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  She pulled a pocket comp from her pajamas and read aloud. “Consistent with Comreg 6789.2 paragraph three, it is the captain’s duty to hold a formal inquest upon the death of a crew member, and take whatever steps he or she may deem necessary up to and including summary execution. Reports of the captain’s findings, plus physical evidence if any, shall be filed at the next port of call.”

  The captain closed the pocket comp and put it away. A pair of piggy little eyes swung towards Sasha. “So, sweet buns, what happened? And remember, the bridge recorders are running, so this is for keeps.”

  I felt Sasha shrug and allowed my arm to fall away. “Lester made sexual advances towards me from the moment I came aboard. I rejected them over and over again. So many times that I feared for my safety and carried a weapon.”

  “Which I told you not to use.” the captain said sternly.

  “True.” Sasha admitted calmly, “remembering that you warned me about Lester, and did so in front of a witness.”

  The captain had forgotten about that, and she scowled accordingly. “Go on.”

  Sasha nodded slowly. “I got up at the time I usually do, took a shower, dressed, and stepped out into the passageway. I was halfway to the galley when Lester stepped out of a hatch and punched me in the side of the head. I fell. He slapped my face, threatened to kill me, and ripped at my clothes. I reached for my gun…”

  “Where was it?”

  “In a shoulder holster under my left arm.”

  “So he couldn’t see it?”

  “Correct.”

  “Go on.”

  “I reached for my gun, pulled it out, and shot him in the face.”

  “And?”

  “And he fell over dead.”

  The captain nodded grimly. She looked around the compartment. “Questions?”

  Silence.

  “All right, given the fact that Sasha Casad’s testimony is consistent with the physical evidence, and is partially confirmed by a security camera located in the vicinity of the attack, I find that Lester Hollings’s death was a justifiable homicide, committed in self-defense. Inquest closed.”

  The captain nodded to Wilson, and he touched a button. She smiled and looked around the bridge. “Okay, everybody, the recorders are off.”

  Sasha and I turned to go but stopped when the captain said, “Not so fast, chrome-dome. We still have a problem, and you’re going to help.”

  “She means the phantom,” Killer said helpfully as he examined a set of absolutely filthy fingernails. “We’ve got to find him.”

  I looked at the captain. “Why?”

  She scowled. “Because the phantom was programmed to assist the engineering officers, that’s why. Barring a major drive failure, or something equally catastrophic, the phantom has enough shit to see us through.”

  I nodded slowly. “Oh.”

  Sasha was more inquiring. “Why search for him? Get on the horn and order him to come.”

  The captain rubbed her chins. They jiggled. “It ain’t that simple, honey buns…the phantom doesn’t like humans.”

  Kreshenko spoke for the first time. “We believe that Lester abused the Engineering Support Android in a manner that caused it to run away.”

  Sasha frowned. “Abused…how?”

  The rest of the crew looked at each other. They were visibly uncomfortable. It was Wilson who answered. He had a deep, rumbling voice. “Lester tried to modify the ESA’s body so that it could function as a sex surrogate. That’s the theory, anyway, but none of us have gotten close enough to confirm it.”

  There were sexroids of course, lots of them, but they had programing appropriate to the job. The ESA didn’t, and Lester’s attempts to graft that function over the others had driven it insane. Which raised some interesting questions: Assuming we were able to capture the phantom, would it be able to perform the job it had been designed to do? And why had the whole thing been left so long?

  I think everyone had similar thoughts, but no one wanted to say anything. To do so would be to question the way the captain did or didn’t do her job and risk one’s livelihood. A real no-no when there are twenty people waiting to fill your slot.

  The search began in the bow. All of the Trader’s crew plus most of the ship’s ambulatory robots had been recruited for the task. The plan was simple: Start in the bow, sweep towards the stern, and drive the phantom before us. Once it was concerned, it would be a relatively simple matter to repair the damage that Lester had done and put the android right. Or so we hoped.

