Atlas & Ares book 1: Men of the Red Earth

"Mars is dying, you oaf."

The old red planet had been dead three and a half billion years when, somewhere west of Marineris, down among the anonymous canyons, she ambushed him with the news. He'd walked into it. The sun hadn't risen yet, and the office was still dark except for points of light scattering off her refrigerator suit. A light from the plaza cast a weak glow through the white panes of the front door, laying a shadow of the company name in front of him. He'd painted it in a large, soda-fountain script, like the name of a minor league baseball team, not too serious—Grand Plymouth Lines. Beneath it, Rigsby had added "Universal headquarters". Rigsby Nevers, also not too serious. Cap scolded himself. Scolded himself for the goofy lettering, and scolded himself because he should have known Solange would drop in today. He said, "You're up early. Still on Bennington time, I see. Must need the advantage, pitting your nine o'clock against my six a.m." Then he brushed past her vague outline, his wake rustling her mylar.

"You wanted math, I got you math." She punched out a fist with a crinkle of plastic sheets.

He groaned. So much for driving her off the argument by insisting she make it rigorous. Even in the dim he could see her bouquet of doodle paper scribbled with equations, models, simulations, all of it proving that if Mars's population dropped any further, human civilization would disappear from the universe. That is, proving exactly what Solange Babineaux wanted to prove every time she had trouble hiring a pilot. They proved it was his fault.

Cap rounded the reception desk and kept to the schedule. The Prince Pallas was due at Deimos today, and Halliday had planned every minute of the next nine hours. Cap fumbled in the kitchen for breakfast. He knocked a mug off the shelf, caught it in the dark, and forced himself to slow down. He breathed. Slow and easy, he reminded himself. Ambrose had drilled that much into him. Slow meant authority. Even with Solange. No matter how much she frayed Cap's nerves, he had to act bored.

He whistled two notes. A pink light crept from the corners of the ceiling. It brightened the rough-hewn walls of the kitchen, still bearing chisel marks, then flowed into the lobby, the entrance, Cap's private office. Artificial sunrise. Slow and easy. Nature never turned on the lights so fast you had to blink.

With his back to Solange, Cap belabored assembly of his simple breakfast, dribbling water from the faucet into the mug, searching bare cupboards for a tall square tin, dislodging its lid, scooping out a pale brown powder, dusting the powder into the water, replacing the scoop, then the lid on the tin, the tin in the cupboard, finding a spoon, mixing the powder into the water, stirring. He stared at the wall. In slow movements he could almost forget that Solange was talking.

But it didn't take long for acting bored to be subsumed by being bored, and Cap lifted the spoon from the mug, rinsed it, and placed it on a magnetic strip to dry. He raised the slurry to his mouth and turned around. Solange glared at him, hands on her hips.

He was glad to see her. He couldn't show it, of course, and she looked ridiculous in her silver mylar poncho, crimped at her wrists and ankles, billowing inelegantly. She had doffed the hood. A sheaf of black braids cascaded onto her shoulders and framed her face, brown skin glowing richly in the pink morning light. But her eyes burned like copper rivets. "Look at my math."

He declined. "It's a temporary problem." He hadn't been listening, but he hadn't needed to. He could play back his side of the argument from previous recordings. "Don't put your hands on your hips. You look like a galoot in a Far Side drawing."

"Look at my math." Undeterred.

"Have Halliday check your math."

"I don't need you to check my math, I need you to understand it."

"Why?"

"Because you're shipping people to the Belt!"

"Yes, pilots, you've said."

She reiterated her argument. "Without pilots we have no water shipments, which means no fuel, which means blackouts, which means no air, no food, not to mention no water..."

He started to say she'd already mentioned water, but he'd said that last time she dropped in for an argument. So he wasn't the only one playing back previous recordings. That was unlike Solange. As if to distract him from it, she launched into a diatribe. “The planet has a minimum crew requirement, and we're down to it. Any lower and the shortages get so bad your empty promise of riches in the Belt start to sound better than this, and even more people leave. You've created a problem that feeds on itself." She waved at the pink light on the ceiling. "And the end won't ooze in at an easy, sunrise pace. It'll happen in an instant, like water freezing." She snapped her fingers. "Goodbye, Mars."

