In the Hall of the Martian King

by John Barnes

  “What’s wrong with that?” Dujuv asked.

  “Shouldn’t history arrive with a little more … fanfare?”

  “I’d like it to arrive gently,” Dujuv said.

  “No glory, no struggle, no challenge? Everything run smoothly and neatly by nice gray people in simple gray buildings? You’d really prefer that to all the color and glory of life?”

  Shadow on the Frost coughed; he had been walking beside Jak for some time, listening intently, his silhouette in Phobos’s light rather like a basketball player wearing a bunny suit. “We Rubahy would say that one of the best things in life is going on a stupid, wrongheaded, needless mission, especially one plagued with bad leadership and worse luck. To succeed in the circumstances—oh, now, that is honor. Futility and having nothing at stake means you don’t have recourse to the sort of courage that derives from the trivial circumstance that things are deeply important or that a lot is depending on you. One of our Rubahy arms masters taught: ‘Anyone can be brave, standing and dying for the honor of his kin-groups and the reputation of his affinity-groups; a hero will risk his life to defend a single feather on a disliked stranger.’ ”

  “Beautiful,” Sib said.

  “Toktru insane,” Dujuv said.

  They trudged on over the Martian desert in silence, toward the landing field.

  “I am having some thoughts about this operation,” Shadow said. “Let’s do it right this time. That will be the last thing they are expecting of us.”

  Everyone laughed, and after a moment the Rubahy began to make a noise like bubbles rising in a metal bucket. “It is good to be with friends who appreciate a joke. But this was what I believe your species calls a truth spoken in jest. We really should try to do this well. What I had in mind was a real, genuine, big diversion, followed by grabbing the lifelog and running like bunnies.”

  Sib grunted. “Elementary—which is why it will be so embarrassing if we don’t get it right.”

  Jak said, “All right, so … what’s the simplest thing we can do? Send most of the party somewhere to make a lot of noise and cause a lot of excitement, while a couple of us go in and grab.”

  “Me and Shadow for going in and grabbing,” Dujuv said. “Strength, speed, and skill, you know. And if it’s in the Princess’s yacht, it will be in her safe, in her bedroom. That means it’s right where they’re best prepared to defend it. So you need a big diversion that will pull off the whole launch crew.”

  “How big?” Pikia asked.

  “Big as possible,” Dujuv said. “The kind of thing that would make someone not notice a brass band in gorilla suits and tutus. Why? Do you have an idea?”

  “Well, in the first place, isn’t that the Princess’s yacht sitting in that launch cradle? And you can just bet she has some good reason to have it all fueled up and ready to go, masen? Which means if she takes it into her mind to just take that lifelog and run—”

  “That has to be their main worry,” Jak said. “I think I see where you’re going. So figure Shyf and Witerio don’t trust each other at all; the ship’s on the cradle, so it could take off any instant, but on the other hand Witerio could probably wreck it, fairly harmlessly, just by having the cradle drop suddenly—and then his troops would be more than enough to take the lifelog back. So both sides are sitting there watching each other, fingers on the buttons, all set to hit or run or both. Anything could start right now.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Pikia said. “Have you ever seen a double-sided snipe hunt?… you tell one group that snipe are attracted by whistling and you can hear them coming when they thump the ground; you tell the other group that they are attracted by thumping the ground, and they whistle as they approach. Then you just put the two groups near each other.” She shrugged, a lopsided-looking gesture because of what had happened to her hair. “So by analogy …”

  CHAPTER 10

  A Panty Raid Is Not Standard Procedure

  They were behind the ridgeline of an anchored dune that looked down on Red Amber Magenta Green’s landing field, across the landing linducer and toward the cradles. Their purses were on again, but under strict orders to stay silent, both acoustically and electronically, so that each purse functioned solely as a notepad and a watch.

