“All clear, Big Slow.” I laboriously extract myself from the sack and climb back up to join Bill and Ben on the lip of the air lock. I’m dreading what I’ll find on the other side of it. “You can come inside now.”
I cycle through the lock into stifling heat and humidity. As I strip off my chain mail, I realize it’s over ninety degrees. Spheres of hot water cling to the ceiling, wobbling like improbable steaming jellies before they fall slowly to the floor. One of them breaks off and lands on my shoulder, trickling down inside — it’s not physically damaging, but it’s painfully hot. Maybe the Pink Police were trying to poach the passengers? “Bill. Ben. What do you think?”
“Better get back to our stateroom, Big Slow. I don’t think we’re going to be too popular around here.”
“Um.” I nerve myself: “Pygmalion?”
She replies at once: She sounds distracted. “I’m busy. Go to your room, Katherine.”
“Told you so,” Ben smugs at me. I pretend I didn’t hear him.
Our stateroom is a tip. It’s been thoroughly searched, and there’s nothing quite as messy as a room that’s been turned over in microgravity. I lock the door behind us and contemplate the wreckage with dismay. “It’s only for another day,” Bill (or Ben) reminds me. “Chill out and try to ignore it. They didn’t find us, did they?”
“No,” agrees Pygmalion, startling me. “The decoy worked superbly. I note that they seem to have taken Ford with them. Do you know anything about that?”
“No.” I think for a moment. “I believe she went willingly, though, which implies a degree of collusion.”
“Quite possibly.” Pygmalion is silent for a while. “I think it would be best if you remain in your room until we arrive, then leave discreetly. The other passengers are highly upset, and some of them may assume that you are a police informer if you reappear.”
“Has Jeeves offered to pay, then?” Bill snipes.
“One does not discuss confidential corporate arrangements in public. ” Pygmalion’s snippy put-down is clear enough. (Ten to one Jeeves has paid handsomely for her to collude in smuggling me past the Pink Police.) “This has been most inconvenient. My upholstery is damaged and my passengers outraged — it’s scandalous! But — oh.” Her tone changes. “Oh. No!”
“What’s—”
“They just launched a missile.” She pauses for a knife-edged second. “It’s running directly away from us. Why would they do that?” More seconds tick by. “It just detonated. Ninety-six kilometers away. Most strange.”
I shudder convulsively. It is anything but strange if you are privy to all the facts: a stuffed suit floating in vacuum, drifting ever farther from Pygmalion’s air lock, and an RSA cutter with a frustrated captain and an impatient VIP passenger aboard to witness the kill.
Someone really doesn’t want my payload to reach Mars!
Whores de Combat
WELCOME TO MARSPORT, Deimos.
A brief factual rundown cannot do the place justice. I’ve been here before (even lived here for a handful of years), but it never fails to surprise. Let me attempt to explain…
Deimos is the outer of Mars’s two moons, an irregular rocky lump between ten and fifteen kilometers in diameter, depending on where you hold your measuring calipers. It was originally covered in loose regolith, high in carbon, which has long since been recycled for construction materials. A century of solar energy beamed from the big collectors near Mercury powered the rockets that adjusted its orbit, and today Deimos is the anchor weight for the largest surface-to-orbit space elevator ever constructed: Bifrost.
Most of the inner planets have no space elevator at all; Venus and Mercury because their days are unfeasibly long, Earth because its gravity well and debris belts challenge the limits of engineering. But Luna has the L1 lift, and as for Mars — Mars lies on the cusp of the heavily populated, energy-rich inner system and the material-rich outer system. Mars also has Deimos, the perfect construction site and gravitational anchor for Bifrost. And so it was inevitable that Mars, the gateway to the outer solar system, would acquire an elevator like Bifrost, and a city like Marsport to run it.
Most elevators are simple things — parallel tapes traversed by sluggish climbers, drudge laborers whose groaning cantilevers bear the burden of interplanetary freight among the worlds of the outer solar system. But there’s nothing simple about Bifrost. The complex of cables is half a kilometer across, wide enough to anchor a world. Fast express shuttles hurtle up and down with passengers, while the slow, sturdy supertrain scows take weeks to complete a round-trip, lowering refined feedstocks and returning with processed materials, manufactured more conveniently in the turbulent forges of Mars than in orbital facilities — and which can then be exported to the rest of the inner system.
A quarter of a million indentured arbeiters and their aristo overseers, and perhaps a tenth that number of independent souls, work the port facilities: loading and unloading cargo, inspecting payloads, maintaining the infrastructure, untangling problems, and serving those who get the real work done. Once our dead Creators ran ports like this, with names like Liverpool, and New York, and Singapore. Today (as the jester said) everything is automated. Plenty of hands keep the traffic flowing, hour by hour and year by year.
Pygmalion is tiny in comparison to Marsport: a fist-sized hovercam buzzing alongside a gigantic freight dirigible. I follow her progress as traffic control directs her final approach to a small peripheral docking hub on the poleward flank of Voltaire crater. “You will please stay in your cabin while the other passengers debark,” she tells me prissily. “I will notify you when you may leave.” I think she’s still upset because of the water damage to the saloon ceiling. She’s probably as certain I’m smuggling something as that coldly treacherous aristo Ford, but she stays bought — and Jeeves will pay her well enough. So Bill, Ben, and I wait impatiently until she says, “You may go.” Then we leg it through the dripping corridors and out onto the dockside.
Arrival on Marsport is not subject to customs — it’s a free port, the Pink Police aside. I still recall my bearings from my last visit, over a decade ago. The problem is not so much arriving, as being seen to arrive… but I’ve got a solution for that problem.
The Honorable Katherine Sorico emerges from Pygmalion fully an hour after the other passengers have left. She’s taken the time to change into a distinctive puffball dress worn over free-fall pantaloons, ruffled and pleated and patched with metallic lace, with warning lights blinking at ankle and cuff. She does not skulk around grimy dockside loading tunnels and container farms, but sweeps along, her servants behind her, and commandeers the first conveyance she claps eyes on (a crew service spider that’s clearly seen better days) directing the hapless arbeiter to take her to the nearest tube stop. She sits stiffly erect, eyes straight ahead, her servants sitting atop the spider’s passenger cage as it scuttles through warrens and alleyways and across debris nets, finally landing just beside the tube hatch. “Summon me a private carriage,” she tells one of her servants; “I want to be settled into the Grand Imperial in time to send out calling cards before evening.”
The servant complies. Only a minute later, the hatch opens. The Honorable Katherine climbs into the padded, compact tube ball, directs her arbeiters to make their own way to her estate, closes the hatch… and is seen no more.
Ten minutes and three private tube balls later, Maria Montes Kuo, an independent plumbing contractor (hairless, in dark coveralls, with specialized optical turrets in place of the bishojo glistening orbs of an aristo), emerges diffidently from a service hatch in a public station, her tool bag strapped across her shoulders.