by Jael Wye
Cesare frowned, tabbing the analysis. Then his fingers froze over the pad, the blood draining from his face. He looked up, snaring her with his hard black gaze. “Is this some kind of sick game?” he grated.
She shook her head. “No. There’s a ninety-two percent chance of a catastrophic failure of the main tower anchors within the next hour. You have to tell the miners to get out of there!”
He looked down into her face for what seemed like an eternity. Whatever he saw there must have convinced him. He nodded once sharply. “Milla!” he called across the room. “Get Iqbal and stand by for orders. We have a level four emergency.”
Bianca barely registered the small form of the Earther dashing for the sleeping quarters. Cesare was already striding toward the rover docks, the pad clenched in his fist. She ran after him, hard on his heels. He punched in a com as he went. “Mehmet, get everyone out of the mine right now,” he said. “Tower Two is going to crash.”
They ran out the door and into the walktube, grabbing mars-suits and pulling them on as they went. They tumbled into a transport, and over the low hum of the engines, the click and slide of the lock door, she could hear the mine’s first small warning chime begin to sound.
* * *
“Where is everyone? I told you to get the feck out of there. Why are you not getting the feck out?”
The tram’s com crackled with silence for a few seconds. Then, “Cesare,” Mehmet said, sounding strained, “we think we can stabilize the anchors. Han and Hussein have gone down to the well to work on the interfaces. Bo and I are working from the control room. Asif has got the bots jacking up the outer tread distributors. Give us a few minutes to get this under control.”
Cesare shot a sideways glance at Bianca, who was working on the tram console and her cuff pads. She shook her head frantically at him, dread moving in her dark eyes. The warning chime sounded steadily in the background, each small, insistent tone like a nail in the base of his skull.
“No,” he gritted to Mehmet. “Everyone leave the tower immediately.”
There was a brief pause on the com. Then, “Ay.”
A tense silence ensued. Cesare fired the tram as fast as it could go down the glaze road toward the rapidly looming towers. It was his nightmare come back to life again—tearing through the Outback, not knowing what horror would be waiting for him at the end of the journey. “Bianca, what are you seeing?”
Her nimble fingers flew over the tabs. “Probabilities are climbing fast.” Suddenly her face went white under the gold veil of her visor. “Ciel!” she whispered.
A second later, Cesare heard a dull, muffled crack, felt it echo through the ground. With a terrible slowness, the main drill of Tower Two began to collapse in on itself, the gleaming black shards of the spire crumpling into the well of the housing. He heard the panicked shouts of the miners over the com, heard his own hoarse “No!”
Before his eyes, the main tower body snapped one of its treads and shifted ponderously into a crazy tilt. The warning chime abruptly died. In the shocking silence a plume of red dust and white smoke began to well up into the sky.
“Mehmet! Bo! Han! Someone answer me!”
Silence stretched like a wire. Then, “We’re all...all right.” Mehmet’s voice was soft and shaky. Muffled groans and curses came over the com.
Cesare sagged with relief. “Are you out of the tower?”
“No, we’re in the tram lock, except for Asif, he was outside—”
“I’m fine.” Asif’s normally gruff voice was high. “The tread broke away from me.”
“Everyone get out of the tower. We’re nearly there.”
“We can’t—the lock is stuck!” “Ciel! Feck!” “Power’s dead, manual’s not responding,” came a garble of voices.
Shite! “No one panic, we’ll get you out.”
He stole a glance at Bianca. She was already working on the lock schematics, delicate brows drawn in concentration. Something fierce welled up inside him at the sight of her. Something he couldn’t afford to think about now. He focused on the controls and shot the rover straight down the track toward the tower, into the blinding cloud of dust.
Chapter Eight
Rescue
Cesare and Asif were arguing over a plan of action. Cesare had stopped at the outer tread line to pick up the young Earther, and then sped around to the tram lock where the others were trapped. Now they were stalled in the face of the black composite mountain before them.
