didn’t they?” Perrik’s voice came from just the other side of the hatch. Had he been standing there, waiting?

  “Yes. Someone did.”

  “It would have turned out the same if we’d had a high-voltage fence.” His voice was tense, but not frightened.

  “Perrik.”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you made something black?”

  A long silence followed. “Was anyone else harmed?” said Perrik at last.

  “No,” said Mary.

  “You can come in,” said Perrik, and opened the hatch. He looked away from her, walked to the opposite side of the room as soon as the hatch had closed again.

  She told him what had happened. He listened, head down, pacing back and forth. When she had finished, he said: “First concern: you don’t have to be afraid of the black ones. They’re the soldier biis. They’ll defend the others. So much for my philosophical experiment.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t want to make them. It shouldn’t have been necessary to make soldiers in a perfectly balanced society; it spoiled the balance. But there it is! He didn’t have to die. If he’d run away after the first one hit him, he’d have lived. If he’d just laid down and kept still, they’d have stopped attacking. But he kept trying to catch the pollinators and so they didn’t know what else to do.”

  “How do you know that, Perrik?”

  “I see what they see,” said Perrik. He tapped a finger against his temple.

  “So . . . you have some sort of psychic connection with your biis, then?”

  “No.” For once Perrik raised his head and looked at her, with impatience. “They’re robots. I have an implant. It feeds me the data they gather.”

  “An implant?” Mary turned to stare, and he quickly looked away. “You did surgery on yourself?”

  “It wasn’t hard. I drank a glass of Dad’s whiskey and lay down. The mechanics came and did what I’d programmed them to do. It didn’t even hurt.”

  “Oh,” said Mary, a little weakly.

  “Thank you for hiding the body. Second concern: I’ll need to prepare. They’ll try again. Where’s Dad?”

  “Just outside, dear.”

  Perrik braced himself and went to the hatch. He hesitated there a moment, clenching his fists until the knuckles were white; then flung the hatch open. “Dad!”

  “Boy?” Cochevelou jumped up from his chair.

  “You need to put security patrols on the allotments.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well . . . you should have had them on before now!”

  “Don’t you talk to me as though I was an idiot! You mind your manners, boy, I’m your father!”

  “Don’t you talk to me as though I were a child!”

  Their voices rose, accelerated into all-out battle. Mary, long accustomed to tuning them out once they’d started, let her gaze wander around Perrik’s room. The frame globe in the corner was almost still; lights of many colors clustered there, scarcely moving. Her gaze was drawn to a far table, the only active place in the room. Something white gleamed there, a soft shifting white the color of Luna seen from Earth, streaming out from under the edges of a covered box.

  “What’s this?” inquired Mr. Rotherhithe, where he sat poring through his mail on his buke. “What’s this charge Financial is asking me about? Some sort of retainer fee to Ben-Gen Enterprises?”

  “Nothing with which you need to concern yourself,” said Mr. Nennius, from the general director’s desk. “If you’ll look at the whole charge, you’ll see it was refunded for delivery failure.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Rotherhithe. “Failure, is it? Not a world the Company likes to see in any format, that’s my experience. I’m sorry for you, young man. Notice how the days are stretching into weeks, and Mars still hasn’t turned a profit? Not so easy as you thought it was going to be, is it now?”

  “On the contrary,” said Mr. Nennius. “It’s proceeding exactly as I knew it would. However, to keep you happy . . .” He input a series of orders. “There! More kicking the anthill. Something interesting should develop soon.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Straws

  It was also possible to ride in an open-air automobile on Mars. Just.

  A great deal of preparation was necessary, to be sure: one had first to put on a suit of thermals, and then a suit of cotton fleece, and then a suit of bubblefilm, and then a final layer of quilted Outside wear. Boots with ankle locks were necessary too, and wrist-locked gauntlets. One could put on an old-fa
shioned aquarium helmet like Mr. Morton, or a snug new Aercapo like Mr. Vespucci, if one had the money; most people at Mary’s economic level made do with a snugly-fitting hood, a face-mask hooked up to a back tank, and kitchen grease mixed with UV blocker daubed thickly on anything that the mask didn’t cover.

  Having done this, one could then clamber through an airlock and motor across Mars, in a rickety CeltCart 600 with knobbed rubber tires and a top speed of eight kilometers an hour. It was transportation neither dignified nor efficient, since one was swamped with methane fumes and bounced about like a pea in a football. Nevertheless, it beat walking, or being blown sidelong in an antigravity car. And it really beat climbing.

