The screen goes dark. I sit there for a moment, until the animated—dog? cat? weasel? what the heck is that thing?—bounces back into view and tells me how much my little chat just cost. I am so glad I’m not paying for this vacation myself.
CHAPTER FOUR
Earth orbit—Sky Five docking station
1 hour before the food court stops serving brunch
The Princess of Mars Cruises’ flagship passenger liner Dejah Thoris is even larger than the Beanstalk climber, but a smaller portion of its interior volume is used to house passengers. The rest is the fuel supply, power plant, main engines, and cargo bays. It’s one of the largest civilian spacecraft ever built, and that says a lot about human civilization: we have slipped the surly bonds of Earth, now let’s party hearty.
I watch from Sky Five’s main observation lounge as small tugs and spacesuited workers load supplies and freight onto Dejah Thoris. The ship is shaped like an egg, with a rectangular section cut out of its midsection on one side. Cargo containers are secured in that niche with scaffolding and latches and cables. At the small end of the egg is command and control. The large end hides the main drive reactor, which reveals itself in a honeycomb of engine bells.
This is going to be my home for the next week. I don’t think I’ve ever spent that long on a civilian ship. Vacation. What do people actually do on vacation?
I suppose I’ll start with heavy drinking and take it from there. Maybe I’ll consider this a research trip: practicing how to camouflage myself within a civilian population.
My boarding group is called just after lunchtime. A bellhop in a ridiculous outfit, apparently intended to look like a nonspecific navy uniform, leads me to my stateroom. We weave past other passengers adrift in zero-gravity and service robots trundling luggage up and down the corridors. I do not laugh out loud at the lopsided beret attached to the bellhop’s head. I do not sneer at the faux-luxurious decorations that cover every square centimeter of the vessel’s interior: Rubenesque cherubs, brushed-metal abstract sculptures, oversaturated astronomy photos. I am playing the part of a clueless tourist who wants to be here.
I do tip my attendant generously, in cash, because I feel sorry for anyone who has to look like he does all day, especially floating through these garish hallways in zero-gee. We won’t have gravity until the ship starts moving, just before dinnertime.
My stateroom is far too spacious for one person. I imagine that’s why all the crew members kept raising their eyebrows when they saw that I was in an executive suite. It’s four fully furnished rooms, each with a vid wall masquerading as a window. The walls show views of Sky Five that are all wrong for my current location, ten decks below the bridge and halfway to the centerline of the ship.
I find the wall controls and change them to display the Las Vegas Strip at night. If my view’s going to be unreal, it might as well be fabulously unreal.
In the front room, next to the doorway leading to the bedroom, are a work desk and a wet bar. Velcroed to the top of the bar is a large basket filled with fresh fruit, candy, and liquor. I pluck the card from the basket and open it.
Kanga:
Welcome to your home away from home. Enjoy the trip. Don’t forget to exercise.
—Christopher Robin
P.S. I’ve arranged a dinner seating for you at the Captain’s Table. Please do your best not to embarrass your country.
Paul’s sense of humor is more like a humor singularity, from which nothing funny can escape. But the booze in the gift basket is pretty good.
I take a mini-bottle of rum over to the computer built into the work desk. Now that I know where I’m going tonight, I can’t resist doing some reconnaissance.
* * *
Edward Gabriel Santamaria, the captain of Dejah Thoris, stands nearly two meters tall. He towers over everyone else in the dining room as he strides toward the table where I’m seated for dinner with eight complete strangers. Even in this huge, multilevel space filled with people and noise, he stands out. Also because of the cam-bot hovering at his shoulder for passenger photo-ops.
I’ve read up on the captain. Not in depth—without a secure communications link, I don’t have access to the agency’s full data warehouse—but the promotional materials provided in my room were a start. An omnipedia search on the public Internet provided additional background.
