Waypoint Kangaroo (7 page)

“Interplanetary,” I say. “Imports, exports, tariffs, duties, taxes. Most people don't realize how much commerce there is between all the inner planets and our asteroid belt colonies. And of course, trade regulations have changed quite a bit since the war.”

I don't have to name the conflict. Everyone knows I'm talking about the Independence War. A lot of things changed after Mars graduated from being a colony world to a full-blown planetary rival, and most of them don't make anybody happy.

All eight of the other passengers at the table are from Earth, six of them are American, and four are especially patriotic and talkative. The captain's eyes are livelier now, watching with genuine interest. He no longer needs to drive the conversation. I wonder how many of his dinner guests expect him to be the master of ceremonies throughout the entire meal.

The background music in the dining room fades for a moment, and a male announcer's voice tells us that
Dejah Thoris
has passed Lunar orbit and is now in interplanetary space. A smattering of applause follows, and then the music resumes.

One of the women at my table asks the captain how fast we're traveling. He consults his wristband display and answers her precisely, in kilometers per hour, then adds that the ship is still accelerating—that's why it feels like we have gravity.

“Just under nine meters per second squared,” Santamaria says. “That's about ninety percent of Earth normal.”

Dejah Thoris
will continue accelerating, he explains, until we reach “midway”—the middle waypoint of our trip, halfway between Earth and Mars—on the fourth day. Then the engines will throttle down until the ship's at zero acceleration again, propelled forward only by inertia, and we'll be in freefall. That will last for one full day, during which several sections will be converted into weightless open spaces. Passengers can register for sessions of various zero-gee activities, aided by crew chaperones and recorded by flying cam-bots like the one following the captain around now.

Everyone else at the table looks excited—“Weightless Day” is one of the big selling points of this cruise—and I feign enthusiasm. These people haven't suffered through hundreds of hours of military spacewalk training. Well, maybe Captain Santamaria. His beard hides most of his face, but his skin is aged and mottled from exposure. I wonder if he was in the Outer Space Service before retiring to this cushy job.

Santamaria continues his breakdown of our voyage. During midway,
Dejah Thoris
will slowly rotate until the ship is facing backward, with the engines pointing in our direction of travel. Then everyone will go to sleep, and wake up again under point nine gravity, only this time we'll be decelerating until we reach Mars orbit.

The purpose of all this, he explains, is to shorten the time it takes to make the trip. We build up a lot of speed during the first half, and we need to burn it off during the second half, otherwise we'd completely overshoot our target at several thousand kilometers per hour. Once we get to Mars, we'll dock with the space elevator there, and the passengers will disembark to continue our holiday on the red planet.

That includes me. I'll ride the Mars elevator down and meet my contact in Capital City, who will tell me whether it's safe for me to go back to Earth. If so, I'll board a high-gee military transport and endure a fast return trip—hours instead of days. If not, I've got a date with the tourist traps around the Martian polar ice caps.

The last time I saw those ice caps was the day the Independence War started. I saw them out the window of a private spaceplane, one of the last vessels to break Mars orbit before Earth warships established a blockade. Paul recalled me as soon as the shooting started. I was ready to evacuate—as the most junior agent at Galle Crater station, I routinely got stuck with the least interesting surveillance and maintenance tasks—but I didn't expect to be the only passenger on that flight home.

I never asked Paul how difficult or expensive it was to get me off Mars that day. I don't really want to know.

Our Captain's Table dinner arrives. It is an extravagant, multicourse indulgence of red meat, seafood, more meat, hot cheese fondue, meat stuffed inside another kind of meat, and perfunctory helpings of bread and vegetables. I'm not complaining—I like animal protein as much as the next red-blooded omnivore—but I do watch the reactions of my dinner companions carefully, noticing who goes for which dishes and how they attack each course.

The captain takes a small portion of every one of the seemingly endless varieties of meat offered by the servers—but only a small portion. He doesn't dip into the cheese, but dumps a lot of salt on his vegetables. I wonder if he's had any heart attacks or stern warnings from his cardiologist yet.

