Red Planet Blues Read online

  “NKPD!” shouted another voice I also recognized—a deep, Scottish brogue. “Let Lomax go!”

  Joshua looked up. “Back off!” he shouted, in that female voice. “If you don’t, I’ll finish him.”

  Through blurring vision, I saw Mac say, “If you kill him, you’ll go down for murder. You don’t want that.”

  Joshua relaxed his grip a bit—not enough to let me escape, but enough to keep me alive as a hostage, at least a little while longer. I sucked in cold air, but my lungs still felt like they were on fire. In the illumination from the flashlights I could see Cassandra Wilkins’s face craning now to look at McCrae. As I’d said, most transfers didn’t show as much emotion as biologicals did, but it was clear that Joshua was panicking.

  I was still on top. I thought if I waited until Joshua was distracted, I could yank free of his grip without him snapping my neck. “Let go of him,” Mac said firmly. It was hard to see him; he was the one holding the light source, after all, but I suddenly became aware that he was also holding a large disk. “Release his neck, or I’ll deactivate you for sure.”

  Joshua practically had to roll his one good eye up into his head to see Mac, standing behind him. “You ever use one of those before?” he said. “No, I know you haven’t. I work in the transference business, and I know that technology just came out. The disruption isn’t instantaneous. Yes, you can kill me—but not before I kill Lomax.”

  “You’re lying,” said McCrae. He handed his flashlight to Pickover, and brought the disk up in front of him, holding it vertically by its two U-shaped handles. “I’ve read the specs.”

  “Are you willing to take that chance?” asked Joshua.

  I could only arch my neck a bit; it was very hard for me to look up and see Mac, but he seemed to be frowning, and, after a second, he turned partially away. Pickover was standing behind him, and—

  And suddenly an electric whine split the air, and Joshua was convulsing beneath me, and his hands were squeezing my throat even more tightly than before. The whine—a high, keening sound—must have been coming from the disruptor. I still had my hands inside Joshua’s chest and could feel his whole interior vibrating as his body continued to rack. I yanked my hands out and grabbed onto his arms, pulling with all my might. His hands popped free from my throat, and his whole female form was shaking rapidly. I rolled off him; the artificial body kept convulsing as the keening continued. I gasped for breath, and all I could think about for several moments was getting air into me.

  After my head cleared a bit, I looked again at Joshua, who was still convulsing, and then I looked up at Mac, who was banging on the side of the disruptor disk. Now that he’d activated it, he apparently had no idea how to deactivate it. As I watched, he started to turn it over, presumably hoping there was some control he’d missed on the side he couldn’t see—and I realized that if he completed his move the disk would be aimed backward, in the direction of Pickover. Pickover clearly saw this, too: he was throwing his robot-like arms up, as if to shield his face—not that that could possibly do any good.

  I tried to shout “No!,” but my voice was too raw and all that came out was a hoarse exhalation of breath, the sound of which was lost beneath the keening. In my peripheral vision, I could see Joshua lying face down. His vicious spasms stopped as the beam from the disruptor was no longer aimed at him.

  But even though I didn’t have any voice left, Pickover did, and his shout of “Don’t!” was loud enough to be heard over the electric whine of the disruptor. Mac continued to rotate the disk a few more degrees before he realized what Pickover was referring to. He flipped the disk back around, then continued turning it until the emitter surface was facing straight down. And then he dropped it, and it fell in Martian slo-mo, at last clanking against the deck plates, a counterpoint to the now-muffled electric whine. I hauled myself to my feet and moved over to check on Joshua while Pickover and Mac hovered over the disk, presumably looking for the off switch.

  There were probably more scientific ways to see if the transferee Joshua was dead, but this one felt right just then: I balanced on one foot, hauled back the other leg, and kicked the son of a bitch in the side of that gorgeous head. The impact was strong enough to spin the whole body through a quarter turn, but there was no reaction at all from Joshua.

  Suddenly the keening died, and I heard a self-satisfied “There!” from Mac. I looked over at him, and he looked back at me, caught in the beam from the flashlight Pickover was holding. Mac’s bushy orange eyebrows were raised, and there was a sheepish grin on his face. “Who’d have thought the off switch had to be pulled out instead of pushed in?”

