“You’re nuts, Jim. Where can we take him?”
“To our hotel.”
“Yeah? So how the hell do we—” His face bunches into that big Russian scowl I know so well. It means nothing will stand in his way once his mind’s made up. “All right, but stay close, da?”
I snatch his skivvy and use it to crown the man with the broken arm. Now there’s no one who can follow us, no one who can tell which way we escaped. “Da.”
I hold onto the skivvy while Sergei heaves Trench Coat Man up onto his huge shoulders. It takes every ounce of Soviet muscle, but he manages to carry him over the rubble to the kitchen. As soon as he makes a right turn into the utility room, I know what he has in mind for our escape route.
And it isn’t going to be pleasant.
CHAPTER 2
Trench Coat Man
It’s one thing to feel like garbage—at the end of a couple of long shifts in a row, that’s a familiar feeling; it’s quite another to actually be garbage, filthy and dripping wet and riding one of the arterial refuse conveyors under the streets of Cydonia Sights. Boy, if anyone could see us now, we’d be the sight of Cydonia.
The refuse belts run parallel to the sewage pipes, so we’re treated to the combined smells from both. The old tunnel we’re in is as big as a subway tube. A gridiron maintenance walkway runs between our conveyor and the sewage pipe on the opposite side. It’s poorly lit in here. I can just about read a few lines of graffiti on the wall as we pass:
IF UR READING THIS
U SUCK.
SINCERELY
ANOTHER JUST LIKE U
P.S. GET A REAL JOB, GRID-LICKER!
Cold water streams through gaps in the ceiling bricks. Together with the non-stop thunder rumble from the street above, it makes me think there’s some kind of typhoon blowing up there. But there are no oceans on Mars. Each resort has its own communal reservoir and water recycling plant. Has ours been destroyed somehow, and that water’s flooding the streets of Cydonia Sights?
I tell Sergei my theory.
He cups his hand and catches some falling water, smells it, tastes it, then spits it out. “There’s something...off about it. It’s not pure. Try for yourself.”
I do exactly as he did, except I spit it out even quicker. Sergei’s right. It isn’t drinking water. They’ve put something in it. A chemical of some kind, giving it a bitter taste. “From a swimming pool?”
“Don’t think so. Not unless they’ve put a ton of chlorine in it. What el—” He reacts to a bright light flashing inside the tunnel ahead of us. A torch beam. More than one. Several.
Sergei quietly slides off the conveyor and drags Trench Coat Man after him. He points down the tunnel in the direction we’ve just come, but his expression isn’t scrunched into that determined, ultra-cocky Russian scowl I know so well. No, he’s almost looking at me—not quite, as that would be admitting he needs help, which is something the Minsk Machine can never do. He’s gazing at my feet instead. In Sergei-ese that means he isn’t confident his plan will work, and he’s hoping like hell I have a better one.
I scan the walls for an access ladder to the surface, but I’m fairly certain we’d have seen one along the way. Scouting ahead for one is definitely out now; those are red beams slicing out of the torchlight. More insurgents!
We can’t go back, we can’t ride with the garbage, and we can’t stay put. Which leaves...
“The sewage pipe?”
Sergei mulls that over for a second, then gives my shoulder an extra-generous squeeze of approval. One of these days I’ll have to start wearing hockey pads if I want to survive his displays of gratitude, but I’m not even sure that would save me. He’s almost fifteen now. In a few years he’ll be a full-grown man, and I’ll be visiting the hospital. A lot.
He unscrews the nearest access hatch in the top of the pipe. The wicked stench erupts full into our faces as we peer inside. There’s a steady gush of fast-flowing water, but we can easily fit inside. It’ll be harder to tell when we’ve reached our digs, but the pipe does run parallel to the conveyor—the exact same conveyor our hotel uses for garbage disposal.
Between us we lower Trench Coat Man into the pipe and then jump in after him. Sergei closes the hatch after us. It’s now one hundred percent black and one hundred percent disgusting. We can’t stand without bending uncomfortably, so it’s easier to crawl. Easier but way more gross. Sergei goes first, dragging our patient by the collar of his trench coat, and I bring up the rear. I try not to think of anything except my memory-foam mattress and pillow waiting for me at the kip-house.
