The Callisto Gambit (53 page)

Her mother had painstakingly let out the bodice with matching fabric, and added another frill to the hem. And now the dress turned out to be too long, because Elfrida had forgotten to tell her mother that she wouldn’t be wearing high heels.

“You could borrow my shoes,” said Cydney Blaisze.

Elfrida rolled her eyes at her ex-girlfriend. “Cyds, my feet are twice the size of yours.”

It touched and delighted her that Cydney had come all this way, but …

“Do
please
stop moving your face,” said Miss Mercury 2291, who stood in front of Elfrida, applying make-up to her face. “You don’t want to end up with crooked eyebrows.”

Elfrida did kind of wish Cydney hadn’t brought her new wife.

Not that she begrudged Cydney the happiness she’d found on Mercury. As a high-powered executive in the tourism industry, Cydney had consolidated her celebrity status by marrying into the famous Wright family. But it
was
kind of intimidating to have a supermodel doing your make-up.

Holding her face as still as she could, staring past Miss Mercury into the three-way mirror, Elfrida despaired of her appearance. In vain she reminded herself that John didn’t care what she looked like. You only got married once. And
everyone
was here.

Here: on Mars.

Elfrida had recklessly sprayed invitations far and wide across the solar system. To her dismay, nearly everyone had RSVP’d. She assumed they would balk at travelling to
Mars,
of all places—had anticipated a wedding party that consisted of her parents, Mendoza’s cousins, and a few of the gang from Pallas. But as it turned out, all their friends and acquaintances had jumped at the chance to visit Mars. Her wedding was a secondary attraction, Elfrida suspected.

How quickly fear faded, and curiosity took its place!

Six months after the final destruction of the PLAN, Mars was still off-limits to civilians. The CEF enforced the quarantine by summarily slagging intruders—no warnings, no second chances. Unlike the former Star Force and CTDF, the Combined Earth Forces did not screw around. But actually, all the top people in the CEF were Star Force / CTDF officers who’d served in the field, and Elfrida knew some of them from her spell on Eureka Station. Her visa application had been personally approved by Admiral Jeremy McLean.

Of course, it wasn’t McLean who’d made it possible for her to get married on Mars in the first place …

Eyes closed so Miss Mercury could do her eyelids, wondering if she dared scratch her nose, Elfrida heard a voice in her ears.

“Can you get away for a few minutes?”

Elfrida jumped. Miss Mercury sighed in exasperation. Elfrida was still not used to her new phone—a nearly-invisible pair of wireless earbuds, the latest thing. Everyone was using external comms tech now. BCIs had gone right out of fashion. Funny, that.

~I’m kind of stuck here,
she subvocalized. Her phone picked it up via the induction mic stuck on her throat, which looked like a pearl pendant.

“This is urgent,” Jun Yonezawa said.

If
he
said it was urgent, it was. Jun was pretty much the most important person on Mars. Not the most powerful. That was a crucial distinction, she’d been made to understand. A monk couldn’t wield any power. But everyone in the CEF listened to Jun, having learned the hard way that taking his advice was usually a good idea.

Elfrida was
Jun’s
guest here on Mars. So she was going to listen to him, too. Screw her dress and make-up.

~OK,
she subvocalized.
~We’ve still got an hour before the ceremony, anyway.

“Great. Just tell them you need to sort out some paperwork.”

~Where do you need me to go?

“I’ll show you the way.”

A blue U-turn arrow appeared on her contacts, directing her to turn away from the mirror.

Elfrida steeled herself, “Mom, Cyds, Isabel? Apparently there’s a problem with our paperwork …”

“Oh, Ellie!” her mother cried. “I haven’t finished your hem!”

“I’ll take it off and you can work on it while I do this,” Elfrida said, trying to reach the zip of her dress. Then she realized she had nothing else to put on. They’d already taken her jeans and sweatshirt away to be recycled, and she was supposed to change into another dress after the ceremony, which wasn’t ready yet.

“Hurry up,” Jun said, with a tinge of urgency in his voice.

Elfrida moaned, picked up her skirts and extricated herself from the room, while Cydney screamed at her not to mess up her hair, and her mother superstitiously begged her not to let John see her.

