by Neil Clarke
“Me too,” Dorian said, but he searched for her free hand in the dark and gave it what he figured was a comforting squeeze.
She looked down at their interlaced hands, then back up, brow furrowed. “You should have said, though. You should have said, ‘Nahm, don’t let her see a mirror’.”
Dorian took his hand back. The guard ushered them into the side alley, stopping underneath a graffitied Dokemon. Dorian crossed his arms.
“Alright,” he said. “How much does he want? And if it’s cash, we need a machine.”
“No cash,” the guard said, brandishing a phone still slick from the plastic wrap. “I do Bank.”
“Of course you do,” Dorian said. “So how much, shitface?”
“Five million Baht.”
Dorian’s exaggerated guffaw accidentally landed a speck of spit on the guard’s shoulder, but the man didn’t seem to notice and Dorian didn’t feel keen to point it out. “Who do you think I am, the fucking king?” he demanded instead.
In reply, the guard thumbed a number into his phone. “I call cousin,” he said, seizing Nahm’s wrist. “Your ladyboy will go to jail, maybe you too.”
Nahm gave a low groan again. Dorian made a few mental calculations. He had just over a million Banked, and the footage from the hotel had to be worth triple that, even if it wasn’t a full encounter. He would still come out of this in the black. The last thing Dorian needed was police showing up. And he didn’t like the idea of Nahm sobbing in some filthy lock-up, either.
“Half a million,” Dorian said. “All I got.”
The guard’s ringtone bleated into the night air. He shook his shaved head. Nahm started cursing at him in Thai.
Dorian clenched his jaw. “A million,” he snapped. “I can show it to you. It’s really all I’ve got.”
The guard stared at him, black eyes gleaming in the blurry orange streetlight. The ringtone sounded again. Then, just as the click and a guttural hallo answered, he thumbed his phone off.
“Show me.”
Dorian dug out his tablet and drained his account while the guard watched, dumping all of it to a specified address and waiting the thirty seconds for transaction confirmation. Nahm shifted nervously from foot to foot, mascara-streaked face bleached by the glowing screen, until it finally went through with an electronic chime. Dorian’s stomach churned at the sight of the zeroes blinking in his Bank. He reminded himself it was temporary. Very, very temporary.
Once the transaction was through, the guard bustled out of the alley without so much as a korpun krap, leaving Dorian alone with Nahm. He was formulating the best way to get back into the hotel room without running into the guard again when she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him into a furious bruising kiss. Her fingers on his scalp and her tongue in his mouth made it difficult.
“Thank you,” she panted. “For not letting him call.” She hooked her thumb into the catch of Dorian’s trousers, giving him her smeared smile. “No champagne. But …”
With her right hand working his cock, he nearly didn’t feel her left slipping something into his pocket. He clamped over it on reflex. Nahm looked vaguely sheepish as the sound of a sputtering motor approached.
“I still am working on my hands,” she said, wriggling her fingers out of his grip, leaving a small cold cylinder in their place. “Bye.” She stepped away as a battered scooter whined its way into the alley, sliding to a halt in front of them. Dorian watched Nahm climb on to straddle a helmeted rider with a cartoon snake on one thick forearm. He lost his half-chub.
As the scooter darted back out into traffic, Dorian looked down at the insurance cam in his palm and grimaced.
It took another oversized bottle of beer before he could bring himself to watch the cam footage. Finally, slouched protectively over the table, he plugged it into his tablet and fast-forwarded through the empty hotel room until the door opened. Nahm glided inside on her pencil-thin heels, but instead of Alexis Carrow coming in behind her, it was the security guard, furtively checking the hallway before locking the door.
And instead of fucking, they sat on the edge of the bed and had a fairly business-like discussion in Thai. At one point Nahm departed for the bath room and returned with the ziplock in hand. Dorian narrowed his eyes as she tossed it casually to her partner in crime, who stuffed it into a black duffel bag. The man paused, gesticulating at the bed and walls, then, with Nahm’s approval, dug a scanner bar out of the duffel.