  I looked around. Kreshenko had armed himself with a section of cargo netting. The captain had a sandwich in one hand and a stun gun in the other. Killer had fashioned a lasso from a length of utility line and twirled it over his head. Wilson untangled his homemade bolo and Sasha looked bored. “All right,” the captain said through her food, “go get him. And remember, if you hurt the little bastard, we’re screwed.”

  Not the most inspiring speech I’d ever heard, but direct and to the point. We spread out and headed down-ship. Hand-held radios helped coordinate our movements. Each corridor, passageway, compartment, and cubicle was searched. We found all sorts of things including rats, a parrot’s mummified body, a cargo module with “urgent” marked all over it and a five-year-old delivery date, the still my predecessor had maintained, plus an entire storage room packed with supplies that Kreshenko didn’t have listed on his inventories and the captain ordered him to ignore. But no android.

  Various members of the search party did catch glimpses of the phantom, however, always a step ahead of us, fleeing towards the stern. But large as she was, the Red Trader was only so big, and the outcome was inevitable. We found him huddled in a locker full of pneumatic cargo jacks, trying to blend in with the equipment around him. The things that Lester had done to his body were disgusting enough, but the artificial intelligence that stood in for his brain had been scrambled, and required three shifts of electronic therapy. The result was somewhat twitchy but functional enough to meet our needs—barring what the captain called “major catastrophes,” which I was too stupid to imagine.

  And so it was that I went back to petting the aniforms, finished my shift, and hit the rack. The dream grabbed my mind and pulled it down.

  “Holy mother full of grace, help me make it through this place…” The pilot’s personal mantra was little more than a whisper now, as if the strikers might hear it, and punish us with a missile. And I couldn’t really blame her, since they were damned close and had some first-class detection equipment. And why not? They had stolen it from the same place Mishimuto did. I patted her shoulder. It was slick with sweat. “You’re doing good, Loot. Just a few more klicks and it’ll be over.”

  She nodded stiffly and kept her eyes straight ahead as she slid the ship around the side of a slowly tumbling asteroid. The trick was to keep it between us and the research station for as long as possible. After all, you can’t shoot what you can’t see, and even the best detectors can’t see through solid rock.

  That was the theory, anyway, although the strikers might have surrounded themselves with a whole network of remote sensor stations that were busy screaming their heads off.

  I imagined missiles leaving their racks, zigzagging away from the installations that fired them, and accelerating in our direction. The Loot might have time to detect them, might have time to say the words uttered by so many pilots before her, but would die a millisecond later along with me and the entire team.

  The Loot rescued me from my own imagination. “We’re twenty from the drop.”

  I hit my harness release. “Gotcha. I’ll be with the team. Thanks for the lift.”

  It was macho stuff, the kind we practice in the corps, and she wasn’t playing. “Your team will have sixty seconds to deploy.”

  I nodded, snuck one last look at her nipples, and floated free. I pulled myself down the corridor, cycled the hatch, and propelled myself into the cargo bay. The gunny yelled “Ten-hut” and the troops did their best to obey. But
it’s hard to look military inside a Class III battle suit, especially with all sorts of extra gear strapped to your body, and no gravity to hold things in place.

  I said, “As you were,” and accepted the gunny’s help in donning my battle suit. It was similar to the trooper model, except for the lighter weaponry, heavier armor, and a sophisticated command and control package. It fit like a glove, smelled like the dump I had taken in it the month before, and was servo-assisted. The gunny thumped her helmet against mine. She had wide-set eyes, a pug nose, and a dusting of freckles across the top of her cheeks. “How ya doin’ sir? Everything okay?”

  I tried to ignore the smell. “Just fine, gunny. Couldn’t be better.”

  She grinned knowingly. “Life sucks, don’t it, sir? Well, that’s why god gave us the corps. To shorten the suffering.”

  I laughed, knowing it was expected of me, and knowing she was scared too. And there were thirty-six men and women on our team, their helmets turned in my direction, all of whom shared the same feelings. I thought about some of the stupid gung-ho crap other officers had laid on me and tried to avoid it. “We’re on final approach. You know the objective, the layout, and what you’re supposed to do. Questions?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, then. Load the tubes.”