  Phobos was now well down the sky toward the east, waning as it approached the sun that would rise in just under two hours. Pikia’s plan, as modified by Shadow, Sib, and Gweshira, would take just about an hour to execute, leaving them an hour of darkness to help their escape. With luck, it would be just enough.

  Always assuming that we are trying to steal the lifelog from the right place, Jak added to himself. But no question, Cyx had that look about him, and Shyf looked like she’d set the hook pretty firmly. And if there’s anyplace she’d want it, it would be on her personal launch.

  Three hundred meters to the southeast, the local Pertrans service crossed the landing track, passing through an underpass. To the left of the underpass was the quai where they had come in and where Shyf had arrived. Beyond the quai, the landing track bent around to become an ordinary heavy-duty linducer track, curving around to deliver spacecraft, suborbs, and aircraft to the hangar, the marshaling loop, and the cradles.

  Directly behind the quai, the main hangar rose 350 meters above the field, and stretched almost a half kilometer long. It hid most of the field from them; they were relying on everyone’s memory, afraid to call in satellite pictures or to look up maps, lest their purses’ transmissions give them away. Studded with warning lights and lighted windows, the top of the tower, eight hundred meters above the desert below, reached far above the hangar. The hangar itself was dark and quiet, all its big doors closed.

  Aside from the control tower and the hangar, two other features were visible. Just to the right of the control tower, looking much shorter because it was only about half as high and because it was much farther away, the monitor tower— the spaceport’s central firefighting facility—stood like a castle turret from some medieval adventure viv, the kind of place you expected to see standing off an assault by armored knights in Helicopters. Under 15X magnification, the monitors themselves—the giant waterguns on the rooftop—were clearly visible.

  The last feature was their goal. Cradles One and Three must be in down position, for they were not visible over the hangar or the ridgelines, but just to the right of the hangar, peeking over the ridge, was the raised tip of Cradle Two, in the up position. And since the next commercial flight out of the spaceport was more than a day away, the logical guess was that the reason Cradle Two was up was because it contained the Princess’s yacht; as Gweshira had pointed out, Shyf could not trust her new ally any more than Witerio could trust her, so undoubtedly she had insisted on being poised and fueled for takeoff, he had insisted that the cradle be down and the tanks empty, and the bluest eyes had won.

  A launch cradle was not an absolute necessity, but when one was available it could save as much as a third of the onboard fuel for takeoffs from a planetary surface. Physically, the cradle was a broad trough, rounded at one end and open on the other, about two hundred meters long by sixty wide and sixty deep, with linducer track running down its center and all the way up the curving back. When the cradle was tilted to vertical, a ship moving on linducers could climb into the back of the cradle; lowering the cradle to horizontal made it easy to bring the ship forward for maintenance and outfitting. To be ready for launch, the cradle was again tipped up and rotated to point into the correct trajectory; at the moment of launch, a surge through the linducers would hurl the ship forward and out the open end, taking the place of a booster stage.

  Cradle Two was motionless and pointed upward at about a sixty-degree angle, turned slightly away from them—the position for a fast launch into equatorial orbit, exactly what would be needed for a quick getaway and rendezvous with Rufus Karrinynya.

  It was impossible to see through the hangar, but “If I remember right,” Jak said, “the fuel tanks are on the far side of the cradles, from wh
ere we’re sitting.”

  “That’s what I remember too,” Dujuv said. “If not, I guess we’ll have to make something up. My team is the only one that will be affected if they’re on this side of the cradles.”

  “Anyone else remember anything about the lay of the land?” Jak asked. Xlini Copermisr shrugged slightly. “Usually Splendor One, which is a really ancient warshuttle (four hundred years if it’s a day) and also happens to be the entire Spatial of Red Amber Magenta Green, is on the marshaling loop for Cradle One. Sometimes it’s on the main marshaling loop, but since that’s where they’ve got John Carter bottled up, I don’t imagine they’re doing that right now.”

