Titans

by Edward W. Robertson

  I pointed up at the corner. "You too!"

  "I'm sorry, Rob!" Fay said.

  Pete pounded inside. He took one step toward me and Baxter held up his hand in a guard.

  "And from you, you bully," I said.

  "What?" he said.

  Baxter rolled his hand in a come-on gesture. "Say you're sorry."

  "I apologize for my misdeeds?" Pete said.

  "Accepted." I rolled off Baxter and stood, panting. "I'm going to take a shower. I want some mush waiting for me when I get out. Then, partners, I want you to bring me up to speed."

  Silently, the AI waited for the gunman to die. They'd caught him off guard. Baxter imagined, once word got out, the next one wouldn't be as easy. He said as much.

  Arthur frowned and bobbed his face-image, his version of a nod. "They probably know already. Heart monitor or something."

  Baxter threw the pistol on the ground. "What do we do now?"

  "What are you doing throwing that aside? That's a murder weapon!"

  "I don't have fingerprints." He gave the other machine a look. "And I don't think we need to worry about DNA."

  6

  The Red Planet, when you got right on top of it, turned out mostly brown and orange with small white yarmulkes on its poles. When I'd been here in 2071, New Houston had been a three-dome city so degenerate its 1200 citizens had wiped their ass with toilet paper and broadcast movie files from a pirate station. 129 years later, a handful of independent domes dotted other spots across Mars' surface, but they'd all stalled half-finished and underfinanced, unable to stabilize their bacteria vats, struggling to maintain dependable O2 output, falling behind the water demands of increasingly finicky colonists. New Houston remained Mars' only true city; with resources so limited, it made more sense to keep adding to existing infrastructure than to start a new town from scratch. From two miles above the thin winds and grease-fine dust, the city's three hundred bubbles touched sides like a clutch of frog's eggs.

  Somewhere in all those domes, a constitutionalist lawyer named Shelby Mayes had been arrested for drunkenly assaulting the son of a city board member, and no member of New Houston's Auxiliary Investigative Department, the private police available to anyone unsatisfied with the bare-bones public force, would touch the case at any price.

  Prior to the arrest, Mayes and her team had spent months prepping constitutional rights packages for the vulnerable laborers readying to leave Titan for worlds unknown. Scheduled to depart in four months, their chances for airtight foundational doctrines would be crippled if they had to bring a new legal team up to speed now. Baxter thought HemiCo had set up Mayes and bought off the AID. Fay thought it was more complicated than that but would work out in the end. Pete, he thought it was her own fault.

  I thought we needed our own assessment.

  "We should go talk to her," I said on our way down from the orbital port that functioned as Grand Central between atmo traffic and the void-crawlers.

  Baxter frowned. "She gave her statement to the police. I assume you didn't read it."

  "Better to trust a traveling salesman than a drunk," Pete said.

  "Even if she told the truth, memories change," I said. "Things come back to you. Or you forget and make up what you wish had happened instead. If you want to do this, our first step is to make sure we know what really happened."

  "Go for it," Fay said. "You've got two weeks until the trial."

  That seemed impossibly swift for a case as high-profile as hers, but New Houston justice was famous on Earth for making Draco look like Huggo. It was entirely privatized or something entirely unclear to me; to cut costs, the penal corporations had lobbied to rush any case short of the death penalty (which they still used!) through the system as soon as it came in. If you were found innocent, court costs were thus minimized. And if you were guilty, you got sent straight to work on the city's ever-growing infrastructure, paying off your literal debt to society through hard labor.

  The limited public courts worked with the same haste. Martians hated to pay for something as fleeting as justice.

  And they seemed to hate cameras worse. While America was one big live news feed from coast to coast, New Houston didn't even have cameras in their prisons. At least not in the visiting room at Mills Pen, a bare concrete room divided by a wall-to-wall transparent plastic screen. The guard clanked the door behind us and posted up on the other side. Opposite the clear plastic, Shelby Mayes sat alone. Mid-thirties. Bedraggled hair tied up in a ponytail. One elbow thrown over the back of her chair. She looked like a waitress catching her breath after shooing the last diner out the door, not the brilliant, uncompromising, constitutionally-trained crusader of labor law that had made her the AIs' first choice. Her fine features were drawn by the combination of exhaustion, boredom, and anxiety that had marked all slaves and prisoners since the dawn of time—I'd worn them myself in Persian captivity—but she'd be pretty enough, if you liked thin blond whites, which I didn't especially, after a shower and a nap.

