“Hell, Tiki, I don’t even have a posse.”
“Yeah? You’re a troubleshooter, not a lawman.”
Satterwaithe spoke up and said, “It’s time. Shouldn’t we close in?”
I wanted to say, You’re a courier, not a lawman, but I sensed Tiki had his reasons for keeping her around.
“No one’s gone in yet,” said Tiki, but he opened his link. “Bill? We’re going to close in.” He listened, then said sweetly, “Well, I sure hope it was bone,” and broke the link. He looked at Genie. “Martha called him home, told him supper was getting cold.”
I waited a beat and said, “So, the entire Rosario Marching Band could have gone in the back way and you wouldn’t have seen them.”
Tiki glowered.
“On the positive side,” I added cheerfully, “we probably would have heard them.”
“I swear, Mickey, I’m gonna hit up the Association for a deputy. I can’t get by with part-time amateurs. You want the job? You meet a better class of people than you do in industrial troubleshooting.”
I told him I was happy where I was, but he gave me a posse badge anyway, “for the interim,” and took me with him when we exited Murphy’s. He told me to cover the back in case Jaroslav bolted. “You heavy?”
“I could stand to lose a few pounds.”
“I mean, are you armed?” He twirled his quarterstaff. Firearms are illegal in Port Rosario. The Dome was supposed to be bulletproof, but not even the criminals want to field-test the theory. I showed him the knuckles and that seemed to satisfy him. Satterwaithe carried a baton.
Just then we saw someone scrambling from behind Dominick’s. The streetlamp there was out and the figure was indistinct in the pale glow of its more distant cousins. The building on Fifth, right behind Dominick’s, had overhanging balconies and the figure ran under the balcony and vanished in the shadows.
“Don’t like that,” said Tiki and we hurried across the street. I circled behind the building as planned and Satterwaithe sprinted up Mercado to try to catch the runner on the next block. Tiki went in the front.
Just as well, for I had a bad feeling about this.
Drifting sand had accumulated around the base of the tavern and just below one of the windows there was a very nice footprint. Someone had jumped from the second or third floor. This is an easier feat on Mars than on Earth. I knelt and inspected it, measuring its depth. I looked up and saw Tiki leaning out the second floor window. That gave me the height of the jump.
“Bytchkov’s dead,” I guessed.
“Deader’n Dizzy’s mouse,” Tiki said.
“Knifed?”
He scowled. “How’d you know?”
“It’s fast and to the point. I may know who did it.” I entered the figures into my handi and the results told me that the jumper had likely weighed over 70 kilos Earth-weight. I crossed the rear lot to the building on the next street and measured the height of the balcony. One seventy centimeters. I closed the tape measure and put it in my pouch. Then I made a few notations on my handi.
I felt immeasurably sad.
Tiki had sealed Bytchkov’s apartment and made his way down to where I stood. He studied the rear of the tavern. “Not an impossible jump,” he agreed.
Satterwaithe came loping back from Fifth Circle, cutting between the two apartment blocks and ducking under the balcony. “He ran off the other way, toward Sulbertson. I found a witness, though.” She touched her handi. “The runner had a white overshirt and tan overpants. Unless the shirt was yellow and the pants brown.” She grimaced. “He’s not sure. Looked about mid-thirties. Maybe one seventy height.”
Tiki annotated his handi, snapped the sand-shield closed, and reinserted the stylus in its sheath. “I guess we should round up the usual suspects. My money’s on Edathanal. Bytchkov was going to sell the artifact back to her because he couldn’t hang it out for pickup. When he couldn’t produce it, Edathanal lost her temper and—You’re shaking your head, Mickey?”
“It wasn’t her.”
“How do you know? She was the only one we don’t know where she was at 1900 when Bytchkov made the appointment with his killer.”
I sighed. “When you’ve eliminated the impossible you won’t always like what’s left.”
Tiki put a hold on the morning lift, and brought Despina and Gloria to join the others in the departure lounge. Hot Dog had been doing the preflight checklist and Tiki assured him that Iron Planet had bumped back the official lift time. “This won’t take long,” he said. “It’s not like Phobos doesn’t make two passes every day.” Indeed, it swept the Martian sky faster than Mars himself rotated, and so rose in the west and set in the east.
