Atlas & Ares book 1: Men of the Red Earth

Udike flailed as he arced out of the canyon and into the night over Deimos. His tether went taut and jerked him to the surface. He landed on his toes, but the worker who had thrown him came down behind and gave a hearty slap on the back, which caused Udike to skitter across the regolith. Udike whirled. The worker grinned. Great fun! They weren't on the same radio band, so Udike made a show of unhooking the tether from his belt and throwing it to the ground, daring the man to try it again.

The worker kept his grin but gave a respectful nod. He gestured Udike to him, then detached a segment from the end of his tether and crouched to point out a cable running along the surface. He lifted it into the palm of his glove, clipped the tether to it, and pointed to the gray horizon. He stood and began loping.

With slow, deliberate movements, Udike did the same. He hurried to follow, but found it difficult to teach his feet to push forward more than up. Whenever he stepped too hard, he would fly up to the end of the tether, lurch, and snap back down to make a minor crater in the dust. Gradually he found his moon-legs, that gliding toe-motion he had seen Norse use.

Then he cruised. He skimmed the surface at what felt like incredible speed, hills and craters racing by. But it was an illusion. Deimos was only forty klicks around, and the horizon was short, not Mars's three and a half kilometers away but only a few hundred meters. Surface features appeared and whizzed by in only a few heartbeats. Udike reveled in the sensation of having become a giant and bounding over the rocky, desaturated terrain twenty times faster than normal.

He wondered where they were going. He had expected Norse's shipyards on the small moon to be a warren of tunnels, the same way Bennington was an ice warren, Rimstaff a canyon warren, and Colorado a warren of lava tubes, but as he estimated distances he realized that even a small moon like Deimos dwarfed those settlements. Everything was too far apart to connect by tunnel. The shipyard's facilities would be dotted here and there, placed wherever convenient, and rather than link them into a contiguous habitable zone, they formed tiny islands, an archipelago of light, air, and heat.

A rush of burning daylight hit him like a tidal wave. Udike squinted. The short horizon and absence of atmosphere eliminated any possibility of dawn, and sunrise had ambushed him. He raised a glove and shielded his eyes.

They were climbing. The ground had steepened and ahead reared the razor edge of a crater. Waiting at the top was another spacesuit, pacing stiffly.

Even at a distance Udike could tell the suit was old, not an exosuit but an adapted pressure suit, and as they neared his guide loped ahead to confer with it. Then he reversed direction, unclipped from the tether to pass Udike with a grin and a punch in the shoulder, and was gone down the slope.

Udike faced the man he'd been handed off to. The stranger reached forward and adjusted Udike's radio. "Name's Mike," he crackled. "I'll take you to the Hawk. Hear you're a pilot. Thought I'd met everyone who knew how to fly. New in the workforce?"

"Somewhat."

"What have you flown?"

"Hoppers and leapers."

"Never a jumper?"

"Not many pilots who have."

"Sure you can handle her?"

"I'll do alright."

"What's your opinion of Cap's freighters?"

"They fly."

Mike laughed. "Not pretty, are they? When my son saw what I'd done with the derelicts he'd recovered, he refused to have anything to do with me. Stays in the Belt now."

Udike braved a question. "How bad is the Hawk?"

"Take a look." Mike waved.

Udike climbed to the rim of the crater.

When Rigsby Nevers had stumbled into the fact that Udike was a pilot, he persuaded him to join Grand Plymouth on the promise that Norse had snagged a jumper adrift at the far end of a long elliptical orbit out from Earth, her crew having resigned itself to never returning home and instead making a final, daring burn in hopes of breaking free from the mother planet. But she was three thousand tons, and had run out of fuel. Norse had swapped in a lighter power plant, but put the weight back in with larger engines. She could do a round trip to the Belt on one tank. Udike knew the facts. What he didn't know was how he would feel to look at her. Standing on the rim, he found out.

