The Aethers of Mars

by Eric Flint

  Only fairly confident, though. Vorontsov was known to be a prickly man, difficult in his dealings with subordinates. “Difficult” was the term Rachkovsky had used. Translated from the diplomatese that the head of the Okhrana’s office in Paris tended to use when referring to high-ranked Russian nobility, the term meant “the man’s an ass.”

  The Martian magnetic field was so weak and localized that the enormous aethership was able to land directly on the planet without any need for cumbersome transfers. That was another thing Alexander was thankful for, since trying to maintain surveillance on their suspects in the course of two vehicular transfers—aethership to transfer station, transfer station to airship—would have been difficult. As it was, Alexander would be able to disembark before any of their suspects and place himself in position to observe them as they came off the Agincourt.

  Meanwhile, his junior partner Drezhner would leave the ship after their suspects had done so, to keep them under observation. There was no real need for that. But Alexander had managed to keep his connection to Drezhner veiled throughout the long voyage and saw no reason to undo that work by having them be associated during the disembarkation. One never knew what might develop. There was no point in losing an asset for no purpose.

  Besides, it meant he didn’t have to be in Drezhner’s company any longer. Once they’d quit the Agincourt, they’d each be going their separate ways. Yet another thing to be thankful for.

  * * *

  When the gangway ramp came down, the Martian daylight flooded the large disembarkation compartment—using the term “flooded” loosely. The light was rather feeble compared to Earth’s. It reminded Alexander of the illumination produced by a late autumn sunrise near the Arctic circle. While still a cavalryman, he’d once been stationed in Archangel, on the White Sea. (For no good reason he’d ever been able to determine; but such was the nature of cavalry service.)

  Alexander didn’t pay much attention to the light, however. Following closely on its heels came the aromas of Mars. Those were …

  Not feeble. At. All.

  Behind him, he heard several people gasp and one person even gag a bit. But Alexander was made of sterner stuff. True, sewage was clearly present among those odors. Raw, open sewage and quite a bit of it, judging from the stench. But you couldn’t be a soldier for long—certainly not a Russian cavalryman—without becoming intimately familiar with vile smells. And while the other odors he detected were not always pleasant, Alexander found them intriguing. They were unfamiliar, exotic, hinting at adventures to come. He was reminded of the time, as a very young officer, that he first arrived in the Tsar’s holdings in central Asia.

  One of the Agincourt’s officers began to speak.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you are now free to leave the ship. Please make your way steadily to the bottom of the ramp, where you will find your personal luggage. Any freighted goods can be claimed with the aid of the assistant purser, whom you will find at the cargo ramp amidships. Please observe caution …”

  Alexander ignored the rest, it being nothing more than the usual speech given by officials of a commercial establishment on such occasions. The gist of it, translated into the common tongue, was: you’ve been duly warned so don’t even THINK of filing a lawsuit if you stumble and break some bones.

  Alexander was the third passenger to set foot on Mars. Where the first two immediately began gawking at their surroundings, however, he picked his suitcase from the pile at the bottom of the ramp and made his way to an overhanging shelter positioned some thirty meters from the bottom of the ramp. The shelter looked for all the world like the sort of shelter provided for people waiting at a train station, but there were neither trains nor rails anywhere in sight. The Okhrana agent had no idea what its purpose was, but he didn’t care. Right now, he just needed a place from which he could observe the disembarking passengers without being easily seen himself. Once he took position deep within the shelter, he would be well-nigh invisible to anyone who casually looked his way.

  * * *

  He was too preoccupied with the task at hand to give much attention to anything not immediately relevant to his purpose. That was bizarre, looked at a certain way. The first time he’d visited Paris, years before, Alexander had spent a full day just wandering around and sightseeing. Yet now, visiting for the first time not a foreign capital in a country which was not really all that different from his own but another planet, he barely noticed the landscape and the inhabitants. But on that visit to Paris he had simply been reporting for reassignment to another bureau, not on a critical mission with narrow time constraints.

  Some idle part of his brain which had somehow escaped the lash of the taskmaster did observe a few things:

  The native Martians looked astonishingly human-like. He thought the term was humanoid. They were skinny to the point of being skeletal and had some facial features—especially the ears—that went outside any human parameters. Still, if you dressed them in winter clothes and put a hat on their heads, passersby would pay no attention to them. Not in cosmopolitan Paris, at least. People would simply assume the Martians were Asians of some sort, perhaps Malays: short of stature, their skin color ranging from ochre to a dull yellow, eyes which at a casual glance seemed to have the distinctive Oriental appearance.

  He could see almost nothing of the terrain itself, because of the nature of Martian construction. The natives favored tall, very slender buildings made mostly of some sort of reddish stone—and then built them right next to each other. The roofs were flat, which was not surprising given that they never had to worry about the accumulation of snow. The surface of the ground looked to be covered everywhere in that same reddish stone. You couldn’t really use the term “cobblestoned,” though, because the stones were flush with each other and very tightly fitted. It was almost like walking on tile.