After this, I might just sleep until my eighteenth birthday.
Water, water everywhere...that you reeeeally shouldn’t drink. The level’s risen in the past few minutes and the flow speed has increased, but I can’t figure out why. It’s gushing over Trench Coat Man’s head, so Sergei has to keep him raised. That’s a lot harder than it sounds with so little room to manoeuvre, and I can tell the Minsk Machine is getting cheesed off. He mutters Russian swear words a mile a minute and stupidly thumps the side of the pipe in frustration.
“Stop that!” I whisper so intensely it burns the back of my throat. God, if they hear us when we’re in here...
Still we trudge on, and still the sewage water rises. I improvise a more practical method of keeping our patient above water: Sergei, on his hands and knees, carries Trench Coat Man on his back. This works well for another five or ten minutes. Then the torrent becomes too much for any of us.
I feel along the roof of the pipe for the next access hatch. But there isn’t one. Not good. Either we find one very soon or there’ll be no—
I’m swept under by a sudden undertow that churns me around like a corkscrew in the rapid flow. I don’t crash into the others. They’re being whisked along too?
Then I hit something solid. It punches the wind out of me. But I find I can climb up it—fistfuls of loose fabric—no, clothes I grip to right myself, to lift my head above water. Coughing my guts up doesn’t improve my situation any, but my situation has improved nonetheless. For one thing there’s light—a disc of dim, beige light in the pipe roof, like the distant glow of a house light through night fog.
“Trillion, you need to climb up!” With one hand Sergei hangs onto the hatch wheel; with the other he crushes Trench Coat Man against his chest, inches away from drowning. I’m not exactly helping the latter—I’m using him to stay upright, pulling the guy down while Sergei’s trying to hold him up.
I scramble up until I gain a strong grip of the hatch, then somehow pull myself out of the pipe. It’s empty in the tunnel. No insurgents, no red beams. The light is from an old halogen heater someone must have left on, whoever was working down here when the explosions hit. Falling drops fizz as they splash on top of the heater.
It’s with tremendous difficulty I drag Trench Coat Man out of the pipe. I didn’t know I had it in me. No doubt he’s cut all over from where I scraped him against the sharp hatch rim, but he’s out, and he’s safe, and he seems to be alive. I think I’ve located a pulse in his neck, but the way my fingertips are throbbing, it could easily be my own pulse.
Sergei refuses my assistance as usual and hauls himself out of the nightmare on his own. The Minsk Machine is strong. The Minsk Machine is steaming. The Minsk Machine reeks.
“You recognise where we are?” I point to an access ladder behind the heater. There’s a number—117—painted on the wall.
He shakes his head. “All I know is our kip-house is at 126.”
“So we’ve passed it, or we haven’t reached it?”
“Dunno.”
“Okay, I think we should go topside,” I suggest. “If we get spotted down here we’re trapped, but up there, we at least have places to go. What d’ ya think?”
“I think you’re learning fast, Trillion. Let’s do it.”
The climb up is another epic one for Sergei, who once again carries the unconscious man on his shoulders. I unlock the magno-hatch and lift it
open.
This is by far and away the wettest day of my life. The triangular shopping arcade in the centre of Cydonia Sights is completely flooded, and the rain is still bucketing down. Only it isn’t rain. The dome roof is intact, which means the resort’s emergency sprinkler system is having serious delusions of grandeur. It’s dumping all the reservoir’s reserves onto us, trying its best to drown us out.
Come to Cydonia Sights. We’ll give you a warm reception all right, then we’ll flush you the hell out!
The anti-fire systems have clearly gone haywire. Halon gas is billowing out of at least three shops on the east side of the fountain. Their evacuation alarms are wailing. EMS bots float by in the drifting water; they bob and wave their arms and upend whenever they try to change direction. Yeah, and they were designed to help us.