At the center of the crater shone a flint arrowhead. She was the color of shale, with a blunt nose and two stubby wings mounted flush across her top. She resembled a military transport plane, the huge cargo door at the back and pair of gigantic engines under her wings, but her dimensions were exaggerated. She was too wide and too flat. And Udike didn't see cockpit windows in the nose. Instead there was a curious, glassy arch across her stern, a roll bar, or a racing spoiler. He twisted toward Mike for an explanation.

But before Udike could ask, Mike unhooked his tether, seized the boy by the arm, and kicked off the crater wall. They launched into the void. "Tender ship," Mike said as they floated. "Semi-permanent assignment in lunar orbit, maintaining satellites. Electrofiber wings, for emergency landings on Earth, kind of a programmable carbon fiber that unfurled under electric current, but temperamental. You won't need them for milk runs to the Belt. Go ahead, introduce yourself."

They touched down gently next to three stories of blue-gray hide, the arrowhead seen from above now transformed into something else in profile, the point of the nose not low like an aircraft's but a high, hemispherical nub, the roll bar or spoiler at the back not decoration but a swept-back conning tower. An ocean freighter.

She was the most beautiful thing Udike had ever seen.

He approached in a kind of sacred awe, forgiving Cap for his other other ships and grateful to have been bought with this one, moving slowly, with sudden jerks, aware of the scrape of his boots on the regolith, as if the Hawk was a sleeping creature not to be woken. He reached out an arm and made contact with her skin. His glove slid along her hexagonal tiles, unable to detect the seams between them. Static charge. Aerohide, thick enough to protect her against micrometeorites at interplanetary velocity. But Udike felt only silk. He stroked the surface and wished he could take his glove off. The hull felt soft, the way he imagined feathers, and he smiled. The August Hawk. The name had been a spasm of imagination, and while he hadn't expected it to fit the ship, he now felt that in the next age of man an august hawk would be a creature out of myth, feathered and scaled, skimming over and under sea-foam, a kind of deep-ocean dragon that appeared from the misty depths of time when most needed. Her wakening would signal a rebirth of magic in the universe.

Mike broke into the myth with facts. "Two airlocks: one on the port side, one on the dorsal. C'mere."

Udike withdrew with a promise to return. Mike took him by the belt and kicked off the ground to land on the Hawk's topside. Flat along her centerline was a hatch. Mike lifted a handle, unscrewed it, and dropped inside.

The airlock was black inside. Mike flipped a row of colored switches to pressurize the chamber, then removed his helmet and opened the door into the ship. It was black too, but a long safety strip glowed in front of them, blocking their path forward, and Udike sensed that they stood on a balcony overlooking the hold. Mike whistled two notes. Behind them, vertical sconces on the wall flickered then steadied into a cold, sterile light. The pit below remained unlit, but by the sconces Udike could make out dim stacks of crates tied down by netting.

Mike stood with has hand on the rail, helmet under his arm. His black hair was well-groomed and brushed with gray, but his eyes creased with long-held worry. He was tired. He had the powerful bearing of a man who could lift the world, but the countenance of one who had grown weary of lifting it. All first-generation Martians looked like that, Udike thought. The pioneer spirit burned out. But as Udike read Mike's face and foresaw that a day when his own youthful spirit would burn low, he also saw that if world-weariness had quenched Mike's fire, then it had quenched a hot iron—and hardened it.

Mike was orienting him. "Cargo down there, bunks to starboard, galley to port, ramps from the galley to the other decks." He gestured overhead. "You have sightlines into the cockpit."

Udike peered up through the transparent bulkhead into the conning tower. "It's not a cockpit," he whispered. Then, louder, to explain himself, "Planes have cockpits. A ship has a bridge."

Mike smiled. "They put it at the stern so the pilot could see the satellite he was backing around. Bad design. Should have used grapplers."

Mike led him past the galley and up a ramp. As he did, he hobbled. Udike asked, "Are you hurt?"

"Old injury. No doctor, didn't heal right." Common enough story on Mars, yet Udike felt he should know this particular instance of it.

Then his eye caught movement in the darkness below, a pair of sharp glints that flashed and disappeared. He peered over the handrail and scrutinized the opaque depths of the hold. Nothing. Probably the glass of his faceplate had reflected the light of the sconces. He removed the helmet, but the undeniable feeling of an afterimage remained, as if in the faceplate he'd scried the face of a ghost.