Dorian fast-forwarded through an impressively thorough search until the cam was spotted, plucked off the wall, and carried back to Nahm. She flashed a very un-vapid smile into the lens. The screen went black for a moment, then cleared again in the bathroom, pointing towards the mirror where Nahm was now painting a bruise under her eye.
Dorian swilled beer in his mouth, letting the carbonation sting his tongue while he listened to Nahm explain, in her roundabout way, how her “little” brother had caught him running a scam in a bar where he bounced. How Dorian had drunkenly bragged about his takings. How Nahm had shopped photos from Alexis Carrow’s vacation in Malaysia six months ago and slipped the fake news report into the mirror for him to watch.
Her brother, working as a valet at the Emerald Palace, had gotten the imposing black ute out of the garage for a quick spin. She’d worked on her Cockney accent for a few weeks and done up a voice synthesizer. And from there, Dorian realized his overactive imagination had done the rest of the work.
“I hope the last part is so easy, too,” Nahm said sweetly, smearing her lip gloss across her face with the heel of her hand. “With the money, we think maybe to buy a boat. Mwah.” She blew a kiss to the cam, then reached in and switched it off.
Dorian leaned back at his table. Unprofessional of her, to add insult to injury like that and lay out her method besides. But he supposed it was understandable in the excitement of pulling off a semi-long con for the first time. And at least this way he’d recouped one of the cams. Dorian slid it back into his pocket, pensive.
For a little while he rewound the footage and sourly watched Nahm blowing kisses on loop, then finally he put the tablet away. He still had enough cash stowed to take a domestic down south and start over from there.
A fresh wave of tourists would soon be showing up on the islands, and Pattaya just wasn’t doing it for him anymore.
Alex Irvine writes books (Buyout, The Narrows, New York Collapse), games (Marvel Avengers Alliance, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival), and comics (DaredevilNoir, Deux Ex: Children’s Crusade). He lives in Maine.
NUMBER NINE MOON
Alex Irvine
They came in low over the abandoned colony near the eastern rim of Hellas Basin, deciding which landing spot gave them the best shot at hitting all the potential motherlodes in the least time. The Lift was just about done, and everything on this side of Mars was emptied out. The only people left were at the original colony site in the caldera of Pavonis Mons, and they would be gone inside twenty-four hours. Steuby, Bridget, and Marco figured they had twelve of those hours to work, leaving enough time to zip back to Pavonis Mons and pay for their passage back in-system on the freighter that was currently docked at the top of the Pavonis space elevator.
“Quick visit,” Marco said to no one in particular. “We’re just stopping by. Quick trip. Trips end. People go home. That’s what we’re doing, boys and girls. About to go home, live out our happy lives.” Steuby really wished Marco would shut up.
“That’s it right there,” Bridget said. She pointed at a landing pad on the edge of the settlement. “Close to the garage, greenhouse, that’s a lab complex. . . .”
“Yup,” Marco said. “I like it.”
He swung the lander in an arc over the settlement, bringing it back toward the pad. Nineteen years of work, people devoting their lives to establishing a human foothold on Mars, and now it was up in smoke because Earth was pulling the plug. It was sad, the way people were withdrawing. Steuby always wanted to think of human civilization like it was an e
agle, but maybe it was more like a turtle. Now it was pulling its head in. Someday maybe it would start peering out again, but all this stuff on Mars would be junk by then. Everything would have to start over.
Or humanity would stay on Earth, and in a hundred years no one living would have ever set foot on Mars or the Moon or an asteroid.
“Shame,” Bridget said. “All that work for nothing.”
“I hate quitters,” Marco said.
Steuby didn’t mind quitters. He kind of admired people who knew when to quit. Maybe that was a function of age. He was older than both Bridget and Marco by a good twenty years. The older you got, the less interested you were in fighting battles you knew you couldn’t win.
But to be agreeable, he said, “Me, too.”
“They’re not quitting,” Bridget pointed out. “Earth quit on them.”
