Red Planet Run (15 page)

Then the letters registered. Without volition one hand came up and touched the neat block figures, and I forgot to breathe.

The bow of the
Tallship.

For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead…

 

—Bhagavad Gita

 

I BROKE THE MARTIAN LAND SPEED RECORD
getting back to the
Kayak
, and made enough noise coming up the hatch that both twins were standing next to it with inquiring expressions when I slammed in. I popped my helmet and shouldered between them, making straight for the arms locker, and their eyes widened.

The sonic rifles I left racked, reaching instead for the laser pistols, cursing when I had to pause to loosen my gauntlets to pick them up. The chargepaks read full and gave a satisfying smack as I loaded them into the butts of the pistols. Just in case, I checked the paks on the sonic rifles, too. Over my shoulder I said, “Suit up. Sean, are the shovels still in the Number Two exterior hatch?”

“Yes, why?”

Paddy’s hands came up to catch the holster before it hit her in the chest. “What’s wrong, Mom?”

I told her the truth. I think I wanted to frighten her, to frighten both of them. “I found a wrecked camp a couple of klicks north of the ramp. It used to be a spaceship called the
Tallship
.” I paused and fixed them both with a look they flinched from. “Suits. Now.”

They began pulling them on. “Is the crew—”

“The crew is dead.” I corrected myself. “The crew has been murdered. Whoever did it opened up the ship like a tin can and then took potshots during the explosive decompression.” Paddy was fumbling with the catch on her holster, and with impatient hands I brushed her fingers aside. The tongue ran easily through the buckle and clicked down solidly. I tugged on it to make sure it was seated securely around her waist. “Remember the drill?”

Paddy nodded, reaching to pull her helmet forward, her voice muffled. “No pulling a weapon unless I mean to use it, no aiming unless I mean to fire, no firing unless I’m aiming to kill.”

“Good girl.” They both seemed to have grown a foot since touchdown on Mars, not enough, not ever enough to grow into the slender, wicked-looking weapons now strapped to their sides. But there was simply nothing else to be done. I’d trained them myself, and they were their father’s children. I jammed that thought ruthlessly to the back of my mind. There was no time to think of Caleb now.

“Wait a minute,” Sean said slowly, one hand pausing at the fastening at his throat. “Wasn’t the
Tallship
the sister ship of the
Conestoga
?"

Paddy’s head snapped around inside her helmet, and she said sharply over her headset, “You mean Lavoliere’s second ship? The guy who killed Dad?”

“Get your helmet on, Sean!” I barked. “Now!”

I led the way up the slope and back to the wreckage at a trot. More secure with a weapon strapped to my side and my children within arm’s reach, I inspected the scene with an eye less clouded by panic.

The Tallshippers had picked a good place for their settlement, a long, level shelf on a south-facing slope. There was a circular blast mark a few meters off the stern; they’d set the ship down on her tail like the textbook said and then let her down easy on her side, probably with lines and pulleys. I looked and found holes drilled where they’d fixed eyebolts for the guys. There was dirt piled high, wide and handsome over the bulkhead facing north. Not that they’d had much work to do there, as they’d set her down to within ten centimeters of the slope. Reluctantly I admitted that their engineers had done more than play with chromosomes. That much luck doesn’t just happen, it’s planned.

Burying the north side let them open up the south side to the sun, as witness the series of square holes cut into the fuselage. All that was left of the windows were shards of a grainy kind of glass, in which, when I held it to the light, I could see bubbles. It had a pinkish tint, but that might have been the ambient light. I investigated further and found wreckage that might have been a smelter and a kiln. A hole in the ground was all that remained of what I presumed had once been a permafrost well. If there had been a thermal unit plugged in at the wellhead, it was gone now.

The inside of the ship had been stripped of anything useful. What had been too big or too awkward to extract had been destroyed where it sat. I found no trace of weapons, no ammunition, not so much as a rifle bracket. I remembered that day on the
Conestoga,
and the antique with which Lavoliere had killed Caleb. No, the geneticists on Lavoliere’s ships had not been what one could call well-armed.