He continued up the ramp to the bridge, but as he put out a foot he paused. The floor was missing. Out one half he saw the lights the balcony, out the other the dark gray boulders of Deimos. Mike said, standing in midair at the helm, "Transparent ceramic. Maximizes visibility."

He waved Udike to the console and pointed out the initialization sequence. Udike brought the ship to life. Soft glows lit the cockpit. The bulkheads were a warm, textured gray, matte and without reflections. The console's switches, gauges, and readouts all illumined in pinks and greens, to preserve night vision. Maximum visibility indeed.

Mike talked him through basic flight operation. Udike recognized the board's organizational theory, and his fingers twitched on his leg, playacting Mike's instruction.

An irreverent voice cut in. "Look at this place! All that glass—it's like the Jetsons' up here."

Cap ducked in from the ramp, pushing himself down off the ceiling after a miscalculated stride, and he kicked awkwardly toward the helm. "Good to see you, Mike." A quick, informal handshake, like they knew each other from way back. Cap asked Udike, "Ready to take her down?"

"Down? I thought I was plotted for the Belt."

"You will, but show me you can land on Mars first, while you've got plenty of fuel for a second try."

"I won't need a second try."

Cap was surprised, but checked Mike.

Mike shrugged. "He knows the controls. No idea where he learned, but I'd wager he can fly." So Mike had read his twitching fingers.

Cap accepted Mike's judgment and Mike dismissed himself. He was visible through the glass floor as he crossed the balcony, leg stiff. He screwed on his helmet, disappeared into the airlock, and a moment later reappeared in front of them on the dorsal hull. He kicked and flew back to the crater rim.

Cap tsked. "Moon full of people who think they're Mary Poppins."

Udike considered asking how Cap knew Mike, then kept silent to give himself a chance to figure it out. Instead he asked, "What'd you learn from Norse?"

Cap whipped from the window, not having intended Udike to know he'd come for information. Then his glare faded to resignation. "Norse didn't know anything." But as he turned back to the desolate crater, Udike detected the obvious mistruth. "Let's go," Cap said, "before I change my mind."

Udike buckled the straps of the pilot's chair. Cap whirled again. His eyes darted around the room in search of another seat. Udike said, "Bunks are below, starboard side. You can tie in down there."

Cap's head bobbed with forced nonchalance, but he breathed through a tight O in his lips and shuffled unsteadily to the ramp, braced on the doorframe. Watching him cross the balcony gripping the handrail, Udike remembered why Cap was afraid to fly, and with it how Cap knew Mike and how Mike had injured his leg.

Nine days the August Hawk sat in Rimstaff. She hunkered in an orange haze of blowing rust that sliced across the plateau, obscuring all but the top of her, and she seemed welded to the planet, as leaden as a geological feature, a jut of primeval rock that had broken through the crust only to have the fires driving her cool and solidify. Rigsby grumbled. So much for efficiency.

Out of the haze two humanoid figures ambled, one tall and unhurried, the other brown and hunched as it shuffled for cover in the storm. The tall one lifted a cellar door for his companion. A minute later an octogenarian emerged from the airlock, helmet off and breathing clear air. He told Udike over his shoulder, "I'll rig something' by end of day." Then he trudged down the ramp into the settlement.

Rigsby asked Udike, "What are you doing with Bosweiler?"

"Cap wants the cockpit to have chairs."

"Why?"

"Didn't say."

Udike was always few on words, but Rigsby detected a twitchy kind of energy in the boy. Antsy. "You're worried."

"I've been parked here more than week. Cap's had me doing system checks, radar diagnostics, nav simulations. Benning and Norse already tested the equipment. What's the problem? Is it me?"

He said it matter-of-factly, but Rigsby detected Udike's high dudgeon. "It's not you."

"Then what?"

Rigsby gritted his teeth. "I'm not sure."

"He's keeping me here for some reason, Rigsby. Today he wants chairs, tomorrow it's too dangerous to lift off in a dust storm. He's making excuses."

