The Tangled Stars, page 14
“We need someone with connections, and we need a bit of muscle. I told you that.”
“But you haven’t told me why.” I held up my hand. “I mean, I understand he might have valuable connections. But I don’t understand why we need muscle. We’re not planning to shoot our way into the museum, are we? That’s not usually your style. And it definitely isn’t mine.”
“No,” Laysa said. “But we might have to shoot our way out.”
We stopped, still five stops short of our destination, and were joined by a red-haired woman with a small daughter with even redder hair, who spent the next four stops staring at me with big green eyes, as though I were the most alarming thing she’d ever seen. It made me wonder if I’d grown horns.
One stop before ours, mother and child departed, the mother giving me an apologetic smile. “She’s shy around strangers,” she said. The girl looked back as she was tugged out and stuck her tongue out at me. I glanced at the screen displaying the stop name above the door: Octavia E. Butler Landing: Perseverance Museum. I had no idea what it meant.
The final leg of the journey only took a couple of minutes—no time to pester Laysa for more answers. Not that she would have given me any. I settled for a brief indulgence in sarcasm. “Maybe the better question is why you need me. You seem to have taken over this entire operation.”
That actually seemed to give her pause. “I haven’t,” she said. “Once we have it, the starship will be yours to command. No question. You put all this in motion. You recruited me. Think of what I’m doing right now as making use of the authority you delegated to me.”
“Well,” I said, feeling somewhat mollified. “Okay, then.”
“The one you have to watch out for taking over the entire operation is Thibauld,” she added, and she timed her delivery of the line so perfectly that the doors opened at our stop and she was already on her feet and moving before I could decide whether she was joking or not.
We found ourselves, indeed, right up against the wall of Jezero Crater. Apartment buildings had been built up above us on the crater wall, visible through the curved ceiling of pressure glass that covered the street. Those apartments must have offered spectacular views out over the rest of the city and the spaceport, away off in the northeast. From up there, the Ernest Cox would be clearly visible.
We weren’t going up, though. Instead, Laysa led me along a street paved in gold—well, gold-colored bricks, anyway. Maybe closer to yellow. The pressure glass drew further away above our heads as we approached what seemed to be the mouth of a canyon, set in the crater wall. The structures I could see farther up the canyon looked very ritzy indeed, but we didn’t get any closer because our destination, The Crater Wall, was right at the canyon’s mouth.
I’d imagined Ilya scraping out a living in some dismal dive, lying low so there was no chance his murderous brother-in-law might find out he was still alive and finish him off. But The Crater Wall was a classy place, and believe me, I know bars. Intimately. I pretty much lived in them after Laysa kicked me out of the inner system. Came close to dying in one, too, but that’s another story.
It was the kind of place I liked because it was busily pretending it wasn’t on Mars at all. It was carved out of the crater rim, but the part that emerged from that stone was built of extruded faux wood and plaster to mimic something from Old Earth, or at least the way Old Earth was portrayed in popular entertainment, which was as close as I’d ever come to a history lesson. (Unless you count the Bible as history. That I’d had drilled into me pretty thoroughly.) No doubt Thibauld could have told me exactly what era was being mimicked, but he wasn’t there.
There was even a signboard hanging from a beam sticking out from the wall and swinging in the breeze. Since there was no breeze—despite the spaciousness of the street, we were still literally under glass—that motion must have been mechanically produced. Still, it was effective.
We went inside through big double doors that stood open to the street. The interior matched the exterior: beams spanning the big main room, shadowed booths along the walls, bigger booths in the corners, and stairs leading to somewhere up above—rooms for private parties, if I had to guess, and possibly much more intimate get-togethers, as well. A delicious smell of roasting animal protein filled the space, and the beers I could see on the tables around me looked eminently quaffable.
I was about to ask Laysa what we’d do if Ilya wasn’t there, hoping she’d say we’d have supper and a few drinks, when I saw him behind the bar.
