Atlas & Ares book 1: Men of the Red Earth

Rigsby Nevers swayed officeward at a quarter to seven, sufficiently behind Halliday's schedule to remind her that he was Grand Plymouth's chief operating officer, not her. He walked lazily, hands in his pockets and elbows dangling. He was tempted to whistle. People didn't think he was serious, just a low-top fade with a grin and an honorary title, but Rigsby didn't mind. He preferred it. In his opinion, being underestimated gave him an advantage. But as he strolled into the office, he was reminded of the one person outside Grand Plymouth who wasn't fooled.

Solange said, "I hear you're the coo."

She sat cross-legged on the couch in the lobby, sipping a hot drink and waiting in ambush. Rigsby checked for Cap. Not there. He'd have to fight this battle of wits on his own. "C.O.O.," he said, "stands for Chief Operating Officer. Comes with a lot of authority." Rigsby cut a wide path around the couch to the kitchen.

"Authority, huh? Could you rename a ship?"

"Sure."

"Go ahead."

"I....don't want to right now."

"You're going to keep calling it the U.N.S. Sparhawk?"

"It's not U.N.S. anything. Just 'The Hawk'."

"Hawk is no good. Doesn't follow Cap's naming convention."

Rigsby fumbled with a tin, and the lid popped off to explode crackers across the counter. "What naming convention?"

"Royal titles. You didn't know?"

"Of course I knew. We have two ships named Prince. I didn't know you knew."

"You have a Prince and a Crown Prince, and the Crown Prince is bigger."

Rigsby casually selected a cracker from the scatterings. "You want me to name it the Duke Sparhawk?"

"Oh, no, no. Duke is too powerful. The Hawk is a small ship."

"Not that small. She was a tender ship."

"She tended satellites. She should have a low title."

Rigsby lowered the cracker. "Ha ha. You want me to name it the Chief Operating Officer Sparhawk."

She grinned. "I think your title is quite a coup."

But he chomped into the cracker with teeth bared.

Before Solange could laugh, the front doors of the office crashed inward and Halliday stormed in followed by Cap saying, "—and get Udike to the burnyard and prepped for Deimos. How far are we from Earth?"

"A hundred and fifty megamiles," Halliday answered, "but you're not honestly considering what Ambrose proposed—"

"Not honestly," Cap replied, scribbling on his lens with his thumb. He finished and pocketed the device.

Rigsby dribbled cracker. "What's going on?"

"Ambrose is hungry for bad press," Cap muttered, wandering into the kitchen and finding his abandoned mug in the sink. He took it, slurped the gray mixture, grimaced. "Have you tried this? Tastes like ground peach pits."

"Where'd you get it?"

"Gidja Boyle makes it."

"Whatever happened to Gidja Boyle?"

Cap grimaced again and muttered, "Moved to Colorado to become a farmer." He returned to Halliday rather than continue the conversation.

She said, "What's on Deimos?"

"The Hawk."

"And?"

"Norse."

"You think Norse knows about the Argrid."

There was a name Rigsby hadn't heard in a couple decades.

Cap tipped his head in affirmation but tried to disguise it with a lift of his mug for another swallow. Then he saw, behind Halliday, Solange sparkling darkly in the background. He lowered the mug. "Why are you still here?"

She raised a steaming mug from her lap. "Free heat. What did Ambrose want?"

"Trouble," Cap said, and Rigsby couldn't tell if Cap was talking about Ambrose or Solange.

A lens hummed. Cap pulled it out, and Rigsby glimpsed part of a message on its surface—

Two km. Ain't nobody got a scope that big.

Cap jammed the lens back into his pocket. "Find me an exosuit."

"For who?"

"For me."

"You don't fly."

"I have to sign for the Hawk."

"It's a figure of speech."

Rigsby turned his back to Solange and asked quietly, "What's going on with the Argrid?"

"Nothing, but Ambrose has his hopes up, and we'll have loan trouble unless I dash them."

"You want to talk to Norse without comms?"

Cap thumbed behind him at the couch. "Without eavesdroppers."

