Waypoint Kangaroo

by Curtis C. Chen

  “Cool it, man,” Arnold says, giving the rest of us an apologetic shrug. “The war’s over.”

  “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, pal,” Jason says.

  Gemma whirls to stare down the two men. “Why the hell are you even going to Mars, if you hate them so much?”

  The two men blink at her for a moment. Then Jason says, “It was my wife’s idea.”

  “Me too,” Arnold says. “Our anniversary is next week.”

  “Happy anniversary,” Gemma says, her voice shaking. She turns back to Ellie and a somewhat ashen-faced Parvat. “I’m sorry. I have family on Mars. I was very happy when the war ended. I didn’t really care who won by that point.” She looks at me. “You’re probably too young to remember any of this.”

  “No, I remember.” I’m sure I know more about it than you do. The agency refused to put me in the field when I first joined, and while Paul wrestled that red tape, he put me to work sanitizing military footage from the invasion. I saw a lot of things that no teenager—no human being, really—should ever have to see. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Gemma.”

  Her hasty smile threatens to twist her face into something else. “I didn’t say anyone had died.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  She blinks wetness from her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to completely derail the tour like this.”

  “It’s okay,” Ellie says. “The war was difficult for all of us. But that’s why Princess of Mars Cruises built Dejah Thoris so soon after the conflict.” I can tell she’s reciting this bit. “We feel it’s important to maintain commerce between our two worlds, to share the best of our cultures with each other and remember what we all have in common.”

  “The desire to get really, really drunk right after this?” I say. That gets at least a chuckle from everyone. Parvat seizes the opportunity to retake control of his tour.

  “Okay, thank you, Chief Engineer Gavilán!” he says, clapping his hands. We follow his lead in giving her a short but at least fifty percent enthusiastic round of applause. “Now if you’ll follow me, please, our next stop is one of the ship’s power generators, where plasma energy is converted into electricity…”

  I let Jason and Arnold lead the way, then wave Gemma ahead of me and bring up the rear again. I don’t like it when strangers walk behind me. As we start exiting down the main hallway toward the elevator, I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  I turn around. It’s Ellie.

  “Hey, thanks for doing that, Evan,” she says. “I’m pretty good with machinery, but not so much with people.”

  “No, you were great,” I say. “Thanks for the tour. Sir.”

  She smiles. “How did you know about Gemma, by the way?”

  “Lucky guess,” I say. “Like you said. The war was tough on everyone.”

  Ellie nods. “You’re a pretty good guesser.”

  I put on my innocent face again. “Thanks. I deal with some difficult people in my line of work.” It’s not a lie. “I’ve learned to ‘read the room,’ as they say.”

  “Well, thanks for your help,” she says. “Enjoy the rest of your tour. And the rest of the cruise.”

  She shakes my hand and walks away. I don’t move for another second, mesmerized by the sight of her ponytail swaying back and forth.

  I’m not complaining about the attention, but there’s no reason she should be personally interested in me. Is there? Why else would a spaceliner’s chief engineer be curious about a guy who claims to be a deskbound researcher, but seems to know quite a bit about interplanetary spacecraft drive systems and military power implants?

  She turns and waves at me over her shoulder, still smiling.

  Goddammit. I really hope she’s not in the loop.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Dejah Thoris—Deck 6, Stateroom 6573

  7 hours before I start causing trouble

  My job is to gather information. When I’m not in the field actively collecting it, I’m sitting at a computer, trawling the electronic communications that connect nations and planets and distilling meaning and intent from the noise. Even when there are no specific questions to answer—like hey, why is that satellite seeing heavy neutrino emissions characteristic of nuclear fission inside a three-thousand-year-old structure deep in a Mesoamerican jungle?—the agency’s always on the lookout for things that break normal patterns.

  Unusual isn’t always bad, but interesting is always worth a second look. And I’ve definitely discovered two persons of interest on this ship.

