Ice Red

by Jael Wye

Cesare dragged his gaze away from her and focused on his work again. It wasn’t going badly, but it wasn’t going well, either. This Tower freeze-up was so complex and multifaceted, he thought it might be more efficient to just scrub all the programming and switch out all the balky units than to try to trace the source of the problem. Expensive, though.

  At least he could take some time making the decision. It was stable enough for now. With a few taps, he ended his work session. Time to quit for the day. “That’s it, blokes,” he said. “Things are green for now.”

  They ended procedure and then they all trooped back down toward the trams. Cesare stood beside Bianca in the lift. The others stared off into space. He shifted his shoulders and looked down at her. Her porcelain face was serene, but she was staring a little too intently at the crack of the lift door. “Ready to go on our field trip tomorrow?” he said.

  She started just slightly and looked up, her gold-flecked eyes meeting his. For a moment he felt his breath catch, just like it had the very first time he had spoken to her. “Ay, I’m ready,” she said. “Are you?”

  Good question, he thought.

  * * *

  That night, Bianca volunteered for galley duty again. She thought tonight’s dinner turned out better than last night’s effort, on the whole. Cesare seemed to find it good enough. Bianca scolded herself for being ridiculous, but she couldn’t help a small flush of pleasure when he had second helpings of her protein stew.

  Just as he had at breakfast, Cesare drew the others out, his broad smile always at the ready. His skin glowed golden in the dim evening light from the viewports. His c-suit was basic black, just as it had been all day. He didn’t have much use for fashion, it seemed. But somehow it suited him.

  The Earthers were all as relaxed and congenial as she had ever seen them. They lingered over their fruit again, chatting over nothing in particular.

  Bianca was content to sit back and listen, as she usually did in situations like this. But suddenly she felt the warmth of Cesare’s attention shining on her. “How has your visit to the Outback been so far, M’Ross?” his deep voice rumbled. “Learning as much as you hoped?”

  She decided to take that question at face value. “Ay, indeed. I’ve had an excellent crash course in mining, thanks to our hosts.”

  “Life out here must be quite a change for a spacer.”

  “I’m adjusting,” she said with a smile.

  “Green. Maybe your visit here will make an authentic Outback duster of you.”

  Bianca laughed. “It might take more than one visit. After all, one trip to Eris failed to make a spacer out of you. And Eris is the most magnificent space station in the Sol, I don’t mind saying.”

  “Eris itself was not too shabby,” he admitted. “It was floating up to it in zeegee that tore my guts out.”

  “Ciel, Cesare, don’t tell me you still can’t go into space without getting strapped down flat,” Han said.

  “Ay, I’m afraid so. I had to be tied to my bed for the entire journey there and back.”

  Iqbal lifted her drooping eyelids a fraction. “Tied to the bed, huh. Sounds like a good way to spend a week to me,” she murmured.

  “It can be, when you have the right chic around to tie you up,” said Bo with a sideways grin at his wife. Milla blushed and thwacked him on the arm.

  “Now, now, everybody, we’re going to shock our guest with all this duster talk of bondage and such,” Cesare said. He cast a glance in her direction, a slight curve to his mouth. Poking fun at the prudish spacer?

  She shrugged lightly. “It’s not shocking, M’Chan. It’s an ordinary part of life in space. Binding intimate partners down is necessary in zeegee.”

  “Necessary?”

  “Ay. For safety. Too much bouncing against the walls and ceiling can hurt. Also, there’s the problem of proper leverage.” In spite of herself, she found her cheeks were beginning to heat. How had they gotten on to this topic?

  Cesare’s lips were curling up, eyes crinkling at the corners. “I hadn’t considered that aspect of it.”

  “Well. That just goes to show how much you could learn if you gave space travel half a chance,” she said, trying to recover.

  Cesare shook his head. “This is all extremely intriguing, I’ll admit, but not enough to lure me back up the elevator any time soon.”