"Long way to go for a private conversation. You know they call that ride the Terror Express."

"Because it goes to Deimos."

"What if you go up and you're afraid to come down?"

"I'm not a cat, Rigsby, I won't get treed. Would you find me an exosuit? And call the kid, get him prepped. Lauren!"

Rigsby fished out his lens, dialed, and wandered into the tunnel it search of the hollow Cap had declared a closet. Solange took his place with Cap. "You said Ambrose wants bad press?"

"Why else become a banker?" He paused. "You did put Ambrose up to it, didn't you? 'Mars is dying'? You told him to call me in the middle of the night before a big day, knowing I'd be too asleep to object to whatever he was talking about."

"Seems to have worked—"

"You ice-hearted shrew!"

The outburst didn't come from Cap, and as Rigsby turned he saw both Cap and Solange looking at him in the tunnel. Rigsby looked at the lens in his hand. He had said it. He stormed out of the darkness and slammed the indestructible lens down on the counter in front of Solange.

"Yes?"

"Do you have any idea how difficult it was—the risk I took—" He hissed through his teeth, restraining himself, and turned to Cap. "She's not here to argue with you or even to flirt with me. She's on a mission. A little corporate espionage."

Cap tensed. He should have sensed a gambit.

Rigsby said, "She stole our pilot."

Solange, unrepentant, "Shouldn't have said his name out loud."

"He was our pilot!"

"Not if he takes my money."

Cap cocked his jaw, angry but calculating. "What's your offer?"

"You can't beat it."

"You're not that rich."

"You're that poor."

"Tell me."

"Double whatever you offer. I told you, there's a labor shortage."

Cap snorted. "If Mars had a labor shortage, more than you and I would be picking each other's pockets. You don't need a pilot badly enough to steal one. Quit the charades. What your father did with the drill wasn't theater."

Without warning she smacked him. Her palm caught him across the cheek and the clap echoed off the hard rock walls. She glared at him. Cap had plucked a nerve, not for the first time that morning Rigsby sensed, but what this one was he didn't know. Solange spun, braids slicing the air, and in three steps was at the door with her hand on the white glass like a bloodstain. Then she was gone.

Cap touched his cheek. "Been trying all morning to make her leave."

"Figured it out a little late."

"Get the pilot back."

"We can't beat her offer."

"Why not?"

"She offered double whatever we offer. We can't raise our bid without automatically raising hers."

"Sure we can."

Cap, being infuriating. Rigsby made it simple. "Double is always more."

"Hardly ever."

"What?"

"We could offer the pilot nothing."

"I'm supposed to be the dumb one."

"We could charge him to work for us. Then Solange would have to charge him twice as much."

"I just said don't be stupid."

"We could offer him more than half what Solange can afford."

"She's the third richest person on Mars."

"Only on paper."

Rigsby squinted, trying to decipher what scheme was afoot.

Cap told him.

Rigsby felt sick. "That's a high price to pay."

"Exactly. More than Solange can double."

"You're sure you want to do it?"

"You got another way to rehire the kid?"

Rigsby sighed and picked his lens off the counter. "Can't go back if he says yes."

"Won't say no."

The idea for Grand Plymouth had been Rigsby's, but to remain underestimated he'd asked Cap to be CEO. But now Rigsby wondered if Cap had potential as more than a front man.

Before Rigsby finished dialing, Cap put his hand on the lens. "One other thing. See if you can find a guy named Bruno Farelli. Don't let anyone know what you're doing."

"What am I doing?"

"Nothing."

"What's a Bruno Farelli?"

"A clue to pull." Then Cap vanished into the tunnel in search of an exosuit.

Rigsby's spine felt rigid. For the first time in their partnership, Cap was giving orders rather than taking them.

Cap lay on his back in the rocket and tasted acid. He hadn't flown since leaving Bennington, and then he'd ridden with the cargo, no windows, and still he'd had to be chloroformed. Now, lying in the plastiform seat of the leaper with an unavoidable view of sky he was about to catapult into, his panic about flight was becoming paralysis. His hands tingled.

