Old Mars Page 13

  “When do we eat?”

  “I’ll whip us up a stir-fry,” she said.

  “Martians make stir-fries?” Beckworth said, surprised.

  “No, I just like stir-fries.”

  “Want me to lend a hand?”

  “You’re not going anywhere near my cooking gear,” she said. “It took years to get everything just right.”

  As they stowed his modest baggage, Beckworth said quietly: “What’s with the canid?”

  “Satemcan? He’s … ah, he’s a very helpful gofer. Especially out in the field. His food doesn’t cost much.”

  He raised an ironic eyebrow, and she went on reluctantly, in a lower tone: “And yeah, a bit of a rescue thing. He’s got … problems. He was lucky not to get needled and stuffed in the digester long ago.”

  “So much for the cold-blooded, ruthless puppy-rescuing Old Mars Hand,” he said, grinning wide and white.

  Sally raised one arm, made a fist, and elevated her middle finger as she went back to the kitchen nook.

  “Rooz, the meat vegans can eat,” she called as she sliced and stirred, and Beckworth joined in the laugh as he set out two flat-bottomed globes of essence on the table and pushed in the straws.

  Martians regarded the idea of killing a domestic animal to get meat from it as hopelessly inefficient. The tembst-modified bird-dinosaur-whatevers the rooz came from grew flaps of boneless meat where their remote ancestors’ wings or forelimbs had been, and they regrew when sliced off.

  “And it does taste like chicken,” Beckworth said.

  She put the fry-up aside for a moment in an insulated bowl and poured batter into the wok, swirling it and then peeling out a half dozen tough but fluffy pancakelike rounds of vaguely breadlike stuff in succession.

  “More like veal, this variety, and there’s this spice that tastes a bit like lemon and chilies—” she began.

  Satemcan whined, his ears coming up and nose pointing toward the door.

  It opened without the chime. A green paralysis grenade came rolling through, but Satemcan was already getting to his feet; he made a desperate scrambling leap and struck, batting the barrel-shaped handful of ceramic back out through the open portal.

  It sailed out on an arc that would—unfortunately—take it right over the balustrade and into the courtyard. There were shouts of Fright! Alarm! from below, abruptly cut off as it shattered on the stone and everything nearby with a spinal cord went unconscious the instant one of the nanoparticles touched skin.

  Three masked figures in robes with the hoods up came through her door on the heels of the projectile, swords and bulbous, thin-barreled dart pistols in their hands. They checked very slightly; she realized it was surprise at finding the Terrans still in their robes indoors, and the fabric was good armor against the light needles.

  Sally pivoted on one heel and threw the bowl of sizzling-hot oiled meat and vegetables into the face of the first Martian through the door. He toppled backward, tangling his companions for an instant as she dove forward in a ten-foot leap from a standing start, one arm up in front of her face. A dart gun hissed in a stink of burnt methane tinged with sulfur, and something struck her elbow painfully through the fabric.

  That was one pistol out of commission for twenty seconds while it recharged. She hit the ground rolling, stripping her sword out of the belt hanging beside the door; no time for the Colt .45.

  Everything felt dreamlike, swift but smooth and stretched somehow; partly the adrenaline buzzing in her blood, partly the gravity. Jumping around on Mars was dreamlike, and so was the softer way you hit the ground.

  Satemcan leapt out the door; there was a round of scuffling and thudding and savage growling and a Martian voice screaming:

  “Pain!​Sudden​extremepain!” in a tone that told of sincerity. “Emphatic mode!”

  And Tom Beckworth fell to the ground with a limp boneless thump, a red spot on his throat showing where a soluble crystal dart had hit as he charged forward like an enraged bull. The third Martian came in at her with a running flèche and all thought vanished as pointed steel lunged for her left eye, blurring-fast and driven by a longer arm than hers.

  Parry in tierce, a desperation move, her blade whipping up and to the side and wrist pronated, jarring impact through her fingers. Smooth ting-shring of steel on steel, and she stepped in with a quick shuffling advance and punched with the guard as the elongated figure began an agile backing recovery. That was a bully-swordsman’s trick that would get you disqualified in any salon on Earth, but she wasn’t on Earth and there weren’t any second prizes here.

