by Jaine Fenn
‘Why not?’
‘This was Shiv’s job. He told me only what I needed to know.’
She was consistent, I’d say that for her. ‘Ah, I got the impression you’ve had direct contact with the financier. So you don’t know enough to take this on yourself?’
‘The gentlemen in question made it clear he was looking for someone to lead in the field. In conducting my business, I never leave this room. I have suggested others who might coordinate the job but he appears to be looking for a certain type of person. If you think you might be that person then I would be willing, for a nominal fee, to put you in touch with him.’
‘I can’t pay you.’
‘Hmm. You really have burnt your bridges, haven’t you, Ms Choi?’ She leaned in to toy with the handle of her chai mug. ‘In the spirit of our continued honesty, I will say that I would very much like this job to be successful.’
‘Even though you don’t know what it is?’
‘I knew Shiv, and liked him. More importantly, I know how much we can all make from this.’
‘So it’s in your interests to put me in touch with your man?’
She stared at the drink, and pursed her perfect lips. ‘I will see what I can do.’
Even though Ika and I had danced round each other, I’d given more than I’d taken. She called the next morning, inviting me back to her parlour/office. ‘I will leave you to take this call in private. You may rest assured that what passes between you will not be overheard.’
‘Or recorded?’
‘I have my reputation to think of.’
Which wasn’t the same as saying ‘No’.
I waited until the door was shut before acknowledging the flashing icon on her largest screen.
Ika had referred to the financier as ‘he’ but it was hard to tell from the image. Features blurred into a generic headshot; probably Caucasian and with a masculine hairstyle, but that was all I could tell. The background was a mash of muted brown and orange. Most likely the whole image was an artefact.
‘Greetings, Ms Choi.’
The voice was low-register and probably male, though it was as modulated as the image was pixellated.
‘Hello. What should I call you?’
‘Whatever you like. Your brother called me Mr P, short for Mr Patron.’
Typical Shiv. ‘Then that’s what I’ll do.’ I found talking to this artefact disconcerting
‘Good. I’ll come straight to the point. What do you know about the job your brother took on for me?’ I thought I could pick out a non-Chinese accent in his perfect, if distorted, Mandarin. I’m good with languages.
‘He planned to steal the Eye of Heaven.’ It sounded absurd, saying it out loud. The largest, most valuable, most heavily guarded gemstone ever found.
‘That’s right. From your tone I’d guess you don’t rate the success of this job.’
Of course, you can read my expression and voice, and I can’t get a thing off you. Thanks for reminding me. ‘Everlight’s Martian HQ isn’t going to be easy to penetrate.’
‘No. But you’re aware the Eye will be on public display in there?’
‘I am. But only for the duration of the New Year celebrations.’ Something Shiv had failed to mention. It put a time limit on the job. ‘Even so, getting away with an opal the size of my head isn’t going to be easy.’
‘A lot of thought has already been put into this plan. I just need you to make it happen.’ That accent. American? Irish? Australian? The latter was the most likely given that the Irish had zero presence on Mars – and he was on Mars, there was no signal lag – and America was history.
‘You appear to be assuming I’ll take on this job.’
‘Not at all. If you’re not interested, our contact ends here.’
‘You need me to decide right now?’
‘You’ve known what the job was for some time. You must have given your potential part in it plenty of thought.
‘I have.’ As an abstract problem, a What if? To commit now, to tell this spooky stranger I was happy to break the law after a decade of obeying it … ‘If you make me answer now it’ll have to be No. Sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too.’ The screen went dark.
Which left my other reason for being here: finding out what happened to Shiv. But there were only two explanations: either his death had been an accident, in which case there was nothing to find out, or it had been something more sinister, in which case if I, an outsider with no contacts or resources, started poking around, I was likely to have an ‘accident’ of my own.
My phone chirped as I stepped onto the walkway back to my hotel. A message from Mum. A recording rather than a call: being this far out had its advantages. Back in my new even smaller hotel room, I played it back.