"We'll be fine." But as he raised his mug for a sip, he paused. We'll be fine. The words echoed in his thoughts. He'd said them recently. But to who?

"How?"

"How?"

"How will Mars be fine?"

"We always find a way."

"And we always will, until the first time we don't."

He winced. Survivor's bias, the not-so-secret fear of every Martian. Twenty years of winning hands and what gamblers liked to forget Martians couldn't afford to: the house always wins.

In the wince, another echo. Survivors. Cap probed his memory, and in it formed the recollection of a call, late last night or early this morning, at an hour when he couldn't be awake without impairing the day ahead. Who had it been? He hadn't roused enough to recall the conversation until now, so it hadn't been an emergency. A social call, then. But calling each other up to gab in the wee hours was no Martian habit, certainly not one of Cap's, which meant whoever called him didn't know him personally. But a call from a stranger he would have remembered. So it was someone he knew. Someone he knew who didn't know him.

Solange said, "What's your business plan when the Boulevard's falsework comes down?"

Cap lifted his eyebrows from his mug with a distant expression Solange took to be cluelessness. She rattled off an explanation. "You're telling people they should mine the Belt because we're short of metal, but the shortage will be over once the Boulevard's scaffolding is dismantled. What's your plan then? Bring everyone back to Mars?"

"Putting the falsework back in circulation won't fix the shortage, not so long as you insist on that wall around Bennington. You know better than anyone we need metal more than people. We're scavenging from ourselves. Martin Bosweiler can replace a hydroponic gutter with a clay trough, but not even the Flintstones could build a spaceship out of rock. You try building a nuclear reactor from ceramic—"

She jerked.

Cap paused to hear what he'd said. "I didn't mean—"

"Yes, you did."

You know better than anyone we need metal more than people. So he had been thinking about that. He set the mug on the countertop island between them. He asked, by way of apology, "How is your father?"

"Responding to treatment."

"That's good."

"I know."

"I was worried you came to give me bad news."

"I did come to give you bad news." She shoved the bouquet under his nose.

He shied away, allergic. But not in time. His eye caught a whorl of paper that bore a graph and a wobbly line labeled "Population". The line flew horizontal, dipped, bobbed, and hit a wall. It plummeted to zero so hard it punctured the bottom axis and crashed into a hard little numeral zero, colored blue. Blue for danger, Cap thought. "We're not going back to Earth."

"We may not have a choice."

"We always have a choice."

"A choice between life and death isn't a choice."

"Don't dilemmize."

"Name our options."

He stuck a hand in his pocket to think. In it, his fingers found a crumpled ball of paper. "Your math is commentary. It solves nothing. If you really thought the metal crisis could be fixed you'd put down the stylus, stand up, and die on your feet."

Once more Solange jerked, but this time Cap had said it on purpose. "Die on your feet" was old Martian sharptalk. Anymore passersby said it emptily in greeting, as hollow as hello, but Solange remembered the way they had said it on Plymouth, when when the ice cap exploded beneath them and every hope had sublimated but the hope that hope mattered. Then it had been an accusation of surrender, a war cry, and a chant of strength. "Die on your feet" was the Martian golden rule. Some called it the Iron Rule. And Solange knew it better than anyone else. She'd known it before the ice, before Plymouth, before Veridrome, even before the Gulch. She'd heard hiking across the savannah barefoot and scrabbling up mountainsides on bloody knees. "Die on your feet" was the personal credo of Ourson Babineaux, who lay at the pole dying of radiation poisoning.

Solange sucked in her lip. Cap hated to see her wounded, but he held her gaze to assert dominance, fearing that if he broke away he would embolden her to continue bullying him. "We're not going back to Earth," he repeated. "I'd rather die on Mars than live in a vegetative state."

