by Jay Allan
“What are you talking about?” Mayes said.
“I’m talking to the gods, not you. You can start pitying yourself again in five minutes. Right now I need you to tell me exactly what happened that night.”
“It won’t change anything.” She sighed through her nose and leaned her elbows on her knees. “It had been a long day with the team. They all are. Figuring the best way to raise spirits is to drink a lot of them, I took them to the Mariner. A dive in the Old Outer Ring. Got there around 9 PM. Local time. Settled in. Nothing unusual.
“Clifton Prelutsky came by about drunk o’clock. Sometime between 13:00 and 1 AM. I went up for another round. He was holding court at the bar, his father’s son, blah blah powertrip. I got into it with him over immigration—verbally. Oldest argument on Mars: ‘How can you claim to be the leading light of personal liberty and then refuse every immigrant you wouldn’t want to live next door to?’“
She gave me a wry look. “Did you know Earthside govs actually pay us to take in samtowners? It’s cheaper than subsidizing their whole lives in the States. Then jerkoffs like Prelutsky have the balls to complain about all the free labor. We duked it out for a while, a couple regulars put in their two cents, then I went and sat back down with my team.
“Viv and Braden were itching to screw, so they bolted. Vance was outside on his omni, I think.” Shelby gazed down at the plastic desk. “I don’t remember what happened after that. Blacked out. Still mad, and no one at my table to cool me down. Supposedly I went back to the bar, called Prelutsky’s name, and when he turned around, I broke his jaw.”
“And there’s no video feed on any of this,” I said.
She squinted at me through the clear wall. “In the Mariner?”
“No personal omni clips.”
“Mars is a long ways from Earth. Half those guys don’t even carry one.”
“At any time was your drink out of your grasp?” Pete said.
“Why? That a favorite trick of yours, big guy?”
“I wouldn’t be interested.”
I punched his arm. “Not helpful. Ms. Mayes—”
“Shelby.”
“Pain in the Ass, Esquire,” I amended. “Any witnesses?”
“Three. Their stories corroborate Prelutsky’s. It’s in the file.”
“Over the course of your discussion, did he at any point provoke or threaten you?”
“Look, that’s everything I remember.” She slapped her palm on the desk. Behind us, the guard poked his head in; Baxter waved him away. Shelby pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t even know how I got home. You want anything else, you read the file.”
“I will.” I stood. “If that’s what it takes to get you out of here, I will read a file.”
We left. The late afternoon sunlight passed through the dome’s anti-radiation tinting and rested on my skin as lightly as a dragonfly.
“She look strong enough to break a man’s jaw with one punch?” I said to Pete.
“Well, you know. Get someone at the right angle. Plus the gravity here, your bones get lighter. Crunchy. Like cereal.”
“Your dad was a drunk, wasn’t he?” I said. Pete’s face went blank. I hurried back on-topic. “I don’t know. Politician’s son, wants to follow suit, I bet he lifts weights every day. Regular gravity training, even. Can’t look weak, especially on this dog-eat-dog world.”
“We should go to this Mariner,” Baxter said. “It will be a king’s bounty of intel.”
“What are you hoping to find? You think it’s a coincidence she’s arrested right before she leaves to negotiate what could be the most important settlement of the era?”
“Not at all. It’s obvious HemiCo is involved. It’s so obvious that their only solution is to sweep it so far under the rug you couldn’t find it if you were a carpet tack.”
“She sounds like a drunk to me,” Pete said.
When I’d lived here, Earth-shipped minicars had been so expensive you had to be the son of Ares himself to afford one. Apparently the snob label had stuck to the vehicles long after they scraped together some homegrown manufacturing, because unlike its namesake, New Houston was still a walking town. Once the city’s fringe, the Old Outer Ring was just a few domes away from the justice center. None of us suggested trying to find a cab.
