The Belt, page 9
“Then why not let Miguel Hernandez go? Why pursue him? And, not to be indelicate, what became of your expert tracker?”
What was she, clairvoyant? Andre tried to hide his surprise, but that hint of a smile tugging at her lips signaled his failure. “Hernandez is a special case,” he said.
“With friends in the wilderness. You fear that.”
“I don’t. Those rogues chose their oblivion. They can have it.”
She smiled into her drink.
“Fine,” Andre snapped. “Be my desert enforcer. Find Hernandez. Make sure he doesn’t recruit any mercenaries. But you clear all operations with me in advance. I refuse to pay for random raids on no-account smugglers.”
“Especially when they supply you with luxuries otherwise unobtainable.”
He ought to slit her throat.
“We will require a base of operations,” she said. “Lunae Planum would suit admirably.”
“Damn it, Hitomi—”
“Unless you wish me gone?”
He did. He didn’t. They weren’t finished. “A small base of operations. And I approve all plans before any construction takes place.”
“A wise arrangement, Andre. May we both prosper through it.” She enjoyed mixing promise and threat, but she was wrong if she thought she could intimidate him. He would be rid of her. Eventually.
Andre stared into his glass. “What about the students?”
“Ricard Fulbert and Quan Linh appear ignorant of Dr. Hernandez’s whereabouts. Their destination was Ganymede, but I have no reason to believe he is there, so I made them other arrangements.”
“Such as?”
Hitomi picked up her glass, swirled it, and drank.
“Bring them back to Lowell. I want to keep an eye on them.”
“Your eyes are myopic, Andre. We will use mine.” She set down the glass and regarded him, emotionless, hypnotizing. “How thoughtless of me. I’ve repeatedly offended your sense of worth. Would bedding me restore it?”
Andre nearly threw his drink in her face.
“Then I shall take my leave.” She rose and crossed the office, a queen concluding an audience with a peasant.
“What about the Ulenga twins?” Andre demanded. “I paid you watch them, too.”
“They remain on Mars. An operation with respect to them is in progress.”
“I didn’t authorize that.”
“You meant to. I forgive the oversight.” She slipped out, a comet receding into the black of space.
Andre so wanted to kill her. The day might come when he would, but not today. She was too dangerous to touch until he found out how she knew so much, until he knew who held her leash. Someone stood behind her, someone with more resources than he. For now, he could only curse himself for hiring her.
They were endangering Linh. That’s all Petrina could think about.
Samuel Lasker had constructed the equipment and planted it in the exobiology lab early that morning when nobody was around. Mid-afternoon, Petrina and Martin played at prepping samples collected over the past year. Two grad students doing their jobs, nothing suspicious, no matter that their mentor was on the run.
But they weren’t so innocent. Petrina fumbled through the work, unable to focus. Time and again, she had to ask Martin to remind her what came next, and Martin grew increasingly irritated. She could see it in the set of his mouth, hear it in his clipped instructions. Rage had been his curse since the torture, as a scrambled brain had been hers. The fires of their handicaps threatened to burn to ash what little hope remained.
As they struggled to maintain a veneer of normality, Samuel’s devices, secreted about the lab, scanned and triangulated. When they detected signals originating within Petrina or Martin’s bodies, they informed tiny gray discs sewn into the collars of the twins’ shirts. The discs jammed those signals. If Petrina and Martin couldn’t rid themselves of the nanobots prowling their innards, they could at least stop them from tattling.
Assuming it worked. They wouldn’t know until they tested it, and Petrina feared the test Martin had proposed, even though he insisted Linh would be safe. She’d gone to Ganymede—hadn’t she?—and Lowell Security had no jurisdiction off Mars. Petrina saw no evidence that Security cared about rules, but Samuel agreed with Martin, and now a tiny vibration from the gray disc in her collar said they were go for the test. She pinched her eyes shut and tried to remember the script.