  I tried to speak and found I did have a little voice now. “Thanks for coming by, Mac. I know how you hate to leave the station.”

  Mac nodded in Pickover’s direction. “Yeah, well, you can thank this guy for putting in the call,” he said. He turned, and faced Pickover full-on. “Just who the hell are you, anyway?”

  I saw Pickover’s mouth begin to open in his mechanical head, and a thought rushed through my mind. This Pickover was bootleg. Both the other Pickover and Joshua Wilkins had been correct: such a being shouldn’t exist and had no rights. Indeed, the legal Pickover would doubtless continue to demand that this version be destroyed; no one wanted an unauthorized copy of himself wandering around.

  Mac was looking away from me and toward the duplicate of Pickover. And so I made a wide sweeping of my head, left to right, then back again. Pickover apparently saw it because he closed his mouth before sounds came out, and I spoke as loudly and clearly as I could in my current condition. “Let me do the introductions,” I said, and I waited for Mac to turn back toward me.

  When he had, I pointed at Mac. “Detective Dougal McCrae,” I said, then I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and pointed at Pickover, “I’d like you to meet Joshua Wilkins.”

  Mac nodded, accepting this. “So you found your man? Congratulations, Alex.” He then looked down at the motionless female body. “Too bad about your wife, Mr. Wilkins.”

  Pickover turned to face me, clearly seeking guidance. “It’s so sad,” I said quickly. “She was insane, Mac—had been threatening to kill her poor husband Joshua here for weeks. He decided to fake his own death to escape her, but she got wise to it somehow and hunted him down. I had no choice but to try to stop her.”

  As if on cue, Pickover walked over to the dead artificial body and crouched beside it. “My poor dear wife,” he said, somehow managing to make his mechanical voice sound tender. He lifted his skinless face toward Mac. “This planet does that to people, you know. Makes them go crazy.” He shook his head. “So many dreams dashed.”

  Mac looked at me, then at Pickover, then at the artificial body lying on the deck plating, then back at me. “All right, Alex,” he said, nodding slowly. “Good work.”

  I tipped my nonexistent hat at him. “Glad to be of help.”

  * * *

  Three days later, I walked into the dark interior of The Bent Chisel, whistling.

  Buttrick was behind the bar, as usual. “You again, Lomax?”

  “The one and only,” I replied cheerfully. Diana was standing in her topless splendor next to the bar, loading up her tray. “Hey, Diana,” I said, “when you get off tonight, how ’bout you and me go out and paint the town . . .” I trailed off: the town was already red; the whole damned planet was.

  Diana’s face lit up, but Buttrick raised a beefy hand. “Not so fast, lover boy. If you’ve got the money to take her out, you’ve got the money to settle your tab.”

  I slapped two golden hundred-solar coins on the countertop. “That should cover it.” Buttrick’s eyes went as round as the coins, and he scooped them up immediately, as if he were afraid they’d disappear—which, in this joint, they probably would.

  “I’ll be in the booth in the back,” I said to Diana. “I’m expecting Juan; when he arrives, could you bring him over?”

  Diana smiled. “Sure thing, Alex. Meanwhile, what can I get
you? Your usual poison?”

  I shook my head. “Nah, none of that rotgut. Bring me the best Scotch you’ve got—and pour it over water ice.”

  Buttrick narrowed his eyes. “That’ll cost extra.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Start up a new tab for me.”

  A few minutes later, Diana came by the booth with my drink, accompanied by Juan Santos. He was looking at her with his usual puppy-dog-love eyes. “What can I get for you?” Diana asked him.

  He hesitated—it was clear to me, at least, what he wanted—but then he tipped his massive forehead forward. “Gin neat.”

  She nodded and departed, and he watched her go. Then he slid down into the seat opposite me. “This better be on you, Alex. You still owe me for the help I gave you at Dr. Pickover’s place.”

  “Indeed it is, my friend.”

  Juan rested his receding chin on his open palm. “You seem in a good mood.”

