“It’s not hard to find him,” Burhawk said. “He’s essentially taken over the entire palace. The Martian Paramount Leader doesn’t even live there anymore. As for defenses, I’ll tell you what I know. But before we do any of this, there’s someone else I want you to meet, first. Someone who might change your mind.”
11
Rhea followed Burhawk and the others through the winding corridors of the secret underground passageway. He paused next to a storeroom containing several black robes. He distributed them to the party.
“Put these on,” he said.
Rhea swapped her existing hooded cloak for the robe, and let the hood hang low over her head. The others likewise donned the fabrics.
“Disable your comm nodes,” he said. “That way there’s no chance of your IDs being scanned. Oh and, wear the hoods of the robes low, like your Warden and myself. After your little scuffle at the terminal, the city’s AI will be watching for your faces.”
“Won’t we stand out, wearing these?” Will asked as he raised his hood. “Unless everyone dresses this way.”
“There’s a growing number of people on Mars who do dress this way, yes,” Burhawk said. “They’re part of a privacy-conscious movement sweeping the planet. The robes are meant as a form of protest and prevent the facial recognition technology from registering and identifying their features. There’s a piece of legislation waiting to pass that will ban such attire, but it’s still legal at the moment. Just as the city can’t force us to connect to their wireless networks to reveal our IDs. As an added bonus, the robes will also conceal your weapons: the fabric is lead-lined. Remote scans won’t penetrate.”
When they were all dressed, Burhawk continued to lead the way through the corridors.
Rhea was close to the center of the group, following behind Miles. Will was just behind her.
“Do you think he’s telling the truth about all this?” Will asked softly, placing his head close to her shoulder.
“He does seem to have intimate knowledge of my situation that no one else should,” Rhea replied, at an equal volume. “He knew that a drone gave me a pistol in city hall, and he knew that someone unlocked my handcuffs. That’s something only a handful of people are aware of. You, Horatio, and the Wardenites in this corridor. No one else has that knowledge.”
“Still, I don’t trust him,” Will said. “He could be leading us into a trap.”
“Why rescue us from the robots, only to lead us right back to them?” she asked. “Or to Khrusos himself?”
“Because he might want to claim the bounty on your head,” Will said. “It might be true that Khrusos didn’t set that bounty. Or it might not. Either way, I doubt this dude cares, as long as he collects.”
“I remember his face,” Rhea said. “If that counts for anything.”
“I don’t know, does it?” Will asked. “Do you remember if he was a friend? Because that’s the more important memory…”
“That, I don’t,” she replied. “But if he truly did help me at city hall, and prevented me from getting chipped, then he’s someone we can trust.”
“He might have been doing that for other reasons,” Will said. “Again, you don’t really know him, or his motivations.”
Rhea shrugged. “We’ll just have to be on our toes.”
“Come on, I hear the sarcasm,” he said. “Don’t be naive about this.”
“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” she told him seriously. “I meant what I said. We’ll have to keep on our toes. And I intend to.”
“Good,” Will said.
Burhawk soon led them to the surface, emerging in a minor governmental building. The corridor they stepped into had no cameras, according to the map data she had. And there were no robots waiting to accost or record them.
Burhawk led them into the street beyond via a back door. A quick glance at her map confirmed once again that no cameras resided nearby.
He led them down a ramp and to the sidewalk, where they passed by a group of sentry robots standing at an intersection. The machines didn’t accost them, probably because the Wardenites kept their heads bowed.
Around her, skyscrapers towered in the air, and after the robots were well behind her, she risked an upward glance to take in the view. The buildings were very much like the crystalline towers of Aradne, but much taller, glittering brightly beneath the sun’s rays. She supposed that with a geodesic framework enclosing the city, thus limiting growth outward, the only direction the builders could expand was up, at least until they reached the inner boundaries of the dome. Some of the skyscrapers in the center of the city reached so high that they almost touched the glass ceiling. Beyond that glass, the sky was a bright red.
She lowered her gaze, because there were a lot of drones buzzing overhead, and while many of them were couriers, she didn’t want to risk having her face recorded by any of them.
A few roadside sellers offered miniature versions of the dome: tiny buildings duplicated inside crystal balls, minus the geodesic lines composing the larger framework. When the miniatures were shaken, small particles would float into the air, simulating snow.
The road traffic to her right seemed dominated by delivery vehicles. There were some self-driving buses and taxis, but her party couldn’t use them: the social credit system of Hongton required active comm nodes in order to board public transportation. At least according to DragonHunter.
On the sidewalk, delivery robots and remote-controlled androids composed much of the foot traffic, though there were also locals, both human and cyborg, who looked to be of Chinese descent. They didn’t wear parkas like on Ganymede—the inner environment here was a comfortable seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit, as the Martians didn’t have to worry about melting through the crust, which was made of iron-rich rock rather than ice. Because of the warmer air, the dress code seemed fairly casual, and dominated by bright colors; the youth wore clothing shredded so badly that she could often see their underwear.
“And I
