by Jael Wye
He had a payload of blackmail material in his hands. He had a couple of security blokes camped out in the rover a few meters away from his, waiting for his signal to move. And he had a few tech toys to play with. Not bad, all in all. He’d been in tighter spots.
They were just over the horizon from the RedIce hab, out of range of the hab sensors, and hidden from visual by the jumble of rock around the rim of a small crater. Woods gazed sourly through the viewport at the barren red landscape outside. This fecking place. He could barely wait one more day to cash in and get the feck out of this dusty hellhole. He would dearly love to do in Victoria and Bianca and the whole fecking lot of them before he went, though.
At least Bianca was in his reach now. He settled in to wait for the moment that high and mighty little mookie puta would draw her last breath. He leaned his head back on the plush rover chair, contemplating the panic, the terror Bianca would soon be feeling. He licked his lips, remembering the taste of her skin on his tongue, and ran his hand lightly over the sudden bulge at his crotch.
* * *
Bianca sat staring at the workstation in front of her, stunned by what she was looking at. For the last few hours, she had sifted through the StarLine data from ten years ago, painstakingly assembled the bits and pieces hidden in the vast memory of the Cloud, and threaded them all together in the proper pattern. On their own, the scraps of names and dates and points wouldn’t have amounted to much, but for someone looking for the right meaning, they told an obvious tale.
Cesare was right. Starline had indeed brokered slaves ten years ago.
The system was simple. The big space transport company Arescorp brought shipments of “livestock” or “biological specimens” to Eris. Then StarLine sent them down the cable and distributed them to companies like the construction giant Qin.
She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead on her hand, trying to get a grip on it all. Those poor people. She pictured the fear lurking in Mehmet’s eyes whenever he looked at her, and she winced.
How could she possibly blame Cesare now for the disgust he had shown her? She bore responsibility for what had happened. There was no denying it. StarLine had been flesh-trading under her very nose, and she had never once suspected it. Had her father...? No. She couldn’t imagine that Max had been directly involved. But he was culpable just the same. It was his negligence that had made it possible for that vicious snake he had married to corrupt his company like this.
And it had to be Victoria. Her father’s fascinating, glamorous wife and trusted CEO was the only one at the company who could possibly have orchestrated something on this scale. Hard as it was, she had to accept that Victoria was not just a manipulative, ruthless cheat. She was something much, much worse.
Somehow, she had to end Victoria’s grip on the space elevator. And she had to do it soon, before whatever scheme she had going with this party on Eris could bear fruit. She shot a glance at the console table where she had dropped the compac. As she had anticipated, it had told her little that she didn’t know already. The only new information she had gleaned was that Victoria herself was coming down the elevator to Pavonis in four days to escort her guests up to Eris. So she had even less time to act than she had thought. She got up out of her chair and began to pace.
It would take more than four days to marshal enough solid evidence to get the StarLine Board on her side, even assuming they weren’t complicit in the scheme. The data she had found so far was enough to satisfy her of Victoria’s guilt, but it was still far too circumstantial to prove her case beyond dispute. And as for charging Victoria before the General Assembly... She suspected that would be almost impossible, even if she did find stronger evidence. She was beginning to realize exactly how deeply Victoria had entrenched herself into the Martian power structure.
She no longer thought she could rely on her family’s friends and allies in the GA to support her. Over the last few days, she had reached out to several associates she thought she could trust about the Eris party, and they had each fobbed her off with vague non-answers. If none of them would even pass on information about Victoria, they certainly wouldn’t indict her for human trafficking.
She had to com Max. Her father had to be forced to confront the truth about what his wife had been doing. The evidence she had uncovered so far might not convince the board right away, but it would convince Max. At least, she thought it would. Maybe she could have him talk to Cesare... She shrank back from that thought. No, Cesare would want as little to do with her father as he did with her.
All right, she could handle Max by herself. Together she and her father would come up with a strategy to deal with that...that huli jing like Max should have done years ago.
She had to get back to Pavonis as soon as possible. There she could find a com line that could reach the interplanetary satellites for relay to his ship. Not StarLine’s direct com, though. Victoria had had a long time to stock StarLine with unfriendly eyes and ears.
Who to trust? She thought for a moment. No one. No one but herself.
Right, then. She straightened her shoulders. She would leave for the city tonight. Cesare should be delighted.
But first, she was going to solve his tower problem for him, just like she said she would. She swung into her chair and pulled up her working models for Tower Two. All she had to do was trace the tower gremlin, and then get gone from Noctis as fast as possible. She began to work.
* * *
Cesare gave up on scanning quota reports and sat back from his workstation. He cast another brooding glance at Bianca’s door and shifted uncomfortably. He had wedged his long, broad frame into a tiny Earther chair in the main chamber where he could keep an eye on her guest quarters, ready to pounce on her the instant she showed herself. But that had been hours ago, and his patience was wearing thin. This is getting ridiculous. How much longer is she planning to hide out in there?
Briefly he considered going up to her door and ordering her to come out. Or maybe pleading with her. Or perhaps he should just get straight to the point and bust her door open with a plaz cutter.