‘Beth, are you really on Mars?’ She paused a moment, as though expecting me to miraculously break the light barrier with an answer. ‘Shiv was planning something, you know. I think it was something big. Big, and special. On Mars. Where you are now, in fact.’ She glanced to one side – she was in the same blue room – and grimaced. ‘We owe it to your brother to find out what he was trying to do. You owe it to us, your family, to finish whatever he started. Ah, they’re such misers; I have to go now. Stay safe, Elizabeth. Message me when you can.’
The recording ended.
Did she know what Shiv had been planning? I couldn’t see how. No doubt they had enjoyed several cryptic conversations on well-monitored channels, and perhaps she even suspected this was the ultimate heist, the one she’d talked about taking on herself when we were younger… Just before she grew wings and flew into outer space. But she couldn’t know for sure. Keeping tabs on me now Shiv was dead wouldn’t be hard. I was her only living relative, after her short-sighted stupidity got my father, and everyone else in that hab, killed. Not that I’d known Wang-Zheng Choi well, given I’d been three years old when he tried to pay off this most inconvenient of mistresses, sending the three of us packing towards Earth. She couldn’t even leave him honestly, and had only got as far as the LunaFree Community. That place had been the nearest I’d had to a home, for five years anyway, before she screwed them over too, and they threw us out.
The fact that my mother wanted me to take this job was reason enough not to.
But if I pulled it off I could pay to free her – thus removing any residual sense of obligation – and then pay to divorce her – thus removing her from my life.
I needed to take a step back.
Start by following the money. Ika was being well paid for her part in the potential theft of the Eye of Heaven. No doubt Shiv had been offered a generous fee as well. Who had the means to bankroll this type of job? An individual? Our ‘Mr P’ had said ‘I’, though that could be a ruse. There were some affluent loners on Mars, early investors who’d struck it rich and stayed on, but were any of them that rich? Hard to know, as those individuals valued their privacy, and living in private self-sufficient domes in an arid wilderness put you well out of circulation. It was possible someone with a lot of money and an eccentric love of valuable items was after the Eye, but I had no way of knowing who. I compiled a short-list anyway, with what little information was publically accessible. Interestingly, two of the individuals on my list gave their nationality as American: they had to be descended from early settlers who’d arrived here before their country went to radioactive hell after its idiotic experimentation in unlimited machine intelligence. Back in the twenty and twenty-first centuries the Americans had a reputation as uber-capitalists, collecting useless items just because they were considered valuable. According to the old movies and other popular media of the time, anyway.
Next I considered larger factions. Mars has a lot of factions but most of them are bit players, fighting for scraps from the Chinese table. Though now the Russians had recovered fully from the Marineris blowout they were a force to be reckoned with again. As were the Deimons, when it came to resources, at least: the Levi-Mathesons and their followers had been sm
art, far-sighted people who, once they’d hollowed out their moon and settled there permanently, had little use for the money that still flowed in from their many inventions and innovations. But their very lack of care for status or material wealth made them unlikely to want to steal a shiny rock whose only value was in the eye of the beholder.
Most likely it was a corp, one that opposed Everlight. Since one of their mining operations had come across the massive opal out in the Tharsis Ranges twenty years ago, the Eye of Heaven had become the heart of their Feng Shui web on Mars, the symbol and talisman of Everlight’s inexorable rise to effectively rule the red planet. Stealing it would strike a blow beyond any that might be dealt via financial shenanigans or corporate politicking.
Ironically, the top contender in this scenario was none other than Four Flowers Holdings, my late father’s employers. FFH were dominant on Luna but less of a player on Mars. Striking at Everlight in the domain where they held greatest power would be just the kind of spiritual coup they’d favour. Kind of ironic that I’d take a job working for FFH considering I had worked for them before, albeit briefly. My first attempt to go straight had involved using my father’s influence – such as it had been – to get a job as a researcher and administrator with FFH NorthWest. And then Mum had reconciled with her old lover, and gone to live with him on Luna, where she poisoned him against me, their wayward and disrespectful daughter. She had also used her dubious connections to help him keep costs down on the new FFH hab. We all know how well that worked out. The worst week of my life occurred just over a decade ago when on three consecutive days I lost my job for reasons I could trace back to my parents but never contest, ended my latest attempt at a relationship, then heard the news about the hab explosion on Luna on a public com.