  “If it’s there,” Pikia said, “then I know what I’m going to do for my part of the op.” She sketched it quickly for them, and they all nodded vigorously. Jak, Sibroillo, and Pikia had the most improvisational parts of the plan; each of them was supposed to run to a particular location and, at the right time, make the sort of noise and chaos that would cause the Princess’s yacht to unbutton and give Dujuv and Shadow a chance to get into it in the confusion.

  “That’s a first-rate bit of confusion you have in mind,” Sibroillo said when she had explained. “And as Jak has probably quoted my saying, many times, always sow as much confusion as possible.” Actually Jak seldom quoted Sib at all, and never on that point, because every time he had taken the advice himself, it had led to disaster. But Pikia had the good sense to nod eagerly, as if she’d heard it many times. Her gift for deceiving the old gwont was nearly equal to Jak’s own; he was glad for the thousandth time to have her along.

  “Well,” she said, “so there’s at least a tentative scheme for causing confusion … everyone else has an assignment … and somewhere to be once it’s completed … everyone have the notes they need?” Everyone nodded. “Are we at the point—”

  “Mmmph,” Jak said. “I’m going to be obsessively cautious and just recheck the basic things that can go wrong. One, the lifelog’s not on the launch. In that case, everyone just runs for it, right? Split up and go any way that seems good to you. Two, the Princess’s beanies and crew might decide they’re safer buttoned up than bringing the thing down. So if you get a chance, anyone, at any point, hit the cradle machinery, because it safeties to the down position, and once it does that they at least aren’t going anywhere, and it might help them to think they want to sortie. Three, we’re all tired, easily confused, easily fixated. Resist that. We’ve got practically no intelligence and no time to reconnoiter. So be alert and keep making it up, because any idea that’s more than a few minutes old might already be past its expiration date, masen?”

  “Toktru,” Dujuv said.

  “Any other issues I haven’t covered?”

  Shadow ahemed and said, “Just to make sure that I understand your customs … there is good reason to avoid lethal force when we can, perhaps to damage only property, and to surrender if trapped or wounded?”

  Xlini Copermisr said, “Exactly right. If you’re captured they’ll just put you in jail till the Hive can transmit the ransom for your release. You don’t want your captors to have any reason to be mad at you if you can help it. So try to keep it all on the level of a major act of vandalism, not war.”

  Shadow made a low, ululating whistle, very softly—the equivalent of a human tongue click, a noise of slight frustration and exasperation. “All right, but this is severely limiting the chances for any real gain in honor.”

  “It’s a sacrifice I am forced to ask of my oath-friend,” Jak said. Shadow bowed his head gravely, accepting the request in that context.

  “All right, has anyone else thought of any other problem?”

  “You’re sure you can keep up?” Dujuv asked Pikia.

  “I ran cross-country in the All-Martian Gen School Meet last year. Make sure you can keep up with me.”

  “All right, you will be running with a panth and Rubahy, you know. Not everyone can.”

  “I’m not everyone.”

  “Toktru masen. That was my last worry, Jak.”

  “Best to get it rolling,” Gweshira said. “We’ll want as much as we can get of that last hour of darkness for fleeing, no matter how this comes out.”

  “All right,” Jak said. “Then tee will equal zero in … two minutes?”

  “Five,” Sib said, “I need to go around the back of a dune for a second. I swear to Nakasen and every Principle there is, when they’re doling out my organs, I pity whoever gets my bladder. If it weren’t for the alternative, nobody would ever want to live to be two hundred.”

  As Jak and Sib trotted over the ridgeline of the third and last anchored dune, Jak glanced to his right; far off, something flickered for just an instant, crossing the ridgeline perhaps half a kilometer farther west. Probably Dujuv, Shadow and Pikia—at least they go that far.

  Jak turned to look at the broad expanse of the Red Amber Magenta Green landing field in front of him. At least, from this much better vantage point, he could see that collectively they had been right in what they remembered: the sixty-meter spheres that were tanks of hot-jet fuel were south of the cradles they served, the main marshaling loop where John Carter was trapped between suborbs was indeed south of the main hangar and east of the tower, and as Xlini had said it would be, Splendor One sat on the smaller marshaling loop beside Cradle One. As soon as they were safely back in the shadows and off the ridgeline, Jak pointed that out to Sib.