He’d aged since our adventures on Luna (unlike you? a snide part of my brain jibed). His face was lined, and the hair I remembered as pitch-black had gray streaks in it. But he was still a full two meters tall and must have massed 110 kilos, and his shoulders were still so broad I thought, if he did come aboard the Ernest Cox, he might have to turn sideways to navigate the doorways.
He’d just pulled a pint of beer from a tap marked Burroughs Brown when his eyes fell on the two of us, standing just inside the door. He froze, just for a second, but then he handed the beer to the customer at the bar, an elderly man whose hand shook as he took it, turned and said something to the green-haired woman working alongside him, and came around the end of the bar, wiping his hands on his apron, to greet us.
At least, that’s what I hoped he planned to do. As he got closer, he seemed taller, or else I felt shorter. And skinnier. And punier. His gaze arrowed from me to Laysa as he planted himself in front of us. There was a pregnant pause, then his face split into a wide grin. “Laysa! Coop!” he said. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes. What brings you to Mars?”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and glanced at Laysa. She didn’t seem to share my relief. She looked like a woman with something on her mind. “I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do,” she said, which . . . was not at all what I expected. Maybe she doesn’t have something on her mind, I thought. Maybe she’s lost it.
But Ilya clearly heard something else, or at least something more, than I did. His faux-hail-fellow-well-met face fell away, replaced with a blankness perfect for either playing poker or executing someone with a single bullet to the head. I really hoped we hadn’t just triggered the latter. The Ilya I’d known on the moon was certainly capable of it.
“Interesting,” he said. He glanced around. “I can spare a few minutes. Come into my office.”
Ilya’s office, tucked away in a corridor behind the bar that also led to the kitchen, was considerably more ordinary than what I expected from the one-time second-in-command of Luna’s most powerful crime family. There was absolutely nothing personal to be seen on its plain pseudo-oak desk, its beige walls, or the shelves along one side, which held industrial-sized canisters of things like tomato sauce and olive oil (presumably made with plants grown in one of the Martian underground farms, since The Crater Wall did not look like the sort of place that catered to the sort of people who could afford to pay the sort of prices shipped-in-from-Earth foodstuffs commanded).
Ilya sat behind the desk in a bog-standard black office chair and motioned for us to sit in the two black-webbing-on-chrome-tubing chairs across from him. Laysa sat on the left. I sat on the right.
Ilya leaned forward. “All right,” he said. “What’s all this about?”
“You haven’t given the countersign,” Laysa said stiffly.
Ilya’s eyebrow lifted. “Really? You have some doubt I’m Ilya Stadnyk, whom you made the trek to Mars to speak to?”
“Please,” Laysa said.
Ilya shrugged. “The moon is a harsh mistress.”
That made even less sense than what Laysa had said. Also, countersign? What the hell? Just what had Laysa been up to in the ten years since I left the moon? Before I’d left, she certainly hadn’t had any connection to . . .
The thought died in my head. No, all I could honestly say was that I certainly hadn’t been aware of any connection she might have had to Ilya and the Kain organization. Which wasn’t actually the same thing at all.
Well, screw that, I thought. I have my own connection. “How’re you doing, Ilya?” I said. “Long time no see, since I helped you get whatever-that-was out of that storage facility that’s now a rather large crater.”
“It has been a while, Coop,” Ilya said. “Wasn’t too long after that that you disappeared. I only heard rumors where you’d gone. Wasn’t sure you were still alive.”
“I could say the same about you. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard you weren’t. Something about food poisoning.” I could feel Laysa looking particle beams at me, presumably for daring to step into the conversation without her approval and without the slightest idea of what all her cloak-and-daggering was about. “But, yeah, I’m still alive. Got a little hot on the moon, so I hightailed it to the outer system.” Somehow, I’d started using Western-action-adventure slang, but it seemed appropriate. “I’ve been running a salvage operation.”
He grinned. “Salvage, or pre-salvage?”
“Bit of both.”