Tiki placed me by the entry from the main terminal while Satterwaithe stood by the tubeway out to the shuttle. I’m not sure where Tiki thought the killer would try to run, but it’s in the nature of the guilty to flee even if no man pursueth. In moments like that a man might not think clearly. Willy gave me a quizzical glance because he had caught the posse badge on my coveralls and the knuckle bar on my right fist. He dealt in information, and the amount of information is proportional to its surprise.
“I think it is fair to say,” Tiki began, “that all of you knew that Jaroslav Bytchkov had stolen something valuable and you all wanted to get your hands on it.”
Despina Edathanal protested. “It belongs to the Visitor Project!”
Tiki nodded and said, “Why don’t you describe the artifact that Bytchkov filched.”
Five pairs of eyes turned toward her. I knew damn well one of the group already knew, but I saw no overt sign. Well, Tiki had his purpose and I had mine.
“It was a truncated pyramid of sandstone,” Edathanal said, “about the size of my two hands. In the right lighting, you can see the hints of a face. Three eyes, arranged as a triangle; a suggestion of structure scoured by untold centuries of gentle Martian sandblasting. It’s the only artifact we’ve ever found that hints at what the Visitors looked like. The weird thing is, the face doesn’t seem to stay put. It’s on one side, then it’s on another. So we think there’s also some very subtle micro- or nanotech going on with the stone.”
I spoke up. “You’ll provide a detailed sketch? I’ll make sure Goods Outbound gets a copy up on the Dogs. Aurora and Pegasus, too.” This was within my purview as an agent of the Port Authority. I wanted the thief to know that moving the contraband off Mars would not be easy. Moynihan Truth shifted in his seat, probably wondering how much we knew.
Tiki turned to me. “Mickey, you want to tell them the next bit?”
Everyone scrooched around in his seat, except Hot Dog, who was leaning against the wall by the departure tube with his arms crossed, and Gloria Iceman, who sat to the side where she could see everyone.
“Jaroslav had one very hot potato and bounced to Phobos before the word could get out to deposit the statue for safekeeping until his partner could smuggle it out. Unfortunately, that channel was cut off a couple days later.” Moynihan’s smile had grown so broad I thought it might split his face in two.
Tiki took up the narrative once more. “Each of you either wanted to lay hands on the contraband or at least find out what it was. And each of you had a very public argument with Bytchkov. In some cases, knock-down fights.”
VJ laughed. “That wasn’t no fight. We played catch. He threw a punch; I caught it; threw it back.” Willy and Hot Dog laughed with him.
Moynihan said, “He’s not the easiest guy to get along with.”
VJ said, “He was a prick.”
Tiki cautioned them, “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”
That got their attention. I had been waiting for the line and had been watching their faces. Tiki’s announcement should be a surprise to all but one. I caught the tell where I was expecting it and a glance at Tiki and Satterwaithe showed that they had caught it, too.
“At first, Dr. Edathanal seemed a good suspect,” Tiki said. “She had the best motive. The statuette had been stolen from her. She had
a fight with Bytchkov in which he slapped her across the face, a public humiliation. And no one knew where she was at the crucial times. But the killer was seen running under the balcony of the neighboring building. Genie over there had to duck when she chased after. The good doctor is too tall. She would have scalped herself.”
“And the rest of us?” demanded Hot Dog, so red in the face that his freckles had disappeared.
“I also wondered about Gloria, here,” Tiki continued. “She was seen in One-Ball Murphy’s keeping a sharp eye on the rooming house, but disappeared just before. But the killer jumped from the second floor window, and she’s too light to have made the resulting footprint.”
Moynihan Truth perked up. “Me, too?”
Tiki shook his head. “No, you weigh enough. Your motive . . . thieves falling out, perhaps—oh, yes, we know about your end of the smuggling operation. You came down to tell Bytchkov that your game with the parasols was busted. But the witness on the next block saw the killer from a distance, and you would never be mistaken for the age he figured.”
