“THAT’S RIGHT.
Just contact us if you notice anything unusual. We’ll follow up on any potential links to Rahmya.”
Shiran had contacted the heads of the other security teams to line up support, most importantly the team responsible for analysis of news coming out of Earth. Her team was too small to handle that sort of monitoring on its own. Her request for assistance went out to other teams via web, and specialized AIs went to work sifting every scrap of available information. But as the sun rose on the second day of Rahmya’s mission, nothing new had emerged. Ochiai would be arriving on Deimos in twenty-four hours.
Minus 9 Hours 30 Minutes
I take the land cruiser underground, through the ice caverns. This is another reason I’m not using a desert buggy. Underground the satellites can’t see you.
AADD has thirty or so air locks between this road and the surface. I guess they’re there to stabilize subterranean conditions before they get into the serious prospecting. I’m using the caverns for a different reason. With all the work they did to map them I’d
be nuts not to use the caverns.
Problem is, for the first time the mission’s not going according to plan. The data I sourced on Earth is turning out to be pretty incomplete. I should probably blame the client too. They’re the reason AADD has started restricting data on their ore deposits, even in academic journals—and especially when someone from
Earth starts nosing around.
Still, I was able to plot a route. I don’t know how these caverns formed, but the ice in here has been frozen—what, a few hundred thousand years? A few million? The ice should be hard as rock. I should be able to drive something as heavy as this cruiser right
over it. But it’s not working out that way.
The floor was firm at first. And the cruiser is just the ticket when the ice is hard. But when I got past a certain depth, conditions deteriorated very fast. And the deeper I go the worse it gets. The
floor has changed from ice to something like melting snow.
I’m so deep under the surface now, I’m guessing the pressure is getting pretty high outside the cruiser. I have no idea why the cavern floor is the consistency of shaved ice, but it’s really complicating
my plan.
Another thing making it hard to drive is the trailer I’m pulling, with the generator and other equipment I lifted from the camp. The whole thing has to weigh a few tons. I did some dry runs on Earth, of course, using a snow cat to haul a big load of ballast. Based on that, you’d think hauling stuff on Mars should be easier, but the lower gravity is preventing me from getting the traction I need. I don’t have the weight; the tracks aren’t gripping the ice. At the same time, mass is mass. If the tracks slip, I have to deal with the same amount of inertia whipping me around.
I can’t build up a decent head of steam, but I’m still optimistic. This mission came with a lot of unknowns. I built in a cushion for surprises. I’m definitely a bit behind the original timeline, but I’ve still got time enough to prepare.
Minus 8 Hours 50 Minutes
Two disk-shaped airships twenty meters across perched on the Martian surface, identical except for the markings that showed them to be from different teams. The airship Shiran took from Kobe was decorated with a geisha, a branch of cherry blossoms extending over her head, Olympus Mons in the background. The other airship bore the insignia of the forensics team, a caravan traversing Valles Marineris. Both were hard-shell Guardian airships—not
pure airships, but rather buoyancy-assisted aircraft.
“A sandstorm that only lasts a day is a good sandstorm, for sure,” said Shiran. “Why do people keep turning up dead?” She stood next to a large surveying van wearing a hard-shell Extravehicular Mobility Unit. Several members of Samar’s team were already
collecting evidence.
The news had come from another team before dawn—all communication had been lost with one of the geological survey teams. It wasn’t that they were refusing to respond; there was no locator
signal at all.
Although this didn’t itself demonstrate a connection to Rahmya, Shiran decided to investigate immediately. There was something about this new development that was just as unnatural as the murder in Kobe. She chalked it up to intuition. And so they discovered
four more bodies.
“Professor, do you think Rahmya did this?” said Mikal.
“Even if she didn’t, I think she brought bad luck with her.”
“Not bad luck—death. She’s an assassin.”
“I don’t care who the fuck she is!” Shiran had had enough of Mikal for the moment. Twenty-four hours had passed since Rahmya had breached the Guardians’ security, and five murders had already taken place. If the hit on the surveying team had been Rahmya’s work, the body count would likely continue to rise. Shiran was not
in the best of moods.
The bodies had already been taken aboard the forensic team’s ship. Mars’s low atmospheric pressure was hard on corpses, especially
if they were mishandled.
Samar came down the ramp from the ship. “I don’t know who the Kobe killer was, but Rahmya gets the credit for this one.”
“How do you know?”
“Take a look.” He turned and went back into the ship, followed by Shiran and Mikal. They passed through the air lock into the pressurized interior, where they raised their visors before proceeding into a smaller compartment. Four naked bodies were laid out on metal tables. Shiran flinched. Mikal ran from the room, his hand
over his mouth.
Even for Shiran, the condition of the young female victim was shocking—cranium split from the bridge of the nose to the crown, eyes bulging grotesquely from exposure to the near-vacuum of Mars. Samar, a veteran, was nonchalant. He held out a small, mushroomed cylinder of metal. “We took these from the victims. They’re deformed from the impact, but the alloy matches the so-called
parts Rahmya ordered.”
“So it was her. But why kill a surveying team?”
“Maybe she stumbled across them on her way somewhere and had to silence them.” It was Mikal. He was back, looking pale. His
gaze flitted around the room, anywhere but on the bodies.
“No,” said Samar. “We recovered the girl’s web. We’re in luck. The victims were lined up and killed one by one, but this one seems to have ducked at the last moment. She was hit in the shoulder. The other three were shot through the heart, which destroyed their webs. The girl was killed by a head shot, leaving her web undamaged.”
“Then she saw the killer.”
“And the motive for the killing.”
“The motive?”
