Ice Red

by Jael Wye

  Cesare grinned, though it looked forced. “Come on Angelo, you know me. I don’t do emotions.”

  Angelo never really understood that attitude, but in this case he’d applaud it. If he believed Cesare actually meant it this time.

  “Do not trust her. Don’t ever assume she’s on your side. Katerina put on a good ‘innocent’ act too, you know.” His voice suddenly broke, his hand clamping over his throbbing leg.

  He was on the verge of a flashback. If he didn’t wall it away instantly he’d be starving to death in that stinking dark cell again, all alone except for the agony in his leg and the rage at the woman who put him there.

  “Angelo...”

  He breathed in. Breathed out. Forced himself back to the hangar, back to his brother. He grated, “Forget it. There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.” He locked eyes with Cesare, silently begging him to let it lie.

  Cesare looked like he was going to push it for a moment, but then he nodded. “Ay, what is it?”

  Marshaling his thoughts, he said, “I’m concerned about Mum and Leo. It’s been more than a year since we heard from them now.”

  Cesare shrugged. “I don’t think you should worry too much. It’s hard to get reliable com service in the Belt. Or maybe Mum just forgot to send a com. You know how she is.”

  “Ay,” Angelo grunted. Their mother, Francesca, was a female version of Cesare, all rash enthusiasm and thoughtlessness. “But Leo’s final treatments are coming up. He needs to be back on Mars soon.” Leo’s rare bone condition had made it risky for him to venture out to the Asteroid Belt, where there wasn’t much in the way of the advanced med tech he needed. Mum had always insisted that Leo not be treated like an invalid, and Angelo respected that. And yet...

  His uneasiness with this adventure had been steadily growing ever since they left two years ago, and now he couldn’t shake the feeling that his family needed him. It was a nearly constant worry these days, always nagging at the back of his mind.

  “I’m going out there to track them down if I don’t hear from them soon,” he said.

  Cesare didn’t try to argue him out of it. He heard the determination in his voice. “Help me straighten out this mess here, first?” he said.

  Angelo nodded gravely. “’Course.”

  Chapter Five

  Earthers

  Noctis Labyrinthus Mining Camp

  I was absolutely right, Bianca thought. Today is not going to be dull at all. She did up the micron seals at the cuffs, boots and collar of her mars-suit as fast as she could, trying hard to catch up with the Earthers. They had already finished gearing up and filed out of the locker room. She hastily pulled her hood up and snapped on her visor. A few taps on her cuff, and the m-suit hummed to life. The small airminer on her back began quietly filtering the breathable gasses out of the atmosphere to circulate around her face. The nanomatrix set into the outer layer of the suit tightened around her to compensate for the low pressure of the air outside, while the heating filaments woven throughout the inner layer began to radiate warmth to ward off the deep cold. Everything was working perfectly, according to the data stream across her visor specs. She was ready.

  She hurried out of the locker room and down the walktube after the Earthers. They were standing inside the lock to the transport dock, a group of small white figures with featureless golden faces. As soon as she joined them, the slightly stooped form she knew was Mehmet reached out and hit the lock release. The air hissed out of the lock, the door slid away, and suddenly Bianca was stepping out onto the surface.

  She resisted the urge to glance up apprehensively. There was no tent, no reassuring composite above her head. Just the thin, dusty wind between her and the violet sky. Around her, Mars spread out in all its ruddy desolation.

  Bianca shook off her moment of hesitation and followed the miners, who were climbing into the transport to the mining towers. Two long, narrow trams attached end to end with a short, flexible walktube, each with two seats in the cab, and two seats for passengers. The rest of the space inside was full of cargo—spare equipment, samples and crates of unidentifiable parts.

  Bianca wedged herself into one of the passenger seats in the lead car. She was next to Hussein, who seemed a nice enough young bloke, if somewhat odd. Asif, his brother, sat stiffly in front of them, and Mehmet was in the driver’s seat. Han and Bo were, presumably, in the second car. Milla and Iqbal had stayed behind in the hab.

  As soon as everyone was loaded up, Mehmet hit the doors and they were off, rumbling quietly along the glaze track down into the canyon toward the huge dark shapes of the mining towers. It would only take twenty minutes or so to reach the work site, so they didn’t bother to turn on the air in the tram and take off their visors.

  Bianca’s companions sat in tense silence for a few minutes. The only sound coming over her visor com was Hussein humming tunelessly to himself. She cleared her throat. “What’s your schedule for today?”

  Long pause. “What did you have in mind?” Mehmet finally said.

  “Well, what does Cesare Chan do when he comes through?”

  “Pull up a few tons of ore and then get us all drunk. That your plan?” Asif growled from the front.

  “Uh, not exactly,” Bianca mumbled. “I thought I would just follow you through your routines and ask questions.”

  “That sounds perfect,” muttered Asif.

  Bianca gave up. I can figure out what all the attitude here is about later on tonight, she thought as she watched the red landscape moving past her viewport. Right now she had to concentrate on getting through her crash course in mining without humiliating herself.