"I agree."

"What should I do?"

"It's my problem. Just sit tight. I'll poke him. I've got a card up my sleeve." But, Rigsby silently confessed, it would be a dangerous card to play, in no small part because it was the same card that, a week ago, Cap had played against Solange.

Udike accepted Rigsby's promise. He put his helmet back on, disappeared into the airlock, and emerged from the cellar door to return to the Hawk, fading into the dust. Living on the ship. Lonely accommodations, Rigsby thought, but no lonelier than flying to the Belt.

So why would Cap expect passengers?

Rigsby left the window and the burnyard cupola to return to Grand Plymouth. Only Halliday was in the office. She stood at the reception desk, bent over a binder and an array of lose papers, cross-referencing manifests. Rigsby said, "Where's Cap?"

"Went out. Didn't say where."

"Say when he'd be back?"

"Nope."

Rigsby waited for Halliday to finish, but when she didn't, asked, "Has Cap said anything about the Hawk?"

"In what regard?"

"Why he's grounded it."

"Not to me." She had fingers on two numbers and looked to the ceiling, eyes half-closed as if to prevent the numbers from spilling out of working memory.

Rigsby said, "Has Cap seemed himself lately?"

"Since when?"

"Since last week, when he returned from Deimos."

"Nope." She finished her calculation, jotted a note, and found a third number.

Rigsby twisted his lips. "He started to act weird before he went up. Sent me on a wild goose chase for some guy named Bruno Farelli."

"Maybe you needed something to do."

"You think it was a distraction?"

"Maybe. Were you asking a lot of annoying questions while he was trying to focus on a hard problem?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

She stared at him, and he got her meaning. "It started before that. He got Solange to leave by mentioning her father and a drill. Any idea what he meant?"

"Nope."

"Should I ask him?"

"Better him than me."

"It's not that I must know, but if he's grounded the Hawk because he's afraid of Solange..." Rigsby dragged his fingers along the polished surface of the reception desk and listened to his skin resist with tiny squeaks. "Do you think I should remind Cap that, by his own scheme, Udike owns the Hawk and could leave with her whenever he wants."

"I wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Have you read the contract? Udike only owns the Hawk as long as he works for Grand Plymouth, but if he quits or gets fired, ownership reverts to Cap. Do you really want Cap to fire the one pilot you found so he can keep the Hawk where he wants it?"

"Rust, I hadn't considered that." He squeaked his fingertips again. "But why is Cap keeping the Hawk here? The whole point of the Hawk was to make faster cycles to the Belt to recoup debt on the Princes sooner. Why park her in the burnyard?"

"I haven't considered it," Halliday replied. "The man is full of mysteries." She looked up from her paperwork. "Did you know he has a sister on Earth?"

"He's not supposed to talk about her and neither should you."

"Why not? Who on Mars would tell anyone on Earth?"

"She's laying low."

"Especially low?"

"Yes."

Rigsby was about to add an old saying of Thomas Kaufman's that the difference between a citizen and a fugitive was the fugitive knew he was on the run, but as he opened his mouth the front doors of the office flew apart and a stranger appeared with wild eyes. Rigsby felt he should recognize the bootblack mustache. "Can I help you?"

"Cincinnati Pierce?"

"He's not here, but I'm the C.O.O., Rigsby Nevers."

Rigsby made the introduction from ten feet away, but autonomically the man's arm sprang from his side and he leapt at Rigsby to pin him with a handshake. Awfully forward, Rigsby thought. "Anthony Zinser, Fourth Hill Publishing."

Halliday scooped up her papers and ran.

Rigsby pried his hand free. There had been talk of someone in Colorado launching a newspaper, the general reaction being suspicion and a firm belief that anyone who wrote dailies was bound to find Mars a slow news planet, and would inevitably adopt the habits of eavesdropping, opening other people's mail, drumming up scandal, and outright fabrication. Rigsby retreated a step. "What do you need Cap for?"

"A ship."

"We don't do rentals."

"It's not a rental, it's a charter"—and before Rigsby could ask the difference, Zinser added with the wild coming back into his eyes—"a rescue charter."