Bianca dimly heard the taut, strained voices of the two men, but she locked them in the background of her mind. She worked in a strange calm, like the clear place in the eye of a dust storm. She was trying to coax the data from the fried remnants of the tower GenIe, but it was nearly hopeless. The entire structure had been royally fecked. The side and corner that housed the tram lock had wedged itself into the bedrock. The entire weight of the tower was resting on the lock, warping the structure badly enough to jam the doors shut.
Asif was saying, “Cutting’s too risky. If we try to jack it up we might be able to pry the lock open—”
“No time,” Cesare shot back. “The power supply, the ruptured lines, the strain on the supports—anything could blow any minute.” As if to punctuate his words, a low, rumbling groan sounded from deep within the shattered tower.
“Cesare is right,” Bianca said. They turned and looked at her with startled eyes, like they had forgotten she was there. Cesare’s face was grim, stony. Asif looked very young, almost fragile, his customary scowl replaced by an expression of desperate fear. But at least they were both listening. “We have to cut the lock open,” she said.
“Whatever you do, do it fast.” Bo’s voice over the crackling com was frighteningly soft. We’re...not feeling so good. Injuries...CO2 poisoning...”
“Iqbal and Milla, did you hear that?” said Cesare over the com. “We need the first aid trams in building C3. Bring everything.”
“Ay Cesare,” came Iqbal’s voice. “We’re on it. Be there shortly.”
“We’ll start cutting as soon as I bring the bots around—”
“I’ve already got them,” Bianca said. “Look,” she pointed out the front viewport. The shadowed figures of the massive construction bots hulked out of the roiling dust, the prongs of their cutters slowly extending. She turned toward Cesare with determination. “I’ll do the cutting,” she said.
Asif grunted, and Cesare frowned. She regarded them with as much calm as she could manage. “Cutting like this needs precision. It will also need welding and bracing. The whole tower is literally hanging by a few carbon threads. One wrong calculation, one bad cut, could bring it down on top of us. I’m a megastructure engineer. I’m trained for this.” She stole a glance at the bots, which were already maneuvering into position. “I’ll open the tower up,” she said. “You two go in there and get those blokes out.” She met Cesare’s eyes. Trust me, she willed. This is the only way.
Cesare considered for only a moment. Then he nodded. “We’ll get in position.” Asif looked like he might argue, but Cesare pushed him toward the lock. With one last, intense look at her from behind his visor, he stepped outside into the swirling dust.
She turned toward the console. Taking a deep breath, she let the cold, calm wash of the physics bear everything else away. Forget that people’s lives were hinging on her ability to do this. Forget that she had only minutes to work in. Forget everything but the numbers. The numbers were her thoughts. The robots extensions of her hands. “All right boys, let’s get busy,” she said to the waiting bots. With a few flicks of her fingers, she positioned the robot arm, and began to cut.
The skin and the insol panel came off easily enough. Next came the structural lattice. Slowly she cut, braced, fused the braces, opening up a hole in the tower’s flank, calculating and weighing every move. The seconds sifted by, each one
scraping painfully along her nerves. Sweat beaded at her temples. She moved the cut pieces, the black composite crumpled and jagged with the force of the tower’s crash. She was inside the lock.
“Bianca,” Cesare’s voice sounded in her ear, “the trams are smashed up inside the outer lock. They’re blocking our access.”
Bianca spared a glance at the two figures waiting tensely just out of range of the cutters. “I see the trams,” she gritted out. She cracked her knuckles and set back to work. Carefully the bots began to extract pieces of the trams, until there was a corridor through the crumpled wreckage into the inner lock.
Cesare and Asif didn’t wait a second longer. They squeezed past the bots and disappeared into the dark interior of the tower.
She kept her eyes on the screens, monitoring the stress levels. Holding steady. She heard a chime alerting her to an incoming transport. Scanning through the viewport, she saw the medical tram plow through the clouds of dust.
