Old Mars Read online

  “I express regret at the risk you must undergo,” Sally said.

  The Coercive didn’t look around, but there was slight surprise in her voice:

  “I chose to be involved.” Thoughtfully: “You vas-Terranan are the first new thing to come into the Real World in a very long time. Working with you is less demoralizing than sitting and contemplating the time when the Deep Beyond spreads over the final cities and the last atmosphere plants wither.”

  “It will be a long time before that happens, too,” Sally said; it didn’t bother most Martians much.

  She was checking their six; it would be difficult to detect a tail, but not impossible.

  “Not so long as the time that has passed since the date when the First Emperor reigned,” Teyud said. “Ah, your canid halts.”

  “Here,” Satemcan said, casting around under the feet of irritated pedestrians. “Multiple trails, but the freshest leads into this structure.”

  “Oh, shit,” Sally added, as the canid looked up with tail waving, expecting praise. “Ah … good job, Satemcan.”

  The glyphs on the building read:

  Cooperative Agency for Aggrandizement, Zar-tu-Kan Franchise.

  “What are we going to do?” she said. In English: “Here at Yakuza Central?”

  “I recommend following the exhortation on the wall: Enquire Within,” Teyud said.

  The waiting room was a large arched space; it had a rack for scrolls, which was the equivalent of a stack of magazines, and a vending device for essences. And there were advertising posters on the walls:

  Have you lost the desire for self-preservation but lack the fortitude for conventional suicide? Then consider tokmar addiction, the most subjectively pleasant form of slow dissolution for individuals with your psychological malfunction! Initial samples available gratis!

  Or:

  Few satisfactions equal the excruciation of those who have antagonized or superseded you. Indulge spite and envy! Our specialists …

  “It’s not the differences that are really disturbing, it’s the goddamned similarities,” she muttered, avoiding the helpful illustrations. “Or maybe it’s both. We do the same stuff, but they’re so fucking up front about it.”

  Satemcan had his ears laid back as they entered; he must be getting a snoutful of unpleasant scents far too faint for human or Martian nostrils.

  “Apprehension,” he whined. “Fear.”

  “Did they come through here?”

  “That way,” he said, pointing with his nose.

  That way was effectively the receptionist’s desk, the one with a helpful sign:

  Past This Point Those without Authorization Will Be Killed without Warning.

  “You wish?” the receptionist said.

  Then he took in Teyud, and Sally could see his pupils expand. He brought his hands out of his sleeves and laid them carefully flat on the table.

  “You wish, most refined of genome?” he repeated—this time using the honorific mode.

  Three Coercives in black robes stood behind the slab of gray smooth stone, and she thought there were probably more in the offing. This was thug central. It was some consolation that their eyes were traveling between her and Teyud with a certain nervousness; she’d been here long enough to read Martian body language well. It gave her an advantage, since the locals she dealt with didn’t have nearly as much experience with Terrans.

  It’s bullshit that they don’t have emotions, whatever those Far Frontiers episodes say. They’re just less self-reflective about them.

  Sally took a deep breath; she wasn’t entirely confident of getting out of here alive, but the odds would be much worse without Teyud.

  “My residence was attacked …” she began.

  When she had finished, the receptionist blinked at her and bent to whisper into a grille. Teyud’s ears pricked forward; so did Satemcan’s. A tendril extended and the receptionist plugged it into his ear. The conversation that followed went entirely silent; he nodded several times, then extracted the intercom thing (or possibly data-retrieval thing) with a plop and spoke:

  “Three independent Coercives contracted with a third party for the operation you mention four days ago, through our employment placement service, with the usual finder’s fee. They also purchased tactical information on your habitual schedule. Early this morning they returned here with a vas-Terranan prisoner, whom they turned over to the third party. They then purchased fairly extensive medical care for bone fractures, burns, and canid bites and departed Zar-tu-Kan bound for Dvor-il-Adazar. We will not sell you their identities because their affiliation contracts contain a nondisclosure clause.”

