Martian Knightlife

by James P. Hogan

  "But we know it was the Cross, although not operating through any of the mechanisms they're looking for, don't we, Dad?" Marissa said when they got a chance to talk alone. She was having trouble keeping horror from showing on her face as she looked at him. "You have to ask the Khal for guidance. He's the only person who'll know anything." Hamilton had his assistant call the Oasis hotel down at Lowell, but she was informed that the guest of that name had checked out without leaving any contact information.

  "I still think you're jumping to unwarranted conclusions," Velte maintained stonily, despite his own condition. "Something broke out on Mars, and a lot of people here have just come up from Mars. There's bound to be a simple connection. What's the latest on the ones they've got at the hospital down there?"

  Hamilton had Asgard's medical chief call the unit down at Lowell who were dealing with the syndrome. And the startling news from there was that Justin Banks—and only Justin Banks—was magically recovering.

  "Now what do you have to say?" Gilder stormed at Velte, finally losing his patience. "Everything he said has come true! No, I can't explain it, you can't explain it, and neither can anyone else here. But there isn't a single fact known to science that couldn't be explained at some time." It was one of those rare times where Thornton Velte found himself too shocked and bemused to say anything.

  "What do you want to do?" Gilder's assistant asked.

  Gilder thought furiously for several seconds. Marissa watched him anxiously. "Get a fast transfer ship ready for immediate descent to Mars," he ordered. "The only hope now is that other mystic that the Khal talked about. We'll go down there, and we'll talk with him directly."

  "Does that mean you'll let them have the site?" Marissa asked.

  Hamilton squared his jaw stubbornly. "I didn't say that. Let's see if this guy can get rid of whatever this is first. It's still a big investment to throw away. Then we'll play it by ear. There might be ways of getting to him yet—just like anyone else."

  * * *

  The eight-man squad that Mahom had recruited was taking it easy outside until plans were sufficiently advanced to hold a detailed briefing. Inside Mahom's office, Kieran sat across from the desk, staring at pictures of the building that Leppo and Casey were being held in, along with floor and site plans purloined from a city architect's office. Since it suited him to keep Kieran Thane invisible for a while longer, and he didn't know when circumstances might require the reappearance of the Khal, he had changed into casual clothes but kept the swarthy Asiatic features and grizzled hair. The squad's commander, Major Everit, small, brown skinned, dapperly turned out in a dark jumpsuit with black beret and calf-length boots, went once again through what seemed to be the only option.

  "Speed and surprise. A distraction phone call, diversions front and back, and then straight in behind stun and flash grenades, and grab them. It's a high-density location. The geography doesn't give any maneuvering options."

  Kieran wasn't overenamored. Hard in and brutal. It lacked the finesse and use of misdirection and deception that appealed to him. But for once he was at a loss to come up with anything better. He shook his head dubiously. "Right in the middle of a residential zone. It's bound to spark instant reactions. Even if you spring them, what are the odds going to be of getting yourselves out?"

  "Speed and surprise," Everit said again. "We'll be gone before any enforcement gets near the block."

  "And then what?" Kieran asked. "You still have to get out of Lowell. All they have to do is seal the locks."

  "There are other ways out of Lowell."

  Kieran looked at Mahom. "I wanted these guys more to keep an eye on Hamil and his people at Tharsis. For this we need something more subtle—quiet and easy. You know my style."

  Mahom shrugged, showing two empty ham-like palms and a pair of bulging eyes. "We looked at it from all the angles, Knight. There aren't other options. There isn't the time."

  Kieran stared back at the pictures and charts. He was still contemplating them, when an incoming call came for Mahom. It was from one of the spies he had stationed around the block from where Leppo and Casey were being held. People were coming out and getting into the Metrosine. A screen showed the picture. There were six of them. Both Balmer and Sarda were there. Kieran also recognized Brown, Black, and the other man he had glimpsed with them in the elevator at the Oasis. Mullen, whom Mahom had previously identified, was with them. Brown drove. A quick tally of the numbers logged coming and going indicated that only three were left inside guarding the two prisoners. It gave much better odds than those Everit had been assuming.

