Sergei shoves the cards back into the clip-belt and heaves a sigh. “Same here. I’ve definitely seen that face before.”
It’s an impressive face, we’re both agreed on that. Sharp features—harshly sharp for a middle-aged guy, no fat whatsoever, with a well-defined chin, like those super-toned dads that draw all the girls and single moms around the pool. He could be military, maybe ex-military. His longish (slightly greying) black hair and days-old stubble probably wouldn’t be allowed, but if he’s undercover...
“Or we could take him down to the alley,” I suggest, wishing I hadn’t, “and tell the cops we just found him there. Let them take him to a hospital.”
“You reckon?”
Now that I consider it, the more sense it makes. “He’s been unconscious for a while now. What if he doesn’t come ’round? We’re not helping him if we just leave him here. Maybe he really needs a doctor, and we’re doing more harm than good by protecting him.”
Sergei slowly and repeatedly punches the palm of his crooked hand. The gentle clap, clap, clap is a familiar one. It helps him concentrate when he has a decision to make. If I’m honest, I don’t really need him to make decisions for me anymore; I’m old enough and smart enough to think for myself. But the Minsk Machine, despite always saying how much he hates responsibility, relishes looking out for me, treating me like a younger brother.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way. We’re all each other has left. I’d never tell him, but I hope it stays this way forever. Just the two of us.
“We need to be long gone when the police find him,” he says. “I mean half way to the next oasis, untraceable, like we were never here.”
“A head start, you mean?”
“Yeah. But how can we do that and let them know about him?”
My empty stomach groans, practically solving the problem for me. “What if we message the front desk just before we leave, ask them to deliver food to our room? We tell them we want it at a specific time, for a late dinner, say, and that one of us is hard of hearing, so they might need to enter without knocking. That way they’ll definitely find him alive and we can be hours away across the desert. What d’ ya think?”
“I think you’re way too smart to be skimming for a living, kid.”
The man’s bass voice startles us. Sergei’s on his feet and cocking a drinks flask over his shoulder ready to throw, before I can even spin round.
“Who the hell are you?” Sergei asks, no, demands. He’s wielding Vodka McCormick’s, and for him that’s like Zeus wielding his lightning bolt. The two are almost inseparable, and woe betide anyone who does separate them. “How long have you been awake?”
“Young fella, I don’t even know what day it is.” The man splutters into a cough, then lets loose a hoarse sigh.
“That’s not what I asked,” Sergei reminds him.
We can only see his boots from where we are, because he’s lying on the opposite side of the beds. He hasn’t moved.
“I’ve heard most of what you’ve said...for the past half hour or so, I guess. And I want to thank you for—”
“Save it,” Sergei interrupts. He never has trusted anyone he doesn’t have to pretend to trust. “First tell us who you are. What those Sheikers want with you.”
“You’re right, son. I should really explain. The name’s...Herapeth, Tom Herapeth. I...we were on our way to the Colonial Games, my buddy and I, and we just stopped off for a quick coffee, minding our own business, when the ceiling exploded and—”
“That’s a lie,” I tell him. “You and your buddy knew you were being watched.”
He peers over the crumpled bed covers, studying me and then Sergei, now me again, with bright, rifling eyes that catch the dappled neon light sneaking in between the blinds. I know I’ve seen those eyes before. That face. They seem like they should be famous, but why?
“And I’m betting you just made that name up,” adds Sergei. “Herapeth flew with Fifth Condor Squadron, then died at Altimere in the Finagler attack. She was Commanding Officer there. I saw the movie. It said she didn’t have any family.”
The man stays silent. He carries on watching us.
“Where do we know you from?” I ask.
“You tell me. The two of you seem to have all the answers. I’m just a guy in a really dirty long coat, whereas you—clearly I couldn’t hoodwink you if I tried.”
“That’s three-sixty talk, mister,” I point out. “You a politician or something?”
“Is that where you think you’ve seen me before? In the Core Congress?” He scoffs. “Sorry to disappoint you, fellas. I’m the last person they’d ever invite for diplomacy. So you’ve obviously mistaken me for somebody else.”