Martin had the first line: “I haven’t found the Meridiani sample. Have you?”
She swallowed and shook her head but couldn’t respond. The words swam away before she could catch them.
Martin motioned her to speak. Getting no answer, he pressed forward. “I wonder where he stashed it.”
Petrina squeezed her eyes shut. Concentrate, she ordered her mind. Concentrate! They’d rehearsed this in writing. The words were in there somewhere. She just had to speak them.
“Petrina? He didn’t give it to you, did he?” Forced to improvise, Martin pressed his hands to the lab table as he fought against a torrent of anger.
“No,” she blurted out. Somehow, speaking that one word released the rest of them. “No, he didn’t give it to me. Maybe Ricard has it. Or Linh.” She nearly choked on the name, remembering Linh’s terror in the wake of the torture. What if Samuel’s toys didn’t work? What if Martin was wrong and they found her and tortured her again?
“Ricard wouldn’t risk it,” Martin said, “but Linh would do anything Dr. Hernandez asked.”
“Should we search her apartment?”
“Security might be watching.”
Petrina shuddered. It wasn’t an act. “How do we get it, then? We can’t just leave it.”
“We might have to, at least until things calm down. Better to play it safe, don’t you think?”
Safe! she wanted to scream. Nothing is safe! But she stuck to the plan. “Okay. Maybe in a couple of weeks?”
“Maybe,” Martin replied. “We’ll see.”
And it was done. They returned to their work and didn’t speak of Dr. Hernandez again. The afternoon wore on.
In Linh’s apartment, hidden cameras watched for any response to their seemingly idle chatter. None came, neither that day nor the next. Martin relaxed and put away the vintage pens and paper they had taken from Ricard’s apartment. They could speak openly now.
Petrina didn’t buy it. Something felt wrong. But she dared not voice her fear lest she rekindled her brother’s anger.
Wind stirred the rusty sand, shifting it in waves down the ancient channel. The westering sun threw sharp shadows across the land. Just below the lip of the bank, Miguel carefully excavated the last of twelve rock samples. It was slow work in his white envirosuit. He had chipped his way from the riverbed to the lip of the two-meter bank, assembling a record of biological activity in the four-billion-year-old channel, if activity there had been.
Probably not. Miguel had collected thousands of samples from a wide swath of the Martian surface, and only one, a loose rock picked up in the Meridiani region, had revealed evidence of living organisms. Possibly life, having originated there, had no time to spread before the planet dried and cooled and became a tomb for its microscopic inhabitants. Mars then slumbered for billions of years, awaiting creatures from its neighbor planet to evolve sufficiently to bring new life to it. The humans at long last came, bringing their greed and thirst for power. That brief efflorescence of native life might now remain forever buried in the sand.
If he was to prevent that, Miguel needed considerable dumb luck or a clever idea. So far, he’d had neither.
Work done, he bagged his specimens and hiked to the rover, where Jake awaited his return. Miguel still wasn’t sure what role Jake played in Nessa O’Clery’s “family” of crooks, but he seemed to have his fingers in everything. When he heard about this outing, he invited himself along as driver, turning aside objections with his creepy grin. Now here they were, two days from base, Miguel working and Jake doing nothing.
Inside the rover, Miguel removed his dusty helmet and gloves and sat in the seat next to Jake. Together, they watched the sun dip below the rim of the bank. Darkness settled quickly over the land. Miguel stared into the void.
“Something wrong?” Jake asked.
“A lot of things, but you don’t care.”
“How you knows? Name one.”
“I’m a prisoner.”
“Why you thinks that?”
Miguel didn’t know whether to laugh or punch him. He might have done both, except he’d seen Jake all but choke the life out of a man. Best not to antagonize him. “I’m as good as shackled. I need to get to Sinus Meridiani.”
“Bah. You don’t knows what you needs. Nessa knows. You listens to her.”
“Where the hell did you learn to speak English, Jake?”