VJ wiped his brow dramatically. “People always say my good looks make me seem young.”
“You wish,” said Hot Dog. But an unease had fallen over him because he had noticed that only three suspects were left. He noticed Tiki watching him and protested, “I got an alibi for the whole day. I was at the Guild meeting!”
“The Guild meeting broke up at 2100,” said Genie Satterwaithe. “I talked to some Guild comrades. That would have left plenty of time to get over to the Groin.”
“But Bytchkov made a call at 1900,” I explained, “and made an appointment to see the man who killed him. You were still in the meeting.”
“So what?” asked VJ. “I seen lots of people on their handis in meetings.”
“’Cept I was running the muffing meeting,” Hot Dog said with evident relief. “I was sitting up on the muffing dais right in front of God and twenty-three muffing comrades, banging a muffing gavel. You can ask them!”
“I did,” said Satterwaithe. “You didn’t receive the call.”
During this exchange, Willy had grown more and more pale, and he had begun to ease away from the others. VJ noticed this and whispered, “Better make a break for it.” Tiki and I both heard it, and so did Hot Dog.
“Willy?” he said. “I don’t believe it!”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “Willy has the best alibi of all. He was in custody in Minetown when Bytchkov was killed, same as three other suspects. If you’d told the arresting officer your name was Willy, it would’ve been obvious. But your legal name is Johann Früh, and it got recorded as Johnny Free on the booking sheet.”
The arithmetic was simple enough now that everyone could see the remainder. VJ gave me a pained look and said, “Geez, Mickey. This is freeping Mars! You know what they do to you here?” Then he bolted for the exit where I stood, hoping I wouldn’t have the heart to deck him. And I remembered how he had shoved me out of the way of that leaking pipe.
Tiki Ferrer’s hands barely twitched and his quarterstaff tangled VJ’s legs and he sprawled out. Satterwaithe was by his side with her baton ready, but there was no fight in him.
“Victor E. Djeh,” Tiki told him formally, “you are detained on the authority of the City of Port Rosario and the Groin Merchants’ Association.”
“You don’t like to hear it,” I told Tiki afterward, when Satterwaithe had marched VJ off to the cells. “You think you know people; but you never do, and sometimes you find out just how much you don’t know them.” I shook my head. “I hope it was just a fight that got out of hand. I hate to think VJ went in there planning to knife the guy.”
VJ was never the sharpest tool in the box. He’d been smart enough to wash his knife, but not smart enough to throw it away. It later proved to have Jaroslav’s blood in the space between the blade and the handle. Just goes to show the importance of clean-up.
Tiki turned to me. “But he had nothing to do with stealing the artifact?”
“No, and I’ll make sure Pondo understands that. I owe VJ that much at least. At least he never crossed the Bassendis.”
The next day, I tracked Gloria Iceman to a Minetown bar. She was hooching with friends, but when she saw me she separated herself and came to sit in my booth.
“Iceman isn’t your actual name,” I told her without preamble. “It’s Eismann, and someone transcribed it incorrectly when you applied for a Martian visa.”
The miner smiled at me. “I liked the sound of it. It’s a good nickname for an ice miner.”
“It is that,” I agreed. “But I think if I dig a little bit, I’ll find out that you belong to the Eismann family that makes the vaults: Eismann and Hertzog. It’s enough to make me wonder if someone at the company built a trap door into their products’ software.”
Gloria Iceman gave me a wide-eyed look. “That sounds awfully precocious.”
“I even wonder who convinced Bytchkov to leave his precious with the Bassendis in the first place.”
“Well, he had to hide it until the heat died down. The statue wasn’t just another link or valve or other bit of trash from a technological midden heap. It was important. Best to hide it somewhere secure.”
“But Edathanal knew who had taken it, and a dozen dogs knew he had brought something to the Second Dog. The Bassendis are shady, but they would not have defied a Port Authority warrant.”
Gloria nodded. “It’s harder to find something if no one knows where it actually is—or who actually took it.”