  Mary clung to the rollbar and reflected that today was actually a fine day for a jaunt Outside, considering. Bright summer sky overhead like cream, though liver-dark storm clouds raged far down the small horizon behind. Before, of course, was only the gentle but near-eternal swell of Mons Olympus, and the road that had been made by the expedient of rolling or pushing larger rocks out of the way, and the long line of unconnected lengths of pipe that had been brought up and laid out.

  “Mind the pit, Cochevelou,” she admonished. Cochevelou exhaled his annoyance so forcefully that steam escaped from the edges of his mask, but he steered clear of the pit and so on up the winding track to the drill site.

  The crew was hard at work when they arrived at last, having had a full hour’s warning that the cart was on its way up, since from the high slide of the slope one could see half the world spread out below, and its planetary curve, too. There was therefore a big mound of broken gravel and frozen mudslurry, scraped from the clan’s drillbits, to show for their morning’s work. Better still, there was a thin spindrift of steam coming off the rusty pipes, coalescing into short-lived frost as it fell.

  Chiring turned and spoke into the holocam, which he had fastened to a boulder with bungee cords lest it blow away.

  “A historic moment,” he intoned in Nepali. “I’m standing on the slope of Mons Olympus. Earth astronomers once assumed this giant shield volcano was extinct; the existence of magma chambers was not discovered until the Kutuzov expedition of 2186. As in so many other aspects of its colonization effort, the British Arean Company opted to ignore the possibilities of arethermal energy here. Now that the private sector has taken the initiative, Mars stands poised for major industrial development. To my left you can see the delivery of the first pump for the power station; to my right, the foundations for the power station itself. Arriving to inspect the work, the first great Martian entrepreneur; Mary Griffith!”

  “Look, Mama!” said Manco proudly, gesturing at the white. “Heat and water!”

  “So I see,” said Mary, crawling from the car. “Who’d have thought mud could be so lovely, eh? And we’ve brought you a present. Unload it, please.”

  “Bravo!” Ottorino cast aside his pick and applauded. He strode forward and Matelot and the others who had been industriously leaning on their shovels sighed, and set about helping him unclamp the bungees that had kept the great crate in its place on the back of the Celt-Cart.

  The crate was much too big to have traveled on a comparative vehicle on Earth without squashing it, and even so the cart’s wheels groaned and splayed, though as the men lifted the crate like so many ants hoisting a dead cricket the wheels bowed gratefully back. The cords had bit deep into the crate’s foamcast during the journey, and the errant Martian breezes had just about scoured the label off with flying grit, but the logo of Third World Alternatives, Inc., could still be made out.

  “So this is our pump and all?” inquired Padraig, squinting at it through his goggles.

  “This is the thing itself, pump and jenny and all, new delivered by shuttle to send wet hot gold down the mountain to us,” Cochevelou told him.

  “And here’s Mr. Morton,” Mary added proudly. “Your construction boss, to exercise his great talents building a shed to house it all.”

  Mr. Morton unfolded himself from the rear cockpit and tottered to his feet, looking about with wide eyes. The speaker in his helmet was broken, so he merely waved at everyone and went off at once to look at the foundations Manco and Ottorino had dug.

  “And lastly,” said Mary, lifting a transport unit that had been rather squashed under the seat, “Algemite sandwiches for everybody! And free rounds on the house when you’re home tonight, if you get the dear machine hooked up before dark.”

  “Does it come with instructions?” Matelot inquired, puffing, as he stood back from the crate.

  “It promised an easy-to-follow holomanual in five languages, and if one isn’t in there we’re to mail the manufacturers at once,” Mary said. “But they’re a reputable firm, I’m sure.”

  “Now, isn’t that a sight, my darling?” said Cochevelou happily, turning to look down the slope at the Tharsis Bulge. “Civilization, what there is of it anyhow, spread out at our feet like a drunk to be rolled.”