  "If we're going to do it, this is the time," Everit said. "We won't see this again any time soon." Mahom looked inquiringly at Kieran. Kieran nodded reluctantly. Everit went outside and called his men inside to brief them.

  As things transpired, it now seemed they had plenty of time. Tracking the vehicle's locator code, which one of Mahom's contacts had extracted from the leasing company's records, showed the car progressing through the Trapezium and along Gorky to exit to the surface at the Wuhan end. It soon became clear that it was heading for Stony Flats. Kieran puzzled over what might draw Balmer, Sarda, and practically the syndicate's entire coterie at Lowell, out to a place like that.

  By the time the Metrosine arrived at a spot identified from the map as a warehouse shed at the back end of the airfield, owned by a company that imported hydrocarbon distillates from the Belt, Everit had run his men through the plan several times, and they were preparing to move out. Kieran used Mahom's desk c-com to buy five minutes of priority time from one of the commercial surface surveillance satellite operators, and when one was next passing over, directed a high-resolution scan of the buildings Mahom had picked out from the map image. Sure enough, the black Metrosine was parked under a glass-roofed annex at the rear of two of them, reached by an alley between. More interestingly, some shapes next to the Metrosine, if he wasn't very much mistaken, were a couple of general personnel carriers painted in desert camouflage, a distinctly warlike profile suggestive of a gunship, and a smaller flyer. Somebody else out there, it seemed, was also putting together a private militia. But theirs had the appearance and firepower of an attack force. Kieran was still pondering on what it could mean when Everit and his team departed in a plain civilian bus. The only thing that made any kind of sense was that whoever had sent the abortive mission to Troy that had almost gotten shot down were getting set to try again. What to do? Recall Everit and get him out to Tharsis before the Stony Flats force made its move? Or gamble on seizing the chance to get Leppo and Casey out while the opposition was minimal?

  But then the situation changed again, and the second option went away. Mahom's spy in Embarcadero called again to say that five more people were coming out. The accompanying view showed, sure enough, the remaining three guards marching Leppo and Casey to another vehicle that had been parked nearby, which then left, going the same way as the Metrosine had. Mahom's man fell in to follow at a distance, and it soon began to look as if the second car was heading through for Wuhan, and hence out onto the surface to join the others at Stony Flats.

  "Mahom, what's the fastest way to get Everit and his team outside in a flyer?" Kieran asked suddenly as the meaning became clear.

  "Their outfit is geared for fast response. They keep an air-APC on permanent standby ready at the Cherbourg skylock." The Sudanese frowned. "Why? What's going through your mind, Knight?"

  "Get them onto it right away! The syndicate still wants its money back. They think I'm at Tharsis—and probably two other people who are far away off-planet by now. They're sending out another team to grab us. But they also think Leppo set them up last time, and therefore he's in with us and knows the story. They want to grill him before they go in." Kieran turned from the screen while Mahom clicked on Everit's call code. "See what it means, Mahom? We don't have to risk a lot of noise and commotion in the city at all. If we move fast, we can spring them outside—right there on the road to Stony Flats!"


  23

  Wedged in the rear seat between Casey and one of the guards, with another armed guard sitting facing them while the third drove, Solomon Leppo stared gloomily out at the complex of levels and spaces beneath the tangle of intersecting domes that formed Wuhan. What he had gotten them both into now, he didn't know. He no longer had any doubts that the Knight was straight enough; but he was also somebody who didn't play with trivia, and extremely complex. Whatever aspect of the Knight's business this was part of was way over Leppo's depth.