He closed his eyes and forced his breathing back under control, tried to relax his muscles. I'm safe, he told his body, but it knew better. A leaper could never be reliable enough to make defiance of gravity safe. His muscles contracted and Cap prepared to ride into orbit in a spacesuit full of his own vomit. He prayed he would pass out.

"Not your fault, you know."

Cap opened his eyes, rolled his head sideways in the bubble helmet. Next to him, Marcus Udike flipped switches above them and ran down his preflight checklist. Cap grunted and rolled back. "I've been told that before." It didn't help twenty years ago and it didn't help now.

"Nobody's to blame. Just some flawed intel."

Staring at the brown Martian sky, Cap's vision stuttered between the reflection of his face in the glass of his helmet and the reflection of his body in the broad windshield. His stomach flinched. Cap controlled his breathing again, and asked, eyes closed, "Why rename her?"

"The Hawk? According to Rigsby you have a naming convention. Royal titles. He didn't say why, but I figured you took it from Frank Wollam's saying about how a title is only good for indicating size of appetite, so I thought the ship needed something lower than Prince."

"'August' isn't a title, it's the name of a month."

"Also means 'distinguished'."

"That's pronounced differently. 'Au-gust'."

"'Yeah, well, 'au-gust' is funnier."

Cap didn't ask how. Jokes that amused nineteen-year olds tended to distress their elders, and ignorant of its humor Cap could live with the name August Hawk.

He studied Udike. The boy wore a graphite gray spacesuit, and his arms moved with practiced ease, gloved hands familiar with every board, switch, knob, dial, stick, and gauge in the cockpit. He was too young to have flown much. Maybe too young to have flown at all. He was nineteen, brown face as pock-marked as the Noachian Plains, and Rigsby had found him scrounging parts to build a mockup flight board to practice on, rather than relying entirely on his very precise mental picture of a cockpit.

Cap turned back to the featureless sky, and discovered that the acid in his throat had, for now, retreated. He could feel his hands again. Cap jolted. He checked Udike, alarmed, as if the boy should have warned him that steady nerves could be infectious. No, Cap supposed, he hadn't caught this calm. Udike had given it to him. He'd used that steady pilot's drawl, like Frank and Marsha had, easy and self-assured, the voice of being able to handle any disaster like there was nothin' to it but a minor 'justment to the flight plan. Or maybe it was deeper than that. Maybe Udike had understood that where other people tiptoed around the subject of the crash, he should speak of it, that avoidance of it, while meant in kindness, made the topic a holy taboo and endowed it with weight beyond what Cap could bear, and braving its name showed showed the event was not some supernatural occurrence but a merely human disaster. Talking of it, Cap realized, began to break its spell over him.

A ping sounded.

Cap raised his arm to see the hardpoint where he'd put his lens. A message glowed on its dome. Found Bruno Farelli.

Finally something had gone right. He smiled and exhaled a slow, measured breath. Formulating a plan.

Udike spared him the countdown. One heartbeat there was a kick of liquid oxygen in a tank below his seat, the next they were riding a caged god of thunder into orbit.

Cap watched as the planet fell away, and he was filled with an overwhelming sense of loneliness, a loneliness beyond being alone, beyond losing his planet and rising into a planetless void. It was the loneliness of leaving one dimension and entering another, of leaving everything behind and going to a place that made it impossible to return. Cap thought, without knowing why, This is how it was for Thomas Kaufman.

Udike executed a roll, and Mars set in the portal. The cockpit dimmed. Deimos glittered in far orbit, and Udike swung the capsule out to chase it, the star gradually resolving into its true nature as an oversized potato. Would have been better not to have a moon, Cap thought. Titan and Ganymede were bigger than Mercury, and even Pluto was rumored to have a round moon. Mars got two city-sized lumps that could be circumnavigated on foot in less than a day and whose gravity couldn't hold a ten-year old with a bicycle and a ramp. Some fear and terror. They didn't evoke the paralyzing emotions of a god of war. They were worthy only of sniggers, like a boy playing soldier with a mop, whose one end is his sword and its other his steed.