“Then I hate Earth,” Marco said. “Just kidding. That’s where I’ll end up, when I’m old.”
Nobody knew they were there, since what they were doing was technically illegal. The sun was going down, washing the landscape in that weird Martian blue dusk that made Steuby think he’d had a stroke or something every time he saw it.
“Time to see what the Lift left,” Marco said, for maybe the hundredth time since they’d taken off from PM. Steuby was ready to kill him.
Their collective guess was that the Lift had left all kinds of useful things. People always did when they had to get out in a hurry. In the thirty days since the Mid-System Planning Authority announced it was ending logistical support for all human activity beyond the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, everyone on Mars had started lining up to get off-planet and back under the MSPA umbrella. Even the asteroid miners, as antisocial and hardy a group as had existed since Vinland, were pulling back. Things on Earth were bad— refugee crises, regional wars over water and oil and room to breathe. When things on Earth got bad, everyone not on Earth was on their own. That wasn’t a big deal for the Moon settlements, which were more or less self-sufficient. Much different story for Mars.
“Are we sure nobody’s here?” Steuby wondered out loud. It would be kind of a drag to get arrested in the middle of a planet-wide evacuation.
“I listened to the MSPA comm all night,” Marco said. “Last people out of here were on their way to Pavonis before midnight.”
Since the easiest way off-planet was the space elevator at Pavonis Mons, that was where the remaining colonists were, hiding out in the caldera until it was their turn to go up. The Hellas Basin settlement, over which they were now circling, was completely deserted. It was newer than PM, so the pickings would probably be better here anyway. Steuby looked out the window. Mars looked different around here. The PM caldera felt like it was already halfway to space because it was so high and you could see so far from the rim, when the storms let you go out on the rim. The Hellas Basin settlement, built just a couple of years ago to take advantage of a huge water supply locked in glaciers on the basin’s eastern slope, was about as far from Pavonis Mons as you could get both geographically and environmentally. Practically antipodal. Where Pavonis was high, dry, and cold, Hellas was low, water-rich, and comparatively warm. Stormy during the summers, when the planet neared perihelion.
Which was now. There were dust devils everywhere, the atmosphere in the area was completely scrambled by magnetic auroras, PM was sucking itself up the space elevator as fast as it could get there, and here were Steuby, Marco, and Bridget thousands of klicks away at HB exploring. Well, prospecting. Okay, looting.
“We’re just here to plunder the mysteries, Ma’am,” Marco said to an imaginary cop, even though the auroras meant they couldn’t talk to any authorities whether they wanted to or not. He put the lander into its final descent and ninety seconds later they were parked on the surface of Mars. There was a sharp crack from below as the ship touched down.
“Nice going,” Steuby said. “You broke the pad.”
Marco shrugged. “Who’s gonna know? You find me a concrete slab on Mars that doesn’t have a crack in it. Steuby, what was it, ten years since we were here before?”
Steuby nodded. “Give or take.” He and Marco had worked a pipeline project on the lower slopes of Pavonis. Then he’d gone back in-system. He preferred the Moon. Real Martians wanted to get away from Earth. Steuby preferred to keep the Earth close by in case he needed it. “Bridget, you’ve been here before, right?”
“I built some of the solar arrays on the edge of the Pavonis caldera,” she said. “Long time ago. But this is my first time coming out to Hellas. And last, looks like.”
They suited up and popped the hatch. Bridget went first, Steuby right behind her, and Marco appeared in the hatchway a minute later, after doing a quick post-flight check on the lander’s engines. “Good morning, Barsoom!” he sang out.
Marco was three steps down the ladder when they all heard a grinding rumble from under the ground. Steuby felt the pad shift and scrambled backward. The lander started to tip as the concrete pad cracked and collapsed into a sinkhole that opened up right at Steuby’s feet. Marco lost his balance and grabbed at the ladder railing. The sinkhole kept opening up and the lander kept tipping. “Marco!” Bridget shouted. “Jump!”
