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  I had barely recovered when the next module arrived, closely followed by the next, and the one after that. I felt like the goalie in a reversed hockey game, as the team fed me pucks, and I bounced them into the net. It became fun after a while as they warmed up and I gained skill. Still, the hours took their toll, and I was glad when it was over.

  The captain towed me towards the ship. A pair of shuttles arrived, jockeyed for position, and disgorged a dozen space-suited figures. They headed for the pen. Their motions were so smooth, so coordinated, that our efforts looked clumsy by comparison.

  A few hours later we were packed, paid, and floating around the lock as one of Marscorp’s shuttles made contact. The captain had come to see us off. She extended a bejeweled hand. I took it and was surprised by her strength. “You’re sure you won’t stay? Kreshenko is soft on sweet buns, and your head makes a good mirror.”

  I shook my head. “Thanks…but we’ll be moving on.”

  The captain shrugged. “Okay, have it your way, but a word to the wise…”

  The hatch opened and we pulled ourselves through. I turned around.

  “Yeah? And what would that be?”

  “Be sure to duck.”

  The hatch closed, and I never saw her again. The stewardess had purple hair and matching day-glo nail polish. She wore a blue jumpsuit and a bored expression. She pointed towards the main passageway. “Grab any seat that’s open.”

  We nodded and used the conveniently placed handholds to pull ourselves along. I considered what the captain had said. “What did she mean ‘duck’?”

  “She meant ‘take care of yourself,’” Sasha replied easily. “What did you think she meant?”

  I frowned. “It could have been a warning.”

  “You worry too much.”

  Sasha spotted some empty seats and pulled herself in that direction. I followed. A tiny maintenance bot, one of hundreds that roamed the ship, scuttled across the overhead. It had a screw clamped in its tiny jaws and appeared to be in a hurry. Whatever the problem was, I hoped it wasn’t critical.

  The rest of the passengers, an eclectic group gathered from five or six different ships, stared as we strapped ourselves in. They were what I imagined to be the usual mix of freelancers, corpies, and a zombie or two. They watched with dull, self-absorbed eyes, thinking of what lay ahead, and wishing it was over. And no wonder, since it was common knowledge that even easy Mars jobs were hard, and not everyone who came lived long enough to go back. Not a particularly friendly crowd, but not especially hostile either, so I forced myself to relax and watched Sasha out of the corner of my eye.

  She looked okay, which was amazing considering what she’d been through. But appearances can be deceiving. Watching her had become a hobby of mine, and I thought I saw tension around her eyes, plus a pallor that no amount of artificial tanning could hide. And why not? The poor thing had been abducted by corpies, chased by poppers, lost an eye, and been assaulted by a sexual psychopath. All in spite of my rather questionable protection.

  It made me feel like children do when their parents are troubled. Scared, vulnerable, and helpless to do anything about it. Which was strange, since I was the one who was supposed to protect her rather than the other way around. I wished we could talk about it and knew she’d refuse.

  The deck tilted, then leveled out as the shuttle banked and dived towards the planet below. My stomach did flip-flops. There were no view ports, so I looked for something to do. A screen had been built into the back of the seat in front of me. I pulled it down and an infomercial appeared. The actor was happy, and why not? He was on Earth. He smiled and his teeth sparkled. “Hi! My name is Tom. What’s yours?”

  I ignored the question and he switched to the noninteractive mode. “Marscorp and its affiliates would like to welcome you to Mars. Regardless of whether you work the interface, or are passing through, our personnel will do everything in their power to make your stay as pleasant as possible. Now settle back and relax while we tell you about your next destination.”

  Sasha looked at my screen. “What the hell is that?”

  “Some stuff about Mars. Wanta watch?”

  She shook her head and yawned. “My mother pays flaks to say nice things about Europa Station too. Most of them are lies.”

  I shrugged and turned towards the screen. She closed her eyes and settled back for a nap. A digitally created Mars had appeared and was overlaid with text. The narration continued, but I was pleased to discover that I could read most of the words myself.