Rigsby stiffened. "Rescue where?" Then, as Zinser's eyes fell, Rigsby started with a different question. "Rescue who?"

Zinser took a breath. "A few months ago I hired a freelancer, señorita, self-proclaimed investigative journalist. Good research, good writing, I bought a few stories. Problem is, she's too good. Puts her nose where it's not wanted."

"Sounds good for business."

"It's great for business, but she doesn't know when to quit. Kept digging when she shouldn't have. She went...too far."

"How far?"

"Enemy territory. She went to Earth."

Rigsby jerked.

Zinser raised his hands in self-defense. "I didn't ask her to go, I told her not to, but do the young listen? No idea how she got through. Arranged her own transportation. But I required her to call three times a day, and for two weeks she did. Then, four days ago, nada. I know, I know, comms can be flaky. But I am not some nervous grandmother jumping to conclusions. This morning I received this."

Zinser reached behind him and from the back of his belt produced a scroll. He unfurled it, a black-and-white mimeograph. "A broadside, posted by authorities on Earth. They're shouting by radio too."

Rigsby expected a ransom note, but the headline read differently. "They've banned Martians? But there aren't any Martians on Earth."

"They don't need any to make a ban, but there was one, and they got her."

Rigsby took the plastic sheet and held it in the light where he could better read the finer, grainier text, wondering what could prompt a ban on Martians on a world where every authority from heads of government to schoolteachers and parents insisted that Martians were a myth. Then, near the bottom of the page, Rigsby found the reason. Only a reference to an incident, not an explanation, and after rereading the sentence, he bit his tongue and handed the sheet back to Zinser.

"What did you see?"

"Nothing. Just a...term I heard somewhere." Rigsby rolled the information around in his mind to interlock disparate facts into a new arrangement, to crystallize them into a single structure so he could see the bigger picture—

"Lauren!"

He resisted the urge to go looking for her, and in a moment she appeared at the entrance of the rear tunnel, arms crossed and refusing to come closer to the newspaperman. Rigsby said, "Would you please take Mr. Zinser to the High Bridge?" That's where Cap goes when he wants to be alone." Then, to Zinser, "Ask Cap about a charter. Start with the fact that you have a reporter who got through the Argrid. Any idea how she did it?"

"One."

"Tell him."

"It's complicated."

"All the better."

"And very circumstantial."

"Just give him a thread to pull. Cap will unravel the rest. Your reporter has a name?"

"Judith."

"Tell him that too."

Zinser nodded, puzzled by the sudden turn in his favor, but Halliday pushed him out through the frosted white doors and followed, directing Zinser up-canyon.

The opaque glass swung closed, and Rigsby counted to ten.

Then he dashed out through the doors in a different direction.

Zinser disliked following women, not because of any prejudice of the sexes but because every woman on Mars seemed to be a head taller than him and when he followed he couldn't see where he was going. As a newsman, he took professional pride in his ability to see ahead.

The tunnel was dirt brown and narrow, but barren of other foot traffic, and Pierce's office girl strode ahead fast enough that Zinser had to trot to keep up. To his left circular portals flashed glimpses of the canyon outside, juts and ledges and crags casting long black shadows on the cliff, as if to make each portal a sundial. Clocks ticking. He checked his lens. No messages. Reflexively he dialed again. He knew it wouldn't help, but he had to do something.

He was doing something. He was getting Pierce. But that posed its own problems. Nevers had given Zinser specific instructions for convincing Pierce to lend him a ship, which meant Nevers thought Pierce would be tough to reason with. Start with how Judith got to Earth. But that was only a guess, incomplete, not ready for the presses. Zinser hated to circulate a hunch and play into the Martian prejudice of newsman as rumor-monger, but a woman's life was in danger and he would have to swallow his professional pride long enough to rescue her.

The blonde brought Zinser to a heavy metal hatch. She spun it open, waved Zinser in with a sharp movement that felt like shoving him forward, then swung the hatch back almost before she finished saying, "Close it when you leave." The door clanged, and Zinser turned to proceed onto the bridge.

