Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  “I heard that,” Fay said.

  They compromised; Pete and I slept in shifts to give Baxter a partner wherever he went. “Wherever” was the active word. We hopped bars. Cruised clubs. Hung in diners. If we weren’t walking everywhere, I would have gained ten pounds from all the food and drink we consumed while people-watching.

  The frustration of being so close to a revelation with no way to reel it in wore on me by the hour. Baxter replayed the clips on his omni over and over. I kept my eyes on the streets. I still wasn’t seeing many old people; Fay confirmed my hypothesis few Martians had access to age treatments.

  “Which isn’t very fair,” it put in.

  “It’s how they live. Most of them left Earth to get away from being told what to do. Look, deep down, every government in history has only cared about one thing: preserving the property of those who’ve got it. If it’s the same everywhere, then ideally a spectrum of governments will exist, and you can choose to live under whichever one you find least shitty. Out here, people can pretty much do whatever they want.”

  “I understand the concepts of economic mobility and being entitled to what you earn,” Fay said without a hint of irritation or impatience. “But everyone here seems to believe hey will rise to a position only a small percentage of them ever attain. Without systematic interference to level the field, many of them will go without basic biological necessities.”

  “In exchange, they’re walking around without cameras in their faces, their blood on file, or the government in their pockets,” I said. “That’s how they want it.”

  “Fine. You agree with them. So why do you have to ask me about their access to age treatments and stuff? I thought you used to live here.”

  “It was a lot different then. Besides, once you’ve got too many memories, forgetfulness will eat your brain alive.”

  “Really?” Fay’s voice was painfully high-pitched. “How do you combat that?”

  “Uh.” A low-gravity-aided brunette walked past, thoroughly distracting me.

  Baxter scowled at me. “We might want to do something about that.”

  I frowned at him. “I didn’t even know you liked girls.”

  “I don’t. Now what about that?”

  “What about what?”

  “That thing Fay just said!” Wearily, Baxter closed his eyes and tipped his face to the dome roof. “Fay, since you’re several thousand miles out of visual range, I should inform you he’s shrugging in ignorance.”

  “Oh!” Fay piped up. “I just cracked a message inbound from the region of space Titan occupied when it was sent. It’s from Olympian Atomics. And it’s vaguely congratulatory in nature.”

  I sat upright, spilling my coffee. “What’s it say?”

  “‘Good work. Keep us posted.’“

  “So?”

  “So when there’s a reply,” Fay said, patient as ever, “I can pinpoint exactly where on that reply came from, allowing you to go in and find out exactly who on Mars is doing ‘good work’ for OA.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, keep us posted.”

  “I am posting you,” Fay said five minutes later as the waitress refilled my cup and laid down an extra napkin, both of which cost me. “HemiCo signature. Map, coordinates, and message sent to your omnis.”

  Mine thrummed before the ship was done speaking.

  “Wake up Pete,” Baxter said. “Determine somewhere he can intercept us along the way. And tell him to bring his Pete-gear.”

  “Done,” Fay said. I threw some bills on the table and we jogged off. The heads of taller men bobbed above mine. People schooled through streets so narrow Felix’s Mustang would get wedged tight. Overhead, buildings leaned so close the sky beyond the dust-smudged dome was a strip of deep, featureless blue.

  “I’m lost down here, Fay.”

  It pumped directions through my earbud. Free to focus on the obstacles in front of me, I slipped my shoulders against incoming pedestrians, nostrils bludgeoned by the scents of sweat and soy sauce and burnt algae. Conditions stayed tight through the next dome. Across it, its tunnel-door fed us into a tall, clear-walled dome that smelled like plants and something I hadn’t realized I’d been missing: water.

  I slowed, taking it in. To make the most of limited space, most domes were filled wall to roof with buildings, gray and orange stone lumps molded to their surroundings. In this one, towers rose as slim and graceful as a pianist’s fingers, spires of metal and tinted plass windows separated by broad rock gardens and tufts of impeccably manicured plants—green ones. Water and open space, among the two most valuable resources in New Houston. Despite the low gravity, something jarred my knees. Paved streets.