  “You know, I believe you could shake off your space sickness if you really wanted to.”

  He crossed his arms on the table and leaned toward her. “Ay? How?” His voice was a caress, his warm, dark gaze intent on her as if he was truly interested in what she had to say.

  She thought for a minute, trying to put her notions into words. “You have to concentrate on one fixed point, and orient your universe around it. You have to forget up and down and near and far. In space, those things don’t matter—only you and the focus point matter. Once you can trust that, really feel it, you can handle zeegee.”

  Cesare arched his brows. “If a bloke can do all that, I’d think he could handle almost anything,” he said.

  * * *

  She came to torment him in his dreams again, like she had every night since he had first seen her. She wrapped herself around him, her soft skin moving under his hands like rippling silk. He came awake moaning, grinding his hips against the mattress. Ciel, he wanted her. He didn’t know if she would kiss him afterward or plunge a blade into his back, and in that moment, he didn’t care. He just wanted Bianca’s long, luscious body under him right now.

  He fisted himself for a moment, then he swore and rolled over, throwing his arm across his eyes. Enough of this pathetic jacking around. The next time he came, he would be deep in her, he promised himself. She couldn’t deny that she wanted him, too, not when the beautiful glow of desire rising under that smooth white skin gave her away whenever he drew near.

  What would it take for him to bring that desire up to soften her lips and glow in her eyes? To make her twist against him, make her cry out his name? He had to find out before it drove him mad. Soon, very soon, Bianca was going make every one of his dreams real.

  Chapter Six

  Diamond

  They cruised along the track toward the reservoir, the white morning Sun beckoning to them as they climbed up out of the canyon. Bianca looked out the tram’s viewport, studying the tubes and pipes that snaked across the face of the cliff. This was the infrastructure of the gas and liquid products of the mine. The towers crude-processed the gasses and trace compounds in the ore they pulled up and then sent the material out through a series of distillery pipes for fine processing. Most gasses were released into the atmosphere, as a small part of the worldwide effort to thicken the air and warm the planet. The water, however, was pumped to the rim of the canyon to await transport to the cities.

  When the reservoir came into view, Bianca could see that it was a gigantic half-moon shaped lake of ice, held back from flooding the canyon floor by a delicate-seeming composite dam. Cesare drove the tram up to the near end of the structure, and the old machine rumbled to a stop.

  They climbed out and stood at the edge of the dam, gazing out over the view. Down at the bottom of the canyon the towers loomed, huge even at this distance. A bit farther on, the viewports of the hab glinted. Beyond that, the Noctis canyon system spread out to the edge of the world.

  Bianca looked over at her self-appointed tour guide standing close by. His tall, broad-shouldered form in his white mars-suit stood out in sharp contrast against the rusty landscape. He had been uncharacteristically subdued during the tram ride up, not speaking much except to explain the pump system and machinery as they went past. The silence was starting to put her on edge.

  But then, everything about him seems to put me on edge.

  She cast about for something to say. “Mag view from this spot,” she said into the suit com. More
than mag, actually. Overwhelming. Almost frightening.

  She knew that a twinge of disorientation was not unusual when looking out at the Martian landscape. Even people who were born here sometimes experienced an instinctual sense that the horizon was somehow wrong. After all, Mars’s curvature was more pronounced than the Earth of their ancestors, since it was a much smaller planet.

  But it didn’t seem small to her right now. It seemed all too big. She and Cesare were just two tiny white specks lost in this vast red world.

  Cesare turned toward her, his quick grin flashing through the gold of his visor. “It is mag, isn’t it?” came his voice in her ear. He feels it too, she thought. That same sense of awe. Only, it didn’t bother him in the slightest.

  He began wandering along the edge of the reservoir, his boots crunching through a crust of red dust to the rock below. Bianca followed, eyeing him covertly. He walked over the rough terrain with confidence and grace, his long stride eating up the ground. Compared to him, she stumbled and scuffled along like a greenie.