Behind the potato gleamed another speck closing in on the moon. The Prince Pallas. Cap had never expected to see her first-hand. Norse had constructed her from fifteen derelicts, a mishmash of shapes and sizes pinned together by a web of carbon rods. Not elegant, but resourceful. She looked less like a star-freighter than a dozen toy spaceships crammed into a fishnet stocking.

Udike, eyeing the ungainly vessel, said, "The Hawk, she's not a dog, is she?"

"She can pull nine mississippis." But Cap knew what the boy meant. "Don't like how my ship looks?"

"Not that one."

He stated it factually, but Cap sensed apprehension, like he'd been set up on a blind date and had just gotten a frightful glimpse of the girl's older sister. "Don't worry," Cap said, "not all my ships are that ugly."

"Seventy-five percent chance."

Cap laughed. The kid had the nerve to tell him both his ships were ugly. He'd done it with an old Martian probability trick, Laplace's rule of succession, which Martians used to calculate meaningless odds from known data—the chance of a dust storm tomorrow, of wilted vegetable shoots, of fractured die molds—whatever the historical rate was, they added one to the number of occurrences and two to the number of opportunities. Instant probability, even if it was useless. Martians did it reflexively, without thinking, and they could work it backwards just as easily. As soon as Udike said it, Cap had reversed the math. A seventy-five percent chance was three-out-of-four odds, which meant the historical rate of Cap owning ugly ships, in Udike's opinion, was two for two.

Cap laughed because the kid was right. Grand Plymouth's freighters were no one's vision of humanity gracing the stars. Norse had said they were uglier than the sum of their parts. But hauling ore didn't require beauty, and spider-webbed derelicts were what they had.

Udike flicked on a light and took out his clipboard. Check his landing sequence. He said, "When I told you it wasn't your fault, I meant more than the crash. You're also being blamed for a pilot shortage."

Cap confessed. "I suppose I am creating one, at least for Solange."

"Have you tracked which pilots you've taken to the Belt?"

Cap hadn't.

"Then how do you know every pilot Solange is missing shipped out with you?"

Cap considered that. "Convenient escape hatch the next time Solange drops by, but it's hardly proof I haven't shipped them to the Belt."

"Have you at least counted the pilots you've shipped out?"

"Maybe twenty."

"Seventeen."

"You've tracked them?"

Udike handed Cap the clipboard. "Those are their names and the rocks you dropped them on."

"Where did you get this?"

"Pilots talk to each other."

"Okay, well, thanks for the bookkeeping," Cap said, unsure if this too was corporate espionage. "What are these names down here?"

"All the other pilots anyone can name."

"And these marks?"

"Those are the pilots we can't find. They're not in Bennington, not in Rimstaff, not in Colorado, not in the Belt with Joshua Benning, and they're not answering anyone's calls."

Cap counted. "Eleven pilot are just...missing?"

"Yes. And the place half those pilots were seen last wasn't the Belt, it was Mars."

Now Cap understood. "The pilot shortage isn't my fault."

"No, it's worse than that."

Deimos loomed large in the windshield and Udike wrapped his gloved fingers back around the flight stick. Cap had to think. Someone had gotten pilots off Mars without his help.

Udike said, "You have competition."

As the Prince Pallas moored over Norse's unloading bay and workers released her haul, Udike thought that if Cap had heard Frank Wollam's line that a title was only good for indicating size of appetite, he must also know the line about how a boat was a hole in the water you poured money into. And Cap had poured plenty of money. But as ripcords pulled and ore plummeted into the rocky crevice, Udike realized that sometimes when you poured money into a hole, it poured out the other side.

Yet Cap ignored it. Instead, he scribbled an epistle on his lens.

The bay was a natural feature of Deimos, a canyon slightly larger than the Prince Pallas and open to space above, with a row of yellow sodium lights mounted along the rims to illuminate work below. Shadowy workers above the lights clipped the waists of their exosuits into tethers. They slapped flashing orange lights onto their arms. In Deimos's milligravity, a human could jump a kilometer off the surface and not come down for half an hour. The lights were to help search and rescue.