Jun’s blue arrows pointed her down the hall of the visitors’ hostel. It was a former PLAN building, constructed from reddish Martian regocrete, the ceilings too high and the halls too narrow. She nearly collided with one of the Dougs from Mercury—she still couldn’t tell them apart—balancing four crates of champagne on top of each other, a superhuman feat that Mars’s low gravity made possible. “Where’s John?” she gasped, forgetting to subvocalize.

“Dunno,” said the Doug. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready?”

“Don’t worry,” said a new voice in her ears—Kiyoshi. “I’m keeping him busy.”

“Don’t you dare get him drunk.”

“Plenty of time for that later,” Kiyoshi said.

She followed the arrows across the reception area downstairs. Everyone stared at her. This was awful. She burst out into the open air.

Of course it was not really the open air.

But it felt like it, with the dome overhead so high that you couldn’t see the triple roof of transparent aluminum and impact-resistant plastic, only the pale brown Martian sky.

Almost a year to the day after the Big Breakup, the CEF had taken Olympus Mons, the PLAN’s last stronghold. The PLAN had died hard. After its artillery was destroyed, it had thrown million-strong waves of Martians at the human invaders. The resulting bloodbath would have made previous genocides look like pub brawls, if not for Jun. The CEF had deployed millions of hastily manufactured flying drones, each of which had a single function: to broadcast his St. Stephen Oratorio—the same cyberweapon that had freed the first Martians—version 2.0. A virus packaged in a three-part oratorio for voice and orchestra, it disabled the PLAN’s command-and-control interface. Singly, by tens, by hundreds, by thousands, Martian soldiers all over Olympus Mons had just stopped fighting. At the same time, human special forces had daringly taken out the PLAN’s underground power plants.

Sad to say, this had involved blowing up a number of fission reactors, which left the elaborate system of caverns under Olympus Mons highly radioactive.

The water had been saved, though. The rivers that the PLAN had fracked out of Olympus Mons’s clayey sediment layers still flowed. Humanity grudgingly admitted that the PLAN had done good there. The CEF now used the water—once it had been thoroughly decontaminated—for its own needs.

Elfrida hurried, holding up the skirt of her wedding dress, through streets of tall, narrow buildings. The streets curved without apparent rhyme or reason. Viewed from the air, they would form one of the PLAN’s weird glyphs. This town had once been populated by Martian servants of the PLAN’s legacy hardware. Now it was a CEF base. Signage splarted above high, narrow doors abounded with military abbreviations. Men and women in uniform stared open-mouthed at the girl in a wedding dress. A few actually pointed and laughed.

“Jun,” she panted, “this is
really
freaking embarrassing.”

“They’ve travelled to Mars, killed enemy soldiers, seen marvels that others can only dream of … but it’s possible, Elfrida, that they’ve never been to a wedding. Think about that.”

“OK, I’ve thought about it, and I really want to go back and make sure all the placecards and flower arrangements are right. As you point out, they don’t have much experience with weddings.”

“I think you can safely leave that to Cydney.”

“How much further is it?”

The blue arrows projected on her contacts led her around another corner, and dead-ended at an airlock.

“I have to go
outside?”

“Yeah.”

A CEF colonel loitered near the airlock. He moved towards Elfrida. “Miss Goto?”

“Elfrida,” Jun said, “this is Colonel Hawker. Hawker, this is Elfrida Goto.”

He spoke to both of them via their comms at the same time.

“Nice to meet you,” Hawker said, staring at her dress.

“I’m supposed to be getting married in forty minutes’ time,” Elfrida said grimly.

“We don’t want to get that crumpled, then, do we? You’d better take it off. It wouldn’t fit under a suit, anyway. Do you, er, need any help with the zips and things?”

“I think I can manage.”

Elfrida used the airlock chamber as a changing room. A CEF spacesuit was waiting for her. As soon as she had it on, curiously, she felt more like herself.

Hawker joined her in the airlock. They checked each other’s seals—a ritual which was doubly important on Mars.

The airlock cycled. Instead of being gradually sucked out of the chamber, the air blew out all at once, in a gale-force blast that would prevent any stray nanites from entering the chamber. Elfrida tumbled out head over heels with it, into the electrostatic scrubbing corridor. Hawker had held onto the grab handles when the screen said to. He picked her up off the metal-mesh floor. They proceeded to the second airlock—which would function as an air-blast shower when they came back—and went out.