  First of all, there’s Captain Santamaria. Obviously he’s ex-military, probably OSS, maybe even intelligence. How did he end up working for the agency? What is he doing for the agency while captaining a civilian cruise ship? And why did Paul put me here, on Santamaria’s ship?

  Then there’s Ellie Gavilán. Also possibly ex-military; where else would she have worked on ionwells before Dejah Thoris? The technology was only declassified on Earth after the war. And there’s no way an Earth corporation would make a Martian citizen chief engineer on their newest flagship.

  My interest in both of these people is purely professional. Absolutely professional. I am clearly in the middle of something here, even if it only turns out to be Paul pulling a prank on one of his old drinking buddies, and I will get to the bottom of it. It has nothing at all to do with Ellie’s shapely body inside her form-fitting jumpsuit. Or her sparkling personality. Or the way she squeezed my shoulder.

  This is business. I’m a spy. This is what I do. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the Kangaroo loves legwork.

  The most efficient way I know to get the best information is to plug into the agency’s data warehouse. If you’ve ever passed through the sight line of a security camera in a public place anywhere in the Solar System, we know about it, and I can look it up and tell you to the millisecond when you were there.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t board Dejah Thoris with most of the special equipment I would carry on a live op. I don’t have the long-range antenna relay I need for my shoulder-phone to bounce a secure signal off military navigation relays. And hacking into the cruise ship’s telecom system is sure to attract unwanted attention.

  Fortunately, I do have a few items in the pocket that I always carry for emergencies.

  I spend the next few hours planning my own little operation. I need the time because I don’t have my usual tactical support team of Equipment and Surgical in my ear, telling me what to do and how to do it. I don’t want to screw this up.

  After I’ve figured out the shift changes for ship’s security and found the blind spots in their camera coverage, I sign up for one of the scheduled after-dinner spacewalk excursions. I pretend to be nervous and flustered as a crew member helps me into my spacesuit. I ask about all the different parts of the suit and all the “funny-looking equipment” so I can surreptitiously scan everything, find the locator beacon that’s hidden in the radio, and measure its broadcast frequency. I also note the length of my tether cable when I’m outside, and go as far as I can around the circumference of the ship without arousing our chaperone’s suspicions.

  Theoretically, Dejah Thoris could do passenger spacewalks all the time. There isn’t day or night when you’re hurtling through the void. But the human body evolved in a diurnal cycle, and it gets first confused, then sick, if you disrupt its natural rhythms for too long. So all passenger vessels operate on a twenty-four hour day, and Dejah Thoris’s meal times and activity schedules reflect that.

  The last spacewalk of the night ends at 2100 hours. It’s two hours later when I sidle up to the excursion area, bypass the door lock, and step inside.

  It’s dark. I leave the lights off and blink once, then look right, left, right, and blink three times. The night vision implants in my left eye come to life, magnifying the dim light sneaking in through cracks in the doors and walls and showing me the spacesuit storage locker.

  I set my shoulder-phone to jam the suit’s locator beac
on. I know from my earlier scans that it won’t start transmitting until I power up the suit, so I don’t need to worry about interfering with other, expected radio traffic. If any crew are outside, they’re on an entirely different frequency.

  It takes me almost fifteen minutes to put on the suit by myself. While I’m doing that, I scan the airlock again, to confirm that it’s not connected to any external monitoring system.

  I can feel my heart beating faster. I’m scared, but also excited. I feel like a kid riding his bicycle without training wheels for the first time—and preparing to ride the bike off a ski jump ramp, over a cliff, and into the ocean. Maybe not a great idea, but it’s sure going to be fun.

  The airlock cycles open. I hope nobody’s passing by the corridor outside, but the locker room, lounge, and office should provide decent sound insulation. I step inside the airlock and close the inner door. It seems to take an eternity for the atmosphere to vent and the status light to turn green. The outer door opens onto a black infinity. I step out onto the excursion platform, walk to the railing on the Sunward side, and start looking for handholds on the hull. A big ship like this needs plenty of maintenance grips and niches to allow in-flight repairs.