Udike knew the specs on the Prince Pallas, fifteen ships welded together by rods, but what drifted into position above him looked more like a giant sausage on a skewer. Packed around all but a forward cockpit and rear engine was loose rock, held in place by netting. Cargo, stored externally.

The great ship rolled as if loaded unevenly, and the workers surrounding it lunged as if attacking a wounded animal. They landed and found mooring anchors, attached the lines they had brought, then scrambled across the netting in search of weak spots. In a moment they found one. A worker seized seized a handle, then ran vertically down the side of the freighter and with a whoop on the radio made a swan dive toward the floor below, pulling the ripcord behind him. The netting parted. Rock bubbled from the gash like a huge drop of blood.

Udike observed with the quiet thrill of witnessing an ancient ritual.

The giant's ore spilled at an excruciating pace, not so much a landslide as the gradual distribution of an asteroid belt, Deimos's one-thousandth gravity hardly accelerating the cascade. It was the opposite of a time-lapse. A momentous cataclysm had been reduced to the excitement of clouds changing shape. The Prince Pallas was only thirty meters above the canyon floor, but the first rocks to be released didn't hit for a full two minutes.

Then the bay began to fill with ore.

A new voice appeared by radio. "Pierce, outta my rockfall. Before I have to dig you out."

Cap popped his lens back onto his sleeve, glanced up at the falling rock, then down at the rubble collecting around his ankles. He pulled his feet out, then searched for the voice, unable to orient by radio.

On the other side of the bay, skirting the column of ore, a figure skimmed the rising tide like a valkyrie ghosting over a battlefield, toes flicking here and there to send her forward in long, coasting strides, a movement that seemed natural to her, as if she'd been bred for rarefied gravity. Maybe she had been. Since the Boulder arrived, Norse had yet to set foot on Mars.

The ease of her movements belied her speed, and in a moment she stood before them, short but unintimidated, grinning at Cap and giving Udike a mischievous wink.

Cap said by radio, "Your foreman told me you were out."

"Just got back."

"From where?"

"Beauty parlor. Heard you were comin' and wanted to look nice. Here to claim your ship?"

"Ask the kid."

"What for?"

"He owns her."

Norse's attention flicked sideways to Udike. "You sold my ship to some freshman?"

"I needed a pilot."

She whistled. "Monster of a signing bonus, kiddo. You playing for pinks now?"

"When I have to. Solange promised double whatever I offered."

"And an interplanetary jumper is more than half what Solange can afford. Clever boy. You come up here so you weren't down there when she found out?"

"Maybe."

"Hurtin' that bad for pilots, are ya?"

"Dug up this one, didn't I?" Cap replied, but his eyes met Udike's and his head quivered with an unspoken order not to mention the missing pilots. "Got anyone who can show the boy his winnings?"

Cap waited as Norse toggled her radio and summoned an exosuit from above, who landed among them, hooked Udike onto a safety line, then seized his carapace and heaved the boy into the sky. The worker leapt up after, and the two disappeared over the rim of the canyon. Everyday life on an asteroid, Cap supposed.

Norse peered up at him, examining, like a full-grown man hadn't just been tossed into space. "What's the huhu?"

"No huhu," he lied. His boots grew heavy under in the accumulating ore. He tugged them out and shook off pebbles.

"Don't play dumb with me, boyo. You come up here like I go down there. I saw you send the kid away."

Cap grimaced. Norse could glean more from a single sentence than most people harvested from whole sagas. She said, "You're fixin' to ask me somethin', and ask it where you can't be overheard. You want a private channel?"

"You trust encryption?"

"Since when do you not?" But she flicked off her radio, grabbed his exosuit by the front of the collar, and hauled his face down where she could put the glass of his helmet against hers. Voice conducting helmet to helmet, she said, "What's eatin' you, buddy boy? And don't say nothin'. Akraj says you want plus-sized telescope. What on Earth you tryin' to see?"

Cap disabled his own radio. "Who said anything about Earth?"

"You huntin' exoplanets?"

"No."