  “You know,” Fay said, “there’s a direct correlation in the amount of space separating New Houston’s structures and the life expectancy of those structures’ inhabitants. Isn’t that interesting?”

  I frowned at the sky. “What, fresh air really is that good for you?”

  “How amazing is it that you can look at a tower with a nice yard and a beautiful view and know its residents will live twenty to sixty years longer than someone in one of those ugly orange apartment blocks?”

  “That sounds less amazing and more gross.”

  “It’s your city,” Fay said cheerily.

  I refused the bait. We hurried on, drawing looks from scattered pedestrians, joggers, and cyclists. A wide, grass-fringed plaza sat in the middle of a square of offices and Earth import shops. I could smell the humidity drop as we ran into the next dome, where the pavements continued but the vegetation ceased. Still a lot of sky above us. As quickly as a spring storm, the dome after that reverted to sardine-like orangestones, dirt streets, and a nonstop swap of people.

  Fay ushered us to a corner cafe. Pete waited under its awning, a pack slung over his shoulders. We exchanged nods like the professionals we weren’t and moved on together.

  I’d imagined the HemiCo base would be ultramodern—a bright blue plass tower jutting from the middle of a dome like a spike of ice; a disk of offices slung from the ceiling by carbon webs, a needle-thin elevator its only ingress—but the neighborhood was slummed by dusty orangestones under a low roof, indistinguishable from a score of other bubbles just like it. We found a second-story cafe across the street from our target, an orangestone with a bar on the ground floor and apartments above that, and settled in at a window table. Pete pawed through his pack, extracted a coffee mug printed with the words “World’s Best Kid,” and set it by the window.

  I itched my nose. “A trillion-dollar interplanetary corporation is operating out of some guy’s fifth-floor walkup?”

  “That’s where the reply came from,” Fay said.

  “Suspicious,” Baxter said. “Very, very suspicious.”

  “Oh, we know what you think.” Pete fiddled with his omni, networking it to the camera concealed in the dot of the “i” printed on the mug and then sharing the feed with my device and Baxter’s. We hunched over our omnis as he zoomed in and panned across the front floor windows.

  “Well, one of us should watch the street,” Baxter said. “Rob.”

  I pulled myself away from the omni screen and gazed down on the street with my own boring eyes, incapable of zooms or infrared or anything fun. I couldn’t even peer through apartment curtains to see who was having sex. I tipped back my coffee, concentrating on the dribble of people moving in and out of the orangestone’s doors. If I had to point to one invention in my lifetime that separated howling barbarism from civilized existence, it would be coffee.

  “Hah,” Pete said.

  He’d switched to infrared, turning our feeds grayscale. Most of the building’s face was a uniform battleship gray. When residents moved into view, they showed as light gray bodies with white hands and heads that contrasted strongly with the dark, ashen windows.

  But across the sixth floor, every single window was a blazing square of white.

  To my naked eyes, the windows of the sixth floor were hidden behind shades but other
wise not worth comment. “Are those apartments secretly on fire?”

  Pete smiled. “IR jamming. What don’t they want us to see?”

  That was as exciting as things got for a while. I went to the bathroom to return some coffee whence it came and had the distressing thought that, given the limited Martian resources, those same molecules of water, urea, and assorted waste must have been someone else’s coffee several times before they’d passed through me. Earth has its own natural water recycling process, but at least down there you can pretend the water in your cup was condensed out of one of the non-urine sections of ocean.

  “Why did you hop onboard with us, anyway?” I asked Pete when I sat back down.

  He frowned over his omni. “Wanted a change of scenery.”

  “Girlfriend broke up with you?”

  “Boyfriend.”

  “Oh. Well, if he doesn’t realize his mistake once he hears how you saved the future of mankind, he wasn’t worth it in the first place.”

  Across the street, a man in a dark jacket stepped out the front door. I elbowed Baxter. “Is that one of our guys?”

