A hologram of a man Ming didn't recognize had appeared in one of the vacant chairs. He was short with thinning hair under a straw boater and pale disturbing eyes. His gaze mack it hard for her to concentrate. While she fended off a typically asinine attempt by Washington to shift the refugee-counselling costs on to her R&D budget she tried to work out who he could be.
There was no identification tag on the table in front of him. They were optional but officials generally used them to impress their importance on the viewer. Not a bureaucrat then, and not a politician either: they usually smiled and the man wasn't smiling. A troubleshooter then, some slick know-it-all from the private sector put in place by the bastard Rodriguez to keep an eye on her.
Without looking down Ming ran her fingers across he console, lapping in the code for a signal trace. She waited for half a minute and glanced down. The trace report stated that no signal was being broadcast to the conference seat indicated.
'This meeting is over,' Ming told the mandarins and terminated the conference link. The hologram mandarins derezzed before they could protest.
If only I could do that for real, thought Ming.
He of course didn't vanish; he stayed real and solid in his chair. How could she have mistaken him for a hologram?
'Are you the manager?' asked the man.
'What's it to you?'
'Your transit system would like to have a word with you,' said the man. 'It has some complaints.'
Olympus Mons West
Lambada's MIG espresso machine was still warm but otherwise the crew room was deserted. The cards from an interrupted game of damage were scattered on the table. Blondie wondered if they were from the same game that Dogface and Old Sam had argued about - what, two, three days ago?
Tinkerbell greeted him with a delighted squeal when he opened his locker. The ten-centimetre girl was on the top shelf of the locker. 'Hi sweetie,' she said. Unless Blondie responded or shut the locker door, Tinkerbell would repeat the greeting every thirty seconds or so until its batteries ran down. He took her out of the locker and held her in the palm of his hand. The cheap hologram faded badly under the crew-room lights. Tinkerbell pouted and put a tiny red-nailed hand against her hip. He'd picked her up during a shopping trip in the Moscow ginza, a non-financial transaction as they used to call them. It took him thirty-six hours to learn how to program it, his unbroken concentration driven on by a turbocharged teenage libido. It had unlocked his talent and his talent had driven him down the Central Line to this place. The day he quit the Stop, Tinkerbell was one of the few things he didn't leave behind.
He considered altering her configuration, darkening the skin tone, changing the hair and face. He'd have to reduce the cartoon breasts, thicken the waist slightly and narrow the hips. The clothes were wrong too; he couldn't imagine Kadiatu in thigh-length boots with decimetre heels, much as he'd like to. He put Tinkerbell back on the top shelf of the locker. 'Sorry,' he said. 'But I don't love you anymore.'
Blondie took out a clean set of coveralls, changed and fixed himself a coffee from the MIG. The tangle of chromed pipes shuddered and ejected a stream of steaming liquid into his mug. Blondie found there was no milk; milk had been Dogface's job this week. He took the drink through to the office and sat down at his desk. Sipping the coffee he punched up two status monitors, the screens forming in the air at head height. The desk booted up a looksee program he'd written during his second day on the job. It checked that all his drones were out doing their jobs.
The older floozies were very attached to their drones, and as a result, Blondie had got the pick of the new Nigerian YI3560s. Dogface said he was welcome to them, he felt that a transfer would degrade the personality templates he had spent years building up.
Five of Blondie's drones were doing routine work in various parts of the system, two were laid up in the shop and one was missing. Blondie took a quick look around on manual while the console scared up a search program. The Central Line was still closed to normal traffic on the approaches to Lowell Depot: yellow emergency icons were scattered all over the Pluto network.
Movement caught his eye amongst the transPluto feeders. He scaled down the map and switched representation over to traffic density. The thickness of the lines now indicated movements per hour. The central passenger and freight lines were double the width of every other line. Lots of emergency service and military stuff.
The Pluto network was fishing line thin. Most of it had been built during the boom of the last decade and was hardly used. However, something nagged at Blondie, a pattern just off the edge of his perception. Working quickly he customized an off-the-shelf pattern-recognition program and applied it to the map.