Her copper eyes resisted the image of her father even as she channeled him. "When you've got two ugly options, you gotta make yourself a third."

"I'm open to suggestions," he answered, and spread his hands in invitation. Between his right thumb and forefinger he held a ball of paper.

He frowned at it, confused, then secreted the wad into his palm. To distract from it he swept his mug from the counter with an oversized motion and took another swig of the awful slurry. He grimaced. Enough time wasted on breakfast. He deposited the mug in the sink and turned his back on Solange. "I'm going to check the overnights."

He escaped into a black hole at the side of the kitchen, the entrance of a tunnel that Cap had drilled out thinking of all the spaces a company office would one day need: a supply closet, a conference room, and, most off all, a map room. The map room was still only an unlit hollow in the cave wall, but in it he stashed half a dozen glass panels, the few Norse had been willing to spare, and Cap stepped to the closest one and flicked on its power. A glow traced into its etchings. By its light, Cap read the crumpled wad.

Mars is dying. J.A.

Almost illegible, but his own writing, scratched out on the floor next to his bed in the dark. Cap wadded it back into his pocket. So the call had been Ambrose. Obvious, in retrospect. Ambrose the banker—someone Cap knew who didn't know him. Cap supposed he should dredge up the substance of the conversation, but probably it was just Ambrose up late worrying over his balance sheet or rubbing his hands over another spectrograph.

"Look at all that glass," Solange said. "Planning the invasion of a small moon, or are you selling storm windows?"

He attended to the rainbow topography on the glass. "I run an interplanetary shipping company. I need the maps."

"You have two ships."

"I have three." With a pinch he expanded a loupe over the Prince Pallas and noted her approach on Deimos. Strange. She'd had to make a course correction.

Solange's face appeared through the glow. "You have three ships, but only two pilots. Remember, there's a shortage."

Cap moved the loupe.

Solange's face paled. "You found a pilot." Hands back on her hips. "One of mine?"

"No, someone Rigsby found, but I'm not saying any more." Even that had been too much. He needed a distraction. He closed the loupe and rounded the partition. "Show me your math."

She grinned and slapped a page onto the glass. "You can read a differential equation?"

He repented. "Somebody save me."

As if in answer, into the tunnel came a pearl blouse, porcelain skin, and platinum coif, as luminous as a rescuing angel stepped from a stained glass window. Halliday.

Solange took her sheet from the glass. "Prayer works."

"Survivor's bias," Cap grunted. That had been close.

But as she neared, Halliday greeted the wrong person. "Solange? No one told me you were in town."

"Up with a water shipment."

"You fly yourself now?"

"Desperate times."

"Rigsby says Cap wouldn't fly if eternal life depended on it."

Solange said, askance, "Cap is unconcerned how long he lives."

Cap interrupted the camaraderie. "Lauren, a word?"

The girls winked at each other, and Halliday trailed Cap to the faux privacy of the other side of the partition. He said, "The Prince Pallas made a course correction."

"I saw. She made two yesterday. Backmath says she's thirty-nine heavy. We must've botched weigh-in."

Cap blinked. "Thirty-nine tons heavy?"

"Thirty-nine kilos."

The dollar signs dropped from Cap's eyes.

Halliday twisted away from Solange. "What do you really need?"

Cap screwed up his lips, then released them. "I got a call from Ambrose last night, too late to comprehend anything, but I took notes." He handed her the wad.

"'Mars is dying'? Short call or you're bad at taking notes."

"Solange greeted me with the same words. She must've put Ambrose up to it. But somehow I don't think he was talking about population, otherwise I'd have known Solange would be by. He must be worried about something else."

"But you can't remember what, and you want me to go over to the bank and ask without letting on that you don't know."

"The last thing I need today is another sermon from Ambrose about how I don't listen to any of his sermons."

"Sure, sounds like fun."

"Really?"

"No," she laughed, "but consider it a birthday present."

"A what?"