The sky seemed to close on their heads, because the air was dirty all the way down out here. The outer wall of the CEF dome looked silvery, not transparent, on the outside. It rose sheer from the dusty, yellow-brown Martian rock. Ahead, a pile of what appeared to be deflated tents lay on the ground. Elfrida scuffled past and looked over the edge of the precipice beyond.

The CEF base stood at the bottom of one of the summit craters of Olympus Mons, 2km down from the massive shield volcano’s peak. She was gazing down into the deepest crater of the caldera complex. The dust hid its floor, another kilometer below. She looked up at the cloudy Martian morning, and shivered. No matter how many times she was told that the pieces of Phobos were done falling out of the sky, the back of her neck still crawled when she thought about the Big Breakup. She’d been thrown off the hull of the
UNSF Thunderjack
with Petruzzelli—leaving her best friend, Jennifer Colden, behind …

“I thought you were in a hurry?” Hawker said.

She turned. He bounced behind her, wearing twenty-meter wings.

“Oh wow!”

The ‘deflated tents’ were hang-gliders.

Of all the things Elfrida might have expected to do on her last morning as a single woman, hang-gliding in the caldera of Olympus Mons was not among them. It turned out to be splendidly fun. She and Hawker leapt off the precipice and swooped across the crater, around and down. Jun had to take control of Elfrida’s glider only once, to prevent her from stalling out—Mars’s thin atmosphere provided only a hundredth as much lift as Earth’s, which was why their gliders’ wings had to be so long.

They landed at a bouncing run on the lower crater’s floor, near the bottom of the cliff they’d launched from.

“Oh, I have to come back and do this with John!” Elfrida exclaimed.

“Now’s your chance,” Hawker said, helping her out of her harness. “It’s going to cost six figures a pop when they start letting the punters in.”

“Olympus Mons, the hottest new tourist destination in the solar system,” Elfrida sighed. “Yeah, a friend was telling me it’s going to be huge.” That, she felt pretty sure, was why Cydney had really come to Mars—to network with the new owners of Olympus Mons ahead of the lifting of travel restrictions.

“You know what they’re planning, though,” Hawker said, as they walked towards the foot of the cliff.

“No, what?”

“Ter-ra-form-ing,” Hawker singsonged. “The old NASA proposals are being dusted off.”

“Really? That’s great!”

Jun said, speaking into their helmets, “That would depend on your point of view.”

“Yup,” Hawker said. “But we’ll let those with the most to lose tell it.”

A pipeline climbed the cliff to the CEF base far overhead. That was the base’s water supply. The pipe came out of an arch in the cliff ahead. All this was old PLAN infrastructure. Martians clambered up and down the steep grade beside the pipeline, shirtsleeved (and some of them were barefoot) in the -80° weather. The ones going up carried stacks of collection plates for the base’s electrostatic scrubbers. They washed the dust and particulate matter out down here, as a service to the CEF, although the nanites still had to be electrically scrubbed inside the airlocks. The ones coming down carried food and other aid donated by well-wishers on Earth.

Elfrida followed Hawker into the pipeline tunnel. She tried not to shy away from the Martians passing around them. Inside her suit, she was safe from the nanites that infested their bodies and brains.

She also tried not to look at the time.

Wisps of water sublimed from a leak in the pipe. The quakes that shook Mars during the Phobos impacts had damaged most everything. A work crew of Martians were patching the leak. Their stepladder and welding equipment blocked the tunnel.

Three Martians squeezed around the blockage and came up to Elfrida.

She thought they were Martians, because they weren’t wearing EVA suits. They wore CEF handout shirts, pants, and hiking boots.

But one of them was taller than any Martian, with fair hair.

Another was shorter than Elfrida, and although her skin had the alien pebbly texture of the Martians, it was a rich ebony hue. Blue beads clinked on the ends of her dusty braids.

Hawker offered the woman a gloved fist-bump. “How’s it going, Colden?”

★

In the sacristy of the newly consecrated Roman Catholic church in the CEF base, John Mendoza paced up and down. His stiff, freshly printed gray tuxedo hid his prosthetic leg. He still limped, but it was not very noticeable. “She’s not coming,” he moaned for the tenth time. “She’s run away.”

“She has not run away,” Kiyoshi said shortly. He was getting bored of Mendoza’s anxiety.