I resist the urge to turn on my eye and look inside his chest. The implant is for work. My own, biological, limited eyes are for play. And I'm having fun guessing at who people are from just their appearance and manner.

My seat at the Captain's Table came with a bottle of fancy wine, and I drink half of it before I realize how much it's affecting me. I'm talking loudly, possibly even flirting with the woman to my right who keeps touching my elbow. I can't remember her name. That seems bad. My medical sensors say my body temperature is several degrees above normal. I switch to water, not wanting to regret anything in the morning.

After dinner, there's a live band and dancing in the ballroom below, but I escape and find my way up to the Promenade.

The shops and tables here offer items ranging from the extravagant to the mundane, all easily charged to a passenger's account with one swipe of the thumb. Jewelry, liquor, clothing, toys, reader tablets, sewing kits, and “personal items,” as a discreet sign proclaims. Makes sense. There's no getting off this ship for the next six days, so everything a passenger might want or need has to be available on board.

This section is just inside the outer hull, with a long stripe of transparent window running overhead. There's not much to see outside, just blackness and the occasional glint of a distant asteroid or spaceship. Normally space vehicles wouldn't have many windows, if any—the radiation danger is too severe. But most of the ionizing radiation in this part of the Solar System comes from the Sun, and the entire bulk of the ship and all those cargo containers are shielding the passenger sections.

I walk down the length of the Promenade, stretching my arms and legs and looking up at the void, but really I'm here to watch the people. Most of them are drunk to some degree. The sober ones are more interesting. I surreptitiously study a family of four and guess, based on the younger child's hair color and earlobe shape, that Mom did some fooling around. But Dad's attitude toward both children—eye contact, tone of voice, touching behavior—implies that he knows, and he's okay with it. Interesting.

I suddenly realize I'm completely lost. Should have studied those deck plans more closely. I stop at an information kiosk, my mildly inebriated brain momentarily mesmerized by its vid loop of a woman in a slinky dress holding up a dessert tray, advertising a nearby late-night buffet. As if the nine different kinds of cake at dinner weren't enough.

Someone walks up and stops beside me. I'm surprised to see that it's Captain Santamaria, sans cam-bot. I guess the show's over for tonight.

“Captain,” I say, nodding.

“Mr. Rogers,” he says.

We both stare at the dessert lady for a moment.

“That's not your real name,” Captain Santamaria says, “is it?”

“I'm adopted,” I say.

He smiles, then looks me in the eye. “Fair enough.”

We stare at each other. I feel like he's gotten some sort of advantage on me, and I furiously try to make some further deduction by studying his face. Can I tell anything more about his personal history from his complexion? Those acne scars covering his cheeks? I'm severely tempted to turn on my eye scanners and see what kind of tech implants he's got.

“Not a lot of kids around now,” Santamaria says.

I nod. “It's pretty late.”

“And this is not a cultural playground.”

It takes my wine-addled brain a couple of seconds to recognize what he's saying. And then I still can't believe it. But before I know what I'm doing, my training—the often-absurd behavior that's been drilled into me by the agency—takes over.

“Children's fitness is of much interest to me,” I say.

“A grandfather never exhibits such things.”

He looks away. The code phrases are a few months out of date, but they're agency protocol. Those three lines of strange dialogue are how our field agents identify themselves to each other when they can't use other means, or when there's a chance they'll be overheard by hostile forces.

Santamaria works for the agency. And he wanted me to know that.

“Enjoy the rest of your night,” he says, looking back at the kiosk. “And if you go here”—he gestures at the restaurant advertisement—“try the strawberry cheesecake. It's excellent.”

Paul picked this ship. He picked
this
ship. He must have known who the captain was.

“Thanks,” I say. “Maybe I will.”

What does this mean? Why did Paul put me at the Captain's Table for dinner? What did he want me to notice? What does he want me to do?