  The Martian made a hissing sound as the Terran’s heavier bone and muscle ripped the hilt of his or her gloved fingers, probably breaking something in the process. Sally Yamashita had just enough time to begin a savage cut from the wrist toward the other’s neck before she felt the slight sting on the back of hers. There had been three Martians to start with.

  Oh sh—

  Blackness.

  The unconsciousness didn’t last long, and the anesthetic dart didn’t leave a hangover. Something rough and wet was touching her cheek. She blinked her eyes open and saw Satemcan’s bloodied muzzle.

  “Bossss …”

  The canid’s paw-hand dropped the applicator from her belt pouch that had administered the antidote. Blood leaked away from the dagger wounds in his throat and torso, slowing as she watched. Volition returned and she rolled upright, trying to staunch the wounds with her hands.

  “Good dog,” she said. “Optimal canid.”

  Satemcan whined. A face looked around the doorjamb, one of the lineage.

  “Medical care, imperative tense!” Sally barked. That brought someone in with a clamshell-shaped platform running at their heels on many small, unpleasantly human feet. It opened to display a bed of writhing wormlike appendages that divided and subdivided until pink filaments too fine to actually see glittered and weaved. Sally grunted as she levered Satemcan inside and the chitin top closed with a clumping sticky sound like two raw steaks being slapped together. A few moments later a voice came from behind a pierced grille in the shell, unstrained through consciousness as the organic machine spoke:

  “Hybrid canid, standard format. Extensive exsanguination, moderate tissue trauma, minor damage to motor nerves. Stabilizing … prognosis excellent but requiring additional proteins and feedstocks.”

  “I authorize the expenditure,” she snapped, holding herself from slumping with relief; Mars didn’t run to national health plans. “Maximum accelerated healing.”

  For a moment she touched the shell of the trauma unit.

  Come on, boy, you can make it!

  She came to her feet; the robe had shed the blood, and scuttling things were coming out of tiny holes in the walls to clean up the rest before they returned to feed it and the spilled food to the house digesters. The platform trotted off pad-pad-pad-pad to plug itself into the … more or less … veins of the building.

  “How much were you paid to let them in?” she asked.

  The lineage head—his name was Zhay—was gray-haired and wrinkled, which meant he’d probably been born when Andrew Jackson was president of the United States and Japan was a hermit kingdom run by knife-fanciers with weird haircuts who spent all their spare time oppressing her peasant ancestors.

  “One thousand monetary units, and in addition a conditional threat to kill or excruciate several of us if we declined,” he said. “The perpetrators were independently contracting Coercives, persons self-evidently given to short-term perspectives.”

  Which is a devastating insult, locally.

  He went on: “I would estimate that they were highly paid, however.”

  Sally made herself count to five before replying in an even tone: By local standards she simply didn’t have any grounds for being angry, and she had to conform if she wanted to be taken seriously. Nobody here would expect the residents to risk their relatives or their own lives to protect someone like her. And if they were going to rat her out,
why shouldn’t they make a profit on it? A thousand monetary units was a lot of money.

  Somebody was willing to pay high for a Terran, or for Tom specifically. Or maybe they wanted both of us, but they were too banged-up to take us both.

  The apartment’s lineage had had the medical platform standing by, which actually showed goodwill. She really couldn’t afford to unload on them.

  “But it would feel so good to go completely ripshit,” she said to herself through gritted teeth, in English.

  “Take this to my consulate and you will receive reasonable recompense,” she went on, when the throbbing in her temples had subsided, typing quickly on her personal computer and loading it onto the data stick.

  She hadn’t known Tom Beckworth long enough to care about him really deeply.

  Not as much as I do about Satemcan, if we’re being completely honest, she thought.

  But he was a Terran where those were damned few, and a fellow American where they were even thinner on the ground, and more important, looking after him while he was still green here was her job.