  Dejah Thoris’s constant acceleration simulates gravity. Ascending fifteen decks until I’m past the cargo section is going to be like climbing up the side of a skyscraper. Except if I fall, there won’t even be ground to hit—either my tether will hold, and I’ll get yanked back into the side of the ship, or the tether will break, and I’ll float through interplanetary space until I get close enough to a relay buoy to send a distress signal with my puny shoulder-phone. That’s if I don’t get fried by the main engines as I tumble past the bottom of the ship.

  Did I mention this is going to be fun? Yeah. Fun.

  I’ve connected several tether cables together to make a run long enough to get me past the cargo section. I attach the carabiner at one end of my mega-cable to the bank of rings above the airlock, wrapping the cable around twice just to be safe. Then I engage the magnets in my boots and start climbing.

  It’s slow going only because I have to avoid windows. Walking up the side of a building turns out to be surprisingly easy. This is fun. I try a few experimental hops, just to see how far off the hull I can get. The gravity makes things tricky; once I’m not attached to the ship, it accelerates past me and I fall backward. But maybe if I rig the cable …

  My helmet’s faceplate dims automatically as I come over the horizon into sunlight. I’m at the edge of the cargo section, where the rectilinear containers have been lashed together on the outside of the ship and covered with solar panels. Just like Ellie described. I take a moment to admire the structure, multicolored bricks beneath a gleaming blue mirror.

  Then I switch my left eye into telescope mode and find the Earth: azimuth negative forty degrees, elevation plus five. This side of the ship always faces Sunward. That allows Dejah Thoris to maintain communications with Earth, and it’ll do the same for my equipment.

  I think of a fish-covered pizza and open the pocket—without the barrier, since I’m already in a vacuum. That makes it much easier to pull out the Echo Delta.

  The full name is “emergency communications dish,” but I guess “Echo Delta” sounds snappier. The bulky military case falls out of the pocket and nearly yanks my arm out of its socket. I clamp the twenty-kilo weight to a maintenance shelf before I open it and start assembling the unit. Fold out the parabolic dish, screw it onto the tripod, bolt that to the hull after scanning for wires. Attach power pack, scrambler module, microcell transceiver.

  I test the dish by tuning to a public broadcast news feed and smile at the tiny vid image in my left eye HUD. Now I can use my shoulder-phone to talk to the dish, and the dish can connect me to Earth.

  After I drop the empty case back in the pocket, I take a moment to admire my handiwork. It’s not the most circumspect assembly job ever, but it works. And I did it all by myself, using only my emergency field equipment and my own wits. Paul would be proud, if I ever told him. Not that I plan to.

  I celebrate by doing a few stunts on the way back. I rig my tether cable to a handhold, kick myself off the hull, and freefall until the cable goes taut. Like jumping off a cliff! But safer. In some ways. I wonder how far away from the ship I can get before swinging back.

  I stop after my third tumble, when my glove slips and I fly ten meters farther than I intended. The ship suddenly looks very small in a vast sea of nothing. I slowly crawl along the hull back to the airlock.

  * * *

  I’m pretty pleased with myself, whistling as I peel off the spacesuit and run down my checklist: suit power off, check. Stop location beacon jamming, check. Replace suit in locker, check. Continue basking in your own triumph, check.

  It’s just after 0200 when I walk out of the locker room. Plenty of time before the next shift change. Maybe I’ll stop by the arcade. After what I just did, that Lunar Lander vid game doesn’t look so tough.

  I step into the lounge and go blind.

  I think I make a noise as I close my eyes, and then I notice the overload indicator in the corner of my HUD. I move my eyes around until the night vision enhancement switches off. All this I do instinctively, so I don’t even feel nervous until I open my eyes and see three security guards standing in front of me, stunners raised.

  The one in the middle and closest to me is a woman—tall, dark, short brown hair, pale eyes that look like ice. I wonder if her stare is always that cold, or if it’s only when she catches a trespasser. The two burly men flanking her look just as unhappy to see me.