Samar didn’t answer. Instead he sent the data to Shiran’s web. Shiran now saw and heard the victim’s last moments from the
victim’s point of view:
A visor enters her field of vision. The face behind the visor is
unmistakably Rahmya’s.
What’s happening, Gong-ru? What’s wrong with my team?
You’ll be all right. It’s just a scratch. This will make the pain go away.
Rahmya smiles. Suddenly the victim’s helmet shatters.
The compartment returned; Samar had interrupted the playback. Now Shiran was looking at a freeze-frame of the victim’s last
moment of life.
“So she’s passing herself off as the Kobe victim,” said Shiran. Footage from the clans’ security cameras had identified the woman in the atmospheric treatment facility: a freelance journalist from
Earth named Gong-ru Yang.
Shiran stared at the web taken from the victim’s body. It was, of course, merely a tool, but an indispensable one for survival off-Earth. It was almost like another organ.
As a Guardian, Shiran had seen death up close many times. It wasn’t unusual for the web of a murder victim or a person killed in an accident to furnish the key to solving the case. Sometimes agent programs were even able to act as witnesses, with almost human reactions. It was as if immortality were creeping in, half unnoticed, via the hardware and software that made human survival possible.
“Is that all we have? What about the motive?”
“It’s coming,” said Samar. “Before I show you, let’s summarize what we know so far. Rahmya uses Gong-ru as her mule to collect the components for a weapon. She kills the mule and assumes her identity. Then, as Gong-ru she makes contact with the surveying team and instead of interviewing the team, she takes four precious lives. Now why in the world would she do that?”
“Cut to the chase, Samar.”
“Watch the rest of the data. Maybe our victim is trying to speak from beyond the grave. Note the corner of her field of vision, near
the cruiser and the surveying van.”
The victim’s web had continued recording. Again, Shiran was struck by the blurring of the line between human and machine
awareness.
Instead of retrieving her weapon, Rahmya brings her land cruiser behind the van. She remains mostly outside the field of vision, so it’s not clear what exactly she’s doing, but evidently she’s working on something. After a few minutes, the land cruiser crosses the victim’s field of vision, towing something.
“What is that?”
“These surveyors use high-resolution ground-penetrating radar. It’s essential for their work, but it uses a huge amount of power. You just saw Rahmya drive off with their power generator.”
“She killed them for their generator?”
“That’s the most logical assumption. Her cruiser was configured for towing. The unit she rented is equipped for off-road operation. Now we know why.”
“If she had to steal a generator, that would explain the need for a weapon. But still—is a power generator really worth four lives?”
“Depends on how critical it is to her plan.”
Shiran used her web to project a map of the surrounding region onto her retina, then superimposed the murdered surveyors’ geological survey map on it. The map included their work schedule and marked areas where they expected to find ore deposits. “Rahmya’s MO tends toward secluded locations. Places where it’s dark. Take a look at this.” She sent her composite data to the flatscreen. “Ten klicks north of here is an air lock entrance to the Hydra Ice Caverns.
It’s big enough to drive through in a vehicle.”
“Are you saying Rahmya took the cruiser into the caverns?”
“Process of elimination. She’s not on the surface. The caverns are the only place she could be. She can’t fly. And that cruiser of hers could maneuver down there. It’s built for rough environments.”
The Hydra Ice Caverns were an underground structure extending deep beneath the Martian cryosphere. The structure was fairly well mapped in the mining data because the processes that had formed the caverns were thought to be linked to the creation of Mars’s ore deposits. The caverns appeared to have been an underground river system. The formation of ore deposits on Mars was due not only to volcanism, but also to the activity of life. There was strong evidence that microbial metabolic activity was also a factor. The thick methane clathrate layer far beneath the surface was a major
piece of supporting evidence.
The caverns were known to have at least nine major branches—thus the name chosen by the surveyors who had discovered them. In addition, many passageways branched off these main caverns, most of them yet to be mapped. Over two hundred entrances had
been found and more were still being discovered.
“So she’s fled into the caverns. That makes it simple,” said
Mikal.
“Not so fast. How are we going to track her? It’s a maze in there. And below a certain depth you’ve got methane to deal with. We’d be fools to rush in without the right gear. And besides, we’ve got no idea how far inside she is already. She could’ve covered a hundred klicks by now. We can’t follow her on foot. Just the time we’d need to prepare puts her out of our reach, for sure.”
“You can’t know that!”
“Then let’s just say going after her isn’t very efficient. A lot of preliminary surveying has been going on down there. How are we supposed to tell the difference between surveyors’ tracks and
Rahmya’s? It won’t be easy.”
“But we know she’s in there. Can’t we seal the exits?”
“All two hundred of them? How long do you think that’s going to take?”
“Then what do we do, Professor?”
Shiran closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. When she opened them, she spoke without emotion. “She’s slipped away from us. I think we should just face that. She’s beaten us. There’s no way we can go after her now.” No one spoke. It was a truth no one wanted to face, but it stood before them like an unmovable object. “Let’s change the rules. She got a head start. We’re chasing her but we started late. Now we can’t catch up. What do we do?”
“Professor?”
“We find out where she’s going so we’re ready for her when she
comes. That’s the only way we can nail her.”
But everyone knew how little time was left to do that.
Minus 8 Hours 15 Minutes
I’m moving through the cavern when suddenly I notice something odd—I can see the red fan pattern of the laser range finder as it scans ahead of me. The laser light should be invisible. Before I can think this through, something smacks the cruiser, hard, shaking it violently. The four tracked feet are pretty tough for fore and aft movement, but they don’t take sudden lateral shocks too well. And
there’s not much support for them on this surface.