It made me feel like children do when their parents are troubled. Scared, vulnerable, and helpless to do anything about it. Which was strange, since I was the one who was supposed to protect her rather than the other way around. I wished we could talk about it and knew she’d refuse.
The deck tilted, then leveled out as the shuttle banked and dived towards the planet below. My stomach did flip-flops. There were no view ports, so I looked for something to do. A screen had been built into the back of the seat in front of me. I pulled it down and an infomercial appeared. The actor was happy, and why not? He was on Earth. He smiled and his teeth sparkled. “Hi! My name is Tom. What’s yours?”
I ignored the question and he switched to the noninteractive mode. “Marscorp and its affiliates would like to welcome you to Mars. Regardless of whether you work the interface, or are passing through, our personnel will do everything in their power to make your stay as pleasant as possible. Now settle back and relax while we tell you about your next destination.”
Sasha looked at my screen. “What the hell is that?”
“Some stuff about Mars. Wanta watch?”
She shook her head and yawned. “My mother pays flaks to say nice things about Europa Station too. Most of them are lies.”
I shrugged and turned towards the screen. She closed her eyes and settled back for a nap. A digitally created Mars had appeared and was overlaid with text. The narration continued, but I was pleased to discover that I could read most of the words myself.
I learned that Mars has a diameter of 4,200 miles and an orbital period of 686 days, each of which is 24 hours and 37 minutes long. Mars is known as the “Red Planet” because of the pervasive orange-red color caused by the dust that blows through the atmosphere. The atmosphere is extremely thin. Ninety-five per cent is carbon dioxide, two-point-seven per cent is nitrogen, one-point-six per cent is argon, and the rest consists of miniscule amounts of oxygen, carbon monoxide, and water vapor. Not a good place to visit without a space suit. And then just to keep things interesting, there are incredible fluctuations in temperature, dust storms, and relatively light gravity. The shots of the surface faded away and the actor appeared. He smiled.
“Now, while Mars is not the wild and wooly place that the vids would have you believe, it does have an exciting history.”
Smiley disappeared and was replaced by footage from the Viking lander. I pressed “scan,” waited for the first landing and subsequent colonization stuff to run its course, and hit “play.” The picture steadied and lost resolution as amateur video came on. I had watched the footage a hundred times back on Earth and never tired of it.
A ragtag army of men and women charged a corporate strongpoint, staggered under a hail of darts, and struggled forward. And then, just when it looked as though they might have a chance, a contingent of Mishimuto Marines, the same outfit I had belonged to, stood up from behind a barricade and gunned them down. The tool heads didn’t have a chance. They danced under the impact of plastic and steel and fell in bloody heaps. Horrible though the pictures were, they provided a glimpse into the life I couldn’t remember, and in spite of the fact that I had searched the faces many times before, I did so again. Maybe, just maybe, I’d been there. The narration continued.
“The brutal and completely unnecessary war started when a small group of self-styled ‘freedom fighters’ staged an illegal strike, and sought to impose illegal demands on the corporations and their stockholders.
“Though claiming to represent workers, and pretending to have their interests in mind, the strikers began the systematic destruction of the very facilities that gave them work. And so it was that the corporations formed the Consortium, met force with force, liberated their holdings, and returned honest citizens to their jobs.”
A tidy ending to a war that had destroyed millions of lives, including mine. The rest of the program was a good deal more cheerful. It seemed that Marscorp had gambled everything on a huge city-sized vehicle dubbed Roller Three. The company was proud of the fact that while the processor traveled less than fifty feet a day, it had already consumed more than a thousand square miles of the planet’s surface and crapped enough palletized ingots to turn a small profit. And, given the size of the red planet’s mineral deposits, plus the fact that Roller Four was in the final stages of construction, there was little doubt that even more profits lay up ahead.
A robo-cam swooped over and around the machine while the narrator droned on. The first thing that struck me was the sheer scale of the thing. It was five miles long, three miles wide, and weighed millions of tons. Built like an enormous box, its skin covered by a landing strip, solar arrays, autocranes, and cooling fins, the processor would have resembled a mechanical dung beetle, except that it was generating waste instead of eating it.
Huge tracks, each a quarter of a mile wide, carried the monstrosity forward. Bus-sized boulders exploded as metal-bright treads fell on them. A cloud of fine red dust hung around the machine’s lower parts as steel jaws gouged tons of rock out of the planet’s surface and dropped it onto highway-sized conveyor belts. From there the belts fed the stuff into a nonpressurized hell where heavily armored humans supervised specially designed droids.
But that’s not the sort of thing that flaks are paid to dwell on, so the scene changed and I found myself looking at a spotless cafeteria while a man in a tall white hat bragged about the quality of his food. I lost interest, touched a button, and watched while the screen was retracted into the seat back.
There was very little atmosphere to slow the shuttle down, so it fell like a high-speed elevator. My stomach went with it. It was weird to think that we’d be landing on top of a huge machine. A machine that would continue to function even as we arrived. Powerful engines and a prodigious amount of fuel kept us aloft for the appropriate length of time, but there were no windows, so the teeth-rattling thump and neck-stretching brake job came as a complete surprise. The shuttle coasted for a while and jerked to a stop.
I expected everyone to stand, grab their luggage, and head for the hatch. The newbies looked around and wondered what to do, but the Mars hands stayed where they were. The stew sounded bored. “Please remain in your seats until a pressure tube has been connected to the shuttle’s main hatch and the seat belt light goes off…”
She had more to say, but I tuned it out. I looked at Sasha and found that she was awake. “Welcome to Mars.”
She smiled. “Thanks. Now that we’ve arrived…let’s see how quickly we can leave.”
I nodded. The quicker we reached Europa Station, the quicker people would stop shooting at me, and the quicker I’d be able to collect the fifty thousand. Which reminded me of what I was being paid to do. “They could be waiting for us.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How would they know where to look?”
I knew she was smarter than that, so I assumed it was a rhetorical question. “They would know where we are because A, there is radio communication between Earth and Mars, or B, they came on a faster ship. And what about the captain? She told us to duck. She knew something would happen.”
“Yeah,” she said reluctantly. “It makes sense.”
“Yes, it does,” I agreed. “So here’s the plan. I get off first, trip the ambush, and you slip away.”
Her eyes looked into mine. There was a softness there, mixed with determination, mixed with something else. Her voice was sarcastic.
“Great, just great. You trip the ambush, get yourself killed, and leave me all alone. What the hell kind of bodyguard is that?”
The conflicting signals made me confused. I felt defensive. “Oh, yeah? Well, what would you suggest?”
“That we wait while the others get off, leave together, and slip away.”
It went against my instincts, but I nodded and touched the weapon under my left armpit. It had been loaded aboard ship, and logic dictated that it still was. I wished I could make sure. The shuttle rocked gently as the pressure tube made contact with the hull. The hatch opened, air hissed as pressures equalized, and the seat belt light went out. A newbie forgot to compensate, jumped to his feet, and hit the overhead. The resulting thud could be heard all over the ship. The Mars hands laughed, shook their heads in disgust, and stood with exaggerated slowness.
Sasha and I stayed in our seats until most of the passengers had left, stood, and eased our way forward. The last thing we wanted to do was follow the newbie’s example. The stew with the purple hair and matching day-glo nails looked at my head, nodded politely, and let us pass. Was she more interested than she should be? Or was she attracted to my size, skull plate, and rugged good looks?
My heart beat faster as we walked down the pressure tube towards the terminal beyond. It might have been comical if it wasn’t so frightening. There were thirty or forty people in the waiting area. The moment we stepped