He levered himself out of his seat and stalked restlessly around the big chamber. Milla looked up as he passed the kitchen and gave him a shaky smile before bending back down over some appliance she had been tinkering with. She and Iqbal had had a bad scare when the StarLine sec had descended on them. So had the miners at the towers, for that matter. It had taken a lot of reassurance to get them all to come out of the bolt-holes after the intruders were gone. But eventually they had all emerged, and a brittle calm had descended over the complex once again.
He walked on across the big chamber, finally coming to a stop at the viewport wall. His gaze drifted over the endless expanse of the red world outside. He pressed his hand to the glass, suddenly struck with an eerie sense of how forbidding his native planet must seem to the Earthers who lived here. Right now, the harsh jut of rock against the violet sky looked threatening, alien. He nearly shivered. Mars had looked that way to him once before, he remembered. On that terrible afternoon ten years ago, when his happy, profligate innocence ended.
Images began unfolding in his mind. Angelo’s feverish eyes blazing out of the vidcom, demanding his help. The half-panicked theft of the rover. The grueling drive to the crashed lander. Then, the sprawled bodies he found inside the ruptured pod. Terrified people, their chests heaving for breath, faces burning black in the cold.
Twenty fugitive slaves, dying one by one before his eyes. All except for two boys and an older man. Hussein, Asif and Mehmet were the only ones that Cesare had been able to save. The only ones he hadn’t failed.
He promised himself on that day he would never fail again. He would track down every single slave on Mars and free them. He would let nothing harm them, not the hostile planet, not his fellow Martians, and especially not his own carelessness.
He shook himself out of
his morbid thoughts. He wasn’t generally interested in guilt and self-reflection. Too much of that rot and he’d crack, just like Angelo. Enough’s enough. Time to check in with Mehmet. He put in the com, and the old Earther’s face appeared on his cuff. His mouth and eyes were drawn in grim, strained lines.
“How’s the tower holding up?” Cesare asked
“The situation appears to have stabilized for now.”
“Green. I’ll come down to lend a hand as soon as I can. I still have to talk over a few things with Bianca. She’s been hiding out in her room.” He hesitated for a moment. Opened his mouth, then shut it.
“Is there something troubling you about Bianca, Cesare?” Mehmet asked gently.
Cesare gave him a wry half-grin. “What makes you ask?”
“You forget how much experience I have working with young people. I used to be a teacher, remember. I can scan you from a kilometer away.”
“Well, that being the case, what’s your scan on Bianca?”
Mehmet’s shrewd black eyes peered at him through the vid. “I think,” he said deliberately, “that she is a good-hearted young girl who knows less of the world than is safe for her, or us.”
That was more or less what Piat Singh had said too, he considered briefly. “She guessed the truth about all of you, about what I’ve been doing with RedIce money for the last ten years. I don’t know what she’s going to do with that information. Even if she didn’t come here with the intent to break up our rescue network, she could still decide to help StarLine crush us out of family loyalty.” Or out of spite, he thought for a half a second—revenge for the things he had said to her at the reservoir. But he simply couldn’t see her being petty like that.
“She has done us no harm yet, even though she easily could have,” Mehmet pointed out. “You said she actually helped you get rid of the security men. Without her aid, the confrontation might have escalated past control.”
“Ay, you’re right,” he muttered. He hated to admit it, but her help with Woods had been crucial. It was because of her that they hadn’t had to run, or fight. He reluctantly considered that he owed her for that.
It might have simply been self-preservation on her part, though, rather than any impulse to help out Cesare and the Earthers. She certainly didn’t trust the bloke. She had chosen to stay amid hostile strangers rather than go with him back to Pavonis. He couldn’t fault her for that, after the way Woods had acted toward her. He frowned as he remembered the violent outrage that had flashed over him when Woods had fastened himself onto Bianca’s hand. His impulse to pound the man into dust had never been stronger than at that moment.
Mehmet’s voice brought him out of his thoughts. “But what does your own judgment tell you, Cesare? What do you think of Bianca?”
What did he think? He hardly knew. He still couldn’t be sure whether she was acting on Victoria’s orders or on her own. All he could be certain of was that her loyalties ultimately lay with Eris and StarLine. If it came to a choice between her company and the lives of the Earthers...could he doubt what choice she’d make?
He tried to tell Mehmet that, tried to tell him that the delicate sweetness of her was just skin-deep, that her cool, driven intelligence was too dangerous to trust. “She’s...” All at once, the memory of her in the tram burned over him, and he could almost feel her against him again, soft and slender under his hands, his lips. There was no icy calculation in that kiss. And no casual self-indulgence either. She had kissed him like she was helpless not to, like it wasn’t her mind or her body driving her, but her heart. He’d never been kissed like that before, not with such beautiful fire. He felt himself beginning to flush. “It’s complicated. She’s complicated. She’s...I...”
“She is very lovely, isn’t she?” Mehmet said softly.
“Ay,” Cesare said, his voice rough. “She is.”
Mehmet opened his mouth to say something, but at that very moment another com chimed in on Cesare’s cuff. Saved, he thought with relief. “Mehmet, it’s my lawyers from up on Eris. I’ve got to take this com.” The old man nodded and tapped off, and Sam Briggs’s face appeared in his place on the cuff screen.
