Martians Abroad

by Carrie Vaughn

  “Charles,” I said. “What is Stanton doing, right this minute?”

  He punched a set of commands into his handheld, calling up the hotel-security feed, most likely. “Huh. She’s in the lift, on her way up here.”

  “Want to bet she’s going to do a bed check?” I grabbed Ladhi, Angelyn, and Elzabeth and hauled them toward the door. “We’ve got to get back to our rooms.” I squeezed Ethan’s arm on the way out. “Call us if you figure out anything else.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Elzabeth and Angelyn raced to their rooms, and Ladhi and I ran back to ours, closing the door just as the lift at the end of the hall slid open. We hurried to rip off our uniforms and grab our pajamas, pull back the sheets, and find our handhelds so we could pretend to be reading.

  Stanton had the lock codes to all the rooms. Our door opened, and Ladhi and I were lying our beds, reading dutifully. Or pretending to read.

  “Girls?” she asked, looking us over, frowning, like this wasn’t what she’d expected to find.

  “Yes, Ms. Stanton?” Ladhi asked, because she was the polite one.

  “It’s late. Lights out.”

  Dutifully, we turned off our handhelds and the lights. Stanton didn’t close the door until we were under our covers and still. It kind of made me want to get up and scream and dance around, just to see what she’d do. Truly amazing how she brought out in the worst in me. She probably did it on purpose.

  When the door finally closed, I sat up and turned the light back on. “Did you notice she checked our room first?”

  “Does that surprise you?” Ladhi asked.

  Not really. I had another hunch, so I jumped out of bed and went to the door, rattled the handle. Locked, from the outside this time. She’d locked us all in.

  “She’s on to us,” I muttered.

  “Can she do that? What if there really is a fire, what if—” Ladhi stopped there. She sat up in bed, gripping the blankets. “What are we going to do?”

  I paced along the wall by the window. We had to be able to do something besides just sit here.

  “George is going to be okay, right?” Ladhi said. “I’m sure it’s just a big misunderstanding.”

  I ran my hands around the window frame, pressing on the glass, hoping for a way to open it, push it out, but no. Solid as a view port in a space station. Should have made me feel better, but it didn’t. Even if I could open the window, what was I going to do, jump from the fifth story and shatter my fragile offworlder bones on the concrete sidewalk below? On Mars, I could jump out a fifth-story window and land like a soap bubble. Well, maybe not a soap bubble. Maybe more like a pillow. But soft enough.

  “Polly, sit down, you’re making me nervous.”

  I started to round on her, to yell and vent, which wouldn’t have been fair to her but I was getting really anxious, when my handheld beeped—incoming call. We both jumped, and I ran to my bed to grab it. “Yes? What?”

  “Polly.” It was Charles. Of course it was. “I’m starting a group call … now.” He lowered his gaze, pressed buttons, and three other boxes opened on the screen. Ethan in one, Tenzig in a second, and Angelyn in the other, with Elzabeth leaning over her shoulder, her eyes still red from crying. They all looked surprised—except Ethan, who was in the room with Charles—and talked over each other. “Who is this—” “How did you—” “What—”

  Charles interrupted. “Everybody be quiet, we have work to do.”

  “Charles, what’s happening?” I said.

  “We have to track the men who kidnapped George, and since Stanton locked the rooms we have to do it here, over the network.”

  Tenzig sneered. “Why don’t we let Dean Stanton and security find him? It’s their jobs.”

  “They’re not looking for him.”

  A chorus of arguments answered him. I didn’t say anything, and Ladhi looked at me, pleading for me to explain.

  Charles continued. “They’re not looking for him because Stanton wants to see what we’ll do. Like the accident at Yosemite.”

  I could believe that Stanton had rigged George’s kidnapping, but the question I needed answered was, Why? Why would she do it? Especially so out in the open like this?

  “It’s a test,” I said. Every minute of our days were planned and scheduled, we were watched so closely—and even the accidents were planned and monitored.