  I learned that Mars has a diameter of 4,200 miles and an orbital period of 686 days, each of which is 24 hours and 37 minutes long. Mars is known as the “Red Planet” because of the pervasive orange-red color caused by the dust that blows through the atmosphere. The atmosphere is extremely thin. Ninety-five per cent is carbon dioxide, two-point-seven per cent is nitrogen, one-point-six per cent is argon, and the rest consists of miniscule amounts of oxygen, carbon monoxide, and water vapor. Not a good place to visit without a space suit. And then just to keep things interesting, there are incredible fluctuations in temperature, dust storms, and relatively light gravity. The shots of the surface faded away and the actor appeared. He smiled.

  “Now, while Mars is not the wild and wooly place that the vids would have you believe, it does have an exciting history.”

  Smiley disappeared and was replaced by footage from the Viking lander. I pressed “scan,” waited for the first landing and subsequent colonization stuff to run its course, and hit “play.” The picture steadied and lost resolution as amateur video came on. I had watched the footage a hundred times back on Earth and never tired of it.

  A ragtag army of men and women charged a corporate strongpoint, staggered under a hail of darts, and struggled forward. And then, just when it looked as though they might have a chance, a contingent of Mishimuto Marines, the same outfit I had belonged to, stood up from behind a barricade and gunned them down. The tool heads didn’t have a chance. They danced under the impact of plastic and steel and fell in bloody heaps. Horrible though the pictures were, they provided a glimpse into the life I couldn’t remember, and in spite of the fact that I had searched the faces many times before, I did so again. Maybe, just maybe, I’d been there. The narration continued.

  “The brutal and completely unnecessary war started when a small group of self-styled ‘freedom fighters’ staged an illegal strike, and sought to impose illegal demands on the corporations and their stockholders.

  “Though claiming to represent workers, and pretending to have their interests in mind, the strikers began the systematic destruction of the very facilities that gave them work. And so it was that the corporations formed the Consortium, met force with force, liberated their holdings, and returned honest citizens to their jobs.”

  A tidy ending to a war that had destroyed millions of lives, including mine. The rest of the program was a good deal more cheerful. It seemed that Marscorp had gambled everything on a huge city-sized vehicle dubbed Roller Three. The company was proud of the fact that while the processor traveled less than fifty feet a day, it had already consumed more than a thousand square miles of the planet’s surface and crapped enough palletized ingots to turn a small profit. And, given the size of the red planet’s mineral deposits, plus the fact that Roller Four was in the final stages of construction, there was little doubt that even more profits lay up ahead.

  A robo-cam swooped over and around the machine while the narrator droned on. The first thing that struck me was the sheer scale of the thing. It was five miles long, three miles wide, and weighed millions of tons. Built like an enormous box, its skin covered by a landing strip, solar arrays, autocranes, and cooling fins, the processor would have resembled a mechanical dung beetle, except that it was generating waste instead of eating it.

  Huge tracks, each a quarter of a mile wide, carried the monstrosity forward. Bus-sized boulders exploded as metal-bright treads fell on them. A cloud of fine red dust hung around the machine’s
lower parts as steel jaws gouged tons of rock out of the planet’s surface and dropped it onto highway-sized conveyor belts. From there the belts fed the stuff into a nonpressurized hell where heavily armored humans supervised specially designed droids.

  But that’s not the sort of thing that flaks are paid to dwell on, so the scene changed and I found myself looking at a spotless cafeteria while a man in a tall white hat bragged about the quality of his food. I lost interest, touched a button, and watched while the screen was retracted into the seat back.

  There was very little atmosphere to slow the shuttle down, so it fell like a high-speed elevator. My stomach went with it. It was weird to think that we’d be landing on top of a huge machine. A machine that would continue to function even as we arrived. Powerful engines and a prodigious amount of fuel kept us aloft for the appropriate length of time, but there were no windows, so the teeth-rattling thump and neck-stretching brake job came as a complete surprise. The shuttle coasted for a while and jerked to a stop.