“Sam! I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days. Where have you been? What’s happening up there?”
“Ni hao, Cesare,” Briggs said. “Sorry I haven’t returned your messages. Been a bit overworked. The rest of the team went back down to Pavonis, you see.”
Cesare wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “The others left Eris? Why?”
“Because they have nothing to do here now. We lost.”
“What?”
“The Trade Court had deemed the case to be without merit.”
Cesare braced his hand heavily against the viewport wall, suddenly breathless, like he’d been kicked in the gut.
But Sam wasn’t finished yet. “What’s more, StarLine has filed a complaint against you for bringing harassing lawsuits. The Court has put your stake in RedIce in trust until the matter is resolved. You are barred from all StarLine and RedIce property pending the first hearing. You understand, Cesare? You have to leave Noctis immediately, and stay away from all the other mines, or the Court Enforcement will send out agents to remove you.”
This couldn’t be possible. “What happened?” he grated. “The situation was under control when I left.”
“That’s just it. You left. You just had to go roll around on the surface with Bianca Ross,” Briggs said, a strange note creeping into his voice. “I told you it was a bad idea. If you had stayed up here things might have turned out differently.”
That sent him reeling again. Had he truly brought this on himself? Chasing across the planet after Bianca instead of staying put and doing his duty... Guilt boiled up inside him, nearly choking him. He forced himself to speak. “There has to be a way to fight this.”
“The preliminary rulings in Trade Court have all gone against you. Any further appeals will almost certainly be dismissed. Effectively, this thing is over.”
“No! It’s not over. We can’t let it happen.”
“I’m sorry Cesare, there is no ‘we.’ I can’t advise you any further. I’m on retainer for RedIce, and you’re not officially part of RedIce anymore. If you want to keep putting up a useless fight, you’ll have to get your own personal legal representation.”
As those last cold words sank into him, Cesare stared at the miniscule image of his old friend. It was like looking at a stranger. For the first time, he noticed the lines of dissatisfaction that had carved themselves around Briggs’s mouth, the resentful light in his eyes. “You deliberately fecked me over,” he said softly.
Briggs gave him a flat look. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“What happened, Briggs?” he continued in the same soft tone. “You used to be a decent bloke I could trust to have my back.”
“This may shock you to hear, mate, but my world never revolved around you and your problems,” Briggs said acidly. “I have my own career to think about.” His long face took on a slightly hunted look. “Listen,” he said abruptly, “here’s a last bit of free advice. Give up on trying to drill RedIce out of Bianca Ross, and take a holiday. You still have your private funds. Go spend a few points. Get yourself a real chic or two to sit on your rod. That’s what I’m doing,” he said with a little smirk. “I’ve got myself some fine yin to soothe my losses.”
Beneath the rising tide of fury, a sudden suspicion flared in him. “Your ‘fine yin’ wouldn’t happen to be Victoria Ross, would it?”
Briggs’s expression faltered, but he recovered quickly. “What, jealous?” His smile was sharp.
Hot rage broke over him. “You sold us all out for a ride on that connie! Fecking idiot!” Cesare snarled. He ripped his cuff off and hurled it across the room. It crashed into something and fell to the floor with a dull thud. He braced his arms ag
ainst the viewport, struggling to get control of himself.
He had lost everything. And it was his own fault. He saw it all with stark clarity now. He had left his company and his people at the mercy of a nest of treacherous snakes in order to chase down one slender hope. Racing to grasp at a lovely desert mirage, only to catch hold of a handful of dust.
* * *
Bianca was drifting on the familiar sea of numbers. She had worked on the tower problem late into last night, taken a few hours of sleep, and then set to it once again before the trip to the reservoir this morning. She had made good progress, methodically closing in on the gremlin that was infesting the tower. Time flowed by as she worked her way through the variations. Pushing here, testing there, the fractals shifting and dancing before her in a kaleidoscope of meaning. She paused over one bit. Something off here. She pushed it, working it over. She scanned it again. Then once again. Still off. Badly off, in fact.
She stared at the model before her as it began to resolve itself, the fragile sense of ease she had lulled herself into shattering to pieces. This can’t be happening, she thought numbly. She jolted into motion, her fingers flying over the pad, crunching, resetting, as a sick dread began to creep over her. She watched helplessly as the cold wash of numbers spelled out disaster in front of her eyes.
No time. She had no time to doubt or consider. She scooped up her workpad and bolted for the door.
* * *
“Cesare!” Bianca stumbled into the main room, looking around frantically. He was standing by the viewport wall, a tall, dark shape against the ruddy light. His head was bowed. He turned toward her slowly, and for a brief moment she was distracted by the bleak expression in his eyes.
“Finally. Come to claim the spoils of war...” He trailed off as she ran up to him, shoving her workpad at him.
“You have to look at this model for Tower Two,” she said, her voice shaking.
“What—”
“Just look!”
He stared at her for a second, then made an impatient sound and took the pad from her. She moved in close, scanning the model with him. “You see? Here, and here,” she pointed. “The anchor interfaces, just like I thought. They’re in a terminal cascade.”