"A birthday present." When his mystified expression failed to clear, she waved him after her, returned for the lobby and the reception desk, where she'd placed a satchel. She rolled back the flap, extracted a brown box tied with pink ribbon, and perched it on her fingertips. "Found this on my way to the office."

"What is it?"

"A birthday present."

"For who?"

"For you."

"I mean for whose birthday?"

"Whose birthday?" The angel incredulous. "Yours, Cap, the present is for you."

"It's not for me to give to someone?"

"Why would it be—"

"Because it's not my birthday."

"Well, some guy named George thinks it is."

He flinched. "Oh. That explains it."

"Explains what?"

"George reckons birthdays by a different calendar."

Solange at his elbow. "Take it, Cap. Your sister's doing something nice for you."

He coughed to silence her but a flash of deduction illuminated Halliday's visage. "You have a sister named George who lives on Earth?"

"I don't like to talk about it."

"That you have a sister, that her name is George, or that she lives on Earth?"

"I love my sister, George is a fine name for a girl, but why she chooses to live in that armpit of a planet—"

Solange to Halliday, "He likes talking about it fine."

Cap took the box. "Happy?"

"Not until you open it."

He tugged off the ribbon and peeked inside. "It's a book. The Scarlet Pimpernel. There."

"What's a scarlet pimpernel?"

"A flower."

"Your sister sent you a book about flowers for your birthday?"

"It's not about flowers. She sent it to me because of the title. The Scarlet Pimpernel—it's a red planet joke. My sister thinks it's funny I live on Mars."

"If it's not about flowers what's it about?"

"It's a novel, it's not about anything. An English aristocrat plays dress-up and trespasses in France—"

Then, as he felt the book's rough burgundy cover and smelled the yellow pages and thought of the story for the first time in twenty-two years, one more echo chased through Cap's mind, an echo not only of death and survivors, but of a reign of terror.

Cap snapped the book shut and swore. "I remembered what Ambrose wants."

The tinted door to his private office showed all six-foot-six of him, lanky and ectomorphic, never having filled out in Martian gravity. His tousled hair hung around his face. He had an dark complexion, but as he stared at it in the jade glass he feared for the first time that when people called it "olive" they meant "green".

The door closed behind Halliday and Cap punched a contact. A bead along the edge of the door hissed and made an airtight seal. That was how emergency bulkheads were used in Rimstaff: for privacy.

Halliday said, "So how old are you?"

"Sixty-five."

"You are not."

He didn't argue.

Her eyes narrowed. Calculating. "You are sixty-five."

"No—"

"You forgot your birthday on the Gregorian calendar, meaning you think in Martian years. But you've only been on Mars nine revolutions. So you must be counting revolutions on other bodies. You got to the Moon in the First Exodus, and there were four Earth years between the First and Second Exoduses, which I'd wager you're counting as forty-eight lunar revolutions though it was really forty-nine. Sixty-five minus nine Martian years minus forty-eight lunar years leaves eight years."

"I'm not sixty-five."

"No," she said, "you're thirty."

He swore again. "To rust with Earth years."

She narrowly avoided laughing. "What does Ambrose want?"

"Scientists."

"From where?"

"Earth."

"Extraction? What for?"

Cap parroted Ambrose. "'Akraj and Hafidh aren't true scientists, aren't postdocs, aren't even college graduates. They're lightweights. Tinkerers. Sun-shield and doodle paper aren't the intellectual successors of fusion reactors and near-C engines. Survival on Mars requires better than a couple of nerds."

"Nerds are the best you get in a population the size of a high school."

"Tell Ambrose that."

"Okay."

"Don't. He'll call in my loans."

"For a quip?"

"For refusing an order."

"Any arbiter can recognize belligerence. Ambrose can't escape a bad loan that easily."

"It's not the loans Ambrose is worried about, it's the viability of an export business. We have to have something to sell back to the Belt in exchange for more raw materials."

"Tell Norse, or Benning. They'll have ideas."

"The only heavyweight Ambrose would flinch for is Thomas Kaufman, and he's not here."

