Axis

mean.

Not much grew out here, just the peculiar woody tufts the locals called cactus grass, and even this looked dehydrated to Brians eye. But among the umber patches of cactus grass at his feet he spotted a place where something more colorful had taken root. He crouched to look, for lack of anything better to do. What had caught his attention was a red flower: he was no botanist, but the bloom looked out of place in this barren scrub. He put out his hand and touched it. The plant was cold, fleshy… and it seemed almost to cringe. The stem bent away from him; the flower, if it was a flower, lowered its head.

Was that normal?

He hated this fucking planet, its endless strangeness. It was a nightmare, he thought, masquerading as normalcy.

* * * * *

They came at last to the airfield off the highway, a couple of quonset-hut structures and two paved landing strips at contrary angles to one another, a bank of fuel pumps, a two-story adobe control tower with a radar bubble. Ordinarily the airstrips customers would have been oil company planes ferrying executives to and from the Rub al-Khali. Today there was just one plane visible on the tarmac: Turk Findley's aircraft, a sturdy little blue- and-white Skyrex baking in the sun.

The Genomic Security caravan parked in front of the nearest pavilion. Brian was a little shaky getting out of the car, his fears surfacing again. Fear for Lise, and under that a fear of Lise—of what she might say to him and what she might deduce, correctly or not, about his presence in the company of men such as Sigmund and Weil.

Maybe he could help her. He clung to that thought. She was in trouble, deep and perilous trouble, but she could still keep herself afloat if she said the right things, denied complicity, shifted the blame, and cooperated with the inquiry. If she was willing to do that, Brian might be able to keep her out of prison. She would have to go back home, of course, forget about Equatoria and her little journalistic hobby. Given the events of the last few days, though, she might not be so haughty at the prospect of a trip back to the States. She might even learn to appreciate what he had done, and was willing to do, on her behalf.

He hurried to keep up with Sigmund and Weil, who brushed past a cluster of airstrip employees and hurried down a makeshift corridor to the door of a tiny office guarded by an airport security guy in a dusty blue uniform. 'The suspects are inside?' Sigmund asked.

'All four of 'em.'

'Let's see them.'

The guard opened the door, Sigmund went through first, Weil behind him, Brian in the rear. The two DGS men stopped short and Brian had to crane to see over their shoulders.

'Fuck!' Sigmund said.

Three women and one man sat at a stained conference table in the middle of the room. Each of them had been handcuffed to a chair.

The male was maybe sixty years old, judging by his looks. Probably older, since he was a Fourth. He was white-haired, he was skinny, he was dark-complexioned… what he was not was Turk Findley.

The three women were of similar age. None of them looked like Sulean Moi. And certainly none of them was Lise Adams.

'Decoys,' Weil said, his voice turgid with disgust.

'Find out who they are and what they know,' Sigmund told the armed men waiting in the corridor.

Weil pulled Brian out after him. 'Are you all right?'

'Just… yes,' Brian managed. 'I mean, I'm fine.'

He wasn't fine. He was picturing the four prisoners with bullet-raddled skulls, washed up, perhaps, on some distant beach, or just buried in the desert, bodies shriveled under a layer of grit, paying the butcher's bill for their longevity.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

D'vali drove the car that took them north until nightfall, and in her less distracted moments Lise made a study of him.

He was—above all else—protective of the child, Isaac.

Lise and Turk had been hustled into a big utility vehicle, the kind with sprung-metal wheels that could cope with all kinds of terrain. The car had been built to accommodate six people comfortably but they had squeezed in seven: Lise and Turk, Diane, Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi—and Isaac.

Turk had advocated taking the Skyrex, but Dvali and Mrs. Rebka argued him out of it. An aircraft would be easier to trace and harder to hide than one land vehicle among many. They would use the plane as a diversion, Dr. Dvali said. Four of the compound's eldest Fourths, one of whom was a qualified pilot, volunteered to take it west. Probably they would be captured. But they knew what they were doing, Dr. Dvali had insisted. They weren't afraid to die, if it came to that. One of the ironies of the Martian treatment was that it quelled the fear of death even as it extended life. Turk asked if they had a cure for the fear of insolvency.

So they drove away, and a dozen or so land vehicles left the compound after them, scattering in multiple directions on the available roads or across the raw desert. The compound had been rigged with explosives to keep it from falling into the hands of the authorities and to destroy any evidence that might lead to their eventual capture. Lise and company had been too far down the road to see the actual explosion, but at one point she had spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon. She asked Dr. Dvali whether anyone might have been hurt—if DGS agents had arrived before the timed detonation, wouldn't they have been killed?

'DGS knows what to expect in situations like this. If they found the compound deserted they would have known it was rigged to detonate.'

But if they'd been careless, or the timing had been bad?

Dvali shrugged. 'Nothing is guaranteed in this life.'

'I thought Fourths were supposed to be nonviolent.'

'We're more sensitive than unaltered people to the suffering of others. That makes us vulnerable. It doesn't make us stupid, and it doesn't prevent us from taking risks.'

'Even risks with other people's lives?'

Sulean Moi—who was, according to Diane, a deformed Martian, but who looked to Lise like a skinny Appalachian apple doll—had smiled sardonically at that. 'We aren't saints. That should be obvious by now. We make moral choices. Often the wrong ones.'

* * * * *

Dvali wanted to drive through the night, but Turk convinced him to stop and make camp in a glade of the scrubby finger pines that forested the western slope of the mountainous Equatorian divide. Because of the elevation rain fell fairly regularly here, and there was even a clean-running creek from which they could draw potable water. The water was cold and Lise guessed it came from the glaciers that clung to the valleys of the highest passes. The chill provoked a pleasant memory of the time (she had been ten years old) when her father took her skiing at Gstaadt.

Sunlight on snow, the mechanical groan of the lifts and the sound of laughter cutting the cold air: far away now, worlds and years away.

She helped Turk warm up a canned meat and vegetable stew over a propane stove. He wanted to have dinner ready and the stove cooled off by nightfall in case there were drones overhead looking for their heat signature. Dr. Dvali said he doubted their pursuers would go to such lengths, especially since most such surveillance equipment had been co-opted for use in the crisis in the oilpatch. Turk nodded but said it was better to take a useless precaution than give themselves away.

On the road north along the foothills they had discussed their plans. Turk, at least, had discussed his plans; the Fourths were less forthcoming. Turk and Lise would ride as far north as the town of New Cumberland; from there they would catch a bus over the Pharoah Pass to the coast. The Fourths would continue on to—well, to