If any of them had known how to use a weapon, Caleb might still be alive.

In a voice louder and harsher than I’d meant it to be I said, “Paddy, Sean, neither of you go out alone or unarmed again, you got that? You’re either together or with me, and you are always, I say again,
always
armed.” I added, “We’re starting target practice again, too, first thing tomorrow.”

“Is it true, Mom?” Paddy said, her voice uncertain. “Was the
Tallship
the sister-ship of the
Conestoga
? Are these the people that killed Dad?”

“Dig,” I told her.

“But Mom—”

“Dig!”

We dug, a wide communal grave. I gave up trying to match the body parts after the first three; it took too long and I felt enough in the cross hairs as it was. It wasn’t until we were filling in the mass grave that I caught a sound over my headset. Half-gasp, half-sob, and I looked up to see where it came from.

Sean was digging next to me. Our helmets were very close, and through his visor I saw a tear spill from one blue eye and leave a wet, shining track down one dark cheek.

I looked across the open grave at Paddy. She was crying, too.

They were sixteen years old, and during the last three hours I’d had them witnessing the results of a massacre, collecting and burying body parts, and arming for all-out war. They’d had the temerity to inquire about their father’s death, and in reward had had their heads bitten off.

“Sean,” I said.

Another tear slid down his cheek, and his glove smacked into his visor when he tried to wipe it away. He straightened up and squared his shoulders and looked as if he were trying to suck the tears back up beneath his lids, as if he didn’t dare display such appalling weakness before his commanding officer. That hurt worse than all the rest.

I tried to speak gently. “Sean, Paddy, that’s enough. Go stand watch on the edge of the shelf. Sing out if you see anything move. Shoo. Take your shovels with you.”

“But—”

“I’ll finish up here. Go on now.”

But when the last shovelful of sand covered the last obscenity, Sean was once again at my elbow. “I want to say something. Give a blessing.”

I stifled a sigh. “If you must.” I leaned on my shovel and prepared to be patient.

The shovel was jerked out of my hands. “What the—” I lost my balance, staggered a step, and regained it in time to see the blade of the shovel coming up from the ground in a silent, deadly arc. “Sean!” I ducked out of the way just in time.

Sean had my shovel and he swung it with silent, single-minded ferocity. “Sean, what are you doing? Put that down! I said put that down, dammit!” The blade came up again. I danced out of the way, not fast enough, and the blunt side connected with my elbow. The resulting harmonic tremors shivered all the way up my humerus and down my spine. “Shit! Ouch! Sean, cut it out! Paddy! Help!”

Paddy waded in from Sean’s blind side and made a grab for the shovel handle. Sean jerked it free; the handle thumped into Paddy’s diaphragm and she slipped and fell and used her fanny to bounce off the Martian surface and back to her feet.

“We can bury the bodies, is that it?” my son screamed at me. “But we don’t have to do anything for their souls? Damn you, Mom! Damn you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” The last words were sobbed out, accompanied by jabs with the business end of the shovel that decreased in force and mercifully failed to connect with anything else. When Paddy tried the second time to disarm him, Sean yielded the shovel without resistance. He bent over, uncaring now that tears were fogging up the inside of his visor.

I stood there, breathing heavily, feeling the sweat trickle down my spine, listening to my son sob over the headset on our goonsuit helmets. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, Sean.”

“You sure are,” Paddy said, a tremor in her voice. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Sean, squared off against the world in general and me in particular.

“Shut up, Paddy,” I snapped.

“Shut up yourself,” she snapped back.

“Shut up, both of you!” Sean yelled.

He was sobbing again and I couldn’t bear it. “Sean, please, baby, don’t cry.”

“I’m not a baby and I’ll cry if I want to,” he said, his voice breaking. He caught himself in mid-gulp, it sounded to me as if by main force of will stifling his tears and getting his breathing under control. He marched forward to plant himself smack in front of me. I looked down at the determined, tear-streaked face glaring up at me through a graphplex bubble that was altogether too clear. “You had us bury the bodies, Mom. Why do you have to make fun when I want to say something that maybe might make their souls rest a little easier?”