The dome wall pitched steeply down as we neared its edge. Few domes were wholly separated from those around them—most shared walls, near their bases, with as few as two and as many as six others—and wherever one bubble intersected another, a short, broad tunnel mouthed between them, functioning primarily as a passage, but also as an emergency airlock in the event of a habitat failure. Fay said the wealthiest domes had finally won the right to close themselves off to nonresidents, but by and large the tunnel doors stood open night and day.
We crossed into a run-down low-ceilinged neighborhood of street shops, grimy orangestone walkups , and dusty unpaved streets throbbing with pedestrian traffic. Food stands sold repurposed algae, shaped into cubes or noodles or pureed into an off-red milkshake. Whatever form the food took, it was heavy with the smell of pepper, cinnamon, cumin, hibiscus, and garlic, none of which could mask the briny tang of aquatic chlorophyll. I stopped for a bowl of noodles and trailed in Pete’s wake, protected from stray elbows by his Earth-molded mass. New Houston’s streetside energy reminded me of Tukwila’s, but somehow muted, muffled. Except the homeless, everyone here had some kind of “real” job. Maybe that was the difference between Tukwila’s jungle-pulse profusion and the generic big city feel of New Houston’s low-rent neighborhoods: species grow brightest in the nutrient-rich tropics, where all that food puts fewer limits on nature’s ridiculous imagination.
The next dome was a desolate row of chunky gray cubes. Even Baxter hurried. Orangestones sprung back up in the bubble after that. The flagship of Shelby’s debauchery, the Mariner lurked in a two-story building crammed against the dome wall. A rust-pitted anchor hung over the front door. Above its drunk bustle, the second-floor apartments housed either the deaf, the poorest of the poor, or the terminally self-loathing.
Inside, a crew of regulars slugged drinks and puffed smokeables of several odors. Mars was infamous for its drug laws—specifically, that they didn’t have any—but the only people I’d seen smoking or snorting on the streets were the obviously jobless. If these men had employers, their bosses clearly gave no damn as to what they did with their free time.
“My kind of place.” I led the charge.
Behind the bar, an irregular and dark-grained surface that appeared to be real wood, a tanned man in his sixties cranked his head around like a gargoyle, snowy hair ringing his bald head.
“Double whiskey soda,” I said, then turned to the others, brows raised.
“Same,” Baxter said.
“Water,” Pete said.
“Girl scout,” the bartender editorialized. When he turned his back, Pete spilled a salt shaker across the bar.
The old man clapped our drinks in front of us, sloshing amber over the wood. Baxter got out his wallet and held it open like a paperback, extracted one of the paper bills Martians used (I suspected they liked to be able to touch their cash), and flattened it against the counter.
“This is one hundred ares. Is that enough to buy some answers?”
I clapped my palm over the bill. “You idiot.”
“What? I suppose we have to waste time buying more drinks and chumming it up first?” Baxter squared his shoulders on the old man. “Do you like having your time wasted?”
The man raised a brow. “That one of your questions?”
“Were you here six days ago? The night of—” Baxter paused, throat moving, getting a translation of the Martian calendar from Fay. “The 14th?”
“If you’re asking about the blond, quit wasting time and ask.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Skinny bitch punched that rich boy’s chin right in.”
“Before that.”
“She came up for a
drink. They argued about new folks busing in. When she turned around, he said something about a tragedy.”
I cocked my head. “A tragedy?”
“That an ass like that was attached to a mouth like hers.” He sniffed. “She came back a minute later, busted him up.”
“Her drink, was it touched?” Pete said.
The old man shrugged. “Not that I saw. But I’m not a babysitter.”
Baxter flattened another bill beside the first. “Anything else?”
The bartender pinched up his mouth. “Save your money. Truth’s already been sold.”
Baxter went very still. “I see.”
“What about the buyer?” I said. The old man glanced toward the door. He worked his jaw, beard ruffling. I waved my hand. “Forget it. I know who owns this world.”
“It’s a hard city,” he nodded, suddenly angry. “Why I keep a third eye on the place.”