  A daunting task, she realized, as the great mine complex slowly rose up before them. There were outstations, rings of glaze tracks, bots of various kinds and sizes, and rows of storage sheds all jumbled together, the two great mining towers looming above it all. Each tower was as big as a city block and rose nine stories tall, with the slender spire of the main drill rising seventy meters above that. Each big, dark box sat on huge splayed treads which moved them over the ground a millimeter at a time. As they progressed at this glacial pace, the drills probed deep into the bedrock beneath the canyon floor for deposits of rare-earth metals and uranium, pulled up the ore from the deep shafts, and sent it through the processors in the main body of each tower. Then the service bots loaded the processed ore into the storage sheds to wait for transport all over Mars, or up the elevator and out to Earth. She knew all this already from her basic research, but dealing with the dusty reality of it was sure to be a completely different matter.

  * * *

  All the rest of that morning Bianca followed her reluctant guides up the towers, through the processing plants, and out and around the complex. Their main job was overseeing the fleets of robots that that made it possible to run an industrial operation of this size with just seven people. But they also inspected and fixed equipment and programs, ran samples and models, tested and planned operations. Occasionally, Bianca would ask questions, touching notes into her cuff.

  She made a point of being as unobtrusive as possible, which seemed to ease their resentment of her being there at all, at least slightly. But she kept her eyes and ears wide open. And she noticed some interesting things.

  Like the fact that several pieces of their equipment were seriously out of date—well cared for, to be sure, but all but obsolete. Yet the company records showed regular expenditures for material updates for this mine.

  So where was all the new stuff? Where had all the money to pay for it gone? Into the accounts of the miners? It didn’t seem so at first glance. Into Cesare’s accounts? She would have to dig into it tonight.

  At least it didn’t appear that the deferred maintenance had endangered the miners’ safety or the productivity of the mine. Tower Two was a perfect example of how they were dealin
g with the problems.

  According to Mehmet, The tower’s General Intelligence had been mysteriously freezing up for weeks now, but the patches and detours they had rigged had allowed them to keep production limping along. Bianca had to give them all credit for squeezing water from the proverbial stone.

  Actually, Tower Two was an intriguing problem. Han, the camp programmer, insisted that the GenIe wasn’t the source of the gremlin, and Bianca tended to agree.

  General Intelligences were centralized e-constructs where data from all of a given structure’s comps and sensors was translated into action. The most complex GenIes, like the ones on the elevator, were highly sophisticated neo-entities. But in Bianca’s experience, they were totally inflexible beyond their capability parameters, and would throw tantrums at the slightest taste of data they couldn’t integrate.

  That meant that the Tower Two GenIe was most probably being fed sour numbers by one of its hundreds of thousands of inputting bots and comps and sensors. It also meant that tracing the trouble to its root cause could be a huge task.

  The puzzle of it appealed to the engineer in her, though. In fact it appealed so much that after lunch she began running a few tests and models of her own in one of the tower workstations. She started with some of the drill algorithms, and got so caught up in the flow of the numbers that she was completely surprised when Mehmet came in to quietly inform her that it was time for them all to head back to the hab. Hours had passed without her noticing.

  This was an exhibition of disturbingly Max Ross-like obliviousness, she realized. She decided to shelve the problem for now, and focus on the human equation of her Earther hosts.

  * * *

  Back at the hab, she went straight into the kitchen and offered herself as a cook’s assistant to a startled Milla. The Earther quartermaster, a slender, pale-haired woman, accepted her help with a nod, and barely spoke two words to her thereafter. Bianca decided to chalk up her silence to shyness rather than animosity, and gave her plenty of space. After about an hour or so, the two of them produced a meal of textured protein and vegetables which, in her personal opinion, somehow managed to be both bland and over-spiced.

  Well, I never claimed to be a gourmet, she thought doubtfully as the Earthers sat down to eat. But none of them complained about the flavor. Evidently they were used to it.

  Everyone maintained an excruciatingly polite dinner conversation, mostly talking over the day at the mine. Mehmet, seated at the head of the table, asked her politely, “Has your experience at the mine been as educational as you hoped?”

  “Yes indeed. It’s almost like being back in university again, except I don’t have to write a thesis. Or so I hope,” she said with a smile.

  The entire table turned a confused look on her. Evidently they hadn’t realized she possessed a sense of humor.

  Hussein’s voice piped up. “I read your business school thesis paper, you know, ‘The Ethics of Megastructure Economic Models.’”

  Bianca stared at the young Earther, astonished. “How on Mars did you find that?”

  “Oh, I looked you up in the DataCloud,” he said with a vague gesture to the eyecam he still wore curled over his cheek. “You can find out anything in the Cloud if you know where to look.”

  Bianca frowned down at the hapless vegetables on her plate as the familiar, unpleasant sensation of being exposed and examined surged through her. She repressed it, though, because it wasn’t as if Hussein’s snooping was a real violation of her privacy. She managed to hide a great deal of her life behind firewalls, but there was still a lot of data on her floating around the Cloud that anyone could gather if they tried hard enough. Besides, the dazed young Earther seemed so utterly harmless, getting angry at him would be like kicking someone’s pet emrat.

  Oblivious to her discomfort, Hussein went on, waving his spoon around, “I liked your reasoning on ethics. It was so thoughtful and empathetic.”

