by Mel Odom
Even if Welby 4AR9KA survived the return trip to Podkayne colony, I knew that he would not be saved. He would be salvaged, parted out, never again an individual. His components would be spread to other units that needed replacement parts. He would never again be Welby 4AR9KA. I was certain he knew that too, yet his programming ran true, putting the welfare of humans ahead of his own. At present, he was a neomort, the living dead.
“You will be of great assistance, Welby 4AR9KA,” I told him. “I will see that wounded you are capable of assisting are brought to you.”
I thought he tried to smile, a purely human response and not one that was necessary to me, because the underlying musculature along his face shifted. However, there was no mouth to frame whatever his effort had been.
Kildare 5BE3NJ was a more aggressive medical bioroid. Where the Welby had more concern for the emotional side of patients, the Kildare was oriented toward saving lives. If amputations were necessary, the Kildare models performed them as a matter of course. No thought was given to what the patient wanted or how he or she was reacting.
Kildare and I sorted the patients. I looped him under my control, setting him up as a satellite to my master. While I worked on my patients, I provided a second opinion on those he dealt with that had major injuries. When aggressive stabilization was required, I managed those patients myself, providing more of a bedside manner than the Kildare did. As I did, I kept looping memories of Simon Blake in with my real-time experience. Simon Blake had possessed medical training as well.
Modular tents were set up outside the crawlers, providing small bubbles of controlled environment where Welby, Kildare, and I could work, and the survivors of the Scarlet Chakrams could re-outfit themselves. Given the time frames we were working under, those tasks would not be finished until dark.
Major Venturi wasn’t happy about spending the night out in the open, especially not since he was using up air and water to do it, but he didn’t want to be caught crossing rough terrain at night by hostile forces. Pro-Martian independence forces were deliberately adding to the body count every chance they got.
In my tent, I stayed busy treating the wounded. Of the fifty-seven survivors, thirty-six of them were wounded. Two of them died before I could get them stabilized. One of them was an eighteen-year-old boy who had suffered cerebral damage.
Once I had carried his body out of the tent and laid him to rest in one of the crawlers’ cargo spaces, I took in a nineteen-year-old girl named Gabrielle. When she entered the tent and disrobed from her hardsuit, she was weeping.
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
I had given her neuro-blockers to blunt the trauma from the flash burns she’d suffered from a laser blast. The blast had not compromised the integrity of her hardsuit, but it had done secondary tissue damage across her back where some of the heat had seeped through.
“No. The pain is tolerable. Thank you.” She sat on folded knees and presented her blistered back for my inspection. Her brunette hair was cut as short as her male counterparts. She looked fragile.
“I knew him.”
“Who?”
“Leif Tetsura. Your last patient. The man who just…died.” Her voce softened and broke.
“I’m sorry for your loss. There was nothing I could do. His injuries were unrecoverable.”
She nodded. “I know. I was surprised he lived as long as he did.” She took a deep breath and let it out as I excised dead skin and applied a new layer of synthetic flesh that would protect her wound and keep it clean. The synthetic flesh was akin to what was used to give bioroids their features. “We just weren’t given a chance. The Chimeras came out of nowhere and hit us.”
I didn’t pause in what I was doing, but my investigative subroutine stepped to the forefront. “Your attackers were the Chimeras?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Their units were clearly marked.” She cursed. “I’d heard stories about those people, but I thought they were gone. Dead, maybe. Or back on Earth or the Moon. They haven’t been active on Mars in years.”
“Why did they attack you?”
“I don’t know if they attacked us or if we just caught them by surprise. Our comm team had caught some strange blips on the frequencies. We went to investigate, just keeping the perimeter secure. Strictly by the book. But the way it turned out, we rolled up on a hornet’s nest.”
* * *
I didn’t finish with the last patient, a man with two broken legs, until 0427. Once he was out the door of the tent, I went to see Welby 4AR9KA.
He sat in his tent braced up by a tool vise used by crawler mechanics. No one was with him. Since he was alone and no one was expected to see him for treatment now, the oxygen and CO2 scrubber had been detached to save oxygen as well as battery power. He also had been left without a light and the darkness covered him. His silver eyes glinted as they tracked me, but that was a passive subroutine response because he had 360-degree vision as well.
I accessed his personal frequency. “Permission to enter.”
“Of course, McDreamy.” Welby waved to me.
I peeled the two openings back and stepped into the small tent.
“Welcome.” Welby waved to a camp chair in front of him. “Please be seated.”
I sat. “Thank you.”
“What brings you to me?”
“Two things. First, I want to thank you for all the work that you did today. The patients are all well cared for.”
“I am glad. I wish I were not so handicapped. I could have been of more use.” The image of his torn and disfigured face made me uncomfortable to a small degree.
I knew he was not in any pain, but after seeing the injuries I had worked on today and the victims of violence I had observed in the performance of my job at the NAPD, I had a hard time resolving that he was all right.
“You served your unit well.”
“Thank you. What is the second thing?”
“Did you witness the attack?”
“I did.”