“We’re here,” Iqbal said over the com. “What’s the situation?
“They’re in bad shape,” came Cesare’s voice. “They need help moving. We’ll be bringing them out.”
In an instant Bianca was out of the lock, running past the maintenance bots toward the mouth of the hole.
Two dim figures moved out of the hazy shadows inside. It was Asif, half dragging and half carrying his brother past the wreckage. Bianca reached inside to catch the young Earther, pulling his arm up around her shoulders. His breathing was shallow, his face glassy behind his visor. “I’ll get him to the med tram,” she said. Asif hesitated for just a moment before he let her take his brother. He gave her one hard, desperate look before he turned and disappeared back into the wreckage without a word.
Hussein lolled against her, nearly unconscious, but he made an effort to stumble along as she dragged him toward the med tram. Milla and Iqbal had the outer door open and the three of them wrestled Hussein inside. Bianca turned, ready to run back to the tower to help the others, but there was Asif staggering along with Mehmet, and behind him, Cesare’s tall form bearing the weight of the two other miners, one under each arm.
In a few minutes of dusty chaos, they had the four Earthers through the locks and lying on the medcots, oxygen masks over their gray faces.
“I’m getting us to the hab,” Cesare said. He threw himself into the driver’s seat and a few seconds later the tram jolted into motion, speeding down the glaze track. Bianca had no medical training whatsoever, so she folded herself into a seat and tried to stay out of the way of the other two women as they worked on the fallen miners. She noticed that her hands were shaking. Had to do something with them. She let her fingers fly over her cuff, bringing up the tower data. The numbers rushed before her in a cascade of inevitability, all of them adding up to one simple, final equation.
“Bloody...Heaven!” she said in a strangled whisper. A few moments later, there was another rumbling crack from the tower, and everyone who could looked back at the building they were fleeing. They all stared in silence as the enormous black tower slowly crushed itself into a ruined heap. A storm of red dust boiled up into the darkening sky.
* * *
It seemed to Bianca that a grim silence crept into the hab during that long, sleepless night, filling up every corner of the Earthers’ once-cozy home. When the dim brown morning finally broke, she made her way to the common, where they had set up the infirmary. Carefully she peered through the door.
There was Han, sitting up and sniffling miserably as his allergies acted up. There was Bo, smiling weakly up at Milla as she fluttered over him, checking the topicals on his ribs. Bianca swallowed and looked away. There was Iqbal’s small round shape on a sofa, still dead asleep.
How they had all made it through this disaster alive, let alone with just minor injuries, only Heaven knew. Bruises, sprains, a few cracked ribs, CO2 poisoning... Not good, of course, but it all could have been much worse.
Bianca’s gaze found Asif across the room where he was sitting between the cots that held his brother and Mehmet. Mehmet was sitting up, slowly drinking a med-solution. Hussein was laying still, his eyes closed. She went over to him, distressed to see the massive bandage on his forehead. “How is he?” she asked Asif.
The Earther looked up at her, his habitual scowl subdued. “He has a concussion, but he’s going to be all right. He just doesn’t want to wake up yet.”
“Who can blame him, poor kit,” said Mehmet. “But he’ll be fine. He’s been through worse. We all have.”
Bianca forced herself not to shift uncomfortably. “Yes. I know.”
“Thank you,” Asif suddenly said. “For helping my brother.” His voice was gruff, but he was looking at her earnestly.
“Anybody would have done the same,” she mumbled.
“Unlikely,” Mehmet said. He put aside his drink tube and focused on her. “If you had not been on hand, Bianca, I have no doubt that this adventure would have turned out much worse. You acted with courage and skill. We owe you our lives.”
Bianca twisted her hands, not knowing what to say.
The old Earther shook his head wryly. “The three of us are forever being rescued from certain death by Cesare, and now by you it seems.”