In the dark, Jake shifted his weight and cracked his knuckles. “You don’t likes my English?”
Right. Don’t antagonize him. “It’s an unusual dialect, that’s all.”
“I gets it from a vid. I watches the first three parts of twenty. The others gets destroyed.”
For three lessons, he wasn’t doing half bad. “Destroyed how?”
Jake didn’t answer. His breath came quick and shallow. It must’ve been a bad memory.
Opting for safety, Miguel dropped the subject. In the deepening dark, stars flooded the sky.
Jake tapped the console, and a dim light illuminated the interior of the rover. “I gets us some food,” he said. He rose and lumbered into the back, where the supplies were stashed along the rear. He rummaged among bags and boxes before returning with a container for each of them. He tossed one to Miguel. Chicken stew. It heated itself when popped open. It tasted like salted plastic, but Jake downed it as though it was a perfectly grilled steak—the real thing, not a Martian imitation.
Jake might have sprouted from the Martian wilderness. He had its roughness, its wildness, and he was a survivor. If anyone was a true Martian, it was Jake. So why did he submit to Nessa’s rule? Curiosity getting the better of Miguel, he asked, “What are you doing here?”
Jake finished his meal and discarded the container in the trash chute. “Making sure you doesn’t kills yourself.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“You needs a handler. You does stupid things, like tries to escape. Then you ends up like Dr. Sarkozy, half dead in medical and no good to nobody.”
Miguel had to admit the possibility. The organization’s network taught him not only procedures for requisitioning rovers and supplies from field bases but also details of the governors that prevented rovers from venturing beyond Nessa’s designated perimeter. Should one exceed its limits, should its governor module be tampered with, all systems would shut down, current location would be transmitted, and any occupants could but wait for rescue or death. That wouldn’t stop him from trying. Too much was at stake.
“I mean,” he said, “why do you work for Nessa?”
“You asks too many questions.”
“It’s my job. I’m a scientist.”
“Your job is to finds minerals.”
“You said we both wanted to be remembered. What I want to be remembered for isn’t finding minerals. What about you?”
Jake stared out the viewport.
“Come on,” Miguel pressed.
“For that I kills a man.”
He must have killed more than one already, but those would have been murders of necessity. People who got out of line. Interlopers. Those weren’t killings to be remembered. Jake had his sights on someone important, but Miguel couldn’t ask. The memory of that last murder remained too near.
Jake told him anyway, in a whisper. “The man who kills my sister.” He turned, mouth quivering, hate radiating from his eyes. “Andre Rand.”
Midnight. Miguel hadn’t slept, nor had Jake. Reclining in their seats in the pitch black, they hadn’t spoken for hours, but each knew the other was awake. Whenever he closed his eyes, Miguel saw anew Jake choking the trespasser, kicking his unconscious body, ordering him thrown out the airlock to asphyxiate. The first instance of the vision sickened him. During the second, he broke out in a cold sweat. He watched the third in numb detachment and realized that, having been unwitting party to one murder, he was capable of enabling another.
The thought should have horrified him. Instead, it sparked an idea.
“I could help you,” Miguel said.
Jake didn’t reply.
“I know Carmen Rand.”
Jake made a sound, possibly a dismissive snort, possibly a laugh, possibly both.
“If you help me, I’ll help you.”
In the brief silence that followed, Jake must have considered it. But his decision was unequivocal: “Go to hell.”
Chapter 9
Work done and assurances given, all that remained was to test the technician’s claim of perfection. Fortunately, he was young, in awe, and not at all the master of his hormones.
Carmen didn’t doubt his skill or the care he’d lavished on the job. She’d watched from an upper window while in his bulky envirosuit he wandered the rubble field half a kilometer from her door, pretending to photograph the residence and the cliff into which it was built. That was his cover while he took measurements—of what she didn’t know—to determine the locations of hidden cameras. Once done, he retreated to his rover and trundled off, only to return later in a camo envirosuit, riding a camo hoverbike, tracing a convoluted route, sometimes near the cliff base, sometimes retreating until invisible, here and there pausing fifteen or twenty minutes. Following him was all but impossible. What he did during those pauses, she couldn’t say, but after considerable flitting about, he arrived at her airlock and with a wide grin pronounced her safe.