It might seem silly for me to do all this, when I’ll just have to pretend I don’t know these things later. I’m sitting at the Captain’s Table every night at dinner. Wouldn’t it be easier, and less confusing, to ask about his life instead of investigating him in secret? Especially when I’m not even on the job, and there’s no need for me to do the extra legwork?
I mean, it’s not like I have anything to prove here. It’s not like I want to demonstrate to Paul and Donald and the Secretary of State and anyone else who might be watching—now or later—that I can fly solo, that I can complete a mission without a babysitter. It’s not like I’m going out of my way to show off my operational skills so everyone can see that I am, in fact, not the weakest link in the chain.
And I’m certainly not doing this because it’s easier to think of “Kangaroo on vacation” as a cover identity than to figure out what I would actually enjoy doing as myself, without orders or instructions, without any kind of direction.
Boy, whichever agency shrink draws the short straw when I get back is going to have a whale of a time. At least they won’t be able to grill me about my mother. I suppose that’s one of the few benefits of being an orphan.
“Good evening, everyone,” the captain says as he arrives at the large circular table. Up close, his white dress uniform isn’t quite as ridiculous as the bellhop’s was, but the huge shoulderboards and thick gold braids dangling under his arms look like they could lead a parade all by themselves.
We go around the table and introduce ourselves once again. I was the first one here, and I’ve heard some of these spiels three or four times now. It’s interesting to watch how people puff up in the captain’s presence. The man sitting directly across from me, Jerry Bartelt, said he was a salesman when he first sat down, but now he’s a “regional sales director.” Whoa there, slow down, big man. I won’t be surprised if Jerry pulls out a cosmetics sample case or a set of steak knives for a demonstration at some point.
The captain politely gives everyone their fifteen seconds in the spotlight, including a handshake or hug for the cam-bot to record as a souvenir holo. He’s got a pretty good mask on, smiling and nodding with great sincerity, but I can see in his eyes that he’s done this a lot, and it’s a bit too soon since the last time for him to really enjoy it. But he’s not distracted, not preoccupied or thinking about something else. He is actually listening to each person, quietly validating their claim that they’re important or interesting enough to be sitting at the Captain’s Table. I wonder how much my seat here is costing the department.
I’m sitting to the captain’s right, on purpose, so I’m the last to introduce myself.
“Evan Rogers,” I say, extending my hand. I’m normally not much for excessive touching, but this is part of the role I’m playing.
The captain shakes my hand. I feel calluses on his palm and thumb. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Rogers. How are you enjoying your journey so far?”
“Oh, it’s fantastic,” I say, gushing just a little, not wanting to sell it too hard. “This is my first time on a cruise spaceship. I can’t wait to try out all the different activities.”
“And what do you do for a living?” he asks.
“Oh, I work for the U.S. State Department,” I say, waving a hand, drawing attention to myself while pretending to be dismissive. “I’m a trade inspector.”
“What kind of trade?” asks the captain. The question comes a fraction of a second too quickly. He’s not just being polite; he’s actually interested in the answer.
“Interplanetary,” I say. “Imports, exports, tariffs, duties, taxes. Most people don’t realize how much comme
rce there is between all the inner planets and our asteroid belt colonies. And of course, trade regulations have changed quite a bit since the war.”
I don’t have to name the conflict. Everyone knows I’m talking about the Independence War. A lot of things changed after Mars graduated from being a colony world to a full-blown planetary rival, and most of them don’t make anybody happy.
All eight of the other passengers at the table are from Earth, six of them are American, and four are especially patriotic and talkative. The captain’s eyes are livelier now, watching with genuine interest. He no longer needs to drive the conversation. I wonder how many of his dinner guests expect him to be the master of ceremonies throughout the entire meal.
The background music in the dining room fades for a moment, and a male announcer’s voice tells us that Dejah Thoris has passed Lunar orbit and is now in interplanetary space. A smattering of applause follows, and then the music resumes.