  "Baxter," she nodded, voice passing right through the screen. She gazed at me. "Who are you two?"

  "That's Pete Gutierrez. I'm Rob Dunbar. We're your new investigative team."

  "Here to rescue me."

  "Damn right."

  She rolled her eyes, settling them on Baxter. "You shouldn't be here. This is HemiCo's world. If they find you, they'll take you."

  He laughed coldly. "I would be transcendent with delight to let them try. Also, we have backup." He tapped the flesh-colored dot mike on his throat. The one that gave us an encrypted line straight to Fay in high orbit.

  "Like that'll stop them."

  "I want to hear your story," I said.

  "What, you can't read?"

  "Yeah, I hope that's not a problem. Baxter couldn't afford anyone literate."

  "Look." Mayes glanced between us without looking directly at any one person. "There's not much you can do. Cut your losses and run with someone from my team instead."

  "Not a good idea," Fay said through our earbuds.

  "Why's that?" I said.

  Mayes have me a sharp look. "Because my jail term is going to overlap your negotiation window?"

  "Because she has the sharpest mind for constitutional law of her generation," Fay said. "And because I have a feeling about her."

  I snorted. "You brought me here because you had a feeling?"

  "What are you talking about?" Mayes said.

  "I'm talking to the gods, not you. You can start pitying yourself again in five minutes. Right now I need you to tell me exactly what happened that night."

  "It won't change anything." She sighed through her nose and leaned her elbows on her knees. "It had been a long day with the team. They all are. Figuring the best way to raise spirits is to drink a lot of them, I took them to the Mariner. A dive in the Old Outer Ring. Got there around 9 PM. Local time. Settled in. Nothing unusual.

  "Clifton Prelutsky came by about drunk o'clock. Sometime between 13:00 and 1 AM. I went up for another round. He was holding court at the bar, his father's son, blah blah powertrip. I got into it with him over immigration—verbally. Oldest argument on Mars: 'How can you claim to be the leading light of personal liberty and then refuse every immigrant you wouldn't want to live next door to?'"

  She gave me a wry look. "Did you know Earthside govs actually pay us to take in samtowners? It's cheaper than subsidizing their whole lives in the States. Then jerkoffs like Prelutsky have the balls to complain about all the free labor. We duked it out for a while, a couple regulars put in their two cents, then I went and sat back down with my team.

  "Viv and Braden were itching to screw, so they bolted. Vance was outside on his omni, I think." Shelby gazed down at the plastic desk. "I don't remember what happened after that. Blacked out. Still mad, and no one at my table to cool me down. Supposedly I went back to the bar, called Prelutsky's name, and when he turned around, I broke his jaw."

  "And there's no video feed on any of this," I said.

&
nbsp; She squinted at me through the clear wall. "In the Mariner?"

  "No personal omni clips."

  "Mars is a long ways from Earth. Half those guys don't even carry one."

  "At any time was your drink out of your grasp?" Pete said.

  "Why? That a favorite trick of yours, big guy?"

  "I wouldn't be interested."

  I punched his arm. "Not helpful. Ms. Mayes—"

  "Shelby."

  "Pain in the Ass, Esquire," I amended. "Any witnesses?"

  "Three. Their stories corroborate Prelutsky's. It's in the file."

  "Over the course of your discussion, did he at any point provoke or threaten you?"

  "Look, that's everything I remember." She slapped her palm on the desk. Behind us, the guard poked his head in; Baxter waved him away. Shelby pinched the bridge of her nose. "I don't even know how I got home. You want anything else, you read the file."

  "I will." I stood. "If that's what it takes to get you out of here, I will read a file."

  We left. The late afternoon sunlight passed through the dome's anti-radiation tinting and rested on my skin as lightly as a dragonfly.

  "She look strong enough to break a man's jaw with one punch?" I said to Pete.