“I—I—” I flopped around like a landed halibut. “I don’t know, Sean.”

“You don’t think we have souls, do you?” he accused.

A theological discussion in the middle of a newly dug and already entirely too well-populated graveyard was not my idea of fun, but my son’s distress held me rooted to the ground. “Truth, Sean? I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about souls. I’ve always been more concerned with the life I was living, to waste—to spend a lot of time worrying over the one to come.”

He pounced. “Then where’s Dad?”

“What?”

The voice, thin, wavering, and oh so very young, demanded, “Where’s Dad? If he’s not with God, then where is he?”

“And why won’t you ever talk about him?”

It wasn’t a comment, it was an accusation. Even through her helmet I could see Paddy’s chin stuck out. “What?” I said.

“You never talk about Dad, Mom.”

I looked at her with real disbelief and perhaps even anger. “What do you mean? I talk about him, I talk about him all the time.”

“No.” Paddy was positive. “You don’t.”

Next to her Sean nodded confirmation. “You think about him all the time, maybe. But you never talk about him.”

“He’s not just dead, Mom,” Paddy said, and the desolation in her voice chilled me to the bone. “It’s like he never existed.”

· · ·

It was a long, quiet, thoughtful walk home. By the time we reached the
Kayak,
I knew what I had to do.

The morning of our departure from Outpost Mother had drawn me to one side and held out a small, slender package. “Here, take this with you, dear.”

The unmistakable weight of old ivory filled my palms. “What? But, Mother—”

“You may find occasion to use it, dear.” She had hugged me and kissed me. “Safe journey, my very dear. Come home to us soon.”

There had been no time before transfer to the
Kayak
for me to ask why she had given it to me.

How could she have known how much I would need it?

The rich weight of the storyknife rode now at the small of my back; I put it on every morning beneath my jumpsuit. Truth to tell, I was frightened of the responsibility of caring for it. It was a 300-year-old family heirloom, and I needed the security of knowing it was by me at all times.

How could Mother have known?

I boosted the twins up the hatch. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

I rummaged through the exterior lockers until I found a small, collapsible bucket. There was a patch of blood-red sand fifty meters south of the ship; I filled the bucket and brought it on board.

After dinner I closed the door to my stateroom and busied myself with some thin, flat sheets of graphplex, a ripsaw, and a thermal soldering iron. In half an hour I had knocked together a square, shallow pan. I shook sand out of the bucket into the pan and smoothed it over. It had to be ground down before it would soak up enough water to hold a cut with the storyknife. Before I went to bed I set the meat vat for turkey.

Sunday evening I cooked elaborately, or as elaborately as I was able: bioturkey, dressing out of a prepak, potatoes out of a window box, and rehydrated pumpkin pie. The whipped cream out of the synthesizer was a pale imitation of the real thing, and I could see both twins drawing mental comparisons between my cooking and Auntie Charlie’s. I forked the last of the pie into my mouth and said around it, “You two clean up in here. In fifteen minutes I want to see you both in my room.”

Paddy opened her mouth. “But I was—”

“Fifteen minutes. My room.”

Fifteen minutes to the second later there was a knock on the door so tentative I nearly missed it. “Come in.”

The door slid back and the twins filed in, to come to an abrupt halt immediately inside the doorway.

I was seated on the floor of the room, my back against the edge of the bed, my legs crossed. The tray of Martian sand was directly before me. We didn’t have a candle or anything remotely resembling the ingredients for one, but I’d turned all the lights down and rigged a makeshift wick to float in a tiny cup of Outpost olive oil, a small jug of which Charlie had insisted on including in the galley supplies. The tiny flame cast a flickering glow over their wide-eyed faces.

“Welcome,” I said. “Please. Sit down.”

They exchanged one of those impenetrable glances they specialized in—us in, everybody else out, and don’t let the door hit you in the fanny on your way. “Please,” I said again. “Sit down.”

They hesitated a little longer and then complied, sitting across the tray of sand from me. My palms were open in my lap, and the storyknife lay across them, an ancient gem carved from a walrus tooth, gleaming from the grasp of six generations. They saw it, and their eyes widened.