Technically, I work for the Ares Consortium, an alliance of corporations formed to run the Martian parasol business. Aurora strings the parasols and Pegasus ferries them to the target asteroid, where Sisyphus rigs the harnesses in place. My ultimate boss was actually old man Bryce van Huyten, but Phobos Port Authority coordinates the local action, so I carry an Authority troubleshooter’s badge.
I told Aurora to set up two loops in the test beds: one that worked and one that didn’t. They balked because any loop that worked was immediately installed on a parasol and packaged for transit, while the defective ones were salvaged for parts. Parasols were urgent, high-priority work, and they couldn’t let loops sit around for me to play with, and blah-blah-blah. The usual. So I told them to call me back when they were ready to get serious and I cut the link.
It took them two days while they pondered what the Authority would say if they blew me off. Then I got a call from Antonelli, the sail prep boss. He had two loops set aside, he told me, “but hustle your ass out here because Logistics is giving me the stink-eye.”
Antonelli and his engineers managed to conceal their delight when my ass arrived. They floated at a respectable distance. Everybody wanted to be close enough to the problem to count coup in case I succeeded, but not so close that they’d get cooties if I failed.
I forgot their names as soon as they were introduced, except for one fellow from Logistics named Moynihan Truth, both because of his unusual name and because I saw him again later. He was ten years old, but that’s in dog years; double it for Earth-equivalent. He’d been born in Golden Flats on Mars, where they have the monument to the first Rover. You’ve probably seen images of Farzi Baroomand’s famous statue, the one that shows all the aliens lined up behind the Rover where the camera can’t see them, laughing themselves silly. Everyone there takes the last name Truth to honor the Rover. The Kid was the only one in the locker smiling and I remember wondering what the big joke was.
Four test beds took up most of the horizontal space. Hobartium loops were tethered to beds A and B. I pointed to A and said, “This one’s not working?” Nods all around. The neon-yellow Hold tag was my clue. “And that one works?” More bobble-heads. It was green-tagged. “And you think it might be the kicker?” Grudging assents, but dissenters mentioned other components, assembly errors, you-name-it. Paralysis of analysis. Smart people with a dozen smart ideas, but not smart enough to try any for fear of being wrong.
But the first rule of troubleshooting is: Start Somewhere. When you don’t know crap, whatever you learn moves you ahead. “Take this kicker,” I pointed, “and install it on that loop; and take that kicker and install it on this loop.”
When the switcheroo was finished I told them to kick amps, and the superconductor on A began to circularize from the hoop stress, while the one on B now remained flaccid. I nodded.
“Yep. It’s the kicker, all right.”
Antonelli swelled up. “For that, we pay Port Authority two ounces troy per diem? We could have done that ourselves!”
“No you couldn’t,” I reminded him. “You couldn’t even get the two hoops set up without my prodding.”
“Big deal,” said one of the engineers. “We already thought it was the kicker.” No matter what the solution turns out to be, there will always be someone to say I told you so.
“Sure,” I said. “But now you know. Now take the top assembly off this kicker and switch it with the top assembly on the other. If nothing changes, the problem’s in the bottom half. If A fails but B works, the problem’s in the top half.”
Antonelli sucked lemons. “What if they both start working?”
“Then it gets interesting.”
The secret of my success doesn’t come from knowing all the answers, but in knowing how to ask the questions. Disassembly-and-reassembly successively narrows the search zone for the cause. Three iterations homed in on the damper circuit subassembly. After that, it was a matter of screening the other kickers in stock and finding the ones with defective dampers. Antonelli wrote a Stern Letter to the Earthside parts manufacturer, which let him wrap things up on a suitably righteous note of indignation. Nothing makes a man happier than the prospect of blaming someone else.
* * *
When I returned to my rooms toward shift-end, I found a message from Pondo asking me to stop by the Second Dog as soon as I could. I finished repacking my go-bag for my next assignment, then took the tow-line up Dilman’s Bore, where I found Pondo waiting just inside the Dog.