  His stomach still ached, his ribs felt raw, and his cheeks burned from the drubbing Mullen had given him to express his displeasure—and Leppo had the chilling feeling that worse was to come. Mullen was convinced that Leppo had somehow set him up and almost gotten him killed, and he just wouldn't buy Leppo's insistence that he didn't know what Mullen was talking about. He didn't know what any of those who had gone on ahead earlier—apparently to meet some important people who had arrived from off-planet—were talking about. Two of them hadn't seemed to be "with" the others at all, but acted as if they were in as much trouble as Leppo and Casey seemed to be. The short, flabby one with the black mustache and freaky eyes, that somebody had called Balmer, had wanted to know how big a split off the quarter-billion dollars Leppo had been offered. Trying to tell him that he'd never heard of any quarter-billion dollars was a waste of time. They seemed to think that the Knight was still out in the desert where Leppo and Casey had collected him from. Why else, they had argued, would the site out there be defended? They also seemed to think that a couple named Elaine and Sarda were there too. Leppo didn't know who Elaine might be, but he thought that the other of the pair—the yellow-haired one—was supposed to be Sarda. Maybe he had a brother or something. Leppo wasn't able to make any sense of it. He was starting to have acute second thoughts about this really being how he wanted to tackle the task of making substantial money. There had to be other ways, more conducive to health and longevity, than this.

  They came to the approach lane of the Wuhan exit lock and joined a short line of vehicles waiting to make egress to the surface. "Looks like we're going on an outside trip," Casey murmured needlessly.

  "Didn't someone say Stony Flats?"

  "Shuddup," the guard next to Leppo growled, elbowing his bruised ribs painfully. Leppo shut up.

  They moved forward with the next batch of vehicles. The inner doors closed behind them; the lock emptied, then refilled with Martian atmosphere. Once outside, the other traffic quickly dispersed among the clutter of roadways and constructions extending along the canyon bottom beyond the extremity of the city. This thinned as the road began rising, until, by the time they came to the series of steep hairpins carrying the road up to the open desert, the signs of habitation had given way to dry, crumbling slopes of sand and rock, with a line of tired pink crags above in the distance. As they gained height, more of the Martian landscape unfolded beyond the canyon. And then, suddenly, on rounding the last of the climbing bends, they almost ran into the skeleton of a tow trailer blocking the road. It lay across at a crazy, tilted angle, one end gouging into the sand mound bounding the roadside as if it had been dropped from the sky. The driver braked hard, throwing the occupants forward.

  "Where the hell did that come from?" the guard next to Leppo called to the driver, pulling himself up on the door pillar hand grip.

  "I don't know. It's . . ."

  The driver's voice dried up. He looked from side to side. Figures in EV combat garb were rising from behind rocks and out of the gulleys, their weapons trained on the car. Two were holding emergency life-bags. It was an indication that they meant business. A few shots would be enough to decompress the vehicle. They would then storm in and cocoon the occupants, unconscious, or at least incapacitated. Resistance was out of the question. Nobody inside could even bring a defensive gun to bear.

  "We've got no chance," the driver threw back over his shoulder. "What do I do?"

  "Call them," the one beside Leppo said tightly. The sound of engines growing louder came from overhead, and moments later an airborne armored personnel carrier with mercenary markings landed ten yards or so behind the car. The driver picked up the headband carrying his stem mike. "Okay, okay. Hold your fire. You've got us cold. What do you want?"

  "Very sensible," a voice agreed over the speaker. "You've got two good friends of ours in there. Get them into breather sets and jackets, and send them out. Then, if you behave yourselves, as far as we're concerned, the other three of you can be on your way. You've got three minutes. Fair enough?"

  Leppo turned in his seat and looked back disbelievingly at the jaunty, red-suited figure that had come out from the APC and seemed to be doing the talking. He'd recognized that voice the moment it started speaking. And the face behind the visor—still brown, but familiar enough by now—confirmed it.

  It was the Knight!

  * * *

  The APC rose slowly until the slack was almost gone from the line connecting it to the trailer frame blocking the road. "Slow . . ." Major Everit gauged the distance from a screen showing the vertical view below. "Hold it there," he instructed the pilot beside him. "Now, slow again . . ."

  "Taking weight," the pilot confirmed. "Okay, I've got it. . . . It's good."

  "Fine. Get rid of it."

  The APC lifted the frame clear, hovered for a moment, and then moved slowly forward to release the suspended load over the downward slope below the road. The car with the three guards inside waited warily; then, when nothing further happened, it began edging forward. Mahom watched it through a window as the APC resumed its ascent.

