If the transients who passed through the hive had little to entertain them besides the canned viddies on their ’plates, the locals had a hangout they didn’t talk about much with strangers. Yevgeny had told Blake where to find it. Trudging through the drifted sand between the half-buried hangars and warehouses, Blake had been walking head down into a forty-knot breeze, and he almost missed the long narrow shed tacked onto the back of a spaceplane hangar.
A yellow spotlight illuminated a torn-off scrap of titanium aluminide which hung over the pressure-lock door, a chunk of metal only an expert could recognize as part of a rocketplane’s vertical stabilizer, with a name sintered onto the metal in black carbon script: My Pain.
The name of the place was officially the Park-Your-Pain, but Yevgeny said everybody called it Porkypine, or just ’Pine.
Blake pushed through into the lock, waited for the green, and opened the inner doors. He slung his helmet back. The unique atmosphere of the place hit him in the head, a really special stink compounded of rademas, tobacco smoke, perfume, spilled beer, pressure-suit sweat, disinfectant. The noise was at rocket-test-stand level, and this was still early in the week; the synthekord was programmed for a melody like the anguished shriek of a shuttle disintegrating in the upper atmosphere, supported by a complex basso that sought to suggest the sound of the first moments after the Big Bang. No lyrics, though. Pure introspection.
Blue runway lights lit the place, helped out by a dozen surplus videoplates tuned to rolling color bars; it would have been a lot darker if the walls hadn’t been sheathed in stainless steel and slagglass. The burntout steel casings of penetrator rockets and spent RATO bottles hung from the ceiling.
Getting from the door to the bar was fun too, sort of the way rugby is fun. Blake wished he were invisible, but every eye in the house was staring at him. He moved as cautiously as he could, inching toward the bar. He didn’t want to bump anybody’s beer bottle too hard, and he didn’t want to brush against any of the local women at the wrong angle–even when they looked at him the way they did. One set of problems at a time.
He made it to sanctuary. “Let me have a Pilsner,” he said to the barman, whose bald scarred head had suffered at least as much damage as the torn rocketplane fin outside–in the same wreck, maybe? Well if the wreckage had anything to do with the name of the place and the fact that the owner was supposed to be a retired pilot, this guy behind the bar was so crazy-mad-looking Blake was not about to ask.
Yevgeny was supposed to meet him, having promised to do a bit of job scouting for him. Blake wasn’t really all that eager to get a job, but he’d just recognized three faces, the two men and the woman from Nevski Place who’d jumped him, and he wished Yevgeny would hurry. He didn’t want to have to repeat his flimsy story again. He’d dribbled out bits of the plumber business here and there, although he’d been forced to improvise, shifting the background of his employment from Mars Station to Port Hesperus.
“What good does that do ’em?” “When we get hungry they invite the STW in. We have to sign or starve.” The speaker’s creased and sun-blackened face seemed to belong on a much bigger man, but this was a long-time resident of Mars, with the light build of an old-timer.
The beery debaters confirmed what Blake had already picked up in a couple of hours of scrounging around the shuttleport. The local Pipeline Workers Guild was under siege; the huge Space Transportation Workers union, one of the first workers’ consortiums to extend its influence beyond Earth, was trying to swallow it up. According to some barstool analysts, the entrepreneurs who ran the private businesses on Mars wouldn’t mind seeing the PWG, tinged as it was by old-style syndicalism, broken once and for all, even if that meant cutting a deal with the corrupt STW. Others claimed that the real aim of laissez-faire capitalists like Noble was to undermine the Mars Terraforming Project–of which Noble himself was a board member.
“That kind of development is
too
real. The MTP measures development in centuries–and meanwhile don’t disturb the fossils, all that crap. Look, friend, they say capital accumulates in the long term. Maybe, but where it comes from in the first place is short-term scams. What Noble and the rest of the honkers are looking for is a land rush. . . .”
“Mike! Mike Mycroft!
Tovarishch!
” Yevgeny’s baritone cut through the shouting and the whistle and mud of the snythekord music, and for an instant Blake saw every eye in the house flicking his way again.
He grinned as Yevgeny plowed toward him. He hadn’t figured out exactly what Yevgeny did for the union, but it was something important: a path was opening before him through the packed bodies. The big man had his right arm around a slender woman’s shoulders and was crushing her affectionately against his ribs. “Look who I brought to see you,” Yevgeny roared, with a wink that would have done credit to Long John Silver. “Lydia, here is my good friend I have been telling you about so much. . . .”
Big brown eyes, bold eyebrows, high cheekbones and a generous mouth, long blond hair tied in a practical knot at the nape of her neck–what was that name again?
“Mike, here is Lydia Zeromski, whose praises you have been hearing from me. We are lucky to have her with us. She is to leave tomorrow, but had delay. She will be gone soon, though.”
From Ellen’s files, Blake knew that the man Lydia had supposedly been in love with was one of the victims who had been murdered two weeks earlier. It was a bit early to expect her to have recovered her cheerful disposition–even if she’d killed him herself.
“Mike, very best of news,” Yevgeny said, turning back from the bar with two sweating beer bottles in his wide hands. He handed one to Lydia. “Mm,” he said to Blake, meaning wait, and poured half of the other down his throat. “Ahh . . . news! You have job, my friend!”
“Personnel carrier,” said Yevgeny. “Ten of you in back. Will be four days on road. Food is standard spacepak–well, almost. Don’t worry,
tovarishch!
Is job, eh? And good job! You save much money–no place to spend it!” Yevgeny’s laughter was a bark. “Have one more beer from me.” Blake looked at Lydia, who seemed to be profoundly absorbed by one of the bright senseless videoplates on the stainless steel wall. “How long does it take you, the run to the pipeline head?” he asked.
He seemed to relax a little. “My point is, maybe some of your famous luck will rub off.” He shoved the desktop flatscreen toward her. “While you’ve been en route we’ve conducted a couple of hundred interviews, anyone who could have been in the neighborhood at the time of the robbery and murders. We even managed to account for most of the tourists.” He and his people had done their work by the book, and he wanted her to know it. “The three locals we named earlier are still on the list. They had opportunity, anyway. Motive . . .”
Lieutenant Polanyi nodded. He liked things by the book; what he didn’t realize was that Sparta knew the motive behind the motive and had no intention of sharing her knowledge with Space Board functionaries like him.
“Black market, that takes up a lot of our time. Drug smuggling is a problem. Occasionally we see contraband items of artistic, historical, or cultural value. Also there are labor questions–this so-called socialist government seems to have had difficulty adjusting to the notion of unions–but short of sabotage or financial finagling, we let the patrollers handle the brawls between the workers and the state. Or the corporations. Whichever.” The state and the corporation were evidently equivalent concepts to Lieutenant Polanyi; in that, he was a typical Euro-American, a typical good soldier of the Space Board, willing to do what he was told wherever he was posted.
Sparta glanced at the graphic display on the flatscreen and slid quickly through a few screensful of data. She pushed it back to him and said, “I’ll study this later.” When she got some privacy she could tap the system memory and absorb what she needed in a few seconds, rather than slog through hundreds of pages of police prose. “Right now I’m still vague on the geography.”