Small as Phobos was, you’d think an illicit bar would be a tough thing to hide. Scientists back in the day had known that Phobos was partly hollow and that puzzled them some. They also realized that the moonlet resembled a Main Belt asteroid, but they couldn’t figure how Mars could capture an asteroid, circularize its eccentric orbit, and rope it onto the Martian equatorial plane—not until they discovered that the Visitors had been tricking it out back in the day. About a third of the interior had been gutted by the Visitors, and the rooms, warrens, and passageways they dug totaled two-thousand cubic kilometers usable volume. But volumes can be made operationally larger when people look the other way, and the pocket under Kepler’s Ridge had somehow escaped notice when volume was platted out.
Koso Bassendi, the owner, was a hard man to cross and was big enough to make it harder still if you did manage it. I never heard of anyone crossing him twice. Come retirement, he and brother Pondo took their bonus money and started the Second Dog. They served beer stronger than the wretched double-deuce that the Prague Convention allowed, but they served an honest measure. You can’t ask more than that of any man.
“Mickey,” Pondo said, “I understand yer going Mars-side tomorrow.”
I didn’t ask him how he knew. My schedule was not exactly classified, and the Authority likes to rotate its employees into gravity wells to keep up their muscle tone and bone calcium.
“Maybe you’ll have time to do my brother and me a little favor.”
Doing favors for the Bassendis was risky. So was refusing. I figured they wanted me to smuggle up some potables in my Authority packet, so I said, “Sure.”. Technically, Phobos is “outer space” and Mars “planetary surface,” so the Prague Convention covers one, but not the other. Go figure.
Pondo guided me into the office, where Koso bobbed with his arms crossed and his scowl directed toward the thick, open door of an Eismann and Hertzog safe.
“Somebody got into our vault,” Pondo explained, in case I couldn’t figure it out. Koso said nothing, but his face tightened like a hangman’s knot.
“You call the cops?”
Both brothers looked at me and I let it go. “So, what’d you lose? Money, securities?”
They shook their heads. “Not even the Bassendi Brothers Benevolent Fund was touched,” said Koso.
I didn’t ask who the Fund was intended to benefit.
Pondo said, “Remember that fellow, Jaroslav Bytchkov, what give us something to keep for him the other day? Well, it’s gone.”
Which meant that whatever that packet contained, it was worth a great deal more than what was left untouched. At least now I knew Pinch-Face’s name.
“And what was it?”
“How would we know?” Pondo said. “My brother and me sell trust. Who would trust us with their keepsakes if we stuck our noses into them?”
The brothers might be shady, but they had a code. “What you want me to do?” I said, though I could already guess.
“Yer a troubleshooter,” said Pondo. “Find what caused our trouble.”
Koso spoke. “We take care of the other part.”
* * *
The brothers figured the taker had been in the bar the night Bytchkov had brought his precious. Who else would have known it was there? I reminded them that I had been there and Koso smiled. “The vault software was tickled during the day, when all decent men are sleeping. You was out to Gulliver the whole time.”
So I had an alibi, which was comforting; but the Basse
ndis wanted me to work for them, which was not so comforting. We went over the surveillance videos and identified everyone present, weeded out those too honest or too inept, and they asked me to investigate the ones who had dropped Mars-side.
That included Hot Dog, of course, who had that guild meeting to run. And Willy’s job, like mine, required periodic commutes. But VJ had also dropped, taking some personal days to “bone up” at a calcium spa. Among the handful of Martians in the bar, a petite ice-miner—Gloria “Iceman,” from Rosario—had already gone home.
“And we’d appreciate it, Mickey, if ye’d look up our depositor and find out what he given us.”
Koso said, “And it shows up for sale, we might trace the taker.”
“But we’d rather you not tell him it’s been stolen.”
“Bad for business.”
I had a private notion that Bytchkov already knew it was stolen. He just didn’t know it had been stolen from him.
* * *
Port Rosario sits in Arabia, a densely cratered, heavily eroded upland in the Northern Territories. Despite its name, it sits over some of the richest ice-bearing strata on Mars. Old water-canyons wind through the terrain and onto the lowlands, an ancient ocean bed. The dome is set in a deep crater and protected by hobartium loops that deflect incoming cosmic radiation. Mars is a hardscrabble world and attracts hardscrabble folk. No one would go there, weren’t for the archeology and the asteroid-capture program.