  "Well, you know. Get someone at the right angle. Plus the gravity here, your bones get lighter. Crunchy. Like cereal."

  "Your dad was a drunk, wasn't he?" I said. Pete's face went blank. I hurried back on-topic. "I don't know. Politician's son, wants to follow suit, I bet he lifts weights every day. Regular gravity training, even. Can't look weak, especially on this dog-eat-dog world."

  "We should go to this Mariner," Baxter said. "It will be a king's bounty of intel."

  "What are you hoping to find? You think it's a coincidence she's arrested right before she leaves to negotiate what could be the most important settlement of the era?"

  "Not at all. It's obvious HemiCo is involved. It's so obvious that their only solution is to sweep it so far under the rug you couldn't find it if you were a carpet tack."

  "She sounds like a drunk to me," Pete said.

  When I'd lived here, Earth-shipped minicars had been so expensive you had to be the son of Ares himself to afford one. Apparently the snob label had stuck to the vehicles long after they scraped together some homegrown manufacturing, because unlike its namesake, New Houston was still a walking town. Once the city's fringe, the Old Outer Ring was just a few domes away from the justice center. None of us suggested trying to find a cab.

  The dome wall pitched steeply down as we neared its edge. Few domes were wholly separated from those around them—most shared walls, near their bases, with as few as two and as many as six others—and wherever one bubble intersected another, a short, broad tunnel mouthed between them, functioning primarily as a passage, but also as an emergency airlock in the event of a habitat failure. Fay said the wealthiest domes had finally won the right to close themselves off to nonresidents, but by and large the tunnel doors stood open night and day.

  We crossed into a run-down low-ceilinged neighborhood of street shops, grimy orangestone walkups , and dusty unpaved streets throbbing with pedestrian traffic. Food stands sold repurposed algae, shaped into cubes or noodles or pureed into an off-red milkshake. Whatever form the food took, it was heavy with the smell of pepper, cinnamon, cumin, hibiscus, and garlic, none of which could mask the briny tang of aquatic chlorophyll. I stopped for a bowl of noodles and trailed in Pete's wake, protected from stray elbows by his Earth-molded mass. New Houston's streetside energy reminded me of Tukwila's, but somehow muted, muffled. Except the homeless, everyone here had some kind of "real" job. Maybe that was the difference between Tukwila's jungle-pulse profusion and the generic big city feel of New Houston's low-rent neighborhoods: species grow brightest in the nutrient-rich tropics, where all that food puts fewer limits on nature's ridiculous imagination.

  The next dome was a desolate row of chunky gray cubes. Even Baxter hurried. Orangestones sprung back up in the bubble after that. The flagship of Shelby's debauchery, the Mariner lurked in a two-story building crammed against the dome wall. A rust-pitted anchor hung over the front door. Above its drunk bustle, the second-floor apartments housed either the deaf, the poorest of the poor, or the terminally self-loathing.

  Inside, a crew of regulars slugged drinks and puffed smokeables of several odors. Mars was infamous for its drug laws—specifically, that they didn't have any—but the only people I'd seen smoking or snorting on the streets were the obviously jobless. If these men had employers, their bosses clearly gave no damn as to what they did with their free time.

  "My kind of place." I led the charge.

  Behind the bar, an irregular and dark-grained surface that appeared to be real wood, a tanned man in his sixties cranked his head around like a gargoyle, snowy hair ringing his bald head.

  "Double whiskey soda," I said, then turned to the others, brows raised.

  "Same," Baxter said.

  "Water," Pete said.

  "Girl scout," the bartender editorialized. When he turned his back, Pete spilled a salt shaker across the bar.

  The old man clapped our drinks in front of us, sloshing amber over the wood. Baxter got out his wallet and held it open like a paperback, extracted one of the paper bills Martians used (I suspected they liked to be able to touch their cash), and flattened it against the counter.

  "This is one hundred ares. Is that enough to buy some answers?"

  I clapped my palm over the bill. "You idiot."

  "What? I suppose we have to waste time buying more drinks and chumming it up first?" Baxter squared his shoulders on the old man. "Do you like having your time wasted?"

  The man raised a brow. "That one of your questions?"

  "Were you here six days ago? The night of—" Baxter paused, throat moving, getting a translation of the Martian calendar from Fay. "The 14th?"

