Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “See that?” I said over the suit radio.

  “Aye,” replied Mac.

  The tracks told the story. Rory had tried to run: you could see the place where he’d leapt up, and where he’d impacted ten meters farther ahead. The meese had leapt as well, and there were clear signs that they’d all ended up tussling on the ground. And then for the rest of the way, there were only the two large sets of tracks, but one had adopted a shorter gait; I assumed a moose had picked up and carried Rory—who might well have been screaming and kicking—from that point on.

  The spaceship was a stubby spindle, with its front and rear points lifted above the ground. Cargo hatches—some open, some closed—were visible, and there was a ramp coming down from what looked to be an airlock door. We walked closer, and I shined my suit’s chest light up at the hull, which was a yellowish beige.

  Along the bow, in script letters, were the words Kathryn Denning. My light was hitting the hull obliquely, revealing just beneath and behind that name some slightly raised lettering that had been painted over; under normal full-on lighting conditions I doubt it would be visible at all, and if I hadn’t already known it said B. Traven, I probably couldn’t have made it out.

  A spaceship was a good place for a hostage-taking: it was designed to survive micrometeoroid impacts, which meant it could take a hail of bullets, too. It also had its own life-support system—and it could take off if need be.

  Mac walked up the ramp, which was pretty steep, and he tried the door. It was locked. Mac told his phone to get him the New Klondike office of InnerSystem Lines; this close to the dome, his phone worked fine, and I could hear his conversation over our shared radio link.

  The phone rang four times, and I thought perhaps everyone had gone home for the day. But then a woman’s voice said, “InnerSystem. How can I help you?”

  “I’m Detective Dougal McCrae of the New Klondike Police Department, and this is an emergency. I’m standing outside the Kathryn Denning, and need access to the interior.”

  “Just a second,” said the woman, then: “I’m told I need an authorization code word from you.”

  “The code word is ‘jasper,’” said Mac.

  “Yes, right, okay,” said the woman. “Well, to get in, you just need to punch in the master skeleton-key combination code on the keypad next to the airlock; it’ll open any door on the ship, including the airlock one. Let me know when you’re in position, and I’ll recite it to you.”

  The keypad was behind a hatch helpfully labeled “Keypad” in English; there was also some Chinese, which doubtless said the same thing. Mac opened the little hatch and said, “Go.”

  “Five zero four,” said the woman, then, “three two nine, three one seven, five one zero.”

  Mac pressed keys and the door slid about fifteen centimeters to the left; presumably it had been spring-loaded but held in place by the lock. The slight displacement revealed a recessed handle. Mac put his gloved fingers into it and pulled the outer door the rest of the way, revealing a chamber no bigger than an old-fashioned phone booth—something I’d seen in plenty of movies but never in real life.

  Mac was still carrying the disruptor as he entered the tiny chamber. I pushed myself inside. It belatedly occurred to me that the surface suit Mac was wearing was probably bulletproof. I wondered if the plain one I’d chosen was similarly equipped.

  Mac turned around and pulled the outer door shut. He then pressed the one large button on the airlock’s left wall; it was labeled “Cycle” in English, and again presumably the same thing in Chinese. I couldn’t hear air being pumped into the chamber, but I felt the growing pressure of it on my suit. When the pressure reached that of the ship’s interior, a green light went on above the inner door, and, for good measure, it popped aside fifteen centimeters, revealing a recessed handle just like the one on the outer door.

  Mac shimmied around—it really was meant to be a one-person airlock—and pulled on the handle, sliding the door all the way aside.

  He still had the tracking device, but it was hard for him to operate it and hold the disruptor, so he handed the tracker to me. I tried to use finger gestures on the display to zoom in, but it wasn’t responding to the touch of my glove. Since we were now at normal air pressure, I pulled off my right glove and tried again. The dot indicated that Rory was about thirty meters toward the stern, and I gestured to Mac that we should start walking in that direction.