  He bolted up, rattling mugs and spoons. “I’ll see where he’s going.”

  “No you won’t,” Fay said.

  “I’m shorter.” I stood, hoping to head off the argument before Baxter could yell how it just wasn’t fair while Fay kamikazed through the dome roof to snatch him up. “He’ll be less likely to spot me.”

  Baxter snorted and sat down. I dropped downstairs and hustled after the man’s trail, weaving down the gritty street. I stopped at the first intersection, craning my neck.

  “He went left,” Baxter said through my earbud.

  I ran until I glimpsed the back of the man’s head bobbing among the crowd. He moved with no particular force or hurry, but oncoming pedestrians broke around him the way a school of fish flows around a cruising shark. We entered the sparser traffic of an interdome tunnel and I let him gain distance. On the other side, gaps opened between the scalloped white faces of neo-Rococo apartments. In some psychological middle finger to the thin winds, arctic cold, and unpredictable bursts of face-melting radiation beyond the domes, Martians tended to run around in shorts, tough-soled mesh slippers that let air in and kept dust out, and shirts that varied from tank tops to a complicated weave of straps that sung the praises of exposed skin. In the thinly-peopled and -clothed streets of this upscale New Houston bubble, my pants stood out like a petticoat.

  I drifted to the other side of the street, letting the man who’d bribed Shelby’s witnesses get further and further ahead. He cut across the pale stone street, stopped in front of a closed tunnel door, and flashed a small object in front of the entrypad. The man-sized door slid aside, then glided shut behind him. The manual handle denied me.

  “Lost him,” I said into my throat mike. “Fay, you got my location?”

  “Yup,” the ship answered. “Can’t get you in, though. Not without tripping city security.”

  “Righto.” I walked back to the cafe. They had nothing new to report.

  “You just let him go?” Baxter said once I filled them in on my tailjob.

  I sipped room-temperature coffee. “It was a closed dome.”

  “You’ve never heard of digging?”

  Pete looked up from his omni, blear-eyed. “It wasn’t a dead end. This proves a link exists between HemiCo and Olympian Atomics.”

  “Yes.” Baxter tapped his teeth. One of his incisors was chipped; normal wear, or a cunning stab at realism? “And so it seems the only way to help Ms. Mayes is by robbing that building.”

  Fay secured floor plans. Pete dropped by the ground floor bar to get a feel for the place and find a way into the upstairs apartments. Baxter and I failed to figure out which room on that whited-out sixth floor they were operating from; if they had infrared blockers, they had countermeasures for point-cams, bugs, and microphones, too. Pete had assembled all these items after we bought the video from the grizzled bartender, anticipating we might be in for some surveillance, but the white market only sold civilian equipment and the black market turned up street-level stuff, none of which was likely to subvert whatever HemiCo was running. As free as Mars was supposed to be, the government still saved the best espionage tech for itself and its biggest contributors.

  Fay, for all its digital intelligence, came up with a decidedly analog solution.

  “People will do anything for money, won’t they?”

  “Some people,” I corrected, annoyed at its casual denigration of our entire species.

  “Why not pay someone to watch for one of the criminals to show up, then follow him up to his apartment?”

  Many of New Houston’s immigrants took out loans to cover the outrageous expense of moving from Earth or, sometimes, from Luna’s Atlantis. Not all of them managed to work off their debts. The resulting homelessness was one of the city’s hottest issues, but it provided us with a vast sea of potential employees. As the sun sank down, spraying the plass domes with prismatic rainbows, I interviewed six people and determined two were reliable. In the spirit of the free market, we paid them to do our dirty work and retreated to the safety of our hotel.

  We got our answer the next evening while Pete was out scrounging for door-cracking equipment. Supplied with disposable omnis, our homeless scouts alerted us the moment the man left the HemiCo apartments. He didn’t appear to live there—after I’d followed him to the closed dome, the homeless men hadn’t seen him return to the apartments until that morning—but we carried stunners in the folds of our halfvests regardless. We bought the sleep-deprived scouts coffee and algae, then set them up as lookouts. In the truncated thirteenth hour that closed Mars’ clock, we entered the stairwell at the back of the crowded bar and tromped up to the sixth floor.

