Hide and seek (7 page)

That one was down, writhing in pained surprise on the ground, but the other man was a little quicker, a little warier. Blake easily parried a couple of his vigorous light-handed blows, but–feeling an awkward wrench in his shoulder from his slip on the ladder–fumbled the counterattack. Still Blake managed to roll out of the clench. He dashed for the corner of the hotel, hoping to reach the crowded plaza beyond.

From above, two booted feet slammed into his wounded shoulder–the woman, the third member of the trio, had climbed up the fire escape ladder but had turned around when she realized he’d gotten past her, getting back down in time to jump him as he ran under her–and he went sprawling under her weight. Blake’s bad landing slowed him, and he was on his knees when the woman kicked him again, her boot connecting with his ribs beneath his upraised left arm. She was
strong
for a skinny gal! He caught the shadow of the two men out of the corner of his eye and tried to hurl himself away, but he was too late; he was hit from behind by something blunt and heavy.
For a second–or maybe a minute, or maybe more–everything was black with whirling purple splotches. When Blake opened his eyes, the woman was walking away, looking back at him with undisguised venom, her pale complexion flushed and her brown hair streaked with sweat, but showing no apparent inclination to continue the fight. Behind her stumbled the two men, equally angry but oddly subdued. The one Blake had kicked was trying to disguise his limp; he spat on the ground in front of Blake as he passed, but said nothing.

“You are all right?” The man helping him sit up had a huge square face, chiseled in flat strokes as if it were a sculptor’s rough wooden model, deeply lined around his mouth and nose. He was wearing loose blue coveralls that like Blake’s might have been washed once within the past year or so.

“What . . . oww!” A searing pain shot through Blake’s side as he turned to look at the sullen trio, now arguing loudly among themselves as they disappeared into the crowd.

 

“You are sure you are not hurt?”

“Not really, just bruised,” said Blake, gingerly feeling his ribs. The bruises were psychological, too. After his bravado performance in the gym against Ellen, he’d flunked his first real test and had needed rescue by a stranger. “Thanks for helping.” He lifted himself slowly to his feet.

“Yevgeny Rostov,” said the man, thrusting out a callused and grease-blackened hand. “I convince them they make big mistake.”

“Mike . . . Mycroft,” Blake said, holding out his own right hand, suddenly conscious of how badly it matched his cover. Not that it was a soft hand–Blake exercised himself by climbing rocks, among other pursuits–but neither was it a plumber’s hand. Blake’s ordinary work, which he had not paid much attention to of late, was with rare books and manuscripts. Dusty work, not greasy work. “Who did they think I was? Who are
they?
”

“They are from Mars, like me. They think you are man living in that hotel room last week, but I stay in that hotel and I tell them
nyet
, that room is empty two days now, you are not him.”

 

“I wonder what he did to get them upset?”

 

“Something bad, who knows?” Yevgeny shrugged expressively. “You come with me, Mike. You don’t need clinic, maybe, but you need to restore your strength.”

A few minutes later Blake and his savior were seated under a gnarled Russian olive at one of the Nevski Garden’s outdoor tables, anticipating the arrival of a platter of the sausage of the day. The waiter slid a couple of foaming mugs of black beer onto the zinc tabletop and Yevgeny nodded at him, which was apparently good enough to settle the bill.

“Thanks. Next round’s on me,” said Blake.

 

Yevgeny raised his mug.
“Tovarishch,”
he growled.

 

“Comrade.” Blake raised his own. He sipped tentatively at the opaque brew and found its flavor strong but not unpleasant.

In the busy plaza nearby, most people were hurrying home for the night. A few poor souls, possibly including a grade six plumber or two, were trudging to their night jobs. The inhabitants of Mars Station were less flamboyant than the hothouse crowd on Venus’s Port Hesperus, their clothes and hairstyles tending toward the sensibly dull–more overalls than shorts and miniskirts–but the racial and social mix was what Blake was beginning to think of as typical of space, mostly Euro-Americans, Japanese, and Chinese, with some Arabs. Most people were young to middle-aged; there were only a few children and first-generation oldsters in evidence. But Blake knew he shouldn’t generalize from his brief experience. Besides Port Hesperus, he had visited only Farside Base on the moon, and that briefly, and there were many other colonies in space, farther from the sun, where the odor of vegetable curry was more prominent than the odor of grilled meat.