Certain death? “What do you mean? Cesare saved you from something like this before?”
“Ay. Cesare saved our lives when our lander crashed on this planet.”
“You crashed here?” Bianca sank down to sit on the edge of Hussein’s cot. “I thought you were sold as—as slaves.”
“We were. The boys’ parents and I held some political opinions that the present government of the North African Union found troublesome. The NAU had us arrested, and then sold us to Qin to do maintenance work on the Martian surface. Arescorp and StarLine were paid to transport us.” He said all this in a calm, even tone.
“What happened then?” she whispered.
His eyes drifted, looking into the past. “The slave runners had gotten careless. There were over two hundred hibernation boxes in that shipment. Too many to hide what was happening from anyone who wanted to know. On the journey out, a young pilot on our ship realized what was going on, and decided he couldn’t live with it. That was Michelangelo Chan, Cesare’s brother.”
Bianca opened her mouth to ask a startled question, but Mehmet pushed on, “Instead of shipping us down the elevator as planned, Angelo sent all of us to the surface in emergency landers.” A painful look flashed across his face. “And he paid a steep price for his decency, Heaven help him.
“He got most of the escape pods to a landing site near an outpost where the slaves could take refuge. Unfortunately, the lander Asif and Hussein and I were in hit a bad entry, and crashed several kilometers from the target. The boys lost their parents in that crash. We three were the only survivors.”
Bianca’s eyes flew to Asif’s closed, dark face. He was staring at the floor, showing no reaction whatsoever. Heaven, what a terrible thing to endure. No wonder Asif had turned out so angry, and Hussein so...odd.
“Angelo couldn’t com MarSec or Emergency Response to go find us without jeopardizing all the other fugitives,” Mehmet went on. “So he commed Cesare instead. Cesare commandeered the biggest rover he could find, and came out to get us.”
A sudden realization struck her. “That was why he took that delegate’s rover,” she breathed.
Mehmet nodded. “Cesare found us, patched us up, gave us a home and a future.” The old man smiled at her gently. “And now, so have you.”
Bianca dropped her gaze to Hussein’s small form on the medcot. “Don’t thank me. Please. If...if it weren’t for us, for StarLine, none of this would have happened.” She steeled herself, and looked up. The Earthers were all watching her. She met their eyes without flinching. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right. I’ll expose this to every vid in the So
l. I’ll force MarSec to prosecute...”
Mehmet was shaking his head. “No, my dear. That would put too many people at risk. You see, Angelo managed to steal data evidence implicating several high-powered government and trade officials, including Victoria Ross, in human trafficking and other illegal enterprises. He and Cesare used it to strike a deal—safety for themselves and all of us, in return for silence.”
“Then Arescorp and Qin got a slap on the wrist, and the government pretended the whole thing never happened,” Bianca said, putting the last pieces together.
“So now you know the whole story.” Cesare’s deep voice sounded. Bianca twisted around to see him standing in a doorway to the private quarters, looking out over all of them, arms folded over his chest. He walked slowly into the room.
There was so much generous strength in this man, she thought as she watched him move toward them. How could she not always have seen it?
“Now you know why Victoria really wants RedIce,” he said. He nodded to the fallen miners. “She wants them. The living proof of what she did. I just wish I could figure out why she waited until now to move against us.”
Bianca considered for a moment. “I think you may be wrong about her motivations,” she said quietly. Everyone looked at her in surprise. “I think...I believe that Victoria doesn’t know about the RedIce Earthers, or what you did for them.”
He frowned. “Why do you say that?”
“Because she insisted that I do this acquisition.” She spread her hands, looking down at them pensively. “She sent me down here to get me out of her way, not to cause her any problems. If she knew what was going on with RedIce, what the potential for a damaging scandal was, she would have sent one of her own people to deal with it. Someone like...well, like Woods.”
“She was one of the major players in all this. How could she not know?” Asif demanded.