  “Hands where I can see them,” the woman says, her finger just touching the trigger. She really wants an excuse to shoot me.

  I raise my arms slowly, never taking my eyes off her. She’s clearly the leader. I suddenly realize that they’re much too concerned about a mere trespasser. They were looking for someone. Someone dangerous. The woman is holding her stunner too firmly, and her arms are braced against a nonexistent recoil. She’s wishing she had an actual firearm, so she can drop me if I make a move.

  “Mike, pat him down,” she says.

  The man to her right holsters his weapon and walks over to me, staring me down all the way. He gives me a very thorough frisking.

  “He’s clean,” Mike says. He takes a step back, standing behind me, and pulls out his stunner again. I decide it’s time to say something.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I say, using my best pathetic-civilian voice. “I—I didn’t think anybody would—”

  “Shut up,” the woman says.

  I shut up.

  She’s actually thinking about whether she should shoot first and ask questions later. I can see her sizing me up. I relax my body and hunch my shoulders. I want to appear to be as slight a physical threat as possible.

  “Danny,” she says to the other guard, “check his ID.”

  Danny grabs my right hand and presses the thumb against a handheld scanpad. After a second, his wristband—a gauntlet of touchscreen controls for his duty equipment—lights up with my passenger record. “Evan Rogers. Stateroom 6573.”

  The woman seems disappointed, but she doesn’t lower her stunner.

  “What were you doing outside the ship, Mr. Rogers?” she asks.

  “I just wanted to do another excursion. By myself,” I say. “I did a spacewalk right after dinner, and it was so amazing, I just wanted to enjoy that—that freedom without a bunch of noisy people all around me. I’m sorry if I caused any trouble.”

  She mulls this over for a moment, probably trying to decide if I’m lying or not. I’m pretty sure she can’t tell. I’m good at my job.

  Then she takes a step toward me and jams the tip of the stunner up under my chin.

  Apparently I’m not that good.

  “What the hell were you doing outside the ship, Mr. Rogers?” the woman repeats. This time, she says it like she doesn’t believe that’s my real name.

  I make a choking noise for eff
ect. She’s not actually hurting me, but I want her to get some satisfaction here. I’m still assessing whether I can take down all three of them at once, and if I do go for it, I need them to be as overconfident as possible.

  My heart is pounding. I didn’t expect to get caught here, and I didn’t expect security on a damn cruise ship to be so hardcore. If this were a real op, I would have three layers of cover stories and remote support through my implanted comms. Or I could just plead the Fifth and wait for Paul to bail me out.

  But this isn’t an actual operation. I don’t have backup, and there’s no guarantee the agency will come to my rescue.

  I don’t have a lot of options here. However, I do want to stop the choking.

  I grab the woman’s wrist with my left hand and push it away, aiming the stunner at the ceiling. At the same time, I kick backward, catching Mike in the stomach and putting him on the floor. I launch myself forward, pushing the woman into Danny and slamming him against the wall, and simultaneously open the pocket behind me, thinking of a small woolly mammoth.

  I reach back through the barrier for my pistol and pull it out. I close the pocket before anyone can see it—I hope—and put my back to the wall with my arm wrapped around the woman. I place the barrel of my pistol under her chin. Now her body is shielding me from Mike and Danny’s stunners, and they all know I mean business.

  “I thought you searched this guy!” the woman hisses at Mike. He has no response.

  I speak in a loud, clear voice. “I am not the person you’re looking for. I am not working with the person you’re looking for. Do you understand?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the woman says. “I’m totally convinced now. You can go about your business.”

  I sigh and say to Danny and Mike, “I need you to get Captain Santamaria down here.”

  “Fat chance!” the woman snaps. At least she’s not struggling or biting. I hate it when people bite me.

  “I need you to call Captain Santamaria,” I say, “and tell him that I’m a friend to lumber but not columns.”

  The woman twitches and does her best to turn her head toward me. “You know Paul Tarkington?”