  Mary gazed down, and shivered. From this distance the Settlement Dome looked tiny and pathetic. The Martian Motel was a blight of dust-covered shelters and parked rigs, with the Excelsior Mobile Card Room the only bright exception. The network of Tubes seemed like so many glassy worms, and her own house and even the grand new Emporium might have been a pair of mudballs on the landscape, with the Hauler depot a distant third one. It was true that the settlement’s landing port had recently enlarged, which made it more of a handkerchief than a postage stamp of pink concrete, and there were actually several shuttles lined up there now. Still, little stone cairns dotted the wasteland here and there, marking the spots where several luckless prospectors had been cached because nobody had any interest in shipping frozen corpses back to Earth.

  But Mary lifted her chin and looked back at it all in defiance.

  “We won’t need the BAC for a damned thing, if I have my way,” she said. “Not with our own power source. Think of our long acres of green. Think of our own rooms steam-heated. Lady bless us, think of having a hot bath!”

  Which was such an obscenely expensive pleasure on Mars that Cochevelou gasped and slid his arm around her, moved beyond words.

  “In fact,” Mary went on, “think of all those poor Haulers, and prospectors sleeping in their cabs down at the motel. Think of poor Rowan and dear Mr. Vespucci crowded into that one little loft, and Mr. De Wit and Alice crowded into theirs. What’s this place need, eh, but a few cottages and a boardinghouse or two? And me with Morton Construction just started, and look at all this lovely potential real estate I’ve laid claim to!”

  “And Settlement Base but a meager handful of clerks in a wretched little dome,” gloated Cochevelou. “We’re outnumbering them, and we’ll outlast them, my queen.”

  Clinging together on that cold prominence, it was a while before either of them noticed the tiny figure making its way up the track from the Empress.

  “Who’s that, then?” Mary peered down at it, disengaging herself abruptly from Cochevelou’s embrace. “Is that Mr. De Wit?”

  It was Mr. De Wit.

  By the time they reached him in the CeltCart he was walking more slowly, and his eyes were standing out of his face so they looked fair to pop through his goggles, but he seemed unstoppable.

  “WHAT IS IT?” Mary demanded, turning her volume all the way up. “IS SOMETHING GONE WRONG WITH ALICE?”

  Mr. De Wit shook his head, slumping forward on the cart’s fender. He cranked up his volume as far as it went too and gasped, “LAWYER—”

  “YES!” Mary said irritably, “YOU’RE A LAWYER!”

  “OTHER LAWYER!” said Mr. De Wit, pointing back down the slope at the Empress.

  Mary bit her lip. “YOU MEAN—” she turned her volume down, reluctant to broadcast words of ill omen. “Hodges from the BAC?”

  Mr. De Wit nodded, crawling wearily into the backseat of the cart.

  “Oh, bugger all,” growled Cochevelou. “Whyn’t you fight him off then, as one shark to another?”

  “Did my best,” whe
ezed Mr. De Wit. “Filed appeal. But you have to make mark.”

  Mary said something unprintable. She reached past Cochevelou and threw the cart into neutral to save gas. It went bucketing down the slope, reaching such a velocity near the bottom that Mr. De Wit found himself praying for the first time since his childhood.

  Somehow they arrived with no more damage done than a chunk of lichen sheared off the airlock wall, but they might have taken their time, for all the good it did them.

  The lawyer was indeed Hodges from the Settlement, whose particular personal interests Mary knew to a nicety and whom she might have quelled with a good hard stare. He was avoiding her gaze, however, whistling an uneasy tune as he peered at some distant point on the ceiling.

  “Good luck, my dear,” said Cochevelou, pouring himself a drink. “I’ll just quench my thirst and then edge off home, shall I?” Hodges’s gaze snapped down, though still avoiding Mary’s, and he fixed Cochevelou with a fishy eye.

  “Maurice Cochevelou?”

  “I am.” Cochevelou stared back.

  “Duly elected chieftain of Clan Morrigan?”

  “That would be him,” said Mary.

  “Ah.” The solicitor drew a text plaquette from his briefcase and held it out. “You are hereby advised that—”

  “Is this more about my Perrik?” Cochevelou demanded, slowly raising fists like rusty cannon balls.

  “In short, sir, no,” replied the solicitor, with remarkable sangfroid. “The British Arean Company is reorganizing its affairs and has decided to inventory all resources accrued by Clan Morrigan over a ten-year period in order to assess your debt load.”

  “An audit,” said Mr. De Wit.

  “Debt load?” shouted Cochevelou. “What debt load?”

  “The debt for support material received at the outset of the colonization effort,” said Mr. Hodges, “which our records clearly show received by you, but for which the British Arean Company has never been repaid.”