  Out of curiosity, I called up the local news, an online site that gave a scroll of cultural events, residential information, and security alerts for the island. I went over the last hour of news—nothing about a kidnapping, no alerts to be on the lookout for men matching the kidnappers’ descriptions. This was totally out of any kind of public awareness.

  “You’re all crazy,” Tenzig said. “And you’re going to get in more trouble than you already are, if not kicked out of the school entirely. I don’t want any part of it.” He pushed a button, and his box went dark and vanished.

  “That’s okay, we didn’t need him anyway,” Angelyn muttered. “He’s just worried about how all this is going to look on his record.”

  “I can’t look at every security-vid feed myself,” Charles said. “I’m tapping each of you in to a likely security feed and sending security pictures of the kidnappers from the hotel. We need to sync up the facial recognition program to go over the last hour or so of footage, to track them from when they left here. They’re probably at one of a handful of addresses—I’ve found their residences and where they work—so we’ll check those first. If you get a hit, tell me.”

  “Can you bring Ladhi in on this so she can help?” I asked, and a moment later Ladhi’s handheld beeped.

  We got to work. Charles sent me half a dozen links, and the boxes opened up on my screen. They all looked the same, security-vid views of streets and entranceways, gray sidewalks and redbrick walls, all well lighted. Even this late, the streets were crowded, partygoers and night owls bustling. Everyone seemed to be wearing coats and hats that hid their faces and made them hard to identify. But I didn’t have to see the faces—we were looking for George, with two men who matched a certain description. The facial recognition program started isolating traits and rejecting mismatches. It still seemed to go slowly, even with all of us covering different video feeds.

  I started with the most recent footage and worked backward, going through each camera, helping the software by rejecting near misses. Then the handheld pinged a match, and the vid showed three bulky male figures, two holding firmly to the one in the middle. They turned the corner and left my view.

  I hit pause and called out, “There, I think I got him, on feed, um…” I recited the ID on the security feed.

  “Got it,” Charles said. “That’s at Fifty-second and Broadway. Angelyn, that’s moving into your territory, can you find them?”

  “Looking, looking … Yes. I have them. They entered a building on Fifty-second, twenty minutes ago, I think.”

  “And there we go. We’ve got them.”

  “We can call security to go find him, now,” Elzabeth said. “Right?”

  “Because that worked so well the last time,” I muttered.

  “We’ll do better than that,” Charles said. “We’ll find a way to get him out of there ourselves.”

  Angelyn said, “Can we, I don’t know, hire our own security?”

  “You going to pay for it?” Charles said.

  “I’ll pay for it,” Elzabeth said.

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. We’re on an island that’s a tourist resort, aren’t we? There ought to be all kinds of services we can send to disrupt the kidnappers and give George a chance to escape.”

  “Assuming he’s smart enough to take the opportunity,” I said.

  Charles’s expression had turned pensive. “Good point. We need to find a way to call him. We don’t have to mount a rescue, just cause a disruption.”

  He was in thinking mode, lips pursed, scratching his chin.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Angelyn said. �
�Pizza delivery. We send over a pizza.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “Pizza, it’s a kind of food—don’t tell me we haven’t made you eat pizza yet. Maybe I’ll order one for here, too. Anyway, we order it, send it to that address, they’ll bring it right to the door. Should be all kinds of distraction.”

  “Do it,” Charles said. “Make it a big order. Charge it to Stanton’s account.”

  “Wait, you have Stanton’s credit-account number?” I said, impressed in spite of myself.

  Angelyn was already punching in codes.

  “Can we find a way to get a message to George? Give him some kind of warning?” Elzabeth said.

  “Without tipping off the kidnappers,” I added.

  “Details,” Charles muttered. “I wish we had a camera in that building.”

  “You have a handheld ID for one of those guys?” I suggested.

  “Getting to that … and … thank you…”

  Just like that, he hacked into one of the kidnappers’ handhelds. He threw up a box with the image from the thing’s camera eye, but since the guy kept it in his pocket, all we saw was a big shadow. We got sound, though.