  The interior of the ship was well lit—in fact, too well lit. We tended to keep things a bit dimmer on Mars, since we only got about one-quarter of the sunlight Earth did. I found myself squinting. But I also peered around, trying to picture the horrors that had occurred aboard this ship all those years ago, and my mind started playing tricks. I was still breathing the same bottled air I had been out on the surface, but it now had an iron tang to it, as though it smelled of blood.

  I assumed the meese hadn’t counted on being tracked here and so wouldn’t be expecting us. Still, the broadband disruptor wasn’t easily aimed. If they’d kept Reiko rather than Rory, Mac could have fired the disruptor blindly into a room. But we couldn’t risk taking out Rory, too.

  Mac and I walked stealthily down the corridor, me in true gumshoe fashion and him in flatfoot mode. We soon heard voices up ahead and made an effort to be even quieter. The voices were muffled not because they were coming from behind a closed door—they weren’t—but rather because Mac and I were still wearing our fishbowls. I undogged the fasteners, lifted mine off, and tucked it under my arm.

  In reality, the air inside the ship did smell different: it was musty and stale. Without the helmet, I could hear the voices more clearly. It must have been the two meese: they had the same thick-and-slow speech Trace had had. They occasionally interrupted each other, which was strange and hard to parse: two identical voices overlapping.

  Rory, if he was still with them, wasn’t saying anything. I consulted the scanner and tried to judge the location the voices were coming from. It looked like the meese and Rory were now in separate rooms: the two thugs sounded like they were ahead but to the left and Rory was showing as ahead and to the right. I indicated that Mac should head off to immobilize the meese, and that I’d rescue Dr. Pickover; my phone had recorded the lock-override code that had been dictated to Mac and could play it back to me if I needed it for another door.

  Sure enough, the little corridor we were in had come to its end, and there were two doors in front of us. The one on the left had its door open, and I could actually see the broad back of one of the meese through it; he was wearing the same clothes as before. The door on the right was closed. It had a sign on it, and although I couldn’t make out the writing the symbol above it was clear: a caduceus; this was the sickbay.

  I put my glove back on and looked at Mac. This was almost too easy. If Rory was safe behind the closed door on the right, Mac could take out the meese on the left, then we could spring the professor and be on our way. Except for one thing: Mac probably thought the kidnappers deserved due process, blah, blah, blah. Fine; he could use the disruptor to hold them at bay until the cavalry finally finished with the riot and showed up.

  We didn’t have a lot of time to think. The meese hadn’t yet detected us, but if either of them happened to look out the open door of the room they were in, they’d see us. And so, while we still had the element of surprise, Mac shifted the disruptor so that he was holding it like a shield, and he surged forward, shouting through his surface suit’s speaker, “NKPD! Freeze!”

  THIRTY-TWO

  The visible moose turned to face us, looking startled. I ran toward the door on the right and hit the keypad, and pounded out the skeleton-key numbers as fast as my phone read them back to me. I had my gun out, just in case Rory wasn’t alone, and—

  And he wasn’t. The paleontologist was lying on his back on the one and only examination bed in the sickbay. He’d been strapped down, doubtless with the aid of the meese, and his work shirt removed—small consolation, I’m sure, that thi
s time he wasn’t going to lose another favorite garment. Looming over him was a scrawny, pale man with shoe-polish-brown hair in his mid-thirties—younger than me, but a toothpick; there was no question which of us would win in a fight. Still, the man was holding a cutting laser, which he’d been in the middle of using to make a vertical incision in Rory’s chest, not unlike the one I’d seen Horatio Fernandez carve in Trace’s corpse. A deepscan was displayed on the wall; it took me a second to realize that it was showing the interior of Rory’s torso.

  I gestured with my gun at the pale man. “Drop the laser and put your hands up.”

  “Alex!” said Rory, lifting his head to look at me.

  “Hands up!” I said again to the scrawny man, who had ignored me. Meanwhile, next door, Mac shouted, “I said, freeze!” I was torn; if he needed backup, I should perhaps go help him. But a moment later, I heard Mac say, “That’s better. This is a broadband disruptor. It’s already taken down one of you today. Don’t make me use it again. Keep your hands above your heads.”