  International Union of Thugs, Local 141, she thought bitterly. They’ve had a long time to come up with rules to cover every contingency.

  The receptionist blinked; evidently Sally’s expression was showing more than she wanted. Earth-human body language wasn’t exactly the same as Martian, but it wasn’t impossibly different either for basics like humor or anger. The problem was that each species found the reasons for the other’s emotions weirdly opaque. Add in that Martians had only one language and one set of social rules and hence were unaccustomed to dealing with different reactions, and crossed wires were more common than not.

  There was more cultural variation in San Francisco than on this entire planet. She made the muscles of her face relax one by one.

  “The nondisclosure policy is not negotiable, by permanent directive,” the receptionist said cautiously. “Killing or excruciating myself or any of our other associates here will not alter this; the policy is set at higher levels, to whom we are of little consequence.”

  Sally schooled her face and glanced aside at Teyud. The Thoughtful Grace made a very small gesture with two fingers of the hand resting on her sword hilt: Don’t push it.

  “I’m more interested in the person who employed the three … associates of your cooperative,” Sally said grimly.

  “We will inform you of the identity of the third party for a fee of 2,750 monetary units, with financing available on the following terms at an interest rate of …”

  “No nondisclosure clause?”

  “No, none was purchased. This was an imprudent excess of thrift that increases the probability of suboptimal results from the client’s perspective! Note that we will include a nondisclosure agreement with you for a modest additional fee of—”

  Ten minutes later they were back on the street, and Sally was looking at the name and address written on a scrap of paper-equivalent.

  “What do we do now?” she said.

  Teyud smiled. “As to our course of action, we engage in reconnaissance, then attack.”

  Here I am, invading Harvard with fell intent. Or maybe Oxford.

  Even by the standards of Zar-tu-Kan, the Scholarium was old. Old enough that it hadn’t originally been under a dome, or laid out whole in one of the fractal-pattern mazes Martians had gone in for under the Crimson Dynasty. They’d improvised during the Imperial era as it grew; now the reduced students and staff rattled around in buildings that ranged from the size of her apartment block to things bigger than the Solar Dome in Houston or the Great House of People’s Culture in Beijing; the bigger ones were mostly garden now, and they were all linked together by tunnels below and translucent walkways etched in patterns like magnified snowflakes above.

  Sally suppressed a start as she saw herself in a reflective patch of one of them. She and Teyud wore student robes—slightly threadbare and gaudy—and Scholarium-style masks. Hers was a Spinner-Grub, modeled on the pupal stage of an insect used for textile production—a freshman style, and something of a dry joke in local terms. Teyud’s was a jest of her own, a delicate golden mask representing the face of a Thoughtful Grace sword-adept … which she actually was. Here it could mark someone studying the martial arts, or military history. The fact that most people wore masks and clothing that covered everything to the fingertips made sneaking around in disguise much easier.

  And Tey
ud had a rather ironic sense of humor. When Sally mentioned the fact, she nodded slightly.

  “More. In their origins, the Thoughtful Grace were Coercives concerned with maintenance of rule and regulation deference … what is that Terran word …”

  “Police,” Sally said quietly.

  “Yes. And now I am pursuing a similar function, particularly for you.”

  She chuckled slightly. Sally didn’t feel like laughing; it was a bit too personal.

  “And so I still serve Sh’uMaz, in—metaphorical mode—a way,” Teyud said, and touched the Imperial glyph in the forehead of her mask that represented that concept. “Even though I am not in the service of the Kings Beneath the Mountain.”

  Sh’uMaz meant Sustained Harmony, the program and motto of the Tollamune emperors. The Eternal Peace of the Crimson Dynasty was a nostalgic memory on Mars now, but there was some undertone in Teyud’s voice stronger than that.