He tried, but he couldn’t get his feet under him and instead he slipped, pitching off the ladder and falling into the sinkhole as the lander tipped right over on top of him. The whole scene unfolded in the strange slow motion of falling objects in Martian gravity, dreamlike and all the more frightening because even slowed down, the lander tipped too quickly for Marco to get out of the way. He disappeared beneath it as its hull scraped along the broken concrete slabs.
Before it had completely come to rest, Steuby and Bridget were clambering around the edge of the sinkhole, where large pieces of the concrete pad angled under the toppled lander. Steuby spotted him first, face down and not moving. He slid into the dust-filled space underneath the bulk of the lander, Bridget right next to him. Together they grabbed Marco’s legs and tried to drag him out, but he was caught on something. They could pivot him around but not pull him free. “Marco,” Bridget said. “Talk to me.”
The dust started to clear and Steuby saw why Marco wasn’t answering.
The ladder railing had broken off and part of it impaled Marco just inside his right shoulder blade. Blood welled up around the hole in his suit and ran out from under his body down the tilted concrete slab. Now Marco turned his head toward them. Dust covered his faceplate. He was moving his left arm and trying to talk, but his comm was out. His voice was a thin hum and they couldn’t understand what he was saying. A minute later it didn’t matter anymore because he was dead.
“Marco,” Steuby said. He paused, feeling like he ought to say something but not sure what. After a while he added, “Hope it didn’t hurt too much when we pulled on you. We were trying to help.”
Bridget had been sitting silently since Marco stopped moving. Now she stood up. “Don’t talk to him, Jesus, he’s dead! Don’t talk to him!”
Steuby didn’t say anything.
All he could figure was that there had been some kind of gas pocket under the landing pad, frozen hydrates or something. They’d sublimated away gradually from the sporadic heat of a hundred or a thousand landings, creating a soft spot, and when Marco set down their lander, that last little bit of heat had weakened the pad. Crack, tip, disaster.
“What are we going to do?” Bridget asked in a calmer tone. It was a reasonable question to which Steuby had no good answer. He looked around. They were at the edge of a deserted settlement on Mars. The only other people on Mars were thousands of kilometers away, and had neither the resources nor the inclination to help, was Steuby’s guess.
He shrugged. “Probably we’re going to die.”
“Okay,” she said. “But let’s say we didn’t want to die. What would we do then?”
Compared to the Moon, everything on Mars was easy. It had water, it had lots of usable minerals that were easy to get to, synthesizing fuels was no probl
em, solar power was efficient because the thin atmosphere compensated for the distance to the sun . . . as colonizing projects went, it was a piece of cake. In theory.
In reality, Mars was very good at killing people. Steuby looked at the horizon. The sun was coming up. If he and Bridget couldn’t figure something out real soon, Mars would probably add two more people to its tally. Steuby wasn’t ready to be a statistic. Marco, well, Marco already was.
Now the question wasn’t what the Lift had left, but whether they were going to be able to lift themselves or be left behind for good.
“We’ll see,” Steuby said.
Bridget looked up. “See what?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re talking to Marco.”
“No, I’m not,” Steuby lied.
“Here’s a question, since you’re thinking about him anyway. What should we do with him?”
“What do you mean, what should we do? It’s not like we can strap him to the roof.”
She let it go. They started walking toward the main cluster of buildings and domes that made up the Hellas Basin settlement.
Phobos was rising, big and bright. Sometimes sunlight hit Phobos a certain way and the big impact crater on its planet-facing side caught the shadows just right, and for an hour or so there was a giant number 9 in the Martian sky. Steuby wasn’t superstitious, but when he saw that, he understood how people got that way.
Number Nine Moon was his favorite thing about Mars. He hoped, if he was going to die in the next few days—and due to recent developments, that seemed more than likely—he would die looking at it.
From behind him Bridget said, “Steuby. Stop looking at the moon.”
Marco was the one who had pointed out Number Nine Moon to him, when they’d been on Mars before. “I knew him for a long time, Bridget,” Steuby said. “Just give me a minute.”
“We don’t really have any extra minutes.”