His arms caught a pair of stanchions.

Dropping from the face of the cliff hung a slatted bridge. It had no supports, just a tight steel cable, but nowhere near tight enough to keep the bridge from drooping across the two hundred meters span. The construction belonged less to the canyons of Mars than the mountaintops of the Incas. Zinser shivered.

In the middle of the bridge, at its lowest point, stood a lone silhouette, tall but hunched, elbows on the cable. Pierce. Zinser gripped both cables and felt forward with one foot, afraid to look down. Two additional cables above held up a transparent plastic sheet that wrapped the bridge to hold in air and convert radiation into heat, but Zinser still felt cold and had trouble breathing. With each step the bridge rippled and twisted, waves snapping down the cables to bounce off the far abutments and reflect back at him. No wonder Rimstaffers had spent a fortune building the Boulevard. This bridge was terrifying. And climbing out of it again would be like climbing out of a gravity well.

He pressed forward. The silhouette resolved into a swarthy gentleman with curly black hair, wearing a khaki shirt tucked into brown trousers. He ignored Zinser's approach and instead stared out at the canyon, not at the walls and their irregular swallow nests, nor at the lazy yellow arch of the Boulevard half a kilometer down-canyon, but at the space below it, the ragged framework of girders, now unnecessary and being dismantled. The metal was needed elsewhere.

Wind fluttered the plastic sleeve around the bridge, but Zinser resisted the temptation to watch it. Instinct warned him that if he leaned anywhere off-center, the bridge would flip and he would slide to the bottom of the sleeve, or more likely, punch right through it and not stop until he hit the canyon floor a hundred meters below. He inched forward.

"Anthony Zinser, Fourth Hill Publishing." This time he fought habit and kept his hand where it was, resisting his newsman's urge to force a handshake and build rapport.

Pierce said without looking, "You write La Gazetina. I'll get out of your way, let you get a view of the Boulevard."

"I came for you."

Pierce laughed. "I'm not talking to a gossip rag."

"La Gazetina is a mercantile fact sheet."

"Lot of gossip for a fact sheet."

"So you're a subscriber?"

"Just what I hear."

"Sounds like gossip has its uses."

Pierce flinched, caught off guard. "You've used that before."

Zinser bowed.

"I'm still not granting an interview."

"What about an audience?"

For the first time Pierce looked at him, squinting, unsure how to respond.

Zinser advanced to a more confidential distance. "I lost a reporter, name Judith. She'd be college-age if we had college here. She's been working for me in Colorado, has a great nose for sniffing out stories, but she's gone missing. On Earth."

Pierce's long body went taut, and the next instant he was past Zinser and swinging up the bridge as nimbly as an ape. Zinser clutched the bouncing cables and called after him. "How will you get through to Earth?"

Pierce halted. He swung back down to Zinser, shaking the bridge even more. "How did your reporter get through?"

"Arranged her own transportation, refused to tell me how or with who. But I have a guess. She was chasing a lead." Zinser tested his grip, and his eyes wandered from Pierce to the slats under his shoes. "What you have to know about Judith is, she's a bit...conservative."

"What's that mean?"

"Well, she's...unconventional. For Mars."

"She can't be both conservative and unconventional."

"What I mean is: she's a second-generation Martian, one of the few, and she's not like us first-genners. She's nervous about the Martian experiment. She's afraid that, given our scarce resources, we'll mismanage it. She thinks we, maybe, need help allocating it more...efficiently."

Pierce puzzled through the roundabout descirption. "Vac," he swore, "she's a statist."

Zinser rose to the girl's defense. "She could have a point, but she's not writing opinions, she's doing the research, letting the facts speak. But her research, well, it led her to Earth."

"How?"

"Wouldn't say."

"Some reporter."

"She is collecting facts."

"And how did those facts get her through the Argrid?"

"All I know is where she was sniffing."

"Where's that?"

"I hate to say this, but there's a rumor—I know, I know, but I'm not putting in print here, am I? There's a rumor about you and Gidja Boyle."

"Oh for air's sake, get a life." Pierce whirled away and ascended the bridge.

