In the Hall of the Martian King (6 page)

“You know,” Jak said to the blank space in front of him, “I liked you better when I thought you were a pigheaded old bureaucratic
fossil.”

He realized he didn’t have much time. He needed to grab that lifelog for Hive Intel and simultaneously make it look like he
had tried his heart out to get it for PASC, and he needed to be down on the surface with Dujuv, working the angles, right
away.

There was bound to be a military try, too, to grab that lifelog. Within a few hours every officer in the Spatial would be
told to delay Jak as much as possible. If he was going to commandeer transport to the surface, he should get it commandeered
now and make sure it stayed commandeered.

He lifted his left hand and spoke to his purse. “Identify every officer and techny who has any power to prevent
John Carter
from making a flight down to Red Amber Magenta Green’s landing field. Assuming they have one. Nearest landing field if they
don’t—”

“They have one—all weather, long enough runway. Check for all inspection certificates to make sure they can’t block it with
missing paperwork?”

“Do it.” Jak pushed the reward spot hard, and the cheeble was joyous. “All right, line those heets up by rank, and start blinking
them onto the screen, lowest first. As soon as I’m done talking to one, move me to the next. Try to structure it so that anyone
who calls his boss about it will find his boss is busy talking to me.”

A very junior mechanic’s face appeared on the screen, hand on his chest in the salute position. “Sir!”

“I need immediate confirmation that to the best of your knowledge warshuttle
John Carter
is ready to be commandeered for an emergency mission to the surface.” The
Carter
was the flagship of the Deimos fleet, suitable for calling on a king.

The techny nodded vehemently. “Sir, it is completely ready to go; get your party aboard and you can launch in ten minutes.”

“Thank you, techny. Very unofficially, it’s highly likely you’ll need to make good on that.”

“Thank
you,
sir.”

Jak gave the civilian administrator’s salute, and his purse blinked off the techny and blinked up a junior officer on the
screen. Jak had essentially the same one-minute conversation over and over as he worked his way up the organizational chart
in a blinding fury of bureaucratic ticket-punching.

With his purse helping, Jak commed thirty-one technies and officers in less than twenty-five minutes, all on ultra high priority.
Because the priority was so high, no one hesitated an instant before answering.

Being a true wasp, and thus among the most modest humans in the solar system, Jak was both pleased and appalled by what he
encountered—he thought the first lieutenant who had to step out of her shower was really cute, but it would have been all
right with Jak if the senior techny, a simi covered with full body hair, had waited a moment to get off the toilet.

The only conversation that was different was the last one, when he finally spoke to the base commander.

“Acting Procurator Jinnaka, what can I do for you?”

“I am commandeering warshuttle
John Carter
for a descent to the Red Amber Magenta Green landing field, party of two—myself and an assistant—for arrival at fourteen
hundred ground solar time. Please have it ready for boarding two hours and forty minutes from now.”

“Sir, we can’t guarantee its availability, and I don’t know if we have any other warshuttle—”

“I’ve already verified with all of the involved personnel that it is ready for immediate departure.” Jak spoke to his purse.
“Transmit the relevant records to the base commander’s purse, please.”

The base commander glanced down at his own purse, his lips pressed tight together. “Very well,” he said, “it will be ready.
In the future, you need not disturb so many of our personnel here—we are busy and we do have things to do— you can call me—”

“I am aware that I can,” Jak said, pleasantly, “and also that I can call anyone I like. Or even people I don’t like, if I
may be permitted a small joke. The mission is urgent, sir, and I want to commend all of your personnel for their immediate
willingness to help and for the pride and confidence with which they were able to tell me that what I needed would be available.
Splendidly well done, sir.”

“You are too kind.”

“You may tell the skipper of
John Carter
that my assistant and I may be somewhat early, but I won’t request that his departure time be stepped up. Thank you again,
sir.”

Jak clicked off and let himself smile broadly. He spoke into his purse. “Draft a short favorable memo—

“From: me.

“To: every officer I talked to, and to his CO.

“Subject: commendation for efficiency and cooperation.

“Content: summarize what I just said to the commander.

“Style: formal.”