“Ah-ah!” Sergei thrusts an accusing finger at him. “You just did it again. It’s like Jim says, you’re handy at talking ’round the truth. Why don’t we keep it simple, okay?”
The man quirks an eyebrow, then drags himself onto his knees. “Suits me...Jim’s friend. If you take off that balaclava and introduce yourselves, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
Sergei and I share a suspicious look, but we can’t think of a reason not to play along. We are all on the same side. Aren’t we?
The Minsk Machine unmasks himself, sips from his flask. Trench Coat Man claps his hands and invites Sergei to throw him the flask. The big Russian obliges. “Sergei and Jim,” he says, mid-throw.
“You brothers?”
“Yeah.”
The man smiles a knowing smile, clearly not believing us. He sips from the flask and shivers with delight. “Brothers, huh? Well you’re my brothers now. Jim, Sergei, you did a helluva thing, dragging me out of there like that, without even knowing who I was. A helluva thing. All that way—without any help, I take it?”
“No help, no,” answers Sergei proudly.
But that isn’t completely true. We had help, and I don’t think it’s fair that her risk should be forgotten, not if this guy turns out to be somebody with influence. “There was a girl that helped us,” I say. “She risked her life when she duped the insurgents—it gave us time to escape.”
“Oh? Who was she?” the man asks.
“Rachel Foggerty.” Even saying her name out loud flame-grills my cheeks and neck and the tips of my ears, and soaks them with vinegar when I hear Sergei snort a laugh. He knows how embarrassed I get when I have a crush on a girl. “She ran off. I think she’s still out there, hiding somewhere. You think she’ll be okay?”
“I’m sure she will be. The Colonial Police will have full control of the resort by now.” He cocks his head to one side, studying me. Am I that interesting? “You said earlier that you recognised me from somewhere, Jim. Let’s run with that, see if we can figure it out. I don’t believe in coincidences, and I don’t think you do either. Am I right?”
“I—I guess.”
“Jim...Jim Trillion. Is that your real surname?”
“Hey, how did you—”
“He was listening in,” Sergei reminds me. “He probably knows all about us.”
“Actually, I know almost nothing about you,” the man says. “But it’s important that I know who my friends are.”
Sergei gets up and towers over us. “I think you’ve asked enough questions, mister. If we’re really friends, tell us who you are, and don’t lie. You owe us that much after we dragged your ass through all that garbage and a goddamn sewer pipe to get you here.”
“Don’t forget the flood,” I add.
Trench Coat Man takes a last sip from the flask, then lobs it back to Sergei. “I’d say you two missed your calling.” He burps into his fist. “I tell you what—seeing as it’s breakfast-time and we could all use a good nosh-up, why don’t you two go down and fetch us up a few heart-stoppers: pancakes, eggs, full English, whatever else you think you can put away. Sergei, all that muscle needs feeding. You’ve got my wallet. Take five hundred credits out and don’t bring any back, okay? Meantime, I’ll freshen up a bit. Garbage chutes and sewer pipes: n
ot the most auspicious start to Colonial Day, I have to say.”
No, he doesn’t have to ask twice. Sergei and I might be suspicious of anything the man says, but when you’re penniless and jobless and hungry enough to start chewing toe cheese, no one is suspicious of a five-hundred credit breakfast.
We’re fully dressed and out the door in a flash. I’m a faster runner than Sergei and could easily beat him to the stairs, but he keeps dragging me back because, well, he hates to lose at anything. So I laugh and play along and let him win. But once we reach the lobby, I snatch the five hundred credits from his pocket and sprint off down the sidewalk outside before he knows he’s been skimmed.
“Teacher just got taught,” I yell back, almost wetting myself laughing at his bear-on-skates footing on the slick surface.