  I cocked my pistol and aimed it at the thin man’s face. “Make like your goons,” I said. “Reach for the sky.”

  The man set down the laser and did so. His arms were skeletal.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “Take a hike,” he replied in a reedy, weak voice.

  I turned my phone, attached to the suit’s left wrist, so that it could see his face. “Identify this person.”

  “Error twenty-three,” replied the device, which I had programmed to use Peter Lorre’s voice. “No probable match.”

  I shook the damn thing off and looked back out into the corridor. Mac was now marching the meese toward the airlock. I turned back to the emaciated man. “What the hell are you doing opening up Dr. Pickover?”

  Rory answered that: “I told the goons the diary is sealed inside my torso.”

  I made an impressed face. “And is it?”

  “Yes. I had Fernandez put it in there for safekeeping.” I looked at the deepscan. There was indeed the ghostly outline of an object the right size next to one of the ballast cylinders. “The goons threatened to kill Reiko if I didn’t give them the diary. I had to tell them where it was.”

  There were two chairs in the room, padded enough to be comfortable even under Earth gravity. I set my fishbowl on one of them, then pointed to the other one; the scrawny man sat on it and lowered his hands. I moved back to Pickover. The restraints were built into the medical bed, but although a patient couldn’t undo them once strapped in, the release mechanisms were plainly labeled. I lifted the latch for each of the four restraints, and Rory sat up, the incision on his chest opening a bit as he did so. A biological would be rubbing his wrists and ankles now to restore circulation, but Rory just sat there, looking daggers at his captor.

  “Let me have the diary,” I said.

  Rory hesitated for a moment then did what the skinny man had been about to do before I’d interrupted him: he stuck a hand through the plastiskin and foam rubber just below his metal sternum, rummaged around, and pulled out the diary—still missing its back cover, but sealed now in a plastic bag. He handed it to me.

  The bag was slick with clear lubricant. I didn’t want the damn thing slipping around, so I removed the little bound volume from the bag and shoved it into my surface suit’s hip pocket.

  “What’s become of Miss Takahashi?” I asked.

  Rory’s face lit up. “She escaped, Alex—with my help; I created a diversion. Those big blokes wanted to get rid of her; they want to get rid of everyone they think knows where the Alpha is, and they figured she must know, because she’s read the diary.” Rory was now putting his work shirt back on. “I kept telling them the diary doesn’t disclose the location, and Reiko told them the same thing, but they didn’t believe us.”

  I spoke to my phone while keeping my gun aimed at Rory’s captor. “Call Reiko Takahashi.”

  “Shunted to voice mail,” said Peter Lorre.

  “Call Horatio Fernandez at NewYou.”

  Three rings, then: “Hello, Alex.”

  “Horatio, has Miss Takahashi returned?”

  “No.”

  “She escaped”—I looked at Rory—“how long ago?”

  “Forty minutes, I’d say.”

  “She escaped forty minutes ago. And I’m with Dr. Pickover.”

  “I’ll let you know when she arrives here.”

  I shook the phone off. “Who are you?” I said again to the seated man.

  “Get stuffed.”

  “My phone would know you if you were a longtime Mars resident—so you aren’t. I’ll assume you came here on this ship, and you’re too chicken to go out into the dome. That’s probably wise: New Klondike is a rough place, and it wouldn’t be long before someone there decided to snap you in two.” I took a step closer. “I might even decide to do it myself, and—”

  I hadn’t paid any attention to his clothing until now, but the shirt he was wearing was burnt orange with a circular patch over the left breast, a patch bearing the “ISL” logo of InnerSystem Lines; it was a uniform top. “Christ, you’re part of the crew.” I spoke to my phone again. “How many crew on the Kathryn Denning?”

  “Two,” wheezed Peter Lorre. “A primary bowman and a backup bowman. The former normally travels awake, while the latter makes the voyage in hibernation and is only thawed out in emergencies.”

  “So which are you?” I demanded.