  I expected everyone to stand, grab their luggage, and head for the hatch. The newbies looked around and wondered what to do, but the Mars hands stayed where they were. The stew sounded bored. “Please remain in your seats until a pressure tube has been connected to the shuttle’s main hatch and the seat belt light goes off…”

  She had more to say, but I tuned it out. I looked at Sasha and found that she was awake. “Welcome to Mars.”

  She smiled. “Thanks. Now that we’ve arrived…let’s see how quickly we can leave.”

  I nodded. The quicker we reached Europa Station, the quicker people would stop shooting at me, and the quicker I’d be able to collect the fifty thousand. Which reminded me of what I was being paid to do. “They could be waiting for us.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “How would they know where to look?”

  I knew she was smarter than that, so I assumed it was a rhetorical question. “They would know where we are because A, there is radio communication between Earth and Mars, or B, they came on a faster ship. And what about the captain? She told us to duck. She knew something would happen.”

  “Yeah,” she said reluctantly. “It makes sense.”

  “Yes, it does,” I agreed. “So here’s the plan. I get off first, trip the ambush, and you slip away.”

  Her eyes looked into mine. There was a softness there, mixed with determination, mixed with something else. Her voice was sarcastic.

  “Great, just great. You trip the ambush, get yourself killed, and leave me all alone. What the hell kind of bodyguard is that?”

  The conflicting signals made me confused. I felt defensive. “Oh, yeah? Well, what would you suggest?”

  “That we wait while the others get off, leave together, and slip away.”

  It went against my instincts, but I nodded and touched the weapon under my left armpit. It had been loaded aboard ship, and logic dictated that it still was. I wished I could make sure. The shuttle rocked gently as the pressure tube made contact with the hull. The hatch opened, air hissed as pressures equalized, and the seat belt light went out. A newbie forgot to compensate, jumped to his feet, and hit the overhead. The resulting thud could be heard all over the ship. The Mars hands laughed, shook their heads in disgust, and stood with exaggerated slowness.

  Sasha and I stayed in our seats until most of the passengers had left, stood, and eased our way forward. The last thing we wanted to do was follow the newbie’s example. The stew with the purple hair and matching day-glo nails looked at my head, nodded politely, and let us pass. Was she more interested than she should be? Or was she attracted to my size, skull plate, and rugged good looks?

  My heart beat faster as we walked down the pressure tube towards the terminal beyond. It might have been comical if it wasn’t so frightening. There were thirty or forty people in the waiting area. The moment we stepped out of the pressure tube, three or four of them pointed in our direction and shouted, “There they are!”

  The only thing that saved us was the fact that neither group had expected the other to be there. Weapons appeared, darts flew, and people screamed. Innocent bystanders, of which there were damned few, slid-scurried out of the way as the rest of us took cover behind the chrome-and-black-vinyl furniture. I placed my body in front of Sasha’s, but she moved around me. A woman popped up, tried to get a bead on us, and did a slow-motion tumble as Sasha shot her in the chest. I made a note to keep my movements slow and precise.

  Alarms went off as a dart whirred by my ear. It came from behind! I turned, saw the stewardess with the purple hair fire again, and felt something graze my arm. I put two darts through her throat. Blood pumped, day-glo nails clutched at her neck, and she slow-fell backwards.

  The voice came over the PA system. “THROW YOUR WEAPONS ON THE FLOOR AND PLACE YOUR HANDS ON THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD!”

  We never got a chance to obey, because a volley of sleep-gas canisters tumbled end over end into the waiting area and went off with a sibilant hiss. I had just started to react when the darkness rolled me under.

  10

  “The Class IV environment suit is not intended for prolonged use on planetary surfaces. Such use constitutes an abuse of said suit and serves to nullify all warranties offered by the manufacturer.”