  I used handholds to pull myself towards the stern, stopped in front of the starboard ejection tube, and checked to make sure that my squad had lined up behind me. They had. I dived inside and used fingertips and toes to push myself forward. My squad did likewise. A hatch closed behind the last member in.

  The gunny did much the same thing along the port side, followed by a seal check. She called thirty-eight names, got thirty-eight affirmatives, and blew the tubes.

  We were in position now, ready to be fired out of both sides of the ship, falling, or in this case blasting, down towards the target below. Of course the Loot, plus the ships behind her, would cover us with cannon fire, missiles, chaff, electronic countermeasures, and everything else they had up their naval sleeves, but none of it would mean diddly if the tool heads knew we were coming. Yes, surprise was the key, that and the most fickle ally of all, luck.

  “Five and counting.” The Loot was tense but rational. Better than some I’ve flown with, but wired tight just the same. And who could blame her? Recon pilots have a life expectancy of five or six months. “One and counting.”

  I stared at the steel in front of my helmet and tried to ignore my surroundings. I gave thanks when the ten-second count began. “Nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one.”

  The hatch, mounted up against an indentation in the spacecraft’s fuselage, slid aside. I braced myself, watched the inner hatch cycle out of the way, and felt a wall of air hit the bottom of my boots. We were propelled outwards like bullets from a gun. I had little more than seconds to orient myself, to realize that it was an ambush, and feel the individually targeted micro-missile hit my chest plate.

  They say you can’t scream if you’re dead, but I proved they were wrong. It took hours to slow my pulse, to think pleasant thoughts, and drift off to sleep.

  9

  “Dissent is a luxury that Mars colonists can ill afford.”

  Margaret Peko-Evans, architect of Mars Prime—the first settlement

  The rest of the trip was fairly routine. Each shift was pretty much like the last. Get up, take a shower, drink three cups of coffee, pet the aniforms, and read for Sasha. Progress was slow, but I did my best and was reading at a second-or third-grade level in no time at all.

  The whole thing might have been somewhat enjoyable if it hadn’t been for the way in which the aniforms were “harvested” and passed down the ship’s food chain. I had no part in the actual killing, thank god, but felt like a traitor whenever one of my charges disappeared and was replaced by a newly decanted clone, or “bud.” Then, after I had spent countless hours petting it, the cow, sheep, pig, or chicken would vanish only to reappear around the captain’s waistline.

  Yes, the others were just as carnivorous as she was, but I held the captain personally responsible and saw her as the sole culprit. By doing so I could ignore the fact that Sasha seemed to have an insatiable appetite for steaks, pork chops, and Killer’s super-crispy fried chicken.

  And making a bad situation even worse was the fact that each aniform was identical to all of its predecessors. It was like killing the same pet over and over again. It got to the point where I could hardly look into their adoring eyes or touch their eager heads. So, it was with a sense of tremendous relief that I saw Mars on the main view screen. It was beautiful and looked like a sphere of reddish-orange marble set spinning on a sheet of black velvet. I was thinking about the surface and what we might encounter there when the captain burst my bubble. She moved quietly for such a large woman, and I didn’t know she was present until her forklift brushed my right shoulder.

  “Welcome to Mars. Ever been outside before?”

  My eyebrows shot towards the top of my head. “Outside? As in outside the ship?”

  “Sure,” the captain replied curiously. “What? You thought we’d dump the cargo and let it drift?”

  “I assumed we would dock with a habitat. Like Staros-3.”

  The captain laughed. Tidal waves of fat rippled back and forth beneath me surface of her black pajamas. “A habitat! That’s a good one! As if the poor bastards had the resources to build a space station! Hell, they’re lucky to meet the company’s daily production quota, much less dick around with habitats. No, we unload the cargo in orbit and they take the stuff down in shuttles. So how ‘bout it? You been outside before?”

  I knew there was a strong possibility that I had, but I couldn’t be sure, so I shook my head.

  The captain clucked sympathetically. “Too bad. But don’t worry, you’ll catch on. And sweet buns too. When it comes time to unload, everyone turns to, and I mean everyone. Even me.”