Everybody needs a hobby, and the Visitors’ hobby had been throwing rocks at Earth. They had booby-trapped a mess of Main Belt asteroids to drop earthward if we ever got too nosy. If it was some kind of sociopathic IQ test, like some folks thought, we had passed. We had bridled scores of ’stroids with magnetic sails and tacked them into GEO for mining and smelting. And if you’re going to bridle asteroids, Mars is the go-to place. You need less delta-vee going up and down from Mars than hopping rock to rock. That’s why the Visitors come to Mars back when Man was squatting in the forest primeval; and that’s why we’re there now.
Port Rosario always looked down-at-the-heels. There was dust everywhere. I don’t care how good the precipitators are. They say you can never see Venus because clouds hide the surface. The same is true of Mars, except everything is covered with dust. You need a broom to see the true surface. The Martian wind is not very fierce—the air’s too thin—but it’s persistent. A dust storm can develop in hours, cover the planet in days and last for weeks. Some of it gets inside the domes in spite of all, and gives everything a rough, gritty look.
Rosarians were also rough and gritty, miners and teamsters being far from genteel, so it was well to walk careful. I tried to look dangerous whenever I strolled around town and carried enough mass to make it convincing and a set of brass knuckles in case it wasn’t.
The town is laid out on a simple spoke-and-wheel street-plan. I arrived toward local sunset and took a room in Coughlin House in the northern quadrant with a nice view of the lowlands. Nothing but the best for the Authority. I tossed my gear in the room and headed for Centre Square, which was located exactly where you’d expect.
Local custom says everyone goes there first and shakes hands with the statue of Jacinta Rosario. She’s portrayed without a helmet, which is historically inaccurate but artistically necessary. The statue is surrounded by grass and wildflowers and the only open trickle-fountain on Mars. Periodically, someone worries about “wasting water,” but since Rosario is a closed system, the water doesn’t really get wasted, and the size of the “Fossil Aquifer” underneath the town is good for a great long time. It’s not like Martians are profligate, but like they’ll tell you: “Anything for Jacinta.”
Pilot House is out the end of Mercado Radial by the ATC tower. That’s where zeppelin pilots check in. I stuck my head in the Chief Pilot’s office and asked if Jaroslav Bytchkov was in town and he checked the logs and told me to try Dominick’s Tavern at Mercado and Fourth. That was the heart of the Groin, where the merchant association had chipped in to hire a marshal to patrol the streets and break up fights. The neighborhood was called the Groin because it was a bad place to get your kicks.
* * *
Dominick’s proved a three-story duroplast building facing inward from the Dome. Apartments were on the second and third floors. No fine views for them. I found a café across the street—One-Ball Murphy’s—with a view of the entrance and waited for Bytchkov to show. I ordered a drink of “whiskey,” though it wouldn’t pass muster in Scotland or Kentucky. I think One-Ball boiled it out back in an old radiator.
I noticed Gloria Iceman at another table, also watching Dominick’s. That was interesting, so I clicked a pix with my handi and made a note. Ice miners generally hung out in the south quadrant, around the mine elevators, not here near the aerodrome. I don’t think she recognized me, but the next time I looked, she was gone and I hadn’t seen her leave.
It was 2100 when I saw Bytchkov exit Dominick’s right under the street-lamp. It must have been Old Home Week, because he was in animated conversation with Moynihan Truth. The young man had not been in the Dog the night Bytchkov squirreled his precious, but here he was chatting him up like an aged uncle with a legacy. I took a few more pix—and became suddenly aware that the other two seats at my table had acquired occupants.
On my right sat a pale, hard-faced woman with the indefinable glam of a rocket jock. She smiled at me, but it wasn’t a friendly smile and she didn’t say anything. On my left, a dusky man with obsidian eyes held a quarterstaff in his right hand. I nodded to him.
“Morning, marshal,” I said.