We’re only a few minutes’ walk—or should that be doggy paddle—from our kip-house. The only other person I can see is huddled under a towel on the far edge of the square, sat on the steps of the posh hotel, head in hands.
It’s a girl. I can see her long, white legs and her even whiter hair. And that towel—chequered, with silver edging that catches the neon light from the hotel sign and reflects it through a million heavy raindrops and across the battered surface of the flood.
Rachel!
She looks up at me, revealing her freckled face that’s now pink and puffy as well. She’s been crying. I pretend I haven’t seen her. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s to spare her the embarrassment. Maybe it’s because we’re the ones the insurgents want, and if anyone sees that I recognise Rachel and she recognises me, it might turn out badly for both of us. That, and maybe I don’t want her to know me as something that’s been flushed through a sewage pipe.
Our glances touch. She gives a fragile wave. I wave right back, then instantly turn away to help Sergei carry Trench Coat Man off the street. This is who I have to be right now—a second Minsk Machine. I hate myself for not asking her to join us, but I also know she’ll be safer if I don’t.
Our patient gets heavier and heavier. Either that or I’m getting weaker. It suddenly hits me that we’ve gone to all this trouble, risked our lives like this for a man we know absolutely nothing about. Not even his name.
Only that he’s on our side. Whatever side that might be.
I look back to see if she’s still watching. We’re officially unemployed again, Sergei and me, soon to be homeless, and bound to the portents of an ever-red sky. This is the last time I’ll ever get to see the freckled girl with the white hair and those long, white legs.
Two masked men approach her from behind the fountain. Their red tracer beams cut through the cloud of halon gas. I drop Trench Coat Man’s legs and yank Sergei down to his knees behind a nearby bench. Water rushes up my nostrils and burns my sinuses. Anyone can see right through the bench’s golden polymer glass, and the insurgents are right there at the hotel steps, standing over Rachel. If they turn in our direction they will clock us.
She shrugs, readjusts her towel over her shoulders. One of them starts to turn—
Rachel sees where we’re hiding and how close the man is to clocking us and, casting her towel into the flood, leaps to her feet. I duck so quickly my head dips into the water. Trench Coat Man slips beneath the surface, so Sergei has to yank him up. My eyes begin to sting, so I rub them like crazy, desperate to see what’s happening across the way.
By the time my vision clears, Rachel is alone again, crouching on the hotel steps. But something strange has happened. The two masked men now lie face-down as they drift away in the gushing water.
Before I can signal to her, to find out what the heck’s going on, another group of insurgents arrives. Four this time. They spot their comrades’ drifting bodies and check them for signs of life. Nothing. They don’t even try to resuscitate them, which suggests they haven’t simply drowned. They’ve been killed. But how? By whom?
They drag Rachel to her feet and threaten her at gunpoint. But she’s so weepy and helpless-looking, it’s clearly not her they’re after. They just want information. God, I wish there was something I could do to help her!
After a quick, rough interrogation, she manages to pull herself together and points inside the hotel—a jab of certainty that has me convinced the murderers are in there. But Sergei and I share a puzzled look. We didn’t hear anything that sounded like gunfire, or a laser blast.
The two insurgents heed her advice and stalk up the carpeted steps, into the empty foyer, unwittingly buying us some time.
No, she’s bought us this time. Whatever happened to those two men, Rachel has capitalized on the confusion to give us this chance to get away. She gives us the thumbs up, then dashes off quicker than anyone I’ve ever seen.
I’ll never be able to thank her because she’s halfway down the sidewalk now, those long, triathlete’s legs somehow able to maintain speed and balance through the floodwater. By the time Sergei’s lifted our patient back onto his shoulders, she’s gone. Disappeared up a side alley.
I think about her all the way to our kip-house. Why was she alone on the hotel steps? What happened to those two men? What would have happened on our date tomorrow? Will she even make it to the Games? But most of all, what makes a person risk their life to help someone they hardly know? There’s a lot of that going around today—the day before Colonial Day.
Not an hour will pass tonight, and for a long time to come, that I don’t wonder about Rachel Foggerty, out there on her own, running, swimming for her life while Sergei and I are safe in our hotel on the good old fifteenth floor.