  A section of the walkway curled downward in a spiral like a corkscrew. They slid down it in a way practicable only because the gravity was a third of Earth’s, then walked out into the space under a dome. The buildings around the edge were wildly varied, but most of the identifying glyphs bore variations on the beaded spiral that signified tembst. This was the science faculty, more or less.

  Pathways of textured, colored rock wound through the open space, interspersed with low shrubs and banks of flowers. Colorful avians flew or scurried about. One of the birds stopped and hovered before her face.

  “Food?” it said hopefully.

  “Buzz off,” she replied, and it did.

  Students sat or sprawled along the pathways and planters and benches, arguing or reading or occasionally singing. Apart from the eternal atanj a few played games that involved throwing small things with bundles of tentacles that tried to snag your hand. You won by catching the tip of a tentacle and whirling the … thing … at the next player. If it missed, it scuttled back to the one who had the next turn.

  She couldn’t understand why anyone here would abduct a Terran biologist for his knowledge; Martians were simply better at it, and Tom had come to this planet to learn himself. That left something on the order of I need a lab rat with a particular genetic pattern as motivation. Which meant that anything could be happening to him.

  Anything at all.

  “Information,” Teyud said smoothly to a passerby. “Knowledgeable Instructor Meltamsa-Forin?”

  The student had a mask whose surface mimicked something that had a swelling boss of bone on its forehead.

  “Ah, Meltam the Neurologically Malfunctioning,” he said.

  Or Meltam the Eccentric or Meltam the Mad, she translated mentally.

  “Identity, function?”

  The student pointed to one of the buildings. “Be prepared to listen to exquisitely reasoned arguments from faulty premises.”

  “Specialty?”

  “Agri-tembst, with a more recent subsidiary field in Wet World biotics,” the student said. Grudgingly: “In the latter, he has considerable data. Though the subject is arcane and of little immediate utility, it has some interest.”

  He tilted his head and left, having comprehensively dissed a professor. Under other circumstances, Sally would have found it humiliating: the glyph on the building he’d pointed out was roughly translatable as Veterinary Science. Of course, it also meant Engineering Malfunctions and Their Remedies.

  “Tom was kidnapped by veterinarians?”

  The building itself was old enough that it had high, arched windows, filled with foam-rock aeons ago. Most of it was included in the later dome, but a tower reared high above, a smooth stone cylinder that flared outward at the top like a gigantic tulip.

  “Ah,” Teyud said. “Yes. A straightforward entry has limited possibilities. But there are alternatives available.”

  “What alternatives?”

  “There are advantages to being of the Thoughtful Grace genome, which compensate for the increased caloric intake necessary.” She frowned in thought and ate another flower. “In your terms … I am owed favors and have serious mojo with the local Coercives in the service of the Despot.”

  “They’ll intervene?” Sally said, surprised and pleased.

  “Not directly. But … off the books.”

  “I would have preferred a high-altitude insertion with directional parachutes,” Teyud said a few hours later. “There is a small but calculable risk of the airship’s being spotted.”

  “No,” Sally said; that was less impolite in Demotic.

  The blimp was very nearly silent; the engines were panting—literally—because they’d pulled it into a position upwind and were now drifting with the breeze quietly and slowly toward the Scholarium. Zar-tu-Kan passed below the transparent compartment in the belly of the dirigible, less stridently bright than a Terran city from the air, a mystery of soft glow and points of light. It was cold, well below zero, but the robes and undersuit were near-perfect insulation. Only the skin across her eyes was exposed, and that only until …

  Teyud extended a case unclipped from her belt. Sally winced slightly but bent forward. The lid snapped open, and tentacles swarmed out and webbed around her face. The optical-beast pulled itself out of the case with a sticky plop and settled firmly; it only weighed a couple of pounds, and it felt like the slightly tacky play-goo kids used. Everything went blank, and there was a slight sting at her temples as the fine tendrils plugged into her veins. Another sting at the corners of her eyes, and a sensation like blurs of static and a very brief headache as even finer filaments integrated into her optic nerves.