  Even here, at what passed for a landing site, the Martians crowded the area with their edifices. No human nation—no civilized one, at any rate—would allow dwellings and commercial buildings to be erected so close to a field where enormous craft landed and took off. But the natives were either oblivious to the danger or simply chose to ignore the risk.

  That indifference might result from necessity. The population density was astonishing. It brought to mind tales Alexander had heard about Calcutta and Cairo. Everywhere you looked, natives seemed to be scurrying about. “Scurrying” was the best term to describe their locomotion, too. Alexander didn’t spot a single Martian who looked to be on a casual outing or a simple stroll. All of them seemed intent on whatever their business was, and all of them were moving quickly.

  While the landscape surrounding Coprates couldn’t really be seen, the sky was almost overwhelming. The color was a light rose, quite striking in itself. But the centerpiece was the low clouds. Those were colored a bright scarlet due to airborne algae which lived within them. High above were other clouds, wispy and colored white much like the clouds of Earth.

  Alexander had read of the scarlet clouds of Mars, but had assumed that was poetic license. He’d been expecting something that, while certainly reddish in color, would be far duller than the tales.

  But, no. Those clouds were scarlet, and they floated in a rose-colored sky that was almost as bright as the blue sky of Earth.

  * * *

  Among the first passengers to come down the ramp after him was Klaus Kuhn, the supposedly Swiss pharmaceutical representative whom Drezhner had suggested might be Savinkov. Alexander thought the notion was ludicrous, but he did keep an eye on Kuhn while he continued his surveillance of the other disembarking passengers.

  As a result, he didn’t miss the altercation that erupted when Kuhn tried to retrieve his luggage from the midships bay. He was almost immediately accosted by a man in the distinctive black uniform which had been recently adopted by the English military. A sergeant, if Alexander was reading the insignia properly. He was apparently overseeing a squad of men belonging to Rhodes’ private little army, wh
ich was theoretically a security force for the British Extra-Planetary Company. On Mars, apparently, the distinction between Rhodes’ men and the official military blurred at the edges.

  Alexander was too far away to hear the words being spoken, but he didn’t think the exchange was a friendly one. That much became obvious a moment later, when two of the BEPC soldiers seized Kuhn by the arms and the British blackcoat drew his revolver. Some more words were spoken. Then the two English bankers, Stans and Barnes, came up to the group and joined in. Alexander still couldn’t hear whatever was being said, but the Kuhn fellow was looking more unhappy by the moment.

  With good reason, as it turned out. The sergeant suddenly drove the barrel of his revolver into Kuhn’s belly, almost doubling him up. Not more than a second or two later, the soldiers in his squad began beating the man with their rifle-butts. Very soon, he was on the ground and unconscious, whereupon two of the BEPC troops seized him by the ankles and began dragging him out of sight.

  The dramatic conclusion of the affair drew the attention of many of the passengers who had by now disembarked. That was a fortunate break for Alexander, because it meant that dozens of people were milling around, gawking at the scene by the midships bay—and paying no attention at all to him. He was able to carefully examine everyone to see what they were about.

  But … there were no surprises, no mysteries. Jelinek and Underwood both made their way to the area that had been cordoned off for people who wanted to take one of the Martian airships to their destination. Alexander would be joining them himself before long, but there was no need to hurry the matter. None of the airships would attempt to land in the area until the huge bulk of the Agincourt was gone.

  The large group of Hindus drew his attention for a short while. Edward Luff and his children were with them, as was the Duchesne woman.

  Nothing suspicious there. Alexander knew the widow had been planning to sightsee the cities in the Octad Gentillus, but once the Luffs’ governess came down with whatever malady had struck several of the Agincourt’s passengers, Duchesne had agreed to help the English scholar. Ilya had found all that out by questioning one of the cabin boys. He’d expressed some suspicion of the whole thing, on the grounds that he could see no reason a wealthy woman like Duchesne would agree to such a thing.

  But that was just Drezhner being obtuse again. The widow’s motives were obvious. She’d developed a personal interest in Edward Luff; it was as simple as that—and hardly an unusual story.

  By the time Drezhner made his appearance coming down the ramp, almost the very last passenger to do so, all the persons involved in l’Affaire Kuhn had vanished, and the crowd of onlookers had broken up. Alexander was grateful for that. The last thing he needed was to get into an argument with Drezhner about Kuhn. It was a given that Ilya would think the fracas suggested Kuhn was Savinkov, when it was blindingly clear it demonstrated the exact opposite. No Eser agent as canny as Savinkov would have gotten himself into such a mess in the first place. Whatever had aroused the suspicions and antagonism of the English sergeant, it certainly had nothing to do with Russian affairs. At a guess, he’d been caught smuggling something that either the English authorities or Rhodes’ people didn’t want on Mars.

  Once Drezhner left the Agincourt, Alexander hurried after Jelinek. He could rely on Drezhner to catch up with Underwood and follow him to Crenex. Ilya was an unimaginative blockhead—it might be better to say, an excessively imaginative blockhead—but he wasn’t incompetent when it came to the basic skills of counter-espionage. Besides, as tailing assignments went, this one was easy. Approximately one fourth of the passengers disembarking from the Agincourt were headed for Crenex. There was only one airship scheduled for that trip today, and it wouldn’t be leaving for almost two hours. Drezhner would have plenty of time to mingle with the crowd and keep Underwood under surveillance without needing to behave in a suspicious manner.