“Goodnight, Mr. Rogers,” Santamaria says.

I watch him walk away, hands folded behind his back. He moves with the slightest hint of a limp—chronic condition? Combat injury? Did he captain a warship before
Dejah Thoris
? Did the agency recruit him before or after he got this civilian command? How well does Edward Santamaria know Paul Tarkington?

What the hell are you trying to tell me, Lasher?

I don't know about the cheesecake, but I definitely need another drink.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

Dejah Thoris
—Deck 10, Promenade

At least 2 hours past my bedtime

“Is this your first time?”

Jerry Bartelt, the salesman from dinner, is standing next to me. I've wandered into a little alcove off the main Promenade, a semicircular area with colorful interactive displays about Mars. You know, for kids. I'm having some trouble with the controls, which consist of four gigantic red buttons.

“Nah. Just had a little too much to drink,” I say. The “strawberry cheesecake” turned out to be a fancy cocktail, and the bartender at the late-night buffet was very liberal with his pours. I half expected him to be another agent, leading me on some kind of covert scavenger hunt, and it took me several drinks to figure out that nope, he's just working for tips.

You seriously need to get out more, Kangaroo.

I stab at another button and miss again. “I'll get it sooner or later.”

Jerry smiles. “I meant going to Mars.”

“Oh, that.” I finally manage to hit one of the buttons, and the big screen in the center of the alcove lights up with a rotating image of the red planet. “Yeah, first time off-world. You?”

“I've been there a few times. On business. This time it's personal.”

“Vacation,” I say.

Jerry nods. He's watching the display very closely. Too closely? His eyes dart back and forth as place markers fade in and out on the surface, showing us where the cities and major geological features are. Is he looking for something?

“No wife and kids?” I ask.

“Divorced,” he says. “No children. She kept the dog. I had him cloned, but it just wasn't the same.”

It takes me a moment to process this information. “You cloned your dog?”

“Well, technically, by that point, it was my ex-wife's dog,” Jerry says. “But it was in the pre-nup. If we ever got a pet, and then got divorced, if the pet was still alive at the time of the divorce, one of us would get to clone it.”

“That's a little unusual,” I say.

“It was her idea,” Jerry says. “She could be a little, you know, clingy sometimes.”

“So how did you decide who got the clone?”

“Flipped a coin.”

“I suppose that was in the pre-nup, too.”

Jerry smiles and exhales a puff of proto-laughter, as if he's not sure whether he should be amused at this. “You know lawyers. They want you to specify everything.”

I nod and manage to push another button. A large title tells us the image of Mars is switching to an elevation view, and the rusty orange globe fades into oversaturated blues, yellows, greens, and reds. The bands of color shimmer as the animated image rotates. Some parts of the map are just a little blurrier than the others. A civilian observer might not notice the difference, but I recognize those areas as battlefields from the Independence War.

At first, the fighting was limited to the area around Hellas Planitia. Earth Coalition didn't want to confront the Martian Irregulars on their home turf, especially not in the mountains or near the poles. But Mars is a small planet without a breathable atmosphere. The only possible hiding places were underground, and those were susceptible to orbital bombardment.

All the dark circles spinning past on the globe are craters. Most of them are manmade. Some of those places will be uninhabitable due to radiation for another decade or more.

I see a blue smudge across a green crater near the east edge of Argyre Planitia, just below two yellow dots, and I feel a pang of recognition. Galle Crater. We used to call it “Happy Face Crater”—that's what the dune formations looked like from orbit, before Earth Coalition shot down a Martian flyer there. Now it's just a faceless crash site.

The Martian Irregulars had been attempting reconnaissance of the EC troops landing at Argyre, not anticipating they'd land with effective anti-aircraft weapons. But before crashing, the Martian pilot set the flyer's auto-destruct to trigger on impact. The blast obliterated the curved “smile” dune and everything within a fifty-meter radius—around, above, and below.