“I was told the attack came from a mercenary unit called the Chimeras.”
“I saw several such markings on their vehicles. I could not identify anyone.”
“Perhaps I can. May I access your archived memory?”
“Of course.”
I put my hand on his chest and linked with his memories. The attacking force had been the Chimeras. I recognized one of them immediately, and I thought I would be able to find her because Simon Blake knew her habits.
I gave Welby a message for Hayim, then told Welby goodbye. Within minutes I was outside the defensive perimeter and walking west. Leigh Bonner and the Chimeras would be out there somewhere. I intended to find them.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Simon’s memories swirled within me as I cycled through the airlock leading to Paxton Node’s underground. Like most of the node cities on Mars, Paxton was more way station than a colony, a pocket of civilization that catered to the extra-curricular interests of the terraforming crews in the surrounding area. This was the frontier, raw and uncertain, and law enforcement didn’t exist except for roving Martian military units.
I followed the winding staircase down three levels below planet surface. Aboveground, nodes tended to only expose necessary solar collecting wheels and plants grown to produce oxygen, making the most of the surface area. Keeping atmosphere was easier underground, though there were occasional problems with individuals and groups that tried to expand their space without filing the proper requests for those expansions. Smuggling was still a big business in the nodes.
The first two floors housed shops for goods and services and tended to look respectable to visitors that didn’t know what the nodes were truly about. Below that, though, the world turned to hedonism and catered to the baser needs of the men and women that reshaped the outer fringe of Martian civilization.
Simon had been here before several times. I knew that although I couldn’t latch onto a specific memory of his
visits there. I didn’t feel comfortable in this place, but Simon did.
“Just remember, partner,” Shelly said as she walked at my side, “you’re not Simon Blake, and these people you’re looking for are dangerous.”
“I remember.” I passed by Snarky Pete’s, a strip club Simon remembered, and then passed by Pandora’s Pleasures, a sensie shop specializing in auto-erotica, Battick’s House of Smoke, which had its own airlock and CO2 scrubbers, and other clubs. Simon didn’t remember all of them. Nodes were constantly undergoing change dictated by their degrees of lawlessness. Paxton served rough trade and was always in transition. All the colors of the rainbow existed in the advertising, but only in neon.
But Mike’s Saloon still had its doors open. Simon’s yearning for the place stirred within me as I approached the bar.
Dark and unadorned instead of decked in gaudy colors and flashing displays, Mike’s looked like a decrepit bar on its last legs. That wasn’t the truth, though. Deals were done in Mike’s that netted thousands of cred every day as the smugglers made their arrangements, and they all paid a percentage to Mike Dubronsky, the club’s owner, for the guaranteed privacy he provided in his institution.
Two huge clones stood guard at the shadowed door. Even the lighting at that end of the tunnel was deliberately subdued. The clones were beefed-up sec models genenginered to look intimidating, hugely muscled, and slightly green. That was only for those who could be frightened by physical prowess. The true danger was the hidden fully automatic slug-throwers recessed in the club’s front.
Both clones blocked my entrance to the bar. One of them held up a large hand. “Sorry, friend. No public admittance tonight. Members only. Special meeting is in session.”
“I’m a member,” I said.
He held up his PAD. “Let’s see your bonafides.”
I pulsed my PAD, sending him the false ID Hayim had constructed for me, and I added a passcode I got from Simon’s memories. The alpha numeric was there waiting for me.
“That’s an old passcode.” The clone frowned at the reading.
“It’s been a long time and I’ve been away,” I replied. “Am I cleared?”
A moment passed and I considered the fact that I didn’t have any options. Reluctantly, the clone nodded and stepped to the side. “Enjoy your visit.”
I passed through the door and into the dark confines of Mike’s. The white noise generator at the entrance blocked the crashing sounds of the music blaring from the speakers; whirling lights burned through the shadows that draped the interior.
I kept moving. Coming to a stop inside a bar like Mike’s was guaranteed to draw immediate attention. I split off to the left, making my way toward a table in the back, avoiding the long bar.
Mike’s didn’t boast much in the way of decoration. In addition to the ochre-tinted transplas bar and the tables and chairs, several holos of sports events, vidcasts carrying stories about the unrest surging through the colonies, and old films played above the bar.
I pulled out a chair and sat, scanning the crowd around me.
Leigh Bonner sat at the bar taking drags off a narc-stick and drinking what Simon knew could only be Irish whiskey. Mike’s had some of the best liquor because a lot of the time he took his fifteen percent of deals in merchandise which he could sell to his patrons at a markup.
Leigh was much as Simon remembered her: tall and lean, with an angular face and a narrow mouth so tight it looked like she’d just bitten into a lemon. The razor-cut hair dyed cobalt blue was new, but I knew her from Simon’s memories and the file on her that Floyd had given me. She wore rough simleathers and had a slug-thrower at her right hip and a laser pistol snugged up under her left arm. Simon knew she carried several bladed weapons with her at all times too, from knives to shuriken.