“You don’t want the Bassendis mad at you.”
“At me? Why would they be mad at me? Where’s the evidence I took it, beside a similarity of names?”
“The Bassendis aren’t anal about evidence.”
“You wouldn’t put a flea in their ear on such flimsy suppositions.”
“You’ll never get the statue off Phobos. Every cubic of luggage will be scanned at the most minute levels.”
Gloria frowned and pursed her lips. “I think that whoever has the statue will wait a long time before trying to move it off-world. Long after the hoo-rah has died down, long after the inspectors have forgotten what they were looking for. All that extra effort . . . You can’t keep that up for very long.”
Then she clapped me on the shoulder and walked lightly through the barroom and exited into the streets of Port Rosario. I never saw her again.
All that was many years ago and they’re all gone now. Hot Dog smeared himself across a hectare of Martian desert when his ballistic failed to reenter properly. Willy went down for blackmail. Satterwaithe left Mars after the baby she had with Tiki died; Tiki was never the same after that.
Tiki found enough evidence in Bytchkov’s apartment for the Port Authority to arrest Moynihan Truth when he stepped off the shuttle in Panic Town. He was exiled to Ceres.
The Martian Board of Actuaries sentenced VJ to slavery on the thermal decompositors out by Mt. Olympus for the remainder of Jaroslav Bytchkov’s natural lifetime. I did what I could for him by arguing to the Board that Bytchkov’s chosen profession of smuggler and thief put his lifespan at the low end of the confidence interval. That shortened VJ’s sentence, but he never got around to thanking me for it.
Gloria “Iceman” Eismann was killed three months later when the tunnel collapsed in Ice Mine 23. I don’t think the Bassendis had anything to do with it. I never told them my suspicions. Wherever she squirreled the statuette remains unknown, and it has never been found to this day.
Edathanal never found another artifact like it, and after a time everyone assumed she had been mistaken about the whole thing.
A writer back on Luna named Myles Hertzog possesses a replica, probably made from Edathanal’s sketches, and has achieved a modest success with exciting stories about aliens he calls “the People of Sand and Iron.”
* * *
Michael F. Flynn is a frequent contributor to Analog, but his short fiction has also appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction and at TOR.com.
A multiple Hugo nominee and winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, his novels have included the Spiral Arm series and the Firestar series. A statistician, he lives in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Next, in a break from the serious, author-scientist Jaleta Clegg helps us imagine a reality TV world gone bad—even worse than we have it now, I swear—wherein space travel is the greatest reality show of all in . . .
THE ULTIMATE
SPACE RACE
by Jaleta Clegg
“Henry! Hurry up, it’s starting.” Ethel snuggled deeper into the Cuddle-Couch(TM) (with Soruna(TM) holographic projectors and Tru-Life(TM) surround sound speakers with ThunderRumble(TM) subwoofer cushions, built-in armrest controls and auto-connect, and the optional posture-correcting lumbar support and SpaDee heated massage—Henry’s sixty-eighth birthday present, worth every dime). She turned up the volume with a squeeze of her hand.
The announcer’s handsome, chiseled face smiled from the floating projection. “Tonight, live from the Sporting Club’s docks at New Vegas, it’s the thrilling conclusion to the Ultimate Race. Remember, what happens in New Vegas, stays in New Vegas, the world’s first and only orbiting casino. At least for another two months.” He chuckled on cue. “Brought to you by our sponsors, Tummie Gummies, the fruity delicious colon cleanse. Chew two to refresh your life, inside and out.”
His face switched to singing, dancing, rainbow-colored candy bears waving banners of toilet paper.
Henry plopped beside Ethel, a bag of freshly popped popcorn in his hand. “What’d I miss?”
“Nothing yet, just Calton Hooper’s intro.” Ethel popped a handful of the white fluff (now with 72% more fiber!) into her mouth. She grimaced. “Why can’t they leave it as popcorn? What’s this flavor?”
Henry looked at the bag. “Licorice root. It was on sale.”
Mission: Tomorrow - eARC Page 11