  A sticker found in the right armpit of each Jiffy Corp Class IV environment suit

  Someone slapped my face. I felt my head rock back and forth. It hurt and, worse than that, forced me up out of the nice black hole where I’d been hiding. I made a conscious decision to hurt the person who was hurting me, gathered my energy, and reached for their throat. Or would have, if my arms had been free.

  Someone laughed, a deep grunting sound, not unlike that made by primates in the zoo.

  That made me really angry, angry enough to open my eyes and squint up into the harsh white light. It came from a ceiling-mounted fixture and served to silhouette my tormentor. I couldn’t see his features, but the outline was big. Bigger than I am. He saw my eyes open and nodded his satisfaction. “So. sleeping beauty awakes. Time to rise and shine, sweet cakes. We’re going for a little hike.”

  I heard a series of clicks and felt the restraints drop away. The blob withdrew and I forced myself to sit. I had what felt like a hangover and decided the knockout gas was to blame. The ambush! Sasha! Where was she? My head throbbed as I looked around. It seemed as though I was inside some sort of cylindrical vehicle, an impression that was confirmed when it hit a bump and the back of my head bounced off a heavily padded bulkhead.

  A corridor ran the length of whatever it was that I was in. It was filled with half-dressed men and women. They swore when the vehicle rocked from side to side and struggled to don what looked like space suits. Almost all of them had the whipcord-thin look of people teetering on the edge of starvation. Some eyed me with open hostility. The rest seemed determined to ignore me.

  My tormentor reappeared. He was big, black, and completely bald. It was supposed to look intimidating and did. He had a wedge-shaped torso, thick arms, and legs like tree trunks. I put my plans for mayhem on temporary hold. He nodded as if endorsing my decision.

  “That’s right, sweet cakes. Get the lay of the land before you try me on. It’s nice to have a mule with a little bit of common sense for a change. Now get your big white ass down off that bunk and suit up.”

  Discretion seemed the better part of valor, so I slid off the bunk. My landing was feather-light and served to remind me of the planet’s rather iffy gravity. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned just in time to catch a loosely tied bundle. It was a suit similar to the one I had worn in orbit. I shook it out and managed to slide inside without making a complete fool of myself. I didn’t know why that mattered, just that it did, especially with the black guy looking on.

  The truth was that I didn’t like him, but still wanted his approval, kind of like a recruit hates the DI’s guts but wants his or her respect. A bit perverse perhaps, but very much in line with my need for authority figures, and the occasio
nal bit of guidance. Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t deck the bastard if I thought I could get away with it and doing so suited my purposes. Confused? Hey, join the party.

  I checked the seals on my suit and tried to figure out where they had taken me and why. What had happened to the Trans-Solar goons, anyway? Not to mention the homicidal greenies. And Sasha? Was she a prisoner like me? Or lying dead in a meat locker?

  Then I saw her, a reed-thin woman with stubblelike hair, piercing blue eyes, and a ruler-straight mouth. The kind that never smiles. She had sealed her suit but left the face plate open and was killing me with her eyes. Or trying to, anyway. There was something familiar about her, as though we had met before, and recently at that. On the shuttle? In the terminal? Yes, I thought I remembered a frightened face, a gun, and a dart whirring past my head.

  Yeah, she’d been there, and, even more importantly, she understood what was happening. I had already taken a step in the woman’s direction when a hand fell on my shoulder. It was the black guy again. “Wrong direction, sweet cakes. The lock is towards the ass end of this kidney-buster. Follow the mule in front of you.”

  I turned in the proper direction. The guy in front of me had “Screw you!” spray-painted across the sand-blasted surface of his oxy box. It seemed like the perfect sentiment.

  The vehicle braked to a jerky halt, failed to throw any of us to the deck, and vibrated in frustration. The line shuffled forward and I followed. It soon became apparent that the lock held five people at a time, so there were a number of pauses while we cycled through. I had seen no sign of guards other than the black man, so I made plans to run. A quick check assured me that he was seven people back, well clear of the group I would share the lock with, and apparently uninterested in my activities. Good. Once clear of the lock, I would have about five minutes to disappear.