He airswam toward the door. “Back to regular security level,” he told his purse, and all the windows instantly became transparent
again. The door dilated in front of him, and he airswam to Pikia’s desk.

“Ahem,” Jak said.

All four of the human staff looked up, and at least one camera on each of the dozens of robots swiveled toward him.

“I have an emergency mission to the Martian surface; I may be gone for a period of weeks, and I am leaving immediately. Process
all routine cases, defer anything that requires my approval. If it’s urgent or an emergency, call me on my purse. I’m taking
the only other line officer with me—that’s you, Pikia—so all of you should pretend that you miss us.”

The ragged cheer was slightly disconcerting, but not as much as Pikia’s impulsive hug, which nearly tumbled him backward.
“Get packed,” Jak said, disentangling himself. “Departure in two hours and forty minutes. Make sure you have enough formal
wear, we’re going to have to be polite to diplomats. Cancel all your social calendar for the next two weeks.”

She was still grinning like a moron. “Jak, boss, chief, whatever,” she said, “I didn’t
have
a social calendar until you said we’re leaving. I’ll be back with a bag in ten minutes.”

“That should be Mister Jinnaka or sir—” he said, to her rapidly flipping feet, as she airswam out the door.

A
s Pikia and Jak floated in the cageway, waiting to go aboard
John Carter,
she said, “Can I ask a very immature question?”

“As long as I don’t have to give a toktru mature answer.”

“Where will we be sitting? I like to get a good view of the cameras and viewports.”

Jak glanced sideways at her; he could tell she was excited and trying to hide it. “Don’t worry,” he said, “so do I. We’re
on spare acceleration couches in the cockpit. It’s my first flight down to Mars; I wouldn’t miss being able to see it.”

She smiled and her eyes twinkled. “That’s what I wanted to know.” Then, as if the thought would burst her if she didn’t voice
it, she explained, “I’ve been down and up a hundred times at least, probably more, and I still love it. But so many adults
pull down the shade.”

“Toktru. They don’t do it because they’re adults. They do it because they’re boring. I still love the window, too.”

Well, she might be the boss’s bratty relative, but she had a nice smile. And the job was simple—watch Duj and Teacher Copermisr
talk, say some polite things himself, collect the package, put it on the next warship bound for the Hive.

A crewie came out, gave the Spatial salute, and asked them to follow her inside. They entered through the main doors over
the boarding-side wing, where the beanies would storm out in an opposed landing.

Aside from its war room within the worryball,
John Carter
was exactly like every other warshuttle in the Hive’s fleet at Deimos, purpose-built to land on Mars, with wings designed
to reconfigure to cope with the drastically varying reentry stress profile, the widest range of forces for any world with
an atmosphere. The accidental terraformation of Mars by the Rubahy Bombardment had produced as strange a set of conditions
as could be found anywhere in the solar system: breathable atmosphere farthest up, but lowest pressure at surface; very viscous
low-density air that exerted high shearing but low heat on a reentering spacecraft; a thermosphere with easy aerobraking,
and a troposphere with a steep glide ratio. An orbit-to-ground shuttle for Earth could be fixed geometry (though it would
heat up like a furnace while high and fly like a brick while low), but the Martian atmosphere required continuously varying
the exposed surface. Warshuttles and launches entered shaped like dolphins and landed shaped like condors, morphing constantly.

Inside the boarding airlock,
John Carter
was folded down to almost a bare fuselage, a long ellipsoid with small curved fins on all sides, nose bulbous, tail conical,
resting on the track.

Atmosphere-flight craft always looked wrong to Jak; he had grown up in space. Spaceships should be spheres joined by struts,
with platforms, discs, or squares stuck on at any convenient angle, and the working guts out and visible. Craft made for air
were weirdly seamless, squashed-and-squeezed alien phalloi, with big, awkward-looking wings stuck on like some equally alien
birth-control device.