One of the women at my table asks the captain how fast we’re traveling. He consults his wristband display and answers her precisely, in kilometers per hour, then adds that the ship is still accelerating—that’s why it feels like we have gravity.
“Just under nine meters per second squared,” Santamaria says. “That’s about ninety percent of Earth normal.”
Dejah Thoris will continue accelerating, he explains, until we reach “midway”—the middle waypoint of our trip, halfway between Earth and Mars—on the fourth day. Then the engines will throttle down until the ship’s at zero acceleration again, propelled forward only by inertia, and we’ll be in freefall. That will last for one full day, during which several sections will be converted into weightless open spaces. Passengers can register for sessions of various zero-gee activities, aided by crew chaperones and recorded by flying cam-bots like the one following the captain around now.
Everyone else at the table looks excited—“Weightless Day” is one of the big selling points of this cruise—and I feign enthusiasm. These people haven’t suffered through hundreds of hours of military spacewalk training. Well, maybe Captain Santamaria. His beard hides most of his face, but his skin is aged and mottled from exposure. I wonder if he was in the Outer Space Service before retiring to this cushy job.
Santamaria continues his breakdown of our voyage. During midway, Dejah Thoris will slowly rotate until the ship is facing backward, with the engines pointing in our direction of travel. Then everyone will go to sleep, and wake up again under point nine gravity, only this time we’ll be decelerating until we reach Mars orbit.
The purpose of all this, he explains, is to shorten the time it takes to make the trip. We build up a lot of speed during the first half, and we need to burn it off during the second half, otherwise we’d completely overshoot our target at several thousand kilometers per hour. Once we get to Mars, we’ll dock with the space elevator there, and the passengers will disembark to continue our holiday on the red planet.
That includes me. I’ll ride the Mars elevator down and meet my contact in Capital City, who will tell me whether it’s safe for me to go back to Earth. If so, I’ll board a high-gee military transport and endure a fast return trip—hours instead of days. If not, I’ve got a date with the tourist traps around the Martian polar ice caps.
The last time I saw those ice caps was the day the Independence War started. I saw them out the window of a private spaceplane, one of the last vessels to break Mars orbit before Earth warships established a blockade. Paul recalled me as soon as the shooting started. I was ready to evacuate—as the most junior agent at Galle Crater station, I routinely got stuck with the least interesting surveillance and maintenance tasks—but I didn’t expect to be the only passenger on that flight home.
I never asked Paul how difficult or expensive it was to get me off Mars that day. I don’t really want to know.
Our Captain’s Table dinner arrives. It is an extravagant, multicourse indulgence of red meat, seafood, more meat, hot cheese fondue, meat stuffed inside another kind of meat, and perfunctory helpings of bread and vegetables. I’m not complaining—I like animal protein as much as the next red-blooded omnivore—but I do watch the reactions of my dinner companions carefully, noticing who goes for which dishes and how they attack each course.
The captain takes a small portion of every one of the seemingly endless varieties of meat offered by the servers—but only a small portion. He doesn’t dip into the cheese, but dumps a lot of salt on his vegetables. I wonder if he’s had any heart attacks or stern warnings from his cardiologist yet.
I resist the urge to turn on my eye and look inside his chest. The implant is for work. My own, biological, limited eyes are for play. And I’m having fun guessing at who people are from just their appearance and manner.
My seat at the Captain’s Table came with a bottle of fancy wine, and I drink half of it before I realize how much it’s affecting me. I’m talking loudly, possibly even flirting with the woman to my right who keeps touching my elbow. I can’t remember her name. That seems bad. My medical sensors say my body temperature is several degrees above normal. I switch to water, not wanting to regret anything in the morning.
After dinner, there’s a live band and dancing in the ballroom below, but I escape and find my way up to the Promenade.
The shops and tables here offer items ranging from the extravagant to the mundane, all easily charged to a passenger’s account with one swipe of the thumb. Jewelry, liquor, clothing, toys, reader tablets, sewing kits, and “personal items,” as a discreet sign proclaims. Makes sense. There’s no getting off this ship for the next six days, so everything a passenger might want or need has to be available on board.