All of which was in the past, and such self-piteous navel-gazing wasn’t getting me anywhere. Even so, the fact that I – and my brother before me – had been selected to take on this job was interesting. Not the FFH connection, now I thought about it – Shiv’s father had been an Indian engineer and Wang had never formally adopted him – but the fact that we were both outsiders. Okay, so I’d only inherited the – potential – role, but our Mr P had been happy to consider me when, as Ika implied, he’d turned down local talent. This insistence on using outsiders both worried and intrigued me.
The next morning, when I went in search of the cheap sludge that passed for food around here, new red-and-gold decorations adorned the main walkways, and the open plaza near my hotel sported a wide scaffolding pillar reaching to the mezzanine above; at the base, half a dozen people in overalls were constructing something that looked like a giant claw out of spidersilk braiding and paper flowers. It was attracting some attention so I asked a passerby what was going on.
‘They’re building a lucky dragon,’ the woman replied. She looked up at me appraisingly, registering my half-breed status. ‘For the New Year, you know?’
Ah yes, New Year was less than a month away. I needed to get a move on.
I saw this movie once, a vintage piece from Japan. The newly-bereaved hero has a dream in which she dips her toe into a dark, inky lake, and the toe gets stained. When she wakes up, it’s still stained. Over the next few days the stain rises up her body, turning her into living darkness. In the end, as it reaches her neck. She goes back to the lake and throws herself in, where she is reunited with her long-lost lover.
While I’d been dreaming, and rationalising, my toe had slipped into the water.
I called Ika. ‘Can you contact the financier again, and ask if it’s not too late?’
‘I’m glad you’ve reconsidered Ms Choi.’
I smiled at the blurred image on Ika’s screen. ‘I didn’t say that. I just said I’d like to talk.’
‘Certainly. You have more questions, then?’
‘One in particular. Why do you want an offworlder to run this job?
‘Mars is a small and insular world. There are a limited number of people with suitable skills and although we’ll have to use some local talent, I feel it’s more likely to succeed if the individual coordinating the job, the only person with all the facts, is an outsider.’
Which was pretty much the answer I’d expected. My knowledge of the Martian underworld was limited but the Chinese dominated it, certainly in Olympus, Mars’ first city, just as they did in mainstream Martian culture. A variation on the Triad system had been imported from Earth. I got the impression the relationship between the Triads and Everlight was complicated. I suspected that stealing Everlight’s crown jewel was not something they’d be happy to attempt – or see anyone else attempt. I picked my next words carefully. ‘Your original choice for this role suffered an unfortunate accident.’
‘Yes. My condolences on your loss.’ Of course he knew I was Shiv’s sister; I’d have been more concerned if he hadn’t.
‘I haven’t been able to find out much regarding that accident, other than the fact that it was a flyer crash, and the flyer apparently didn’t have a working transponder. I don’t suppose you know more than that?’
A momentary pause, then, ‘You put me in a difficult position, Ms Choi. If we don’t have a working relationship, I can’t justify giving you that information. If we do, I’ll share all I know, although some of it may... cause you concern.’
‘So Shiv Neru’s death wasn’t an accident?’
‘No one knows for sure.’ Another pause. ‘All right. I’ll say this: there was evidence that an attempt had been made to capture the flyer.’
‘Capture it? How?’
‘Mars’ low gravity combined with its minimal atmosphere means you can fly a small ground-launched vehicle into low orbit for relatively little power expenditure. You can even leave the gravity well entirely, if someone sends down a larger vehicle from orbit to snare your flyer before it reaches its operational limits.’
‘Someone swooped down and snatched him out the sky before his flyer got to hard vacuum?’
‘Not exactly. Most likely it was ambushed by a second vehicle in low orbit. The same structural mods that allow sub-orbital flyers to be snared also make them vulnerable to, well, hijacking.’
‘Someone tried to hijack the flyer? It thought it crashed.’
‘“Tried” is the relevant word. It is possible they wanted to capture Mr Neru, but something went wrong – perhaps he attempted to evade them – and the flyer was damaged, and crash-landed.’