“You are new to Mars Station,” Yevgeny said.

 

“Passing through. Going to Lab City on tomorrow’s shuttle,” said Blake, thinking that perhaps he should have taken Inspector Sharansky’s advice and gone to the shuttle dock right away.

 

“Thought I might take a hotel room for the night, but they ask a lot here. For what you get, I mean.”

 

Yevgeny’s thick brows lifted above his deep-set black eyes. “Not tourist, I think.”

 

“No, looking for work.”

 

“What kind of work?”

 

“What kind you got?” Blake said with a shrug. He didn’t want to be too mysterious, but he hoped he could curb Yevgeny’s bold curiosity.

The waiter arrived with their dinners. Blake sliced into a crisp brown sausage with enthusiasm as Yevgeny stabbed his and raised it whole toward his mouth. After a few minutes of relative silence Yevgeny emitted a satisfied belch. Blake said, “Good food.”

“Pig that went into it raised here on Mars Station. Pigs are efficient. Garbage in, protein out.” “As efficient as the engineered food molds?”

 

Yevgeny shrugged. “You don’t look like vegetarian to me.”

 

Mike grinned and wiped the last drop of fat from his chin, reflecting that maybe a plumber’s life on Mars Station wasn’t all that bad. Already his stressed muscles were beginning to relax.

A woman came out of the restaurant and sat at a table in the shadows beneath the wide eaves: Ellen, looking slim and confident–and, Blake couldn’t help thinking, beautiful–studying a portable flatscreen. She was wearing her blue Space Board uniform. He stared at her a second longer than he should have, but she betrayed nothing.

Yevgeny was watching him. By now the fractured sun had disappeared from the glass sky, and the big man’s swarthy features were illuminated only by the colorful glow from the strings of decorative bulbs. “Personal history not important, only social history,” said Yevgeny with heavy affability, his eyes flickering toward Sparta, the cop in the shadows.

“Her? I’m not running from the cops, if that’s what you mean.”

 

“There is great socialist work to be done on Mars.”

 

“The terraforming?”

 

“
Da
. Two centuries, maybe sooner, people will walk outside without pressure suits, breathe good air. Then water will flow on surface. Beside canals will be green fields, like in fantasies of 20th century.”

 

“Big job,” said Blake.

 

“Plenty to do. You find work without trouble, Mike.”

 

“You said you live there?”

“But do liaison work here, for Pipeline Workers Guild. Guild workers employed by capitalist corporation, Noble Water Works Inc., employed by socialist government of Mars, prime agent of consortium of North Continental Treaty Alliance and Azure Dragon Mutual Prosperity Endeavor under charter from Council of Worlds.” Yevgeny grunted. “In spare time am student of history. Is necessary.”

“You’ll be up here a while, I guess,” Blake said hopefully.

“Going back tomorrow on
Mars Cricket
, same shuttle as you.” Yevgeny lifted his mug and downed the bottom half of its contents with a series of muscular swallows. When he slammed the mug down on the tabletop again he said, “You stay by me, I introduce you around Lab City. Make sure you find work without trouble.”

“That’s great,” said Blake, cursing himself. Blake, not much of a drinker, took a sip from his mug and tried to look enthusiastic. He knew now that he should have taken Sharansky’s advice and kept out of sight. Unless he could find a graceful way of detaching himself from this insistently friendly character, he would arrive on Mars with his cover blown in advance.

“You know any women here,
tovarishch
?” Yevgeny asked. One woolly eyebrow arched lasciviously as he slowly swiveled his great head to watch the women passing in the plaza. He returned his gaze to Blake, and his expression sagged. “Is foolish question. I introduce you around Mars Station. Maybe you meet somebody you like, don’t need hotel tonight. Now drink your beer, is good for you, plenty proteins.” Yevgeny belched heartily. “Must keep in condition. Easy to go soft, on Mars.”

* * *

Among the craft clustered at the station’s planetside docking hub was a sleek executive spaceplane, the
Kestrel
, flagship of Noble Water Works Inc. In the little head just forward of the tiny four-couch cabin, the
Kestrel
’s pilot was peering intently at his reflection in the mirror, using small tweezers to pluck at the fine hairs of his pale eyebrows. He was a pleasant-looking fellow whose round face was covered with confetti-sized freckles; his bright orange hair nestled in tight curls against his skull.