"Then Earth is the only thing worth lookin' at with a scope that big. What bee's got into your bonnet?"

He fidgeted but her grasp on his collar held. The workers above had pulled more ripcords and rock fell faster around him, piles encroaching on his knees. Somehow Norse had stayed on top of it and risen to his eye level.

She hoisted him bodily from the pile. "You're fightin' with yourself, little one. You're goin' two directions at once and don't know which you want. Possible you want neither. Maybe you didn't want the choice. But I got more ears than time, junior, so spill it."

He forced himself to meet her gaze. He needed information, but once he asked his question she would know what he was contemplating, and he hadn't yet decided whether he wanted her to talk him into it or out of it. So instead of asking for information, he gave information. "Ambrose wants scientists from Earth."

Norse whistled. "Say, munchkin, bury the lede much? Your ma always hoped you go back some day."

He curbed his reaction.

She noticed. "That's the trouble, ain't it? You hate that old ball-and-chain and wouldn't touch it with a million-mile pole, 'cept you want fetch your sis." She gave a sad half-smile. "You're a good boy, Cincinnati Pierce."

He squirmed and glanced away.

The chasm had become darker, ore now as high as the yellow lights. It cast strange shadows. Above, the bare hull of the Prince Pallas sparkled between slowly falling rocks. Cap had the sensation of being in an hourglass. Time running out. He told Norse, "Ambrose is in a hurry for me to get these scientists because, according to him, they're disappearing."

"Disappearin' how?"

"He doesn't know, just disappearing, like something out of a John Galt novel."

She waved dismissively. "Governments always hide their brainstaff. Ambrose only thinks it's news 'cause he just started hearin' about it."

"That's what worries me. How'd he find out?"

"Well, they got a loud new radio tower down there, and a state evangelist with a mouth the size of a federal budget. Maybe he blabbed it."

"Maybe."

"You got a different theory?"

"I got a birthday present today. The Scarlet Pimpernel."

"Happy birthday. I didn't get you anythin'."

"It's not my birthday. The book is from George. Have you read it?"

"The Scarlet Pimpernel? Sure. You think your sister sent you a cryptogram?"

"Cryptograms are part of George's style."

"George is the one who told me to keep quiet about her. Last thing she'd do is phone up a stranger on Mars and give him a scoop."

"She commissioned someone on Mars to forge a copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel, and for no better reason than a joke."

"She's careful. Trust her."

Cap lacked Norse's faith in the carefulness of a teenage girl, but then Cap realized George was no longer a teenager, just his memory of her. Then, as Norse's eyes went elsewhere, not confident and playful but distant and clouded, Cap knew that Norse's faith wasn't in a girl grown into an adult, but in the woman who had raised the girl.

With difficulty Norse returned to the present. "Ask me what you came here to ask me."

"Is there any way through the Argrid?"

She released his collar.

Rock had finished draining from the ship and piled to the canyon's rim, drowning all light and pinching them between the black moon below and dark ship above, the cosmos reduced to a narrow belt of glimmering stars. Norse hauled him back to her helmet. In an outstretched hand she held her lens. "Thought you might be fixin' to ask about the Argrid. Ask a week ago and I'd have laughed you off, said you wasted a terror, but now..." She thumbed her lens. It lit up in blue, and a hologram unfurled above it. "Couple days ago I blipped a jumper on the plunge, headed sunward. Real hot little gasser. Didn't know anyone had business that end of the system, let alone urgent, so I rigged a hot-speed probe to chase up her exhaust ports. If some dumpster diver is scavenging moonyards, I want in. But the Moon's not where I lost her." Her eyes directed him to the hologram.

The deep blue curtain of light he now recognized as infrared telemetry, lightening in stair-step shades. In the utter black of Deimian night, Cap discerned a boundary looming, big and round. Blue for danger, Cap thought. "You chased it all the way to Earth?"

"Almost."

A brown speck appeared over the planet. Then brown faded into yellow, yellow to orange, orange to crimson, crimson to—

SIGNAL LOST.

"Rust."

Norse put the lens away. "Still need that telescope?"

He didn't.