My head was spinning. Shiv had always joked about never letting them take him alive. Looked as if it’d be his epitaph. But who were ‘they’? Why did they want to capture him, out in the Martian wilderness? And what had he been doing taking a solo sub-orbital flight anyway?
‘I think,’ continued Mr P, ‘that I’ve given you more than enough on trust.’
‘Yes. You have.’ Someone had tried to kidnap Shiv, and ended up killing him. Or killed him and made it look like a kidnap attempt. Was I letting myself in for similar treatment if I took on this job? I thought of my nice safe office job back on Earth; except it wasn’t safe, and at best I’d get back to earning just enough to get by, and never find out what was going on here, or why my brother had got himself killed. Not to mention being guilt-tripped by my mother for the rest of my life.
‘I’ll do it.’
Four
Ika had already scoped out three members of the team, but I wanted to speak to them individually before hiring. I also asked her to get me a few prohibited items, for personal defence. Ika agreed though she commented, ‘You do know Olympus Central is safer than most cities on Earth?’ She might be right, given whoever had gone after Shiv had waited until he left the city, but I wasn’t taking chances.
While Ika was arranging the interviews I received a message from my employers. Apparently my case was going through the formalities with Everlight’s HR department, and after their initial ruling – expected in a few weeks, during which time I remained employed if unpaid – I would be expected to prepare a ‘justification response’. I appreciated M
r Lau keeping me informed, but if everything worked out for me on Mars then Everlight HR could stick their initial ruling and request for justification in a place he’d be shocked to hear me refer to.
I chose neutral, public places for the interviews.
For the physical security expert I specified a mid-range tea-house. Xiao-Fei arrived on time and ordered green tea. He was a small man with a limp, and during the course of our conversation he used an inhaler twice. When I’d seen a Chinese name on Ika’s file I’d been wary, and my wariness had increased on finding he had once worked for Everlight as an electrical engineer. However, the blow-out at a remote dome which left him crippled had been hushed up, and the compensation he’d received barely covered his ongoing medical bills. He’d have no problem shafting his ex-employers.
Not that I told him he’d be doing that just yet. Our chat was suitably vague, an exchange of pleasantries, and some personal history from him (most of which I already knew, but I wanted to hear it from his own lips). Then I moved on to more detailed enquiries about the kinds of systems he was familiar with.
I was drawing on skills I’d gained in an office, rather than in my previous life aiding and abetting my mother; Mum preferred scams and schemes and the occasional hack, rather than open heists with accomplices. On those jobs where we’d brought in outside help she did usually tell them the target beforehand. But it’s one thing hitting a local company or institution and quite another going up against the corporation who effectively rule the planet. Plus, the Eye of Heaven could be stowed out of our reach, back in Everlight’s vaults, in a matter of minutes. I’d tell the team exactly what they were going after only when we were committed. Until then, I couldn’t afford the slightest hint of a rumour to get out. As I say: compartmentalisation is vital in a job like this.
Speaking to my next contact meant returning to Ika’s backroom data-fortress. This job required two hackers, with slightly different skillsets, in two different locations. Mr P had specified that the off-planet member of the team would be someone he’d recommend. Her name was Ana, and she insisted on a voice-only interview, which made getting to know her tricky, especially given her love of the local Martian patois, calling me dost and saying shi instead of yes. Most people I’d meet, correctly identifying me as an outsider, stuck to English or Mandarin rather than the mash-up of English, Mandarin, Russian and a variety of East Asian languages that all the cool kids spoke here. And she was a kid – she sounded appallingly young. I tried to see past the Martian dialect to identify her original accent; not mainland Chinese, but somewhere around there. Taiwanese? Or even a Korean; there might be a few of them here, same as there were Americans. Perhaps she was on Phobos: the Pacific Rim Consortium, who ran that particular moon, enjoyed damaging Chinese interests. Or she was somewhere on one of the other stations above us. Maybe even a young and rebellious Deimon sticking it to the man. I just had to trust Mr P had picked wisely when he went for a teen in space.