  Alexander’s assignment, on the other hand, was much trickier. He’d been able to find out that Jelinek’s first stop was Kralladin, a small city located just a bit more than two hundred kilometers from the easternmost of the Octad Gentillus cities. The problem was that there was no regular airship travel to Kralladin. The dirigibles that were used by Martians for travel between major cities, such as the one Drezhner and Underwood would be taking to Crenex, were designed roughly like human airships. But they were generally used for major and regular travel routes. For something like the short trip from Coprates to Kralladin, Martians used their version of aerial tramp steamers. These were oddly designed airships that looked like nothing so much as airborne canoes or longships. The vessels were carried aloft by collections of long, slender hydrogen-filled tubes.

  Such a design would never have worked in Earth’s heavy, turbulent atmosphere. But they did well enough on Mars, with its thin atmosphere and much more predictable weather and wind patterns.

  The problem posed immediately, however, was that such vessels were small. They normally didn’t carry more than a dozen passengers, if that many. It would be impossible for Alexander to travel on the same ship that Jelinek took without being immediately noticed. And while he might be able to explain his presence there—once—he could hardly do so if he kept re-appearing on vessels that Jelinek took as he followed his purchasing route up the complex of canals called the Aromatus, which brought water from the Great Spillway down to the rich benchlands of Sinus Aurorae and Vallis Agathodaemonis. The Aromatus stretched roughly west by northwest, and between the Octad Gentillus and Tryddoc Aru there were many cities, but none large enough to require a regular route by one of the large dirigibles.

  If Alexander had enough money, he’d hire one of the longship-style airships for his own private use. But even on Mars, where European currencies stretched very far, such a vessel would be much too expensive.

  There was no help for it. He’d have to take whichever small longship was the next to make the run to Kralladin, and hope that he arrived before Jelinek had left. If his quarry had already departed, he’d have to do whatever investigation was necessary to discover where he’d gone.

  Were this pursuit taking place in almost any country in Europe—and a fair number in Asia and the Levant—Alexander would have been quite confident he could manage well enough. Here on Mars …

  Who could say? He had no idea how difficult it would be to ask questions of the planet’s peculiar natives, even assuming he could find ones who spoke one of the human languages he knew.

  Such was the life of an Okhrana agent. It was never easy, even on his home planet.

  On the positive side, he reminded himself, there were no horses on Mars. Hence, no cavalrymen.

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  Charlotte found the journey to Ghlaktora absolutely fascinating, especially the last stretch when they had to use the Martian riverboats. From Coprates to the main city in Protei Locus, Uddakit, they’d been able to travel on one of the Martian dirigibles. That was quite engrossing in its own right, although the native airships of that design weren’t too different from human ones.

  If the design of the dirigible wasn’t too different from anything you’d find on Earth, the same could not be said for the terrain. The landscape of Mars was far more stark than anything Charlotte had ever seen on her own planet. At least in western Europe, she had to caution herself. She’d never been anywhere else on Earth.

  Everything seemed to divide into two sorts of regions, very different from each other: the lowlands and the tablelands. She knew that there were also some huge mountains on Mars and some vast basins in the northern hemisphere, but those were not within sight. Their airship was traveling down one of the benchlands—she wasn’t sure of its name—following the canals that seemed to run all along its length. Whether from the action of the canals or the nature of the terrain itself, the result was a huge valley: about twenty miles across and stretching up and down as far as the eye could see.

  Although the dirigible was following the valley, they
were high enough in the air that Charlotte could see over the rims that marked both sides of the benchlands. There lay the famous Martian tablelands, the terrain that covered most of the planet’s surface.

  Their appearance was rugged, but quite uniform: rocky, barren, dry, mostly a sort of red-orange in color. There seemed to be very little life out there, of either a plant or animal nature.

  The outstanding exception to that general lifelessness was the area immediately adjacent to the rims of the benchlands. There, for perhaps a mile back on both sides, the vegetation was quite lush. Even at this distance Charlotte could see large animals moving about, although she could make out little of them beyond their size.

  When she remarked upon the matter to her father, he said: “That’s called the floramargin. It’s quite dangerous, apparently, if you travel through it on foot. And look there!”

  Charlotte followed his pointing finger and saw in the distance ahead of them a peculiar structure. As they neared, she could see that it was a peculiar combination of an enclosed staircase rising up from the benchlands below and what looked to be a small citadel on the very edge of the rim.

  “That’s one of their hunting lodges,” her father explained. “Only the top nobility can afford to build and maintain them. They retire to them during the worst time of summer—it’s much cooler up there, as you might expect—and amuse themselves in the chase. Apparently, being a noted hunter of the sort of large and dangerous game found in the floramargin brings considerable status.”

  * * *

  Once they got to Uddakit, everything changed.