  “Go climb a tree,” said the man.

  “There aren’t any for a hundred million kilometers,” I replied. I looked at the phone again. “Get the names of the two bowmen from the InnerSystem office here.”

  “A moment.” Then: “The primary bowman is Beverly Kowalchuk. The backup is Jeffrey Albertson.”

  “So you’re Albertson,” I said. I gestured with my gun for him to get to his feet.

  He hesitated for a moment then did get up. It was the exact opposite of the effect one normally observed with someone newly arrived from Earth. Usually, the freshly thawed stand with way too much energy and actually lift themselves off the ground a bit; I’m tall enough that I’d bumped my head on ceilings a few times shortly after my own arrival here. But Albertson got slowly to his feet, wincing as he did so; if he was weak here, movement back on the mother world must have been excruciating for him.

  “Those thugs of yours,” I said. “One of them has already been fried—by the broadband disruptor you just heard that police officer talking about. We haven’t identified him yet, but we will—same with whoever it is inside the other two.”

  The thin man shrugged. “Uno and Dos are the only names they’ve got.”

  Pickover brightened. “Oh, I get it! Alex, the third one wasn’t called Trace; rather it was Tres—Spanish for three; sounds the same, but spelt different. Uno, Dos, Tres.”

  “Huh,” I said. “How high do the numbers go, Jeff?”

  “Jump off a cliff.”

  “So what the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

  Rory was now standing beside me. “My grandfather looked the same way,” he said. “It takes a lot out of you.”

  “What does?”

  “Well, I suppose it could be anything, but . . .”

  I waved the gun. “On the examining bed.”

  Albertson glared at me, but then did as I’d commanded. He simply sat on the bed’s edge, but it was enough. The ship’s computer obviously recognized him, even if my phone hadn’t, and his medical records came up on a monitor in the room. I scanned them quickly. “‘Stage-four lymphatic cancer.’ And those numbers don’t go any higher.” I looked at him. “Tough luck. I wouldn’t want to die in jail.”

  Albertson crossed his arms defiantly in front of his chest. I idly wondered if I could bring myself to rough up somebody in such bad shape, and—

  “Oh, my,” said Pickover. He’d been looking at Albertson’s medical record in more detail; I imagine the scientific gobbledygook meant more to him than it would
have to me. “Alex, look at this.”

  He was pointing at some text on the screen. I squinted to make it out, and—

  And I guess this wasn’t Albertson after all. Not only was the date of birth given, but the computer had also helpfully calculated his age and placed it in brackets after the date: “78 years.”

  I turned back to him, and—

  And—

  God.

  And he was the backup bowman. He—Christ, yes. I’d never heard of anything like this, but . . .

  He looked like he was in his thirties. Biologically, he probably was in his thirties.

  “You’ve been doing this forever,” I said. “For decades. You keep making trips back and forth between Earth and Mars—spending eight months or more each way in hibernation. I didn’t know it was possible to do that many stints in deep freeze, but—”

  Cancer.

  A man who’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer decades ago.

  “You’re Albertson, all right,” I said. “But that’s not the name you were born with—was it, Willem?”

  “Why don’t you—”

  “Take a long walk off a short pier? The nearest one of those is back with the trees.”

  Rory was staring at the man now, his eyes wide. “My . . . God,” he said. “Willem Van Dyke—I never thought I’d see you in the flesh, but . . .” He shook his head. “The disease has taken a lot out of you, but, yes, I can see it now. Well, well, well. There are a million things I’d like to ask you about the second expedition, but . . .” He drew his artificial eyebrows together, and his voice turned angry. “Christ, you almost killed me!”

  Van Dyke slid off the examining bed. “I did no such thing. That incision in your torso can be sealed easily enough. And besides, you can’t be killed.”

  “Not here,” said Rory. “Not now. Before. You’re the one who brought the land mines along on the B. Traven. You’re the one who booby-trapped the Alpha. Damn it, you blew half my face off! You could have killed me!”

  “You can’t be killed,” Van Dyke said. “You’re not alive.”