Ilya turned his piercing gaze on Laysa. “So, Coop, what are you doing in the company of a Free Mooner?”
“I only found out a short while ago that’s what she is.”
“And it’s not something we normally just say out loud like that,” Laysa said, scowling at Ilya.
He lifted his hands and looked around the office. “Who’s going to hear? And who on Mars would even care?”
“There are Earthforce agents here,” Laysa said.
“Aside from them. Mars doesn’t care about freeing the moon or overthrowing the Earth government or any of other largely hallucinatory goals adopted by any of the myriads of so-called revolutionary movements infesting the system. Mars cares about trade. As long as it keeps flowing in and out and Mars gets its cut, it’s happy.”
“The question is, do you care?” Laysa demanded. “You knew the sign and countersign. On the moon, you carried out some pretty big raids to help build Free Mooner supplies.” She nodded at me. “Including one with him.”
Wait, what? “That surface gig was a Free Mooner operation?”
“It served the Free Mooner operation, would be a better way to put it,” Ilya said mildly. “They were running guns through that storage facility, but the operation had been compromised. It so happened there was something there I wanted, too—the object you retrieved for me. I killed two birds with one stone.” He sat back in his chair and regarded Laysa levelly. “I’ve been away from the moon almost as long as Coop here. I’m a Martian now.”
“Are you saying you don’t care about the moon?”
“I’m saying I don’t care about Free Mooner political goals,” Ilya corrected. “Not the same thing. Oh, and I’m also saying, I never did, not the way true believers do. I thought some revolutionary chaos would keep Earthforce so busy I could make a lot of money for the family and build our power while they were distracted. That was where your goals and mine came together.”
Laysa actually looked shaken. Clearly, this wasn’t how she’d imagined this conversation proceeding at all.
I shook my head and sighed. “Ilya, I want you to know I knew nothing about this Free Mooner business when I was still on the moon.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t have thought you would, Coop. You were always about the game.”
The game. My mentor, Shakespeare, had used that term once or twice. I didn’t really think of what I did as a game—it was all about survival—but I suppose it did have game elements. Certainly, when I beat a security system or conned someone into handing me the very thing I wanted without me having to lift a finger to steal—I mean, pre-salvage—it, I felt like I’d won.
“You’re right,” I said now, rather than argue the term. “And I’ve got the mother lode in my sights.”
“Bit of a mixed metaphor there,” Ilya said, “but do go on.”
“Coop,” Laysa said warningly. “My reason for thinking we could trust Ilya to help us just evaporated.”
“Funny,” I said. “My reasons for thinking I could trust him just condensed. I understand people who look after themselves. Revolutionaries, not so much.”
“‘A hit! A palpable hit!’” Ilya said.
“Do we or do we not still need the help of him or someone like him?” I said to Laysa.
Laysa let out a puff of aggravated breath. “We do.”
“And do you know of anyone else we might be able to find to help us here on Mars?”
This time, she shook her head but somehow managed to convey even more aggravation.
I turned back to Ilya. “You pretend not to be interested in the moon, and maybe that’s true politically. But there’s one person there you’re very interested in, I’ll bet.”
Ilya didn’t exactly stiffen, but he suddenly became very still. His eyes narrowed slightly. “Who?”
“Terrance Kain.”
His lips tightened, and his nostrils flared, but his voice remained calm. “I wouldn’t mind having a word with him,” he said. “Preferably alone in an air lock with me in a pressure suit and him naked.”
“And what would it take to make that happen?”
“More money than I can currently, or for the foreseeable future, put my hands on.”
“Well,” I said, “what I’m about to tell could make you the second-richest man in the system. Would that suffice?”
“Second-richest?”
I grinned. “After me.”
“Coop,” Laysa said warningly.
“Stuff it, Ranger Grey,” I said.
And then I told Ilya that MASTT Primus was back, and we needed his help stealing the only ship in the system that could travel through it to New Earth. “Interested?” I finished.