  George, being tough. “You won’t get away with this, my family is very important, they’ll hunt you down!”

  The next voice was closer—the owner of the handheld. He sounded tired, frustrated. “Kid, you’ve said that ten times, please be quiet. Nothing’s going to happen to you, we just have to wait.”

  “Wait for what?” George argued.

  “Just wait. Okay? Seriously.”

  Angelyn interrupted. “Pizza’s going to take twenty minutes.”

  “Why so long?” Charles shot back.

  “Because they have to make it?” Angelyn offered nicely.

  “Too bad you can’t change the laws of physics, right Charles?” I said.

  “Working on it,” he murmured.

  “You’re joking, right?” I said.

  “This is all theater,” Charles said.

  George provided some entertainment while we waited, by turns pleading with and threatening his kidnappers, who appeared to be waiting for some signal, just like we were. The amount of money he kept offering to ransom himself with increased, until the other kidnapper—also in the room, standing some distance away by the sound of his voice—said, “I’m inclined to take him up on his offer rather than wait for the cue.”

  “No kidding.” Guy number one chuckled.

  “What cue? What’s going to happen?” George said.

  “Oh, he sounds so scared,” Elzabeth crooned from over Angelyn’s shoulder on their end of the call. She might have been right. To me, he sounded as blustery and arrogant as he ever did, but there was an edge to his voice that might have been fear or desperation.

  “It’ll be good for him, being scared for once,” Ethan said. And he sounded amused.

  “Hey!” Ladhi called. “I’m watching the vid feed, a car just pulled up outside the kidnappers’ building, I think it’s the pizzas!”

  “All right, here we go,” Charles said, a gleeful tone in his voice. “Polly, order a taxi, they can pick him up right at the front door.”

  I found the contact number on the tourist info page and got Ladhi to double-check the address for me. ETA: five minutes.

  “Taxi on the way,” I said.

  “Good. All right, turn your volumes up, it’s showtime.”

  On the kidnapper’s handheld feed, a door alert sounded.

  “Is that it?” said the second guy. “Is that the signal?”

  “No, we were supposed to get a call,” said the first guy.

  “Then who’s at the door?”

  “Stay here, I’ll go check.”

  A bit of rustling while the guy moved through the rooms, padded down the stairs, and opened a door. “What?”

  A younger male voice said, “Yeah, we have an order for a dozen pizzas to be delivered to this address for some kind of party?”

  “What? I think there’s been a mistake, we haven’t ordered any pizzas…”

  “But the order is right here, they’ve already been paid for and everything.”

  “Well, we don’t want them, can you take them somewhere else? The employee mess hall maybe?”

  I decided right then that this pizza-delivery thing must have been invented for its comic value.

  “Let’s wrap this up,” Charles said.

  A loud alarm rang, making Ladhi and me slap our hands over our ears. Another fire alarm? I couldn’t tell where it was coming from until I looked back at my handheld. The box showing the kidnapper’s handheld suddenly got an image, blurring as it zipped past, as the guy took it out of his pocket to look at it. “What is that?!”

  “What am I supposed to do about these pizzas?”

  “Hey, you, get back here!” That was the other kidnapper, and I heard heavy footsteps slamming down a staircase.

  Then things got very messy. I might have thought this would be like watching a vid, clandestinely eavesdropping while we got the audio and visual feed from the kidnappers’ handhelds. Like sitting in the corner, watching events unfold. This wasn’t like that at all. There was a lot of shouting and running, and the guy must have shoved his handheld back in his pocket because everything went dark again, and the alarm was still blaring, echoing off the walls in the house they were in, adding to the chaos.

  “There, he’s outside! Check the video feed!” Angelyn said, and then Charles sent the image from that camera feed to the rest of us, and finally this was like watching a vid. There was George, standing on the street, looking back and forth in a panic. A guy standing there in some kind of food-services uniform, holding a stack of flat boxes, blinked back at him in confusion, and the two kidnappers barreled out the door after him. George ran.