  Then everything went brighter, like an overcast day. Teyud glowed very slightly; the animal sensed ambient heat as well as magnifying light.

  “Functioning,” she said.

  If she looked anything like Teyud, she was now giving a fair imitation of a Bug-Eyed Monster from an ancient magazine cover; the optic the Thoughtful Grace wore turned the upper part of her face into a smooth bulging surface like the eyes of an insect … which was more or less what it was. This was Imperial-era military tembst, and Teyud had said there was a very slight possibility it would kill Sally when she tried to use it, despite her providing a blood sample for prior authorization.

  Too small a probability for serious consideration, was the way she’d put it.

  The intercom whistled, then said: “Coming up on target. Prepare to deploy. I express a desire that random factors eventuate in a favorable pattern.”

  Satemcan whimpered slightly as Teyud picked him up, and he clamped on to her harness with both paw-hands. Sally checked her equipment; her sword was across her back, in that cool-looking position that meant you had to be careful to not slice off your ear when you drew. She wore a native dart pistol, after a bit of an argument from Teyud. Her own Colt had a much higher rate of fire—it didn’t depend on a chamber generating methane. On the other hand, shooting someone with a bullet didn’t drop them instantly, and it was much louder.

  Cables uncoiled from the roof of the assault transport’s ceiling. Sally clipped one to her harness and gripped it in her gloved hands.

  Down below, the dome of the Science Faculty glowed like an opal beneath the moon—Phobos was up here, a third the size of Luna from Earth, and Deimos crawled past it. The airship’s props whirred briefly as it corrected course.

  “Deploying … now!”

  The transparent doors beneath them opened, and her weight came onto the harness. The cable dropped away, coiling into space, and dangled as they approached the swelling top of the tower. Teyud’s head moved, calculating.

  “Now,” she said, and squeezed the release.

  Sally followed suit, and they swooped down into the not-darkness. She hoped the falling-elevator sensation in her stomach was all physical. The tower’s roof was flat or nearly—shedding rain wasn’t much of a problem here, and from the markings there had been Paiteng perches there once. She didn’t try to gauge her own speed; Teyud was the specialist, and she just followed as closel
y as possible. There was a sudden flexing in the cable; the bundle of sucker-equipped boneless limbs at its end had clamped down on the target. She clamped her legs together and extended them as the roof rushed up at her, then hit the release and tucked and rolled the way she would have from a parachute drop; she’d done that on Earth, of course, but never here.

  Whump.

  “Oooof!” and a muffled yelp from the canid.

  Things thumped and gouged at her and the wind jolted out of her lungs. The boots and padding protected her, a bit. She thought the impact would have broken bones on Earth; it would have broken bones here, for most standard-issue Martians. Teyud was up on one knee, the edges of her blackened sword blade glimmering and the dart pistol in the other.

  Sally drew likewise, the steel a comforting weight. The pistol was in her left and much lighter, but she didn’t have the Thoughtful Grace’s advantage of being ambidextrous. Satemcan staggered for a moment, shook his head, and slunk over to her heel.

  There were a couple of packages of Semtex in her belt, part of her other-job kit as she thought of it. Hopefully …

  They came erect and padded over to the door. It opened its eye—slowly, which was the sign of a system reaching the end of its life span. Teyud leaned forward swiftly and pressed her optic mask to the opening. Things made rather ghastly wet, sticky sounds as the commando optic used one of its functions to take over the other biomachine, and the door swung open.

  “Poor security maintenance,” Teyud said very softly.

  A spiral staircase led down from the landing stage, curling around a shaft that held—or had held, once—a freight lift. Teyud went down with a rapid scuff-scuff-scuff leaning run not quite like the way a Terran moved and only slightly more like the way a standard Martian did. Sally simply hopped down three or four steps each time, quiet enough in padded-sole boots if you were careful. There were occasional glow-globes, but they were nearly dormant; the optics gave them a sort of twilight view, in which footprints glowed slightly from remnant heat.