  “Oh, I am,” I said. “I got paid.”

  The man the world now accepted as Joshua Wilkins had returned to NewYou, where he’d gotten his face finished and his artificial body upgraded. After that, he told people it was too painful to continue to work there, given what had happened with his wife. So he sold the NewYou franchise to his associate, Horatio Fernandez. The money from the sale gave him plenty to live on, especially now that he didn’t need food and didn’t have to pay the life-support tax anymore. He gave me all the fees his dear departed wife should have—plus a healthy bonus.

  I’d asked him what he was going to do now. “Well,” he said, “even if you’re the only one who knows it, I’m still a paleontologist. I’m going to look for new fossil beds—I intend to spend months out on the surface. Who knows? Maybe there’s another deposit out there even better than the Alpha.”

  And what about the other Pickover—the official one? It took some doing, but I managed to convince him that it had actually been the late Cassandra, not Joshua, who had stolen a copy of his mind, and that she was the one who had installed it in an artificial body. I told Dr. Pickover that when Joshua discovered what his wife had done, he destroyed the bootleg and dumped the ruined body that had housed it in the basement of the NewYou building.

  Not too shabby, eh? Still, I’d wanted more. I’d rented a surface suit and a Mars buggy and headed out to 16.4 kilometers south-southwest of Nili Patera. I figured I’d pick myself up a lovely rhizomorph or a nifty pentapod, and never have to work again.

  Well, I’d looked and looked and looked, but I guess the duplicate Pickover had lied about where the Alpha Deposit was; even under torture, he hadn’t betrayed his beloved fossils. I’m sure Weingarten and O’Reilly’s source is out there somewhere, though, and the legal Pickover is doubtless hard at work thinking of ways to protect it from looters. I wish him luck.

  “How about a toast?” suggested Juan, once Diana had brought him his booze.

  “I’m game,” I said. “To what?”

  Juan frowned, considering. Then his eyebrows climbed his broad forehead, and he replied, “To being true to your innermost self.”

  We clinked glasses. “I’ll drink to that.”

  ELEVEN

  TWO MONTHS LATER

  Ihad my feet up on the desk when a camera window popped open on my monitor. The guy on my screen had obviously pushed the doorbell—that’s what activated the camera—but had then turned around. New clients rarely showed up without booking an appointment first, so I reached for my trusty Smith & Wesson, swung my feet to the floor, and aimed the gun at the sliding door. “Intercom,” I said into the air, then: “Yes? Who are you?”

  The jamoke looked back at the camera—and I saw that half his face was dull metal with only traces of artificial pinkish beige skin still attached. But the voice! I recognized that cultured British accent at once. “Good afternoon, Mr. Lomax. I wonder if I might have a word?”

  I placed the gun on the desk and said, “Open.” The door slid aside, revealing the transfer in the—well, not the flesh. “Jesus, Rory,” I said. “What happened to you?”

  There was movement on the surface of the metal forehead—little motors that would have lifted eyebrows had they still been there, I supposed. “What? Oh. Yes. I need to get this fixed.”

  “Get into a bar fight?” I thought maybe the old broken-beer-bottle-in-the-kisser routine could slice through plastiskin.

  “Me?” he replied, as if astonished by the notion. “No, of course not.” He extended his right hand. “It’s good to see you again, Alex.” His handshake—controlled by the artificial body’s computer—was perfect: just the right pressure and duration.

  With the skin half blasted away, his face looked almost as robotic as that of the unauthorized copy of him I’d rescued from the Skookum Jim. I went back to my seat and motioned to the client chair. Pickover was carrying a boxy metal case with a thick handle attached to the lid. He placed it on my threadbare carpet then sat.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked.

  “I’m hoping to engage your services, old boy.”

  “You want me to get whoever did that to you?” I said, making a circular motion with my outstretched hand to indicate his damaged face. “A little revenge?”

  “It’s not that. Or, at least, it’s not precisely that.”

  “What, then?”