  “And there’s the taxi,” Charles observed. The taxi was an electric-powered groundcar painted a mustard yellow with a lighted sign on top. Another one of the traditional modes of transport on the island. If George had listened to the orientation when we got here, he’d know that all he had to do was get in and it would take him wherever he wanted.

  “Please, George, pay attention to the taxi…” Angelyn muttered, because it looked like George was going to run right past it in his panic. Poor guy.

  But he didn’t. Right at the edge of the security camera’s range of view, George did a double take, stopped, and piled into the taxi’s backseat. The car pulled away as the two kidnappers raced down the sidewalk. They glared at it and slouched, clearly discouraged.

  Well, that was exciting.

  “That’s it,” Charles said. “He’s on the way back.”

  Elzabeth clapped, and Angelyn turned around to hug her tight. The rest of us sighed. For not having moved for the last half hour, I was exhausted. I blamed the gravity.

  I heard a soft click from the door.

  “Ladhi, try the door,” I said.

  She padded over, turned the handle—and the door opened. She looked back at me, holding the door open, uncertain.

  “Hey, guys?” I said carefully, because I didn’t quite believe it. “The doors are unlocked. We can leave.”

  “Do we dare?” Ladhi whispered, like someone was listening in on us, and maybe they were.

  “I don’t care,” Elzabeth said. “I’m going to meet George.”

  I heard their door open and slam closed in the hallway.

  “Let’s go,” I said, getting up to race after them.

  Charles and Ethan joined us, and the six of us ran to the elevator. Elzabeth fidgeted the whole way down.

  Me, I was waiting for bombs to drop. “What next?” I said. “Do we call out Stanton?”

  “We don’t do anything,” Charles said. “We pretend we don’t know anything.”

  “She has to know what we did, she monitors everything—”

  “But she’ll pretend she doesn’t, and we’ll pretend that we didn’t.”

  “But then why is she doing this? Why set up these disasters just
to see what we’ll do? It’s wrong, she’s crazy—”

  “Polly, be quiet, she’s probably listening in on us right now.”

  “I don’t care! I hate her and I don’t care if she knows it!”

  “She probably doesn’t care how you feel about her.”

  “We can call Mom. All of us, we call our parents and tell them what’s been happening—”

  “And who are they going to believe?” Charles said, arcing his brow in that maddening smug way of his. “Stanton or us?”

  “I don’t care!” I shouted again, as if yelling it to the universe would actually change something.

  “Then be quiet and let me handle it.” He was so infuriatingly superior about it all.

  “So what, I’m just supposed to pretend this wasn’t all a setup?”

  “Yes. You are going to keep your mouth shut.”

  “Make me!”

  And he just stared down at me. Once again, I felt a shock that he was taller than me, staring down at me.

  The others were watching us, pressed over to one side of the elevator, leaving the two of us alone to shout at each other in our hard Martian accents. Well, leaving me to shout. Charles never shouted. Charles had no emotion at all. He was a machine with flesh glued over him.

  “What?” I muttered at them.

  “Do you guys always argue like that?” Ladhi said.

  “Yeah,” I answered, deadpan. “It’s because we love each other.”

  “Look up ‘sibling rivalry,’” Charles said. “A well-documented psychological phenomenon. Polly falls victim to it often.”

  “Charles!”

  “See?”

  I growled. The elevator doors opened.

  The lobby was filled with automated scrubbers and cleaners repairing the damage from the fire-retardant foam, making a soft, annoying hum. In their midst, a pair of uniformed security officers stood talking to Stanton, who appeared utterly calm and serene with her gray uniform and superior gaze. She should have been surprised to see us all marching out of the elevator, but she wasn’t. Narrowing her gaze at us, she considered. Charles must have guessed that I was about to open my mouth and start yelling, because he grabbed my wrist and squeezed.

  Before anyone could say anything, George came in the front door. He looked flushed, sweaty, exhausted, his shirt untucked, a spatter of mud on the hem of his trousers and shoes. He looked around, blinking like he’d left an air lock to emerge in bright sunlight.