It looked like a spider web: lines of high density traffic radiating from a central hub centred on the unused depot ai Managona. When he switched to the remote monitors at Managona he found they were non-operational. Blondie tried the signalling subsystems but they were non-responsive, even with the maintenance override.
He thought suddenly of cancer, individual cells rebelling against the body, striking off in new and dysfunctional directions. Subversion of the natural order.
Like a virus, the Doctor had said.
He punched into the floozie comm circuit and got Lambada.
'I've got to talk to the Doctor,' he told her.
'He's gone,' said Lambada. 'Took off with your girlfriend about ten minutes ago. Commandeered Ming's VIP shuttle.'
'Where to?'
'Somewhere in the Canyonlands, I think. Talk to this one, she knows more about it.' Lambada stepped away from the camera to reveal a pale-faced young woman in a ripped-up leather jacket.
It was Zamina.
Achebe Gorge
Acturus Station to Achebe Gorge was five minutes in the prioritized VEP shuttle. The Doctor and Kadiatu did the journey standing up, overrode the door controls and left the shuttle while it was still moving.
The OXFAM information centre didn't want to give them Benny's location. 'Privileged data,' said the man behind the counter. Kadiatu kept the man distracted by threatening to break his fingers while the Doctor raided the files. He was the fastest console operator Kadiatu had ever seen.
'Kanger Crossing,' said the Doctor. 'Where is it?'
Kadiatu surreptitiously leant a little bit harder on the man's hand until he agreed to take them. The OXFAM worker had an open-topped four-by-four parked round the back. It looked like something he'd built in his spare time.
'I'll drive,' said the Doctor.
'It's got manual gears,' protested the OXFAM man.
'So have I,' said the Doctor.
There was a grinding sound from under the seats and the jeep lurched off. Directions from the OXFAM man put them on a tarmac road heading roughly east. The small Martian sun was high overhead and as the jeep topped a ridge Kadiatu could see the dark smudge of the memorial forest to the north.
Every tree a soldier.
Four hundred and fifty thousand, not counting Paris.
She buried her father there three years back, in the plot for soldiers who'd outlived their war, under a Douglas fir with her mother.
Pale green sunlight on the needle carpet.
Kadiatu knew what had happened when she saw that the door to the bungalow was open. She went in behind the Doctor wishing she'd asked Francine for a gun.
Benny's resettlement officer was face down over the kitchen table. Single stab wound from behind, under the fourth rib and into the right auricle according to the Doctor.
'Instantaneous,' he said. 'Probably a carving knife.'
'His mother lived with him,' said the OXFAM man.
'In the bathroom,' said the Doctor. 'The tap's dripping.'
Kadiatu went towards the door.
'Wait,' said the Doctor. 'Listen, you can hear the air move '
He was through the door with such suddenness that Kadiatu hardly saw him move. She heard a window break at the rear of the house. 'The jeep,' shouted the Doctor.
'Call the police,' Kadiatu told the OXFAM man.
Outside a figure sprinted across the garden for the parked jeep. The Doctor was right behind her. Kadiatu got a look at the person's face as she cut across the lawn to head her off. It was the woman from the cavern. The woman saw her and swung her left arm round to point at Kadiatu.
Kadiatu heard a bang as she flung herself down and the flat whine of a subsonic projectile going overhead.
Damn, thought Kadiatu, left-handed and I didn't see the gun.
Benny jumped into the jeep and reached quickly down to start it. Kadiatu watched as the Doctor sprinted and jumped for the back of the jeep. He scrambled on board, fighting for a grip as Benny threw the jeep into a screeching three-point turn.
Kadiatu got to her feet and chased them up the drive. The jeep veered to the right and hit a banked verge. The Doctor was catapulted into a low line of bushes. The jeep rolled over once and ended up on its side, striking sparks off the tarmac.
Kadiatu reached the Doctor just as a police siren dopplered overhead towards the bungalow, a blue-painted drone circling in to seal off the crime scene.
'That way,' said the Doctor. Benny had fought free of the jeep and took off to the west. They set off after her but a second police-drone appeared over the ridge and veered to intercept them.
'Can you lose the drone?' asked the Doctor.