This section is just inside the outer hull, with a long stripe of transparent window running overhead. There’s not much to see outside, just blackness and the occasional glint of a distant asteroid or spaceship. Normally space vehicles wouldn’t have many windows, if any—the radiation danger is too severe. But most of the ionizing radiation in this part of the Solar System comes from the Sun, and the entire bulk of the ship and all those cargo containers are shielding the passenger sections.
I walk down the length of the Promenade, stretching my arms and legs and looking up at the void, but really I’m here to watch the people. Most of them are drunk to some degree. The sober ones are more interesting. I surreptitiously study a family of four and guess, based on the younger child’s hair color and earlobe shape, that Mom did some fooling around. But Dad’s attitude toward both children—eye contact, tone of voice, touching behavior—implies that he knows, and he’s okay with it. Interesting.
I suddenly realize I’m completely lost. Should have studied those deck plans more closely. I stop at an information kiosk, my mildly inebriated brain momentarily mesmerized by its vid loop of a woman in a slinky dress holding up a dessert tray, advertising a nearby late-night buffet. As if the nine different kinds of cake at dinner weren’t enough.
Someone walks up and stops beside me. I’m surprised to see that it’s Captain Santamaria, sans cam-bot. I guess the show’s over for tonight.
“Captain,” I say, nodding.
“Mr. Rogers,” he says.
We both stare at the dessert lady for a moment.
“That’s not your real name,” Captain Santamaria says, “is it?”
“I’m adopted,” I say.
He smiles, then looks me in the eye. “Fair enough.”
We stare at each other. I feel like he’s gotten some sort of advantage on me, and I furiously try to make some further deduction by studying his face. Can I tell anything more about his personal history from his complexion? Those acne scars covering his cheeks? I’m severely tempted to turn on my eye scanners and see what kind of tech implants he’s got.
“Not a lot of kids around now,” Santamaria says.
I nod. “It’s pretty late.”
“And this is not a cultural playground.”
It takes my wine-addled brain a couple of seconds to recognize wha
t he’s saying. And then I still can’t believe it. But before I know what I’m doing, my training—the often-absurd behavior that’s been drilled into me by the agency—takes over.
“Children’s fitness is of much interest to me,” I say.
“A grandfather never exhibits such things.”
He looks away. The code phrases are a few months out of date, but they’re agency protocol. Those three lines of strange dialogue are how our field agents identify themselves to each other when they can’t use other means, or when there’s a chance they’ll be overheard by hostile forces.
Santamaria works for the agency. And he wanted me to know that.
“Enjoy the rest of your night,” he says, looking back at the kiosk. “And if you go here”—he gestures at the restaurant advertisement—“try the strawberry cheesecake. It’s excellent.”
Paul picked this ship. He picked this ship. He must have known who the captain was.
“Thanks,” I say. “Maybe I will.”
What does this mean? Why did Paul put me at the Captain’s Table for dinner? What did he want me to notice? What does he want me to do?
“Goodnight, Mr. Rogers,” Santamaria says.
I watch him walk away, hands folded behind his back. He moves with the slightest hint of a limp—chronic condition? Combat injury? Did he captain a warship before Dejah Thoris? Did the agency recruit him before or after he got this civilian command? How well does Edward Santamaria know Paul Tarkington?
What the hell are you trying to tell me, Lasher?
I don’t know about the cheesecake, but I definitely need another drink.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dejah Thoris—Deck 10, Promenade
At least 2 hours past my bedtime
“Is this your first time?”
Jerry Bartelt, the salesman from dinner, is standing next to me. I’ve wandered into a little alcove off the main Promenade, a semicircular area with colorful interactive displays about Mars. You know, for kids. I’m having some trouble with the controls, which consist of four gigantic red buttons.
Waypoint Kangaroo Page 5