Baxter pressed his gut against the bar. “You’ve got a cam—?”
Pete’s hand snaked over Baxter’s mouth and clamped down hard.
“How much?” I said.
The old man cocked a brow. “Three grand.”
“We could practically buy our own ship for that,” I muttered.
Baxter spit out Pete’s hand. “Done.”
“Apartment E.” The bartender raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Come by around three.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tonight,” he glared.
We ordered another round for appearances, and because drinking is fun, then shoved off to lose ourselves in a neighboring dome until the clock rolled around. At a cafe patio, Pete and I found common ground in some tongue-peeling espresso. Water boiled differently on Mars and they’d used that to invent a whole new brewing technique.
“They set her up,” Baxter announced. “Some chieftain at Olympian Atomics cut a deal with HemiCo to chop the legs out from our negotiations.”
I was still a little buzzed. “My God, do you think they shot JFK, too?”
“Jakarta Free Kinetics? You think they’re involved, too?”
“Why would OA bother with all these little games? If they’re just going to sabotage every step of the negotiations, why agree to negotiate at all?”
“You heard Lee Jefferson. Customers get grumpy with brand names who openly commit atrocities.”
“You’re giving them an awful lot of credit, setting Shelby up to drunkenly punch some jerk in the face.”
“Wait until we see that tape,” Baxter scowled, distracting a passing man so thoroughly he walked right into a ten-year-old boy. The kid whumped into the dust and tried not to cry.
Something about the nonstop passersby troubled me. I didn’t pin down what until that night when we returned to see the bartender. He opened the door to his rathole apartment, coughed into one big-knuckled fist, and smoothed his beard. That’s when it struck me: he was among the oldest people I’d seen in the run-down domes we’d been hanging out in. On Earth, a bevy of pills and treatments under public insurance had stretched the average lifespan past the century mark. On Mars, it was strange to see so many young people, so few sagging faces and white-haired heads.
We traded cash for the bartender’s memstick, hired a cab with a whining electric engine that could barely make running speed, and retreated to our hotel.
The film was mute and poorly angled. The camera had been positioned inside a small round hole; after seeing the Mariner, I’d readily believe it had been hidden in the muzzle of a revolver. Baxter beamed the file to Fay. In the course of ten seconds, the ship located the relevant segment of tape, cleaned it up, and beamed it back down. We watched Shelby amble up to the bar, speak to the bartender, and argue with a sharp-nosed young man for two full minutes. She disappeared off-camera, sipping as she went, and reappeared forty seconds later. The young man turned; Shelby’s fist crashed into his chin.
“Well, who knows,” I said. “Maybe HemiCo tripped her into him.”
“Watch the next clip,” Fay said into our ears.
The timestamp jumped half an hour. The bartender’s head turned toward the door. Two men in dark jackets leaned on the bar, facing the camera. They ordered drinks, spoke to the bartender and two witnesses who’d stuck around, then paid their tab with a thick stack of bills, leaving two other stacks behind as tips. After they left, the two witnesses set their drinks over the cash, exchanged words, and bent over the bar laughing at an unheard joke. When they straightened up, the money was gone.
Baxter tapped his finger against the omni screen so hard I thought it would crack. “If she’s so guilty of that thing we just watched her do, why did the men in the jackets pay off the witnesses?”
“So we find them,” Pete said. “Frontier?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the ship said into our ears. “But check your expectations. Police records aren’t nearly as comprehensive out here.”
When I woke for the bathroom a couple hours later, Baxter sat in his chair replaying the clips on his omni. In the white glow of the device, his pale face was as distant and still as the side of the moon.
He didn’t notice me, and so he didn’t think to hide his expression: obsession, plain and pure. The look of a man who’d sacrifice us all to have his revenge.
“You know what, loot his corpse,” Arthur said. “We’ll need more money.”