  They slowly made their way along the edge of the sea of tumbled ice. The curving rim of stony debris formed a nearly perfect half-circle. “Was this a crater?” Bianca asked.

  “No, actually this was an old pit mine,” Cesare said.

  “Really?”

  “Ay. This whole canyon is riddled with old pits and tunnels from before we got the towers. We’ve been working this claim since the earliest colonies. In fact, this mine is so old, it used to be a diamond mine.”

  “A diamond mine. What a strange thought.”

  “Ay, I suppose it is these days. But diamond used to be really rare and valuable a long time ago. Once big diamond manufacture got under way, there was no profit to digging it up anymore. Luckily for this mine, there turned out to be other deposits to exploit.”

  “Hmm. Is there still any diamond here?” She asked idly.

  “Oh, ay. Let me look. Probably won’t find anything, but you never know.” He crouched down near a drift of gravelly debris, and started sifting carefully through it, picking up the occasional specimen and looking at it through his visor specs. “I’m glad you decided to come out here with me,” he said after a minute. “I wanted the chance to talk to you on a more personal basis.”

  “Personal?”

  “If we’re going to work together, we should have a decent personal relationship, ay? I set that back pretty far the other day, and I’m sorry for it. I’d like to make a fresh start.” He looked up at her with a half-smile. “So, since I’m already on my knees, I suppose I might as well get on with the groveling I promised you.”

  She had to smile. “No self-abasement is necessary, M’Chan, I assure you.” She hesitated, then said casually, “Still, if you really want to make things up to me, you could answer a few questions I have.”

  He stiffened slightly. “What questions might those be?”

  “Well, yesterday you mentioned that you’ve had some bad experiences with StarLine. Could you tell me what they were?”

  He looked sideways at her for a moment, his expression indecipherable. Then his deep voice came over the com by her ear. “Actually, I’ve managed to avoid problems with your company myself. My employees, however...many of them have had bad experiences with StarLine.”

  “What kind of experiences?” she said, her brow furrowed. “If people are having serious complaints about elevator services, I need to know.”

  He snorted softly. “It wasn’t the elevator service that gave them problems. It was the elevator management and—how do I put it—corporate philosophy.” He got up and walked a few paces, then crouched to sift through a new pile of stones.

  Bianca followed him. “You keep dropping all these dark hints about StarLine. Why don’t you scan it out for me. Exactly what are you accusing us of?”

  “Running a slave ring, to put it bluntly.”

  Bianca felt her lips part. “What... I assume you mean that metaphorically,” she said.

  “Oh no, I mean it literally. About fifteen years ago, a few Earther regimes wanted to get rid of some of their political dissidents and other undesirables. So they started rounding them up and selling them off to Martian companies as a cheap, disposable commodity. And not just workers. Little kits too. Old people.” His voice grew harder. “StarLine was the broker.”

  “Ridiculous!” Bianca sputtered. “I don’t know who has been feeding you such paranoid dreck, but it’s absolutely not true!”

  Cesare said nothing, just let a trickle of stones fall through his fingers.

  She drew herself up. “I have had full access to all the StarLine company data for years now, and I can guarantee that there isn’t the slightest hint of a...a slave ring in any of it.”

  Cesare shrugged slightly. “There probably wouldn’t be. Around the time of those labor investigations ten years ago, things got too hot to continue human trafficking. So they shut it down, as far as I know.”

  She snorted. “Convenient.” She began to pace around. “The elevator is a vital part of the Martian economy. That kind of influence attracts enemies, slander. That’s all this is.” She spun on him. “These employees of yours who are making these mad claims—I want to talk to them myself.”

  Cesare shook his head. “After what they’ve been through, they aren’t going to want to expose themselves to StarLine again.”

  “This is cracked. My father is a decent man. The board members are decent people. They would never in a million years do something so barbaric. This has got to be some kind of mistake, if it’s not just pure malicious gossip.” She continued pacing.