  “Please note that if there is any repetition, my associates at the consulate will invoke an arbitration council and propose a heavy fine for implicit violation of the mutual-protection provisions of my lease.”

  Zhay looked as if he were going to protest—it was an arguable point, since that clause really only applied to random street crime and burglary. Instead he simply gestured acknowledgment again and accepted the little plastic rectangle.

  She didn’t bother to threaten him with the consulate’s influence with the local government. Robert Holmegard was a good man, but she’d learned right down in her gut what the Alliance consul still had trouble accepting over there in the palace district: government just didn’t matter nearly as much here as it did back on Earth, where variations on social democracy were pretty well universal outside the EastBloc.

  And I am better informed about this side of Martian life than a diplomat. Much, much better.

  “I will be out for a considerable period,” Sally concluded. “I need to find a Coercive of my own. Please leave on the porch light; I’ll be back after midnight.”

  It didn’t rhyme in the monosyllabic tonalities of Demotic, but the puzzled frown was worth it. They really didn’t get folk rock here.

  A Martian staggered out of the Blue-Tinted Time Considered as a Regressing Series, cheap inert fabric mask dangling and a smile—a slack grin, by local standards—on his face. He hummed a tune, then called out:

  “Eu … Eu … euphoriaaa! Is there anyone within heeeearringggg intent on parareproductive coitus?”

  Sally stiff-armed him as he stumbled toward her. The lightly built Martian gave an ooof and bounced back into the wall, still giggling.

  “Three inhabited planets in this fucked-up zoo of a solar system, and you can’t get away from irritating drunks on any of them.”

  He sank against the wall and slid down it, tittering, then started to hum the same tune as he sat splay-legged. Several adolescents eyed him, waiting to see if it was safe to lift his possessions, but blinking and backing a little when she glared at them.

  It was that sort of neighborhood. She pushed through the doors. Teyudza-Zhalt was usually to be found here when she wasn’t working a contract. It was a canal-side dive where the crews of the long-distance canal boats and the landships that sailed the desert plains and caravan traders down from the highlands hung out … and where the little sign with the glyphs reading Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence on her table wasn’t at all out of place.

  Silence fell as Sally entered the inner door, and heads moved to consider her.

  “Vas-Terranan,” someone murmured—which was insulting, but at least subtly so.

  There was a slight clatter as weapons were laid back on tables or holstered. The light had an unpleasant greenish cast; someone was underfeeding the glow-globes. The murals on the walls looked dusty and faded, outlining a big circular room on the ground floor of a tower more than half-abandoned. The adamantine stone of the floor was worn deep enough to show ruts in places, and it was set with circular tables cut in slabs from the perfectly circular trunks of tkem timber. They were nicked and battered, which took some doing with a wood that contained natural silica monofilaments.

  The air was dry and cool, of course, but it somehow smelled of ancient ghosts and lost hopes and all the labyrinthine history of Zho’da, the Real World.

  Teyud sat with a tiny incense-burning brazier empty and swept clean beside her, but leaving a faint musky fragrance in the air when you got close. She was playing atanj, left hand against right, and occasionally taking a sip from a globe of essence as she considered the moves of her pieces or threw the dice.

  Beside the folding game-set her table held a bowl of sweet dipping sauce and a platter of black-streaked crimson flowers. She crunched one, swallowed, sipped, and inclined her head in Sally’s direction.

  “I express amiable greetings, Sally Yamashita,” she said, in a voice that had an undertone like soft trumpets. “This match will be completed shortly.”

  The Coercive was on the tallish side of average height, around seven feet, but the color of her huge eyes was distinctly odd, a lambent amber-gold. Her robe was of a reddish khaki, excellent blending colors nearly anywhere on the planet, but the hood was thrown back to show hair caught back in a fine metallic net. Hair and metal both had a sheen like polished bronze. She was slender, but not with the impression of birdlike frailty common among Martians. Unless the bird was a golden eagle, the type Mongols had used to hunt wolves with back in the old days.