I considered how best to approach her. She and Simon had worked together well, had even been occasional lovers, which I did not know until that moment and felt uncomfortable about knowing. She had been young back then, and there was a hardness about her eyes now that hadn’t been there before.
A server approached me, but I sent him away. Deciding on the direct approach, I got to my feet and walked toward Leigh.
She noticed me at once. She didn’t look at me, didn’t give any indication that she’d sorted me from the crowd around her, but her gaze lingered on the reflective surface of the screen pulsing advertisements behind the bar. The bar’s interior was mirrored there as a grey world of shifting shadows.
I was a little over a meter away when she turned to me with the slug-thrower in her right hand, held close to her side so it couldn’t be easily taken from her and the bar crowd couldn’t see it.
“Unless you want a new orifice, stop right there,” she said softly.
I stopped and slowly held my hands out to my sides. “I just want to talk.”
“I’m not in the mood for conversation. Keep moving.”
Three men rose from a table behind us. I tracked them in the bar’s reflective surface as well. Two of them had chimera tattoos, one on his neck and the other on the back of his left hand. I could not confirm the third man’s tattoo because he stood behind the others.
“Is there a problem, Leigh?” one of the men asked.
I spoke first. “I knew Simon Blake. I just wanted to talk about him.”
Something flickered in her dark eyes, then it was gone. “That’s a name you don’t hear much these days.”
The three men hovered around me.
“I know that Simon saved your life in Shandakor Heights. You were wounded and he carried you out.”
Leigh’s gaze flickered over me again, taking a new appraisal. “That’s not a story that gets told often, and not many people know it. Mostly because the people who did know it are dead.”
I didn’t say anything. That revelation was the best I had to offer. If she didn’t speak to me, I had at least still found her.
Finally, after a long moment, she shook her head at the three men standing around me. “Give us some space.”
The men pulled back, but not before the biggest one of them dropped his hand on my shoulder and said, “We’ll be watching.”
Leigh nodded to the bar stool beside her. “Have a seat.”
I did.
“What’s your name?”
“McDreamy K47I19.”
“I don’t know you.”
“No,” I agreed. “You don’t.”
“So how did you find me?”
“Simon mentioned that you often came here when you were in this area. He showed me your image. I don’t forget faces.”
“He kept a picture of me?” The wistfulness in her voice was so faint I barely caught it.
“He did.” It was a white lie to the best of my knowledge. It was possible Simon kept an image of her, and saying so kept our dialogue open.
She sipped her drink. “That begs the question of how you knew I was in the area.”
“I heard that the Chimeras hit a supply caravan a couple days ago out in the wilderness.”
She flicked ash from her narc-stick and I could tell by the tension in her body and the pulse at her throat that I’d won no confidence from her.
“Simon’s dead,” she said. “Years ago.”
I nodded.
“So why are you here?”
I didn’t hesitate. I’d already decided to be up front with her. Trying to lie about my interest was possible because I knew she couldn’t read my face, but nothing I could make up would be as convincing—or hopefully as explosive—as the truth. I’d found the Chimeras. Now it remained to be seen if I could find Mara.
“I’m looking for Mara Blake.”
She hesitated just for a fraction of a second, but I saw that hesitation. She tried to cover by taking another sip of her drink. “What does that have to do with me?”
“You knew Mara Blake.”
“Not well.”
“I need to know where she is.”
“How would I know?”
&
nbsp; “She was taken by the Chimeras.”
Leigh laughed and shook her head as if I were deranged. The effort was pretty good, but it was hollow. She knew I was telling the truth, and that recognition sparked anticipation within me. “I don’t know anything about that.”
I chose to be direct, almost confrontational, knowing that it was risky, but believing anything less would allow her to brush me off. “I think you do.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe you’re forgetting I’m holding a slug-thrower and have friends in this bar.”
“No.”
She waited for me to go away. I didn’t.
Her brows furrowed. “Who sent you?”
“I came on my own.”
“Why are you interested in Mara Blake?”
“I have to find her.”
She let out a long breath. “This is where I would ask you—again—who sent you.”
“And I would tell you, again, that I came on my own.”
“How do you know Simon?”
I thought about that question for just a moment. “We got to know each other while he was on Earth.” That was close to the truth, and in some essence, could not be more true.
“While he was at MirrorMorph, Inc.?”
“Yes.”
Leigh’s nostrils flared a little. “You’re a medical bioroid.”
“In this place I am.”
“You were something different before you came here.”
I didn’t care to elaborate.
“Why are you looking for Mara Blake?”
“Because Simon asked me to look after her if she were ever in trouble. I’ve been searching for her since she disappeared.”
She thought for a moment and took another drag on her narc-stick. “How did you know Simon?”
“We worked together.” Again, another claim that was mostly true.
“Where?”
“Off the books.”
“I was at MirrorMorph. I don’t remember you.”
More of Simon’s memories cycled through my mind, and I recalled that Leigh had worked there for a time. In the end, Leigh’s jealousy had caused Simon to ask John Rath to reassign her. I did not think Leigh knew that.