  Cesare looked up at her, his eyes searching and serious. “You’re telling me you don’t know anything about this?”

  “Of course not.” After a moment, she laughed bitterly. “So that’s why everyone down here has been acting like I’ve got the superflu. Everyone believes this slime. They all think I’m out to snap a collar on them or something.” She shook her head. “And here I was thinking I was investigating you for abusing your workers.”

  “What could possibly make you think I was thumping on anyone?” He sounded a little bemused over the com.

  “Come on. You have a mine full of rotten hardware and software out there. You have a company full of people who don’t officially exist, and you’re funneling company money to who knows where...” she trailed off as the implications of what she was saying sank in. “So that’s where all the money is going. You’re spending it on these people you say are slaves.”

  “Former slaves,” he snapped. He jerked to his feet and strode a few paces away. “Ten years ago there were thousands of Earthers brought to Mars against their will that I had to track down. I still haven’t found them all, in fact. When I do find them I buy their contracts and get them new identities. I offer them jobs at RedIce, and some of them accept. Some move on to other companies, and some even go back to Earth. And yes, all of that takes a lot of money. Running a liberation underground is not a cheap proposition. But it’s worth it, because they’re free human beings now. And they’re going to stay that way, even if that means using some creative accounting.” He looked at her directly, his mouth hard.

  “You’re protecting them.”

  “As you say, they don’t officially exist, so they don’t have anyone else to take their part but me.”

  “Why just you? Why not report this to MarSec, for Heaven’s sake?”

  “Because my father would be implicated too,” he said heavily. “He was one of StarLine’s customers.” Bianca was shocked all over again.

  “I put a stop to that shite the minute I had enough pull in the company. Nearly gave the old man a stroke. And now he’s getting his revenge, selling RedIce to you.” Bianca was silent, thinking about the bitter, burnt out man in the video message Shen Chan had left for her.

  Cesare bent
and scooped up a new handful of grit. “So there’s another reason you ought to give up on acquiring RedIce, Bianca. It’s a payload of drama and trouble. I’m used to it myself,” he said wryly. “But trust me, it’s a huge pain in the arse.”

  She turned and looked out over the rugged, dusty ice field, her thoughts in chaos. Cesare’s accusations couldn’t be true. Even if it were possible for her father to conspire in something like this, she still would have known about it. Wouldn’t she?

  Ten to fifteen years ago, Bianca had been in school on the surface and her father had just married Victoria... A thread of doubt crept through her. If, somehow, Earthers had been brought through the elevator by force, could it really have been kept from her? Asif’s words from last night suddenly rang in her mind...what you did to us...

  A low sound of satisfaction rumbled over the com. “Look,” Cesare said. “I found one.” He held up something between his gloved thumb and forefinger.

  It took Bianca a moment to figure out what he was talking about. “You found a natural diamond?” she said, moving toward him.

  “Ay.”

  She peered through her visor at the tiny, dingy crystal in his hand. “Very interesting,” she said politely.

  Cesare slid a half-grin at her. “All right, maybe they aren’t all that impressive. They do polish up nice, though.” He put the diamond into the specimen pouch on his hip. “I’ll run a cutter over it for you, and you can keep it as a souvenir. Something to remind you of your trip to Noctis.”

  She shifted away. “Thanks. That’s thoughtful.” She started to walk back toward the tram, feeling his gaze following her. Remind me? As if I could ever forget.

  * * *

  Cesare glanced at the slender white shape of the woman next to him as she carefully picked her way over the stony path.

  Her delicate face looked remote behind the gold of her visor, as if her thoughts were a million kilometers away. She hadn’t said a single word for the last fifteen minutes as they made their way back to the rover.

  “I want you to know that I don’t hold you responsible for what StarLine did,” he finally said. To his surprise, he was willing to entertain the possibility that she was just as innocent as she seemed. Against every one of his expectations, the more time he spent with her, the more alluring she became.