Kadiatu stopped and swung her extensions over her shoulder. She untangled a matt black cube and twisted the microswitch on the top with a fingernail. The police-drone wobbled uncertainly for a moment and turned back towards the bungalow. Kadiatu said a silent prayer for Lunar Max, a scumbag but an honest scumbag.
The ground began to slope upwards and the going got slow.
'She's heading for that escarpment,' said the Doctor.
The cliff wall projected inwards across the canyon floor for fifteen kilometres in a wedge-shaped escarpment. The Doctor and Kadiatu were running up through the carefully managed deciduous woods that covered the slope of an ancient landslide at its base.
The escarpment vanished upwards into the atmospheric haze. Kadiatu thought she saw the glint of sunlight on glass at the top.
'There's a lift up the wall,' said Kadiatu.
The lifts rode up inside a box-girder shaft bolted on to the rockface. The Doctor shaded his eyes and looked towards the foot of the canyon wall.
'Do you think she went there?' he asked.
'Must have done,' said Kadiatu.
There was a hole ripped in the chain-link fence near the gate. The Doctor held it open as Kadiatu ducked through. There was a squat windowless building at the base of the lifts and they made for that. The front door was open. Inside was a single large room stacked with storage pallets. The lift shafts, four of them, were placed against the far wall. The black iron framework had been riveted together. Kadiatu was reminded of the antique train they'd ridden to the house in Kent. There was a High Voltage warning sign above each of the lifts. She guessed they ran by linear induction. The shafts vanished downwards as well as up.
'There must be a transit station down there,' said Kadiatu.
The Doctor checked the indicator lights. 'She went up,' he said.
The lift doors opened with the unmistakeable whump sound of pressure seals.
'Pressurized,' said the Doctor. 'It must go all the way to the top.' He pressed a button and the lift accelerated smoothly upwards. 'How much time does she have on us do you think?' he asked.
'Twenty minutes,' said Kadiatu. 'Why's she going up to the rim rather than down to the transit station? She could be well away by now.'
'Perhaps she thought we'd have the station covered.'
'Perhaps we should have,' said Kadiatu. 'Why didn't we?'
'That would have involved the security forces,' said the Doctor. 'They're very nervous right now and that makes then trigger happy. They might have shot her.'
The lift indicator showed them one kilometre up the cliff Outside the small window the girders had become a flickering blur. Through them Kadiatu could see the sky growing visibly darker.
'Would that be such a bad thing?' asked Kadiatu.
'Bernice is my friend,' said the Doctor.
'She's killed a lot of people.'
'She's killed nobody,' said the Doctor. 'The real murderer is whatever it is that's using her. That's your killer.'
'She could at least try to resist it.'
'She is resisting it, that's why we're here,' said the Doctor 'I'm not even sure that I could resist it myself.'
'I'd have resisted it,' said Kadiatu.
'You,' said the Doctor, 'have a lot to learn.'
The lift started decelerating at around the two-kilometre mark and finally eased itself up into an airlock. A double set of doors opened to reveal a rough concrete corridor lined with portholes.
'Any ideas?' asked the Doctor.
'This is one of those rim stations,' said Kadiatu. 'They run ground transports out on to the Tharsis Bulge from here.'
'You're sure?'
'Yeah,' said Kadiatu. She was sure because Gaelic Five did a pretty good drama series called
Dustkart
which ran in perpetual syndication dubbed into thirty-six languages.
The corridor turned a ninety-degree comer and then split in two. One branch went up a ramp to the left, the other carried straight on.
'Left,' said the Doctor.
The ramp opened up into a deserted gallery thirty metres long, a teak bar ran the length of one wall opposite a single gigantic picture window. Chairs covered in treated zebra hide were scattered in front of the window, which overlooked the Thaisis Plain.
'Sunset Bar,' said the Doctor.
Kadiatu checked out the view. They were at least a hundred metres above the plain. A beetle-like dustkart was pulling out from underneath the gallery, red dust kicking up beneath its fat tyres.
'Look,' she told the Doctor, 'we must be above the hangar.'
'We came the wrong way,' said the Doctor.
They scrambled back down the ramp and followed the straight corridor until it too split two ways.