Assuming the technician’s self-assessment proved reliable, Andre would no longer know who came and went. His hidden cameras would show only the façade of her home unless she deactivated the new system. She could allow her husband to see what she wanted and hide the rest. Carmen wanted to trust the tech, but trust wasn’t prudent where Andre was concerned, so she seduced the young man, which despite his surprise wasn’t difficult. After he left the next morning, she showered and dressed and called for unannounced transport to the colony—no reporters to be informed. Upon her quiet arrival, she walked in on Andre and his advisors during their morning briefing.
Her intrusion caught him off-guard, but he hid it well. “Here for a shopping spree?” he asked.
“Came to see my husband,” she countered. “I assume that’s allowed?”
The advisors numbered five, three old men and two almost old women, all of whom Carmen knew. She ignored them, and they looked away in embarrassment.
“It’s allowed,” Andre said. “Just ill-timed, unless you’re here to file some boring report.”
“Don’t be absurd, Andre. I’ll wait in the reception room.”
Now that he couldn’t ignore her, she withdrew and took a seat in a spacious, well-appointed room just outside his office where he typically met with important guests among faux leather chairs, potted plants, a small bar, and a cherry sideboard imported from Earth. Carmen thought the sideboard looked forlorn. On it sat a small vase with white flowers and nothing else. She didn’t often come here unless her presence was required for a reception, but on those occasions, the sideboard would be spread with twice as many hors d’oeuvres as needed for the guest list.
She listened for half an hour to indistinct talk leaking from the office, then all fell quiet, and Andre entered. He had a right to be angry, but he looked pleased with himself. One of those boring reports must have contained good news. She rose, took his hands, and pecked him on the cheek.
He laughed. “You’re up to something.”
“I’m always up to something. So are you. You go first.”
He led her to a couch beneath a painting of Olympus Mons that reminded her of Hokusai’s Mt. Fuji series. They sat and gazed into each other’s eyes. Anyone watching might have thought they’d just fallen in love. It was part of the game they unceasingly played. Carmen thought it more fun than being in love, and she supposed Andre did too, else he would have long since rid himself of her.
“We break ground on Schiaparelli Colony next week. Equipment and supplies will be delivered a day ahead of schedule. Best of all, Celia Fundichely’s first installment is in the bank, so everyone gets paid on time. No word of Hernandez, but she’s taking that as a good sign.”
“That’s wonderful,” Carmen breathed. “We should celebrate.”
“I’d celebrate if you told me where the bastard went. He hasn’t come to your place recently, I suppose.”
“You know he hasn’t, and I’ve been getting lonely out there.”
Andre tangled his fingers in her hair. “Oh, is that why you want to celebrate.”
She leaned into him. “It’s a good reason, isn’t it?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t replaced him.”
Carmen brushed her lips over his. “You won’t believe this, but I didn’t want to. For some inexplicable reason, I only want you of late.”
Andre maneuvered her into his lap. “You’ve been all alone out there without even an old friend for company?”
Naturally, he knew of Yago Moncayo’s visit. His cameras had been nominal then. “With one exception,” she said in acknowledgement. “And you know his sensibilities.”
Andre kissed her hair. “You’ve been such a good girl. We should do something about that.”
“Please do.”
He shifted her off his lap and said, “One moment.” He vanished into his office. Door locks clicked into place, and she heard him give instruction to the outer office that he was not to be disturbed.
Carmen relaxed and stretched out on the couch, hair scattered, one arm behind her head, legs parted in anticipation of his return. Had Andre known of the technician or his handiwork or her dalliance with him, he would have dropped at least a hint, but he hadn’t.