Baxter rolled his eyes and robbed the man. Was Arthur aware of the way he gave orders? He was tempted to think it stemmed from the arrogance of intelligence—that once Arthur pointed out the logical course of action, it would be so blindingly obvious Baxter would hop right to it—but Baxter thought Arthur acted that way because he’d never had any friends.
He hadn’t gotten along with the lab men the way Baxter had. His handlers had either spoken to him like a child, like they were winking to each other when Arthur couldn’t see them, or treated him with a distant politeness that wasn’t fear but wasn’t far from it. Baxter wasn’t even certain they were friends. Sure, he liked Arthur okay. But he had the impression Arthur kept him around so Arthur would have someone to win arguments with—and to pick things up for him.
Like the money off a dead man.
7
Finding two men in a semi-hostile alien city of 1.6 million people who value privacy somewhere between air and water, and who sealed 22 of their 306 domes off from nonresidents—it’s not as easy as it sounds. The public arrest database was uselessly meager; apparently the private files weren’t networked in the way Fay needed to do its magic. We tried a pub crawl across the dome the Mariner was in. This effort scared up one of the witnesses, who was sweating and drinking in a smoky joint nearby. He let us talk about the night in question, but as soon as Baxter mentioned HemiCo, the witness clammed up cold.
“It’s like the mafia got to him,” I said as we walked away. “You should have let me hit him, Pete.”
Pete shook his head. “The threat of violence is scarier than the strike.”
“With some people, you have to jump-start their imaginations.”
Fay beamed us an analysis of the likely eating, buying, and socializing habits of what little we knew about the two men who’d bribed out witnesses, then chewed up its time trying to process the entire Martian net. We fed it bits of intel whenever we found them.
“We have video of you punching Clifton Prelutsky in the face,” Baxter told Shelby two days after buying the tapes.
She broke into laughter, waving a hand in front of her face like she was trying to brush away an illusion. “Whose side are you on?”
“The side that wants you on the other side of this wall.” Baxter went very still; I’d just picked up that, whenever he got mad or stressed, he forgot to twitch and squirm like a normal human. He explained about the other clip, the money changing hands. “Is that something your defense can use?”
“Not without knowing who the bagmen are,” Shelby said. “Even then it’s awful circumstantial.”
“Well, I don’t think your legal system’s v
ery good.”
“You try coming up with anything that works for a whole society.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “But that’s exactly what we’re expecting you to do on Titan.”
Shelby offered me a highly particular smile. In three thousand years of life, I’d never seen one quite like it, and it took me a moment to decode: the amusement shared by two humans attempting to deal with an alien intelligence.
“That’s different, dear,” she told Baxter. “I’m sure we’ll get that one just perfect.”
“Hmm.” He tapped his fingers against the desk. “How is your case looking?”
“Medical and police reports? Three witnesses to assault and battery? The AID digging into every slipped word, sexual indiscretion, and boozy night I’ve ever had?” Shelby laughed. “I should be available to resume work for you in 18-36 months.”
“But that means you’ll miss everything,” Baxter said.
Shelby gave me that look again.
We tried everything we could to run down the men or turn up more leads. With a vehemence that caught me off guard, Fay flat-out refused to let us split up.
“Absolutely not,” it said. “We don’t need any more of us getting locked up.”
“We haven’t done anything illegal yet,” I spoke into my dot mike. “Have we?”
“The Frontier is referring to something you don’t know about,” Baxter said. “Possibly because it’s too young to understand how rude that is.”
“I won’t let you do it,” Fay said. “I will crash through that dome to stop you. You’d fall right into their grasp.”
Baxter snorted. “They don’t even know I’m here.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I hesitate to compare this to something I have no direct experience with, but you are acting like my mother.”
“And you’re acting like a child,” Fay accused in its bright crystalline voice. “Pete and Rob are there for a reason. Don’t you fucking dare go anywhere without them!”
Baxter gave us a little frown, blotting out his dot mike with the tip of his finger. “I’ve never heard it swear before.”