  And she meant it too, which accounted for the fact that Sasha and I found ourselves adrift within the main lock four hours later. My space suit was too small, Sasha’s was too large, and both smelled like an overripe armpit. The captain had taken the spin off the ship in order to provide unobstructed access to the cargo bay. The result was zero gee and nausea in the pit of my stomach. The others, Sasha included, showed no signs of discomfort.

  The regular crew members had customized their suits, or purchased customized units, I wasn’t sure which. The captain’s was bright pink with lots of flashing red lights and a hint of chrome. Killer had co-opted Lester’s suit. It had been painted to resemble a naked Hercules complete with fake sex organ. He made a production out of cutting it off and waving it over his head. Kreshenko had gone for the high-tech look, favoring a suit fitted with articulated cutters, lasers, and other accessories too numerous to mention. It made him look like a large Swiss army knife. In fact Wilson, already positioned in the cargo bay, was the only one besides ourselves who wore an unmodified suit. The outer hatch cycled open, and the captain’s voice crackled in my ears.

  “Okay people, listen up. Sweet buns will team with Kreshenko, and chrome-dome comes with me. Let’s get it over with.” So saying, the captain fired her jets and headed out into the void. She looked like a wad of pink chewing gum wrapped with Christmas tree lights.

  I didn’t want to go but knew I had to. I fired my jets. The suit surged upwards, bounced off the overhead, and took off again. I cut power, aligned myself with the hatch, and gave it another try. Nausea rolled over me as I passed out into the vast emptiness of space. The captain loomed ahead, dodged out of the way, and made a grab for my suit. “Maxon! Cut your jets!”

  I obeyed and felt completely humiliated as she clipped a line to the eye mounted on my chest plate and towed me towards the ship’s stern. So much for my secret hopes that past knowledge would surface to save the day.

  The ship filled most of the view. The hull was cylindrical and covered with duct work, antenna farms, solar arrays, and other installations too arcane for m
e to understand. And beyond that, half hidden by the Trader’s hull, was Mars herself, a glowing red presence against a field of black. The sight was so awesome, so compelling, that my nausea was momentarily forgotten. No wonder the earlier me had ventured into the Big Black. There could be nothing more beautiful than the sight before me.

  The cargo hatch was open, and the loading lights served to illuminate Wilson’s launcher. The launcher was the equivalent of a spacegoing forklift, except that it could “launch” cargo modules, as well as move them around.

  In this case that meant propelling the containers from the ship’s hold towards the holding “pen” where the rest of the crew would retrieve and move them inside. No simple task when the modules were eight times bigger than you were. The launcher looked like a praying mantis with a man strapped to its stomach.

  Correctly assessing my competence as nonexistent, the captain secured my safety line to the pen and issued strict instructions to stay where I was. I was happy to comply. As the rest of the crew arrayed themselves in front of the holding structure, and prepared to “catch” cargo, I examined the pen. It was anything but high-tech.

  Bright orange plastic netting had been stretched over a metal framework to create a massive box or “pen” into which the cargo could be shoved and temporarily stored. Lights strobed off and on to warn ships of the pen’s presence, and a system of moveable partitions had been installed to divide one load of cargo from the next.

  I watched in amazement as Wilson launched the first container in our direction and the captain jetted out to intercept it. The captain was surprisingly graceful as she hurtled through space, caught the incoming module, and pushed it towards me. “Time to earn your keep, Maxon. Catch the sucker and shove it into the pen.”

  Mars-light winked off the top surface of the container as it tumbled in my direction. The captain had met the module with the correct amount of force, but her aim was off. To correct for that, and direct the cargo into the pen, I would have to move to the right. I gritted my teeth, fired my jets, and jerked to a halt when my safety line ran out. I felt the cable tighten under my armpit and pull me around. I was still in the process of turning back and raising my hands when the container hit. It pushed me into the net, dropped through the opening like an eight ball entering the corner pocket, and drifted towards the back wall. My jets pushed me out, the cable jerked me around, and the captain sounded cheerful. “Good going, Maxon. Keep it up.”