And yet...if I’d invited her to come with us, we might all be dead.
When the man in the trench coat wakes up—if he ever does—he’ll have some serious questions to answer. Like why he’s wanted by the Sheikers. And why, now that we’ve had a good look at his face, both Sergei and I swear blind we’ve seen him someplace before.
Someplace important.
* * *
If there’s one good thing about being drenched by the dome sprinklers on our way to the hotel, it’s that we’re pretty clean by the time we get there. The stink of the sewers hasn’t quite left us—Trench Coat Man, in particular, gives off a brutal whiff—but we’re no longer caked with...you know what.
We daren’t take the stranger up in the elevator because it would mean we’d have to go in through the foyer, past all the prefects (that’s what me and Sergei call strict oasis staff who take their jobs so seriously), and of course the manager himself, who’s the biggest, fakest preef of them all. Good thing Sergei looks a lot older than his real age. That’s gotten us into more places than a congressional ring.
The stairs aren’t much fun. The stranger weighs twice as much as me, and our room’s fifteen flights up, at the end of the corridor. Chrissakes, where’s my bed?
The answer is a thankful, if messy, few feet from the door. Exhausted, backs crooked, Sergei and I both look at the stranger, then at our beds, then at each other, and nod the same done-our-bit-for-mankind nod. We drop Trench Coat Man on the carpet with a thud. He can’t complain, not after what we’ve been through to save his skulking butt. And there’s no way on Mars either of us is giving up our right to veg out and sleep for a week.
We flop onto our respective cots, and that’s the last thing either of us remembers until breakfast-time the following day.
“So you’ve absolutely no idea who he is?” Sergei asks for the umpteenth time as he plays with the VIP pass cards he’s taken from the stranger’s clip-belt. Executive Loyalty Cards from many of the oases we’ve worked, though we’ve never seen inside any of those hotels. They’re for the super-rich only.
It doesn’t fit. Why would a trench coat trader, generally a seller of shadily-acquired goods, frequent the premier hotels of Mars? Not just a few either; Sergei could deal several hands of Cydonia Face with the number of cards he’s shuffling.
“All I know is he and his friend were being watched,” I reply, hanging backward off the edge of my
bed, letting the blood rush to my head until I can’t stand it anymore and kick over into a cartwheel that doesn’t quite work. Sergei’s used to seeing me goofing around and doesn’t say anything when I land in a heap. I like that about us. We can both be ourselves when we’re together, and nothing’s ever too dumb to say or do.
“Who was watching them?” he asks. “And what happened to his friend?”
“Dunno.”
“But he spoke to you, right? He caught you skimming, then let you off?”
“Yeah, he told me not to do it again,” I reply, “but he seemed preoccupied with the white-collar guys who were watching him. That wasn’t long before it all went to hell.”
Wearing only his boxer shorts and a balaclava, Sergei looks ridiculous, like someone who can’t decide if he’s skiing, going surfing, or about to bet the house on a losing hand. But his brain’s working overtime right now, figuring out our next move.
We’ve left Trench Coat Man on the floor, but I’ve propped his head up on a folded blanket and covered him with a second blanket. Still not a peep from him.
“How long do you think we should stay here?” I peer down through the window and see colonial police patrolling the streets outside. The water’s been drained, but everywhere is slick, glistening, and full of litter. Already the resort’s skivvy ’bots are hard at work cleaning storefronts and windows and pavements. One tries to rub down a female cop, mistaking her for a fire hydrant, and gets booted off its wheels. It ends up sliding about half a block before it can frantically right itself like a drunk on an ice rink, and I can’t stop laughing. Sergei smiles for my sake, but he’s got other things on his mind.
“We could split right now if we wanted,” he says. “I don’t know. You tell me, Jim. You wanted us to drag him out of there. Should we stay with him till he wakes up—make sure the wrong people don’t get him?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I reply. “We’re safe in here so long as no one comes knocking. And why would they, right? Plus, I’m kinda thinking this guy’s important for something. Wish I knew why.”
Star Binder Page 3