  Recessed bulbs cast the hallway in artificial twilight. Faint explosions of action holos filtered through the neighbors’ doors. Pete knelt and unleashed his crackers on the man’s apartment. He sprung the bolt a minute later, but ten minutes after that, he still hadn’t fed the right code into the maglock. He sat back, sweating, teeth bared.

  Fay whispered in our ears. “Let me try?”

  Pete held up his palms and backed off, the first time I’d seen him rattled. Baxter took over, translated the lock’s map to his omni, and sent it to Fay. The omni lit up before I’d finished taking my next breath. Baxter twiddled the cracker. The light on the maglock went green.

  Baxter reached for the handle. Pete and I reached for our stunners. In the low light of electronics displays and street lights seeping through the blinds, the apartment was spartan in furniture and aburst with gadgets. Baxter shut the door and I covered Pete as he flanked right, checking behind the takeout-crowded kitchen counter, then went through a closed door on the other side of the apartment.

  “Empty,” he said, reemerging. We pocketed our stunners and got out our omnis, which, after generations of being used as ad hoc flashlights, had finally had the function built into them. Baxter booted up a computer term. Cameras and bugs littered the desk by the window and I helped Pete navigate their internal storage. The data was encrypted, of course. Device by device, we transferred their content to our omnis, prepping the contents for Fay’s unstoppable prying.

  Light and a silenced chirp flashed from the kitchen. It repeated. Baxter grunted, falling back a step.

  “What the shit?” the shooter said. Mouth open, he shot Baxter again, this time in the head. Baxter stayed up. “You’re one of—”

  He crumpled to the floor, victim of Pete’s stunner. I flipped on the light. The second man from the video lay on the kitchen floor, unblinking, breathing shallow. A concealed door opened from the kitchen to a bare closet.

  “How could you miss that?” Baxter hissed at Pete.

  “We had no light. You didn’t see it either.”

  Baxter touched his hairline where a small neat hole trickled blood down his brow and smoke into the air. He knelt beside the paralyzed man and went perfectly still.
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  “He knows what I am.”

  I wiped my mouth. “We should think about this.”

  Pete glanced between us. “Think about what?”

  “There’s nothing to think about,” Fay said in its icicle voice.

  “How about the possibility we wind up joining Shelby in prison?” I said. “We’re supposed to be on a mission of peace.”

  “He shot Baxter,” Fay said.

  “He looks okay to me.”

  Baxter’s body had never looked more smoothly robotic. He rose, selected a knife from the magnetic rail over the sink, and drove it into the man’s heart.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t have any fingerprints.”

  Pete put a hand over his mouth. “You just killed that man.”

  “Technically incorrect. The blood in his brain will remain oxygenated for a few more seconds. The tissue won’t die for another five or six minutes. Lack of oxygen is what will kill him, not me.”

  “I thought we were partners,” I said. “We’re supposed to make decisions together.”

  Baxter met my eyes. “This is personal. You don’t share any blame.”

  “Meanwhile there’s a fucking dead man bleeding out on the floor.”

  He snorted. “You’ve never killed anyone, soldier boy?”

  “It’s done,” Fay said. “Clean up and get out.”

  “We discuss it later,” Baxter said. Numbly, I helped wipe fingerprints from the electronics. I reminded myself whatever DNA or scentprint we left behind, Mars didn’t have me or Pete on file; that we had an interplanetary overlord guarding us from above; that we’d be gone as soon as Shelby’s trial concluded. What was one body when the straits of Artemisium had been so choked with corpses you could practically walk across them to Euboea without getting your feet dead? Or when the dead speckled the scrub of the Holy Land like pepper on rice? Or when the French-Dutch border had been one long war-ruined stretched of burned homes and blackened bodies? It was and always had been a cold world. It, like Baxter, could wear its civility like a second skin, and if it stayed that way long enough, it could forget what lay beneath.