  "I'm not so sure we should be letting them go like that," he muttered to Kieran, sitting across from him behind the flight deck. "The first thing they're gonna do is call ahead with the bad news." Kieran hadn't ordered the vehicle's phone or the guards' personal phones to be disabled to buy extra time. Deliberately leaving people out on the Martian surface without communications just wasn't done.

  "They'd just have been in the way here," Kieran answered. "And the Stony Flats celestial choir is no doubt tracking them. If the car had stayed there much longer, they'd know something was wrong, anyway."

  Next to the pilot, Major Everit was looking perturbed. "Two troop carriers and a gunship rigged for ground suppression," he said, turning to Kieran. "We don't have the firepower to take on something like that. We were commissioned as a light defense force."

  "It's bluff," Kieran assured him. "They want me and a couple of other people they think are down there. They won't just come roaring in with guns blazing."

  "So what do you need us for? If you're not there, they'll go away again."

  "A show of force on the ground—so those goons don't take it into their heads to start slapping any scientists around."

  Everit still didn't seem happy. "I don't like asking my men to face odds like that. If we had firepower to offset that gunship . . ."

  "There's the Guardian Angel," Leppo said from the seat behind, where he and Casey were listening.

  "What's the Guardian Angel?" Everit asked.

  Kieran turned his head abruptly, wondering why he hadn't thought of it. "Sol and Casey's flymo," he said to Everit.

  "Flymo?" The major started to scoff, but Leppo defended their creation indignantly.

  "More than a just flymo, Major. Man, it's got lock-on autocannon, rear-firing laser or radar homing missiles, target acquisition and incoming tracking radar . . ."

  "Not fully tested ye—" Casey started to blurt, but Leppo kicked his foot beneath the seat.

  "Mil D-spec countermeasures package . . ."

  "Where is this machine?" Everit asked.

  "Right under the roof at the Cherbourg skylock," Leppo said. "We could be there in minutes."

  "Fight bluff with counterbluff," Kieran said. "Put there by Providence. You said that was what you needed. Okay, let's go for it. You can drop us off at Cherbourg and then carry straight on to Tharsis. We'll follow as soon as we get the Angel airborne."r />
  Everit was looking dazed. "You'll get used to it," Mahom told him, grinning. "Things kind of happen when the Knight's around."

  "Alter course for Cherbourg," Everit told the pilot resignedly.

  The pilot entered a code into the navcomp, which flashed a request to Cherbourg Local Area Traffic Control for an inbound slot in the skylock schedule. A few seconds later the associated comscreen responded: CONFIRMED AND HOLDING. ESTIMATED COMPLETION 6 MINUTES.

  * * *

  Consternation had broken out in the partitioned office at the rear of the warehouse at Stony Flats, where Lee Mullen and the Firm's local team had been updating the two expediters who just arrived via Phobos to take charge. A call had come in reporting that Leppo and his partner had been hijacked en route by an unidentified military unit that came down out of the sky. The guy who seemed to be in charge of the grab wore a red suit and had a brown face. There was even a picture that one of the guards had managed to snap with his phone as the rescuers and their two charges were embarking.

  The mention of a brown face triggered Mr. Black's recollection of the brief encounter in the hotel elevator. "Let me see him," he demanded. An enlarged version of the face in the helmet appeared on one of the screens. Black studied it intently. "Lighten it a bit," he said to the graphics tech who was with the group. "Make the color normal. . . . Now take the gray out of the hair."

  "How do you want it?"

  "Dark . . . No, say, maybe more brown." Mr. Black watched the transformation. The result was still a little on the old side, but he no longer had any doubts. "That's him!" he pronounced. "It's the guy who was at the Zodiac Bank with his twin brother." He pointed at Sarda, who was standing with Balmer. "The one who said he was the lawyer."

  Sarda stepped forward for a closer look. "He's right. That's who stopped me on the street when I was on my way there. He's the guy with the dog!"