"The rumor is the two of you are in competition—"

"If you want anyone to take you seriously when you tell them you're not a gossip rag—" Pierce turned back. "Competition?"

"From what I piece together, Boyle may have moved to the Belt to found a shipyard."

"That's absurd. Gidja Boyle is a farmer. She ran the community garden here for four years then moved to Colorado to work for Thompson Post. She doesn't have a clue how to build ships."

Zinser moved to put a solemn hand on his chest then quickly grabbed the cable again. "I have met everyone in Colorado, and I have never met her. The few who have talked to her tell me that when they call, she does not answer real-time, always messages back later. Like she's off-world. I have some data on her response times and had them analyzed. Results were inconclusive. You've not heard anything?"

"About Gidja Boyle?"

"About a shipyard in the Belt."

"No, of course not—" Then Pierce's gaze drifted. "The pilot shortage."

"Señorita Babineaux has told me."

"Yeah, well, she doesn't know the whole story. Pilots are missing from Mars, and they didn't emigrate on any of my ships." Then he said, more to himself than Zinser, "But why would Gidja found a shipyard?"

"I haven't the faintest idea, but I know a girl who might, one whose latest story had her nosing around the Belt. One week she was phoning manned asteroids, the next she had a mystery ride to Earth."

"She's a statist. Could she be defecting?"

"No." Cautiously, watching to make sure Pierce didn't make a sudden movement that would tilt the bridge, Zinser released a cable and took the rolled-up mimeograph from the back of his belt. He gave it to Pierce, the fastened himself back to the cable.

Pierce read it, including the fine print. Zinser couldn't be sure, but he seemed to fixate on the same place Nevers had, like there was something he recognized. "What do you see?"

"Nothing," Pierce replied, just like Nevers, and he rolled the sheet back up to give back to Zinser.

Zinser didn't release the cable to take it.

Pierce said, "A ban changes nothing. They decided we were criminals as soon as Thomas Kaufman launched a rocket without their permission. Your reporter never should have gone."

"Judith is a smart señorita. She had a reason to go. I know the face. She was onto a story."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Get me to Earth."

"Says here you'll be arrested and thrown in prison without a trial."

"I have to do something, apply for diplomatic protection, post bail—whatever they ask. I can't leave her in their hands. You're too young to remember what they did to those of us who worked for Thomas Kaufman."

For the first time Pierce met his eyes. The rolled mimeograph became heavy in his hand, like a sword falling to his side. "Who arrested her? Was it the U.N.?"

Zinser shook his head. "U.S. Secret Servus. Bodyguards, once, now a kind of...secret police."

"W-would they torture her?"

Zinser held his breath. "I don't know."

Pierce stared again at the canyon, suspended not so much between two sides of a canyon as between two moments in time, one long past, the other in a possible future. Then his cold, black eyes focused again. "You stay here."

"I can't leave her."

"You're not equipped for a fight."

Pierce was swinging back up out of the gravity well to the hatch on the wall. Zinser shuffled after him. "What do you mean—"

"They won't give you diplomatic protection. But I have friends who can help. I'll bring back your reporter."

"You don't know how to get through the Argrid."

"I'll figure it out."

Pierce disappeared through the hatch. Zinser struggled up the last few steep feet of the bridge, then raced after, banked through the hatch. He whanged his shoulder into the metal rim, yowled, raced forward, doubled back to shut the hatch and spin its wheel, chased down the tunnel after Pierce. "I should come—"

"Too dangerous. I have to go, and my pilot, but no one else. I won't risk anyone I don't have to."

"I'll pay you—"

"Settle up after."

"Why are you—"

But they were at the white doors of Grand Plymouth and Pierce was through and up the steps, ordering the girl, "Tell Udike to fire up the Hawk."

"He's already primed, but J-5 will be out of—"

"Re-plot his course. I'm going to Earth."

"You?"

"A Martian's been arrested and it's my responsibility."

"How's it your—"

"I'm the only person with a ship that can do two planetfalls."