Of course, the joke’s on me when he finally does catch up. Then we splurge three hundred of the five hundred credits on a trio of breakfasts to die for (or from), a snazzy new radsuit apiece, code keys for a pair of hire bikes—the fastest sand bikes in the shop, that we can drop off at the next resort in a fortnight’s time—and finally, enough supplies to fill our pillion bags for a full two weeks of adventuring in the deserts and canyons of Mars.
Maybe crawling through the garbage and the sewage was worth it after all. At the very least, there are no more hard feelings. Trench Coat Man turned out to be on our side after all, even if we still don’t know who he really is.
And what’s more, we might never know.
Because when we get back to our room, he’s gone.
CHAPTER 3
On the Run
Our sand bikes buzz and whine over endless gentle plateaus and rocky slopes and along the signposted trails of the Cydonia Labyrinthus valleys. We mostly fly low, a few feet off the ground, which saves power. The engine buzzes at that altitude. Now and then we have to rip high into the air—over a sudden crevasse, say, or a bed of sharp rocks—and that’s when the engine whines, drinking its reserve power the solar panels have to then replenish.
Much of the scenery is the same: barren, basaltic rock coloured red by iron oxide, more commonly known as rust; endless blood-reds, gold-reds, browns, tans and the occasional blue-grey shale. It’s been described in folklore as an angry planet, left over from some bloody war from long ago, but I’ve always found it kind of peaceful. Natural. Red’s the colour I was born into, the only colour I really know the world outside to be. It also runs through our veins. Without it, the human heart has no reason to exist.
To Sergei, it’s the colour of revolution, of his beloved New Soviet Union. He says he’d like to go back there someday, maybe to live, but I always try to change the subject because I know that when that day comes, we won’t be travelling together. It’s an unspoken thing between us, but we both know it will come eventually; this illegal life we live, constantly on the run, it can’t last forever. When it finally has to end, I’ll be on my own again, really alone. No family, no home, no future.
Sergei is my whole life. And that frightens me. If anything happens to take him from me, where will I be? Who will I be? Sometimes it makes me cry when he’s not around.
But right now life is good. We’re tearing up hundreds of miles a day on our sand bikes, faster than either of us has ever gone before. At these speeds the wind can lift you off your seat and hold you suspended in mid-air, the magno-stirrups holding your feet and a good, firm grip on the handlebars the only things keeping you from being blown off at two hundred kilometres per hour.
When our fuel cells run low, we stop to recharge them at one of the thousands of greenhouse oases dotted across Mars. They’re ideal for travellers. Each one holds between twenty and thirty cots, ample solar energy terminals for shuttles and hover vehicles; and from the bio-domes, organic produce, water, oxygen, herbs and medicines are provided at low cost.
The oxygen is especially important because our breathers and back-rigs can’t hold more than a few days’ worth at a time. While terraforming has made tremendous progress in making the atmosphere of Mars more hospitable, the oxygen is still thin, and the high carbon dioxide content is poisonous.
Expensive GenMod plantations cover vast areas of the planet’s surface, and are policed day and night to prevent off-worlders using them to set up their own terraforming operations elsewhere in the galaxy. The giant orbital mirror array (OMA) is still in operation, heating the South Pole directly. It released all the dry ice into the atmosphere a long time ago, which has helped increase the air pressure to almost two thirds that of Earth’s. But Mars’s giant greenhouse-gas factories are old now; less than half still operate round the clock, pumping out chlorofluorocarbons to maintain the runaway Greenhouse Effect, trapping heat in the atmosphere to help warm the planet. It used to be too cold for humans to live on Mars, but over the centuries we’ve changed that. A long, long time ago—about four billion years—this world used to be a lot like Earth, with a magnetosphere and a full atmosphere and even seas covering the surface. Scientists are trying to make it that way again, but it’s going to take centuries more, they reckon. Mars is a constant work in progress.
Most of our plantations and photosynthetic bacteria farms convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, very similar to Earth vegetation. They’re used in all the bio-domes and the major resorts, to provide breathable air, but also in bigger and bigger woodlands around the planet. They’re off-limits to tourists, so Sergei and I can’t get near them on our bikes, but we have seen them from a distance—hundreds of square miles of green trees and wildly-coloured flowers. The plantations often have their own weather: thick, ghostly mists, and peppery rain that soaks you through.