A warning bell sounded. The pilot reinserted the tweezers into a slot in the handle of his penknife, straightened the knot of his orange wool tie, and turned away from the mirror.

 

He pulled himself effortlessly through the cabin to the airlock aft and checked its panel lights. “Pressure’s fine, Mr. Noble. I’m opening up.”

 

“About time,” came the answering voice on the comm speaker. “I catch you in the head again?”

“Things to do forward, sir.” The pilot spun the wheel and pulled the hatch open. He floated back toward the nose of the plane as Noble emerged from the airlock. Noble sealed the airlock and followed the pilot toward the flight deck.

Noble slipped off the jacket of his dark pin-striped suit and secured it in the locker opposite the head. As the pilot strapped himself into the left seat, Noble climbed into the right. Noble was a square-built man with a sandy crewcut, his handsome face made rugged by wrinkles he’d acquired in two decades of drilling and construction on Mars.

“Did the meeting go well, sir?” The pilot, without prompting, was already running the prelaunch check. “Yes, the laser drills and the truck parts will be offloaded today and come down to us on tomorrow’s freight shuttle. The textiles and organics will have to go bonded through customs. Should be three days or so.”

“That’s not crowding the launch window?”

 

“No, it’s not. It’s precision timing. Rupert assures me
Doradus
will be loaded and cleared for launch on schedule.”

 

“Well, sir, no problem then.”

 

“No problem.” Noble rearranged his silk tie under the harness. “By the way, the Space Board investigator is here. Quick trip.”

 

“I saw the cutter starside as we came in.”

 

“Aren’t you curious?”

 

“Should I be?”

“She’s famous. Getting to be their star. Let’s see”–he ticked off the examples on his fingers–“solved the
Star Queen
case. Got Forster and Merck off Venus. Saved Farside Base.” Noble raised an eyebrow. “Maybe the Martian plaque will be next.”

The look on the pilot’s face was curiously mixed: part pleasure, part something else. “Ellen Troy?”

 

“Right first time.”

 

The pilot nodded and resumed his flight check. “If you’re all set for launch, sir, I’ll notify traffic control.”
IV

The gossamer Martian atmosphere extends much farther into space than does the air near gravid Earth; the wind began to whistle over the wings of the
Mars Cricket
soon after the shuttle left Mars Station, falling planetward. It would not stop even when the shuttle rolled to a halt on the ground, for on Mars the wind is eternal.

After what seemed a too-short trip the shuttle’s tires walloped fused sand and the craft slid unimpeded across the desert floor. Sparta bent her head to peer out the tiny oval window for a first closeup peek at the landscape of Mars.

Nearby, it was an astonishing blur.

Spaceplanes and shuttles land hot on Mars. Supersonic aircraft must be wedge shaped, and even with swing-wings forward they stall easily in the thin atmosphere, despite the low gravity. So runways are narrow lines across the red sands, thirty kilometers long and aligned with the prevailing winds, with ranks of barrier nets across their ends.

Farther from the blurred runway Sparta could resolve a plain of shifting dunes stretching to the base of distant bluffs. The banded bluffs were steep and high and everywhere in shadow, except to the east, where only their tops were in sunlight; their line stretched across the horizon, glowing vibrant gold at their ragged crests, deepening to royal purple in the open shadows below. At this longitude evening was approaching, and the twilight sky was a peculiar shade of burnt orange in which pale stars were already twinkling.

Minutes passed, until at last the shuttle perceptibly slowed its headlong rush, finally braking to a smooth stop well before it needed a barrier, letting its pointed snout droop toward the ground. Its wings, carbon black when cool, still glowed orange in the Martian twilight.

A ground tractor fetched the shuttle from the runway and towed it slowly toward a distant cluster of low buildings. The freshening breeze blew wisps of pink sand across the taxiway. Except for blue runway lights and the distant green gleam of the passenger terminal, there was no hint of life in the dusty expanse. Then Sparta caught sight of figures moving across the sand, people wearing brown pressure suits, hunched against the wind. She had no idea what their business was, but in their postures she read the cold, and she shivered.

Inside the terminal the air was warm. She stepped lightly from the docking tube; she weighed no more than forty pounds, and here she was strong enough to lift a desk or jump all the way across the little terminal building, which was no bigger than an ordinary magneplane station on Earth.