Halliday calculated again. "Ambrose really wants scientists?"

"He has a list of names."

She raised an eyebrow. "A list?" She pressed her thumb into her other palm and and paced, working out a new problem in her head. She reached the end of the room and whirled. "Ambrose knows how to land on Earth."

"How?"

"I don't know, but he hasn't mentioned Earth in twenty years. Doubtful he's bringing it up now because of you or Grand Plymouth. Something has changed. Ambrose is hopeful."

Cap touched the rough burgundy cover of The Scarlet Pimpernel and wondered whether the flutter he felt was hope or fear.

Halliday said, "Who's his source?"

"No idea."

"He wants scientists, but knowing Ambrose that's only his opening bid. He wants to do business with Earth."

"He can't."

"Not without peace talks."

"He's angling for a pardon?"

"And for more than himself, one for all Martians."

"First Solange wanting labor from Earth, now Ambrose wanting to go back and grovel for forgiveness? Thomas Kaufman has been gone too long."

Halliday dropped her thumb from massaging her palm. "Let's go to the Bank."

"Give him what for?"

"No, find out where he got his list and why after six decades he suddenly believes it's possible to make Earthfall."

She strode out of his office, through the jade door, and the name scratched into the other side caught the light. It might have said CEO, but Cap knew who the boss was. He followed.

The door swung shut behind him, and he averted his eyes from the flash of his full name before the title—

Cincinnati A. Pierce.

Most infuriating about the door to the Bank was its clarity. Ambrose had paid for nine doors before Bosweiler made one clear enough, an ostentation aggrandized by Ambrose then having the crystal chemically etched with the Bank's name and logo. The logo itself added to the insult. It was riff on the old shield and spear symbol for Mars, the shield transmuted into a coin by the inclusion of the Bank's name wrapped around the edge and a smaller version of the logo within it. A recursive logo. The coin within a coin within a coin shrunk to a vanishing point. A banker's logo, Cap thought. The big coin for him, the little coin for you. Cap hated to walk through that door. As the glass swung shut behind him, he felt that logo stamp itself on his back, as if marking him as Bank property. To Ambrose, he was nothing but livestock. No wonder Ambrose called that logo his "brand".

But Ambrose and his money had breathed life into the dead dust of Mars, and if it took a branding to escape Bennington and the frozen south, Cap could bear it. Yet as Halliday pushed him into the Bank, remaining hidden in his shadow, he felt a twinge of suspicion, as if run-of-the-mill Martian capitalism had, within these walls, silently metastasized into something very un-Martian.

Ambrose was a short, thick-boned black man, a product of Earth's gravity. He stood leaning back against his counter, ankles crossed, sipping coffee and waiting for Cap to show up. As the door closed, it hissed, airlock triggered by a hidden remote. Ambrose rumbled in cool basso, "Finally remember what I told you?"

"Busy day."

"Have you done the calculations to retarget the Prince?"

"Why should I? Nothing can land on Earth, let alone a freighter."

"The new one can. And you finally have a pilot."

"The Hawk doesn't have the codes. Norse checked."

"She's fast. She could run the blockade."

"She'd burn up in Earth's atmosphere."

"You've done the math, or you're hoping?"

Cap stepped aside to reveal Halliday.

Ambrose stiffened. "You brought your intern?"

"Like you taught me: bring all the ears you can to a negotiation."

Ambrose lifted his chin, wary. "Glad to hear you're considering my proposal."

"It's brilliant," Cap lied. "We should've made a preemptive strike years ago—steal their scientists, cut Earth off at the economic knees."

"Not exactly what I had in mind."

Cap was about to ask why they hadn't tried it years ago when Halliday whispered behind his back, "Ask what's in it for him."

Cap puckered to change course, but decided to trust Halliday. "If not revenge, why do it?"

"I told you, Mars needs scientists."

"But why do you need scientists?"

"Science is good for business. The Bank depends on consumers having valuables to buy."