Pierce disappeared into the black hole of a tunnel and emerged with the pieces of a beige exosuit. He squeezed into the torso. "Get me whatever information we have on Earth. And send a message to Gidja Boyle, tell her—"

"You send a message to Gidja Boyle." The girl rifled through a satchel on the front desk.

Pierce checked Zinser out the corner of his eye, then stepped closer to the desk and kept his voice low. Zinser heard him anyway. "Gidja's not talking to me. Ask her...ask her how to get through the Argrid. Don't ask if she knows, ask her how to do it." Pierce checked Zinser again, this time with a silent request, and Zinser replied by drawing a thumb and forefinger across his lips.

The girl pulled from her satchel a book and slapped it to Pierce's chest. "Best reference we have on Earth, Levy's journal. That's my personal copy, so bring it back."

Pierce twisted an exo-leg into place and tucked the book into a crevice. He grabbed his helmet. Then he paused. He straightened and surveyed the room, searching it for anything that would remind him of further instructions, one last command to give to keep the operation going in his absence. Nothing came to mind. The place would operate without him. Zinser felt a chill, though, as if Pierce's gaze wasn't that of a commander but one borne of sadness. A departure. Zinser recognized the look. He had felt the same way as he watched the sun set on the terracotta roofs of Cartagena and known that, in all likelihood, he would never return.

Zinser stumbled forward to stop Pierce. Worse than a girl in trouble was an attempt to rescue her that sent a man to his death, and Zinser yearned to find some words to call it off, to insist they find some other way, a safer plan.

But his newsman's voice failed him, and Pierce spoke first. He found a final instruction after all. "Don't tell Rigsby until I'm past high orbit."

Then Pierce was gone.

Zinser stood in a stupor in the dusty plaza outside Grand Plymouth after the girl kicked him out, dazed and unable to think, unable to move, unable to nod in reply to the passersby acknowledging his presence with polite smiles, ignorant of his terrible act of asking for help. But he'd had to ask for help, he had no ship. And he'd offered to go along. So while he abhorred himself for being relieved to be safe on Mars while another man plunged into danger, his abhorrence lacked stamina. He reintegrated himself. Pierce was a man, and Pierce had made the choice to leave him behind.

Zinser's foot moved. He glanced up at a narrow path toward a lonely spire of orange rock and at its top a transparent glass door. He felt in the back of his jacket for the other plastic sheet he'd brought. The foot was right. He had another visit to make.

He went to the Bank.

The lobby was empty and he crossed uninvited to a rear passage and an interior door, wooden and opaque, which on Earth would have been pedestrian but on Mars was ostentatious. He shoved it aside without knocking.

Ambrose banged his legs on the underside of the desk. "Tony? What's happened?"

"Cincinnati Pierce has gone to Earth."

A series of emotions passed over Ambrose's face, first a sense of non-sequitur, then confusion that Zinser had wanted the same thing he did, and finally delight that Zinser had accomplished what he hadn't. He threw his head back with a pleased clap of his big hands. "How did you ever manage it?"

Zinser didn't like the reaction. "It's not a scheme, Joe. I've lost a reporter. Pierce went to rescue her. He refused to take me with him."

Ambrose sobered. "This reporter, she's the one who sent you the list?"

"Don't ask me that, Joe."

"Why not?"

"The Secret Servus is hunting Martians."

"The Secret Servus knows we exist?"

"They do now," Zinser replied, and he reached into his jacket and extracted from the back of his belt the second mimeograph.

Ambrose put on half-frame reading glasses. It was a different mimeograph than the one Zinser had given Pierce, not the broadside with a government proclamation but the front page of a newspaper, one not so different from the dozens Zinser had sent Ambrose over the last few months, all using the same journalistic template but different names—

Professor Galloway—missing!

Dr. Fox—whereabouts unknown!

Chemist Dryden—vanished without a trace!

The grainy, black-and-white headline Zinser gave Ambrose now could have been lumped in as just another in a long trend, except it wasn't one sentence, it was two, and when Ambrose read it, he clenched his fist and his brown face turned yellow—

Bruno Farelli—kidnapped!

Martians claim credit!