“Welcome aboard,” Tror Adlongongu, the captain, said, and traded forearm grips with them both. He was short but not small;
his heavily muscled frame suggested many years in garrison without much to do but resistance lifting, and perhaps kobold or
panth genes. He was depilated like all Spatial crewies. His skin was a coppery shade of brown, and the faceplate-shaped patch
of deeper tan around his face indicated frequent EVs. His habit of having a hand on something solid at all times confirmed
him as a long-term crewie. “Well,” he said, “though they told me that what we’re making this flight for is none of my business,
they did confirm that this is important, by telling me that if I messed things up it would be bad for the Hive, the Spatial,
Deimos Base, and me personally—in rising order of badness.”

“They weren’t exaggerating,” Jak said. “They told me much the same thing. Sorry we’re making you land in a backwater.”

“Oh, yeah. At least Red Amber Magenta Green has a landing field,” the captain said. “Some of the Harmless Zone nations would
have had to build one for us first, or we’d have landed on a beach or a lake and brought along a disassembled cradle and some
engineers to be able to fly back up. But Red Amber Magenta Green has a modern all-weather runway to go with their pretensions.
They have a national spaceline, you see—three suborbital transports and an old launch that might date to the Second Empire.
So, not only do they have a good place for us to land, but (more important from my standpoint) they have a cradle to get us
back up. Plus they’re thrilled to have a real warcraft landing there.”

“It’s such a beautiful ship,” Pikia said, lying. “All smooth silvery curves. What does its name mean?”

With chilly correctness, Adlongongu said, “I am happy to have the opportunity to tell you both what is true and what is not.
The ship is actually named after the warrior hero of a Late Medieval English epic set on Mars, which was immensely popular
for about two generations in Old America. But some nitwit of a crewie, knowing only that the ship was named in Late Medieval
English, looked up the parts of the name and concluded that it meant ‘transporter of prostitutes’ customers.’ Despite all
of my efforts to correct this unfounded legend—which I think is prejudicial to good discipline—”

The acceleration bell rang, and everyone airswam to a safety couch. With a subtle push, the linducers activated. The ship
glided along at a meter or two per second. Jak tilted his acceleration couch up for a better view; there was a subtle shimmer
outside the window as air was recovered from the lock, and then the great metal doors in front of them dilated, opening to
a view of the black night of space dotted with bright stars.

Jak didn’t have time to spot any familiar constellation before
John Carter
rotated end for end horizontally, so that now it was moving backward on the linducer track; the nose viewports filled with
the red-blue-green-white whorl of Mars.

Jak’s purse tingled his left hand for a private message. He pressed to acknowledge, then looked down at his palm; letters
scrolled across.

DO YOU SUPPOSE THAT THE COMMON USE FOR SPACE AVAILABLE SLOTS ON THIS WARSHUTTLE HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE PERSISTENCE OF
A CERTAIN LEGEND PREJUDICIAL TO GOOD DISCIPLINE?— PIKIA

Jak rested the fingers of his right hand in his left palm and, double-keying, sent a quick response:

NAUGHTY. SHUT UP BEFORE YOU MAKE ME LAUGH. — JAK

A slight increase in gravity made Jak look to the side; a screen showed the linducer grapple grabbing the Deimos loop. As
the linducer gradually increased the strength of the magnetic field, their coupling to the loop increased, and they accelerated.
For this part of the flight, they would not go above a quarter of a g, and the couches were really needed only as protection
from safety inspectors and insurance agents.

Tourist brochures said modern Deimos looked like a diamond ring. Jak thought it looked more like a hula hoop glued to a smoldering
lump of coal. The main recreational/shopping area was in a roofed-over dome at the West Pole; from space, the many lights
under the dome, and their reflections, littered brightly in the darkness. At the East Pole, the loop was sixty-five kilometers
across, several times the largest dimension of Deimos itself, but barely visible because it was formed by a ribbon of superconductor
five centimeters wide and three millimeters thick.

Deimos orbits Mars at about 1350 m/sec; riding around to the retrograde side of the loop in a very light coupling, they could
have killed their orbital velocity and simply dropped. This would have resulted in their arrival on the surface at a speed
of about five kilometers per second and a temperature of around two thousand kelvins, in an excellent impression of a meteor
impact. (In fact the impression might have been as large as 250 meters in diameter.)