  She tried a smile. “I believe my professor deemed it impractical and idealistic.”

  “Idealism isn’t a bad thing. I think you’re very nice.” She couldn’t miss the flashes of skepticism that crossed the faces of the other Earthers at that pronouncement.

  “Thank you,” she said faintly.

  “You don’t have a boyfriend do you?” Hussein suddenly asked, his wide brown eyes peering guilelessly at her from behind his cam.

  “Er, no,” she said, hoping that this wasn’t the prelude to the confession of some kind of awkward crush.

  But he just nodded. “I didn’t think so. Whenever you’re in the tabloids, you’re always alone. Never any dates, or any friends, either. And no family, of course, since your mother died and your father sent you away. You must be very lonely. It’s sad that a nice person like you should be lonely.”

  Her breath was suddenly shallow, as if she had been sucker punched. With a little research and a few words, this weird young man had shown her and everyone else at this table exactly how empty her life was.

  “You found all that out from the DataCloud?” she mumbled.

  “Ay,” he said, his eyes suddenly seeming not dazed, but soft and kind.

  “Hussein, stop talking nonsense,” Mehmet said firmly, and he started passing around a bowl of the tree fruit Bianca had brought. The tension in the room relaxed a bit. Bianca shot him a grateful smile as everyone turned their attention away from her personal life and back to their dinners.

  “This sure reminds me of home,” said Bo, a cheerful smile on his round face. He was eagerly peeling an orange, the rind scattered around him in little golden curls. The small, brown-skinned tech, who Bianca understood was married to the silent cook Milla, had been the one principally responsible for keeping the conversation going throughout dinner.

  Bianca jumped on the opening, suddenly eager to talk about Earth. She had never given the home-world much thought before, but her curiosity about it had been steadily growing from the moment she set foot in their hab. “Do you miss Earth?” she asked.

  Bo shrugged. “It had its good points.”

  She leaned her elbow on the table, and rested her chin on her hand. “Like what?”

  Han said, “Well, for one thing, you could take a walk outside without choking to death on the air. Usually.” The thin, saturnine man twitched his long nose.

  “Not in Cairo, you couldn’t,” said Iqbal with a lazy smile. The rounded older woman slouched back in her chair, her plump fingers toying with a nectarine.

  “At least it was warm there,” said Bo.

  “You mean hot. And crowded, and desperate,” said Iqbal.

  “Don’t forget violent,” added Han.

  Bianca thought of the teeming slums, the chaotic weather, the political and social unrest that were always prominent features in the Earth vids. No wonder these people had left, she thought.

  “It was still home,” Asif grumbled. He had been quiet so far this evening, keeping his eyes on his plate with only occasional breaks to cast her suspicious looks, his arms folded across his chest and frown in place.

  Bianca wasn’t sure how to respond, but Mehmet said, “Yes. No matter how bad the circumstances were there, it was still home. It’s difficult not to miss your home, sometimes.” He delivered this pronouncement like a benevolent magistrate handing down a judgment from on high.

  “Ay, I know what you mean,” Bianca said, thinking of Eris. “When did you leave? How long have you been on Mars?”

  “About ten years, now, right?” Bo said easily. The others were suddenly intent on their fruit.

  “Were you all in mining back on Earth? I’ve heard that it’s getting difficult to extract metals there. Is that why you decided to come out here?”

  The temperature plunged another notch. Even Bo looked uncomfortable. Milla suddenly got up and started clearing dishes. Mehmet said, “No, we all came to mining
from...other occupations.”

  “Oh,” Bianca said. Time to change the subject. She motioned toward Hussein and Asif with a smile. “You two couldn’t have had a different career before this. You must be about my age.”

  “I’m eighteen, and Asif’s twenty,” Hussein said absently. He was staring into his eyecam again.

  Bianca was shocked. Eighteen and twenty—why, they were barely more than children! Of course, Earthers usually didn’t grow up getting Correction treatments like Martians did, which meant they grew up much faster. She couldn’t judge them by Martian standards. Still, if they had come to Mars ten years ago, they would have been only eight and ten when they made the journey. Highly unusual. And to be working out here at such a young age—very strange indeed.

  So many dark hints swirling in the atmosphere here. She felt like she was edging close to something, touching the outlines of the mystery here in the RedIce mines. But suddenly, she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to push it any further. She cast about for some other direction to take the conversation.

  “So, what did you think of Eris space station when you came through?”

  “That’s it!” She snapped her head around to see Asif glowering at her, his eyes hot. “I’ve got a few questions for you! Why are you really here? What are you trying to get out of us?”

  “Asif! Enough,” Mehmet said.

  “No, si, it’s not enough! I want to know what she came here for.” His stare bored into her, demanding an answer. The others at the table were silent, waiting for her to speak.

  “I...I only want to learn about the mine, about you, to see if you needed any—anything, if you were safe, and happy—”

  “We were, before StarLine began to feck with us. Is this just some cracked prank? Taking away our homes and families wasn’t enough? You have to gloat and feel superior over what you did to us?”

  “What I did...I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bianca said tightly.