We were soaked by one of those rain clouds about half an hour ago, and almost straightaway after, we skirted the edge of a massive red-out, one of the infamous sandstorms that roar across Mars from time to time. Water plus lots of flying sand equals a sticky, clingy mess. I can feel coarse dust in every pore and crevice. Even in places it couldn’t possibly have reached inside my radsuit, it’s there, itching, making my life miserable like a prickly second skin I can’t slough.
Sergei and I decide to stop and get off our bikes. Stripping naked and letting the wind dry us off is pretty much all we can do out here, thirty miles from the nearest greenhouse. The red-out has passed to the north west, so it’s a cool, gentle breeze blow-drying us as we spin slowly, arms outstretched like weather vanes, with our eyes closed.
It’s the best feeling in the world. Until the midday sun starts to bake my shoulders. Mars lost its radiation shield billions of years ago, so it has little protection against solar energetic particles (SEPs) and galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). Without a radsuit, you’re playing Russian roulette with that deadly radiation, which, on the surface of Mars, is measured in millisieverts. The more millisieverts the human body absorbs, the greater the risk of cancer. Wearing a radsuit outdoors at all times keeps us well inside the daily absorption safety limit, so we normally don’t like to take them off.
“How many credits have we got left?” he asks, laying our T-shirts and trousers flat on a nearby boulder, for the sun and wind to dry them. We drape our radsuits over our bare torsos.
“About fifteen. You reckon we should try for another job somewhere?”
He shrugs, looking a bit depressed. “Not much choice, is there.”
“We’ve had a good run, Sergei. It can’t last forever.”
He’s silent as he sits in the shade of the boulder and gazes wistfully into the red wilderness. I join him. There’s no need to say anything. It’s been the best two weeks of my life—I’ve never felt as free, or as grown-up. We did something extraordinary at Cydonia Sights, saved a man’s life in the face of overwhelming odds, and this was our reward. It’s the first time I feel like I’ve truly earned something, and that it’s okay—really okay—to enjoy it.
We’ll be going back to skimming soon. And skimming never felt like this.
“I’m thinking Tardos Mors,” he says, “or those twin domes to the west—so we can
maybe work both resorts at once, two jobs each, and save up for an even longer bike journey, you know? Reach the mountain resorts in the south, maybe. I don’t know. All I know is this is where we should be, out here where they can’t touch us, where we can do any damn thing we want, go anywhere, and they can’t stop us.”
“Same here.”
“So you’re up for double shifts?” he asks warily.
I groan. He snorts. Neither is a surprise. But there’s something else besides a hatred of long working hours guiding this conversation. Sergei is trying to convince me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Of course he likes being free from authority—it’s practically his religion—but it’s as if he’s rebelling more than ever, against something much closer, something he’s sensed in me. But what?
We spend about an hour in the shade, sucking shallow breaths of rich oxygen inside our breathers. The rhythm of my lungs, measured and practised to make the artificial air supply last, is sleep-inducing. I could dream easily here in the sand.
“Jim, Jim get up—Jim!” Sergei shakes me upright, and I’m instantly scared out of my wits because he sounds scared. This is the Minsk Machine we’re talking about. War, women and the Soviet blockhead. He points me—no, practically launches me—toward a shuttle approaching from the south of the plantation. It’s sleek, gunmetal brown, and is descending at high speed, not in our general direction but in our precise direction. If it keeps this course and speed it will crash on top of us in about thirty seconds.
“No time to get dressed.” I pull him after me as I make for the bikes, by way of our baked clothes on the opposite side of the boulder. We bundle up our attire and stuff it in the pillion bags. Without daring to look behind us we hop onto the bikes and choke the throttles. The engines scream at the top of their metal lungs. The noses dip as we rise and churn up sand with our heavy-duty thrusters.
Star Binder Page 4