  "If you're asking about the blond, quit wasting time and ask."

  "What happened?" I said.

  "Skinny bitch punched that rich boy's chin right in."

  "Before that."

  "She came up for a drink. They argued about new folks busing in. When she turned around, he said something about a tragedy."

  I cocked my head. "A tragedy?"

  "That an ass like that was attached to a mouth like hers." He sniffed. "She came back a minute later, busted him up."

  "Her drink, was it touched?" Pete said.

  The old man shrugged. "Not that I saw. But I'm not a babysitter."

  Baxter flattened another bill beside the first. "Anything else?"

  The bartender pinched up his mouth. "Save your money. Truth's already been sold."

  Baxter went very still. "I see."

  "What about the buyer?" I said. The old man glanced toward the door. He worked his jaw, beard ruffling. I waved my hand. "Forget it. I know who owns this world."

  "It's a hard city," he nodded, suddenly angry. "Why I keep a third eye on the place."

  Baxter pressed his gut against the bar. "You've got a cam—?"

  Pete's hand snaked over Baxter's mouth and clamped down hard.

  "How much?" I said.

  The old man cocked a brow. "Three grand."

  "We could practically buy our own ship for that," I muttered.

  Baxter spit out Pete's hand. "Done."

  "Apartment E." The bartender raised his eyes to the ceiling. "Come by around three."

  "Tomorrow?"

  "Tonight," he glared.

  We ordered another round for appearances, and because drinking is fun, then shoved off to lose ourselves in a neighboring dome until the clock rolled around. At a cafe patio, Pete and I found common ground in some tongue-peeling espresso. Water boiled differently on Mars and they'd used that to invent a whole new brewing technique.

  "They set her up," Baxter announced. "Some chieftain at Olympian Atomics cut a deal with HemiCo to chop the legs out from our negotiations."

  I was still a little buzzed. "My God, do you th
ink they shot JFK, too?"

  "Jakarta Free Kinetics? You think they're involved, too?"

  "Why would OA bother with all these little games? If they're just going to sabotage every step of the negotiations, why agree to negotiate at all?"

  "You heard Lee Jefferson. Customers get grumpy with brand names who openly commit atrocities."

  "You're giving them an awful lot of credit, setting Shelby up to drunkenly punch some jerk in the face."

  "Wait until we see that tape," Baxter scowled, distracting a passing man so thoroughly he walked right into a ten-year-old boy. The kid whumped into the dust and tried not to cry.

  Something about the nonstop passersby troubled me. I didn't pin down what until that night when we returned to see the bartender. He opened the door to his rathole apartment, coughed into one big-knuckled fist, and smoothed his beard. That's when it struck me: he was among the oldest people I'd seen in the run-down domes we'd been hanging out in. On Earth, a bevy of pills and treatments under public insurance had stretched the average lifespan past the century mark. On Mars, it was strange to see so many young people, so few sagging faces and white-haired heads.

  We traded cash for the bartender's memstick, hired a cab with a whining electric engine that could barely make running speed, and retreated to our hotel.

  The film was mute and poorly angled. The camera had been positioned inside a small round hole; after seeing the Mariner, I'd readily believe it had been hidden in the muzzle of a revolver. Baxter beamed the file to Fay. In the course of ten seconds, the ship located the relevant segment of tape, cleaned it up, and beamed it back down. We watched Shelby amble up to the bar, speak to the bartender, and argue with a sharp-nosed young man for two full minutes. She disappeared off-camera, sipping as she went, and reappeared forty seconds later. The young man turned; Shelby's fist crashed into his chin.

  "Well, who knows," I said. "Maybe HemiCo tripped her into him."

  "Watch the next clip," Fay said into our ears.

  The timestamp jumped half an hour. The bartender's head turned toward the door. Two men in dark jackets leaned on the bar, facing the camera. They ordered drinks, spoke to the bartender and two witnesses who'd stuck around, then paid their tab with a thick stack of bills, leaving two other stacks behind as tips. After they left, the two witnesses set their drinks over the cash, exchanged words, and bent over the bar laughing at an unheard joke. When they straightened up, the money was gone.