  Pickover rose and effortlessly picked up the metal case he’d just put down. “May I?” he said, gesturing with his free hand at my desk. I nodded, and he placed the box on the surface—and from the thud it made, the thing must have weighed fifty kilos. Memo to self: never arm-wrestle a transfer.

  He unlatched the box, and I stood to survey its contents. The interior was lined with blue foam-rubber pyramids, and sitting inside was a hunk of gray rock, half a meter at its widest and shaped vaguely like Australia. Although it was mostly flat, there were five indentations in its surface. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The counter slab to two-dash-thirteen-eighty-eight.”

  “Counter slab?”

  “The negative to a positive; the other side. If you split rock that has a fossil within, there’s the actual fossil—a shell, say—on one side, and there’s a negative image, or mold, of the same thing on the other side. The part with the fossil is the slab; the other part is the counter slab. Collectors sometimes take the former and discard the latter, although a real paleontologist sees value in both.”

  “And two-dash-whatever?”

  “The prefix two denotes O’Reilly and Weingarten’s second expedition, and thirteen-eighty-eight is the catalog number of the type specimen of Noachiana oreillii—a kind of pentapod—that’s now in the Royal Ontario Museum back on Earth. This is the other part of that piece of matrix; I know the slab like—well, like the back of the hand I originally had.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “I knew I’d found a rich bed of fossils—but, of course, there might be several of those; there was no reason to think that what I’d discovered actually was Weingarten and O’Reilly’s Alpha Deposit. Until I found this counter slab, that is—that’s proof that I’m actually working the Alpha.”

  “Fair enough,” I replied. “But what’s that got to do with you getting your face blown off?”

  Pickover reached into the box and lifted the counter slab about half a meter using both hands—I doubt it required the strength of both, but he was likely being careful with the specimen. He set it down and then removed a large square of bubble wrap. With it gone, I could see what was at the bottom of the box: a flat metal disk about forty centimeters in diameter and six centimeters thick. The device was broken open, its mechanical guts gummed up by Martian sand—but there was no mistaking what it was: a land mine.

  “Holy crap,” I said.

  “Exactly,” replied Pickover. “Someone booby-trapped the Alpha.”

  I gestured at Pickover’s damaged face. “I take it there’s more than one land mine, then?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. One of those damn things went off near me. If I’d been right on t
op of it, it would have blown me to—and here’s a word I’ve never had cause to use hitherto in my life—smithereens.”

  That’s the difference between Pickover and me: I’d never once used “hitherto,” but “smithereens” came up often in my line of work. He went on. “As is, it took out a wonderful specimen of Shostakia I’d been working on.”

  “What set the mine off?”

  “I was jackhammering a few meters away to remove a piece of matrix, completely unaware of the mine buried under the sand. The vibrations from the hammer must have triggered it.”

  I frowned. The New Klondike Police Department wouldn’t care about this. Keeping order—more or less—under the dome was all that mattered to them; what happened outside it interested Mac and his crew about as much as the opera did. Still, I said, “Have you spoken to the NKPD?”

  If he’d had a nose left, Pickover might have wrinkled it in disgust. “I can’t involve that lot. I’d have to show them where the Alpha is, and they’re corrupt. And so I came to you.”

  Process of elimination; one way to get work. “Thanks. But what’s the mystery, then? Surely it was Weingarten and O’Reilly who planted the land mines, no? After all, if they were leaving Mars for an extended period—”

  “—they might want to protect their find,” Pickover said, finishing for me. “That’s what I thought at first—and certainly this thing has been in the ground for a long time.” He’d already set the counter slab on my desktop, and he now reached into the metal box and pulled out the ruined land mine. “But I searched to see who had manufactured this device.” He pointed to some incised markings on the disk’s perimeter. “Of course, it wasn’t sold as a land mine; those are illegal. It’s described as a mining explosive that just happens to have a pressure-sensitive trigger switch; it could also be detonated by remote control, by a coded radio signal. Anyway, this was made by a company in Malaysia called Brisance Industries. The particular model is the Caldera-7, and the Caldera-7 was introduced eighteen months after O’Reilly and Weingarten were killed. No way it was part of the supplies brought along on any of their expeditions here.”