Ilya smiled a smile I’d seen once before, just before we started the operation to raid the surface storage facility on the moon. Or rather, the one I’d seen before, predatory and cold, had been a kind of faint precursor to this one.
“Coop,” he said, “I’m your man.” He glanced at Laysa. “Luna liberate!”
If his look had been predatory, hers was poisonous.
Chapter Eighteen
“Many humans profess to hate meetings. Personally, I love them. I’ve had some of my best naps during meetings, and there are lots of laps to choose from.”
—Thibauld’s Private Log
Laysa supposed she had been foolish to hope that Ilya Stadnyk had been a true supporter of the Free Moon cause, but she was deeply disappointed to discover he hadn’t even been a shallow supporter—that his only reasons for supporting the Free Mooners had been mercenary.
Which Coop, of course, was able to work with, she thought sourly. He’s as mercenary as they come. Lovable enough back when they were together, but she cared about things in a way he didn’t. Has he even thought about what it will mean if interstellar travel resumes?
Coop’s prime objective, she knew, was to get Galioto off his back—and to maybe somehow make a fortune. But New Earth hadn’t been a friend of Earth before the Great Cataclysm. It had been a friend of Luna. New Earth agents had helped the nascent Free Moon movement all those decades ago. The Free Mooners wanted a place they could organize and operate freely, and their cause had resonated so richly with the New Earthers (who had their own reasons for resenting Old Earth), that there’d been talk, just before the Cataclysm, of military backing for a revolution on the moon, which would then have become a protectorate of New Earth—and a beachhead from which it could keep Old Earth in check.
The Free Mooners had been struggling, ever since the Cataclysm, to regain the strength they’d had before. So Laysa, Coop, and Ilya all saw great potential in the reopening of the MASTT network—they just all saw different potentials. And hers, she was convinced, mattered in a way the others’ did not.
They had adjourned from Ilya’s office to his private apartment in the crater wall above The Crater Wall, with a striking view of Mars City One, a sparkling panorama of multicolored lights much brighter than the stars. Ilya had brought out a bottle of genuine Earth wine—Chateau Petrus, the label read—worth a fortune everywhere in the system.
It was a shame, Laysa thought as she gingerly sipped from the goblet he’d just handed her, that she really didn’t like the stuff. She drank it anyway, partly to be sociable and partly because it was kind of like draining funds from Ilya, which right now gave her petty, vengeful satisfaction—the best kind.
Coop was clearly enjoying his portion more than she was enjoying hers, just as he had ended up enjoying this entire encounter more than she had.
She was in one of a pair of chairs upholstered in plush black fabric that faced a long infinity-topped coffee table, the name of the finish derived from the way it looked like a hole into space when you stared down into it, with stars and galaxies gleaming light-years away.
Ilya sat on the matching couch, highlighted with blood-red throw pillows, on the other side of the tables. His entire living room was done in black and red and white (the latter being the color of the walls and carpet). The kitchen, visible across a bar-height glass wall behind him, was so completely automated Laysa thought it could probably have synthesized something close in taste, if not prestige, to the wine they were sipping.
Come to think of it, maybe it had. The bottle looked authentic, but then, it would, wouldn’t it?
“All right,” Ilya said, sitting with his legs crossed and one arm thrown over the back of the couch. “What’s the plan?”
Coop looked at Laysa. Oh, sure, she thought. Now you hand the controls back to me.
She sighed and put down her glass on the disconcerting tabletop, where it appeared to be floating on nothing. “The only way to traverse a MASTT is with a specialized . . .”
“A specialized starship,” Ilya interrupted. “I know that. Equipped with something called . . . RASHER, am I right? And even then, the MASTT has to be kept stable by anchors at both ends. The only way to pass through an unstabilized MASTT is with a special type of starship, and it just so happens there is still one such functional starship in the system, the Pioneer-class vessel Jeanne Baret, currently residing at the Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago, resting in a landing cradle on an artificial island a kilometer offshore in Lake Michigan.”