Two different reasons. Ambrose was rambling, and Halliday detected it. She whispered, "Ask about his P & L."

Profit and loss. But Ambrose wouldn't answer that question directly. Cap would have to come at it from his side. "You get a payday, what do I get?"

"You'll be paid."

"As a contractor?"

"We can discuss terms when you bring me someone."

"No," Cap said, confused, "we discuss terms before action."

"Too experimental. Before action no one knows the costs you'll incur, the risks you'll face—"

"I need terms or you're putting all the risk on me."

Ambrose set down his mug. "Listen, Pierce, I don't know what your human abacus back there is telling you, but you have to understand that this whole thing is a tremendous gamble for me—"

Halliday exploded from behind Cap in white fury. "You filthy Legree! He'll never do it."

Ambrose hardened. "It's the only way."

Cap had missed something. "I'll never do what?"

"No deal," Halliday told Ambrose.

"It sounds worse than it is."

"Only in your money-fevered daydreams could it sound worse than it actually is."

Cap, still lost, "What sounds worse?"

Halliday glared at Ambrose, but she took a breath. Without looking from Ambrose, she told Cap, "The Bank's cash isn't liquid. Ambrose has loaned it out two, three, four times over, stretched himself thinner and thinner in hopes of a big payday. That's why he needs scientists: to put more money in the pot. But to get those scientists he has to pay you, and he's so illiquid he has nothing to offer but the promise of a brighter economic future. He intends to sell you stock."

"Stock options," Ambrose corrected.

"I already know he wants to put the risk on me," Cap said.

"Follow the money," Halliday continued. "Grand Plymouth will be paying the costs of transportation and lost opportunities but without any immediate return. All risk, no reward. Ambrose wants to turn us into investors, which means he has to guarantee his stock has value. But if we bring scientists to Mars, who's to say they'll accomplish anything? A scientist is as likely to wander around splitting apart rocks and fizzing soil as invent a tool or grow a fruit. Ambrose has to ensure his gamble is worth the risk. And that means ensuring a scientist stays on the job." She faced Ambrose, daring him to deny it.

He said, "It'll be contractual."

"It'll be indentured servitude."

"A mutual contract."

"How many doodads will a scientist have to sell to pay off their debt? How much of their labor will you take as payment for their transportation to Mars? R & D takes years. You'll have these scientists in such ironclad contracts some of them will never complete their end. What then? Indenture their children? That's not servitude. That's slavery."

Cap's head snapped to Ambrose.

Ambrose restrained himself. The muscles in his temples worked in and out and though his cool basso resonated calm, beneath it lay fire. "We live on Mars, young lady, not in the Garden of Eden. We don't have the luxury of gentrifying human labor. We have to survive on a sterile rock where the only laws that matter are the laws of nature, the laws of physics, the laws of what's possible—not the laws of Earth, not the laws of men, and certainly not our feelings. We do what we have to, even when it sounds bad, looks bad, and feels bad. That's what it takes to survive."

Halliday crossed her arms. "Tell that to the three-quarters of the Martian population who are black."

She was right, of course. If humans were the salt of the Earth, they were the pepper of Mars. Thomas Kaufman's base had been in sub-Saharan Africa, and the demographics of Mars reflected it. Mars wasn't the Red Planet. It was the Brown Planet.

Halliday may not have been black like Solange, Rigsby, and Ambrose, but as a lifelong Martian she had grown up on stories of oppression and exile, and her lip curled at Ambrose the Earthborn as if, despite his skin color, he'd sided with the oppressor. "Unlock the door."

The seal released. Halliday whirled, struck her palm against the back of the coin-and-spear, and was out of sight before the door swung closed and the light on the glass stopped quivering.

Ambrose raised an eyebrow at Cap. "She speaks for you?"

"You never should have come to me with an idea like that."

"If you'll recall, I didn't."

"Hiding it doesn't change the fact."

"No? Then why haven't you told her everything?"

Cap's eyes narrowed. Then he followed Halliday out the door.

To rust with the stamp on his back.