It was Tiki Ferrer. “Morning, Mickey. What’s a respectable Phobic like you doing in the Groin at night?”
“Just getting my land legs back,” I told him. “Came down from the Dogs at sunset.”
“And snapping pix like a muffing tourist,” he marveled. “Fourth and Merc’ isn’t a noted tourist spot. Why the interest?”
I’m pretty good at arithmetic, and added one and one. “Which are you watching, Bytchkov or Truth?”
“What is Truth?” he asked me. “That the young guy? Tell me about him.”
That meant Bytchkov was the marshal’s target and he was taking an interest in anyone who took an interest. That included Moynihan. It also included me. It was no skin off my nose, so I told him what I knew about the Truther.
Tiki introduced the woman as Genie Satterwaithe, a courier on the Red Ball laying over on Mars while her loop was refurbished and stocked up for the Green Ball to Earth. She had earlier flown ballistics and orbitals around the home world, which accounted for her implicit swagger even sitting down.
“I’m trying to talk her into signing on with Iron Planet,” Tiki told me.
“What’s your interest in Bytchkov?” I asked him. When the marshal demurred I flashed my badge. I wasn’t on Authority business, but Tiki didn’t have to know that.
“That’s a Port Authority badge, Mickey. It doesn’t push much mass down here.”
“Look, marshal, this ain’t for broadcast, but Bytchkov deposited something for safekeeping up in Panic Town and it’s been stolen. I’m trying to find out what it was without tipping him off.” That was the truth, if not the whole truth.
Bytchkov turned and re-entered his rooming house. Moynihan made an obscene gesture to his back. Tiki sighed. “One more name for the list of people less than pleased with Jaroslav Bytchkov. Why doesn’t that list ever get shorter?”
Satterwaithe said, “It’s a gift he has.”
Tiki showed me a holo of a tall, lean woman. “This is Despina Edathanal,” he said. “Recognize her?”
I shook my head. She had the lanky physique of the spaceborn. She hadn’t been in the Dog. “She’s a tall drink of water,” I said. “I’d’ve noticed her.”
“She’s digmaster out at Cassini,” Tiki said. “She filed a complaint against Bytchkov, claiming that he’s filched Visitor artifacts.”
Much was thereby explained. The Visitors were a long time gone
, but they had left some trash behind. A Visitor artifact could fetch enough troy ounces Earth-side to make snatching the Bassendi Brothers Benevolent Fund look like chump change and not worth the risk. The trick would be getting the artifact from Mars to Earth, and I began to see how that might have been arranged.
“A couple days ago,” Tiki continued, “Edathanal braced him right here in Murphy’s and told him if he didn’t return the goods she would tear off his left arm and beat him to death with it.”
“His left arm?”
“Yeah, she was being nice. Bytchkov’s right-handed. Anyhow, Bytchkov lifted for Phobos the next day. Want to tell me who he left the packet with?”
I shook my head. “Wouldn’t be a health-conscious choice.”
Tiki grunted. “So. Tell Koso hello when you see him.”
“I’m starting to think Pondo has the brains in the family.”
“Someone has to. Jaroslav’s had some in-your-face time with a half dozen people these past two days. Words were exchanged, as they say, and fists a couple times. Now he’ll only meet with one person at a time and only at a time and place of his choosing.” Tiki laid out a series of holos on the table, each the size and shape of a standard playing card. “Tell me if you know any of these people.”
One was the archeologist from the dig; another, the ice miner I had seen in the Dog. There were three guys I’d never laid eyes on; but the other three were Hot Dog, VJ, and Willy. I told him who they were.
“Bytchkov had fights with all eight of these?” I said.
“Let’s say spirited discussions. I guess I should add that fellow Moynihan. I have a feeling he’s the one smuggling the stolen artifacts off Phobos.”
“The yellow-tagged loops,” I said, and explained about the defective kickers. “Moynihan’s in Logistics. He could’ve rigged those defects in the first place, then instead of salvaging the parts, hung the loops out with the contraband. Since the parts are already accounted for, they won’t be noticed until Corporate runs a material balance.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 93