  Thoughtful Grace, the emperors of the Crimson Dynasty had called the tembst-modified warrior caste that had enforced their will and kept their peace. They were rare now that the Tollamunes controlled nothing except the old capital of Dvor-il-Adazar and its environs, but it wasn’t only Martian manners that ensured a ring of empty tables around Teyud.

  Sally didn’t intrude on the game; they took their atanj seriously here. The Coercive threw the dice one more time, moved a Transport piece to the square of the left-side Despot, nodded very slightly, and began to pack the set away. When the pieces were in their holders she folded it shut and tucked it into a pocket in the sleeve of her robe.

  “I profess amiable greetings in return, Teyudza-Zhalt,” Sally said.

  She took one of the flowers and dipped it in the sauce. Amiable greetings included an invitation to share. The texture was slightly chewy and the flavor sort of like frangipani-scented sweet-and-sour pork; her stomach growled.

  Murder and sudden death, but you still get hungry if you don’t eat … and I literally threw away dinner.

  “Contractual discussion?” she went on to the Martian.

  “You have recently been engaged in lethal or near-lethal conflict,” Teyud said thoughtfully. “You were struck by an anesthetic dart there—” She tapped the back of her neck. “You are not accompanied by the … unconventional canid. I request details; then we may discuss contract terms in accordance with degrees of uncertainty, calculable risk, and difficulty.”

  They did, and in a marked concession to Terran custom, the mercenary shook hands to seal the deal; hers was firm and dry and extremely strong. It wasn’t the first time she’d worked for Sally or other members of the Alliance mission here.

  “This will be an interesting task,” she said.

  “I need to get my colleague back,” Sally said grimly.

  “That is the point of interest,” Teyud said, finishing her globe of essence. “That he was removed indicates that immediate lethality was not the object of the attackers. They were—metaphorical mode—operating as if intent on armed robbery, even though they stole nothing else. They wished to steal a vas-Terranan. Surely even the most eccentric of collectors would not do that simply to have one on hand? I am pleasantly at a loss for an explanation.”

  The clock on the wall began to sing in the poetic-aesthetic mode, with a tone like the grief of diamonds:
>
  Hours like sand

  On the shores of a bitter sea

  Flow on waves of time;

  Twelve hours have passed

  Since last the Sun

  Rose in blind majesty;

  It shall yield heedless to night

  In one more—

  “Bit him, emphatic mode! Bit, bit, bit him!” Satemcan said viciously, snarling … literally. “I bit the intruder on the territory of my social reference group!”

  “Yes, you did,” Sally said patiently, patting the canid on the head.

  “I will—future-conditional intentional case—bite him again, emphatic mode!”

  You couldn’t just say you absolutely would do something in the future in Demotic; the assumptions built into the structure of its grammar forbade certainty about uncontrollable events. Satemcan was coming as close to that as possible.

  The canid wasn’t looking at his slightly scruffy best; the areas over his wounds were naked and glistening with the pseudoskin that covered them. He was moving well enough, though, and the medical tembst used organic glues to hold things together internally. They’d be absorbed as the accelerated natural healing took place.

  And there was a crazed look in his reddish eyes. Not a happy camper, Sally thought. Well, neither am I.

  “Canid,” Teyud said. “Can you track these individuals?”

  “Yessss,” Satemcan said, all business for a moment.

  He began to walk away from the apartment building, nose working as his deep red tongue came out to lap over it. After a moment he sniggered, which was something to see:

  “He-he-he-he! Here they triggered an antiscent aerosol. I express derision! Utter futility! My exceptional sensitivity and practiced skill easily uncover the scents of blood and fear pheromones.”

  He trotted on. Teyud was keeping her eyes up, watching for movement on the low rooftops without seeming to strain.

  “Intriguing,” she said softly. “This resembles minor-unit confrontation tactics more than most private commissions.”

  Martians weren’t any braver than Terrans, on average; they were just more straightforward. Teyud was, though. They’d worked together before, and it could get stressful. But right now, Sally didn’t give a damn.