  “Good, Pikia will do something with that,” Sib said. “Weehu. I can still run a few kilometers, but it’s a bigger deal than it used to be. Where to now?”

  “I’d say we run for that underpass where the Pertrans dives under the heavy-linducer line that comes out of the main hangar. We’ll have to pop over the landing linducer, but we’d have to no matter what, and they’re probably not on alert. We can squat under the underpass and check out the ground, and then it’s a short dash for you to the control tower and me to the warshuttle. I don’t see any other good hiding place that close.”

  “Toktru.” The older man bent for a minute and sucked in a deep lungful of the good Martian night air; the Chryse Bay, sixty kilometers away, tended to send warm moist air flowing into this part of the Harmless Zone after midnight every night. Sibroillo coughed twice and added, “Well, I’ll have to remember not to do anything like this on my three hundredth birthday trip.”

  It was easy running down the side of the old dune. They blazed across the flat ground, and went up the embankment of the landing linducer in one swift, smooth, silent rush. They leapt onto the half-meter high concrete track that housed the linducers, across the shiny metallic slot, and down the other side, neatly and cleanly. They ran onto the main operations area, toward now-setting Phobos, a narrow, lumpy crescent bowed toward the eastern horizon as it rushed on to meet the sun.

  In less than two minutes since they had looked from the top of the dune, Jak and his uncle were squatting in the Pertrans underpass. Low gravity and a very high oxygen content worked their customary miracles; both men were recovered in a very short time. “Well,” Sib said, “I see the main door to the control tower, and when you don’t know how to get in—”

  “ ‘Always barge in through the front door.’ I could never forget that one, Uncle Sib. I’ll be muttering it on my deathbed. Don’t embarrass me with your part of the mission, you silly old gwont.”

  “Don’t screw up as much as I expect you to, you insolent puppy.”

  They shook hands.

  Jak trotted along the base of the embankment of the heavy-load linducer line, letting it lead him into the main marshaling loop. Sib would be in the control tower in no time, and the more noise Jak could make at the warshuttle, the safer his uncle would be at the tower.

  Dujuv squatted on his heels beside Shadow on the Frost, who stood perfectly still. They were in the dark, west-reaching shadow behind the big fuel sphere for Cradle Two, and for the moment they were about as out of the action as it was possible to be.

  Shadow’s feathered, two
-thumbed hand dropped onto Dujuv’s shoulder to get his attention; one long articulated finger pointed toward the stretched silvery ellipsoid of Splendor One, just south of them, where it rested behind Cradle One. A lighted square had appeared on the side; in it stood a human figure, talking to another one, half in darkness. Then there was a flurry of movement, the guard tumbled down the ramp, and the square of light winked out. Pikia had gotten in.

  * * *

  When the door opened on the side of Splendor One, Pikia had her best “I’m a helpless little girl and I need a nice man to help me” smile glued on tight. She was slightly out of practice because it didn’t work on Dujuv or Jak and she wouldn’t have given it to Clarbo Waynong in any circumstances, but the guard seemed to respond the way most male teachers and pokheets did; he tried to appear gruff and in fact his eyes twinkled as he said, “What can I do for you, miss?”

  “I must have gotten off at the wrong Pertrans station, and I thought this was where the Pertrans line would be for me to get back to Magnificiti, and I’ve been walking just toktru forever, and now that I’m here I don’t see any Pertrans station—”

  “Oh, you can always just get back on anyplace you got off, and tell the Pertrans car where you want to go, and it will figure everything out for you,” the guard said. He looked to be about fifty, his face unlined and his body firm and strong, but self-assured; he might have been an advertisement for longevity drugs, especially with that beaming, stupid, confident smile.