Bodyguard

10

“The Class IV environment suit is not intended for prolonged use on planetary surfaces. Such use constitutes an abuse of said suit and serves to nullify all warranties offered by the manufacturer.”

A sticker found in the right armpit of each Jiffy Corp Class IV environment suit

Someone slapped my face. I felt my head rock back and forth. It hurt and, worse than that, forced me up out of the nice black hole where I’d been hiding. I made a conscious decision to hurt the person who was hurting me, gathered my energy, and reached for their throat. Or would have, if my arms had been free.

Someone laughed, a deep grunting sound, not unlike that made by primates in the zoo.

That made me really angry, angry enough to open my eyes and squint up into the harsh white light. It came from a ceiling-mounted fixture and served to silhouette my tormentor. I couldn’t see his features, but the outline was big. Bigger than I am. He saw my eyes open and nodded his satisfaction. “So. sleeping beauty awakes. Time to rise and shine, sweet cakes. We’re going for a little hike.”

I heard a series of clicks and felt the restraints drop away. The blob withdrew and I forced myself to sit. I had what felt like a hangover and decided the knockout gas was to blame. The ambush! Sasha! Where was she? My head throbbed as I looked around. It seemed as though I was inside some sort of cylindrical vehicle, an impression that was confirmed when it hit a bump and the back of my head bounced off a heavily padded bulkhead.

A corridor ran the length of whatever it was that I was in. It was filled with half-dressed men and women. They swore when the vehicle rocked from side to side and struggled to don what looked like space suits. Almost all of them had the whipcord-thin look of people teetering on the edge of starvation. Some eyed me with open hostility. The rest seemed determined to ignore me.

My tormentor reappeared. He was big, black, and completely bald. It was supposed to look intimidating and did. He had a wedge-shaped torso, thick arms, and legs like tree trunks. I put my plans for mayhem on temporary hold. He nodded as if endorsing my decision.

“That’s right, sweet cakes. Get the lay of the land before you try me on. It’s nice to have a mule with a little bit of common sense for a change. Now get your big white ass down off that bunk and suit up.”

Discretion seemed the better part of valor, so I slid off the bunk. My landing was feather-light and served to remind me of the planet’s rather iffy gravity. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned just in time to catch a loosely tied bundle. It was a suit similar to the one I had worn in orbit. I shook it out and managed to slide inside without making a complete fool of myself. I didn’t know why that mattered, just that it did, especially with the black guy looking on.

The truth was that I didn’t like him, but still wanted his approval, kind of like a recruit hates the DI’s guts but wants his or her respect. A bit perverse perhaps, but very much in line with my need for authority figures, and the occasional bit of guidance. Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t deck the bastard if I thought I could get away with it and doing so suited my purposes. Confused? Hey, join the party.

I checked the seals on my suit and tried to figure out where they had taken me and why. What had happened to the Trans-Solar goons, anyway? Not to mention the homicidal greenies. And Sasha? Was she a prisoner like me? Or lying dead in a meat locker?

Then I saw her, a reed-thin woman with stubblelike hair, piercing blue eyes, and a ruler-straight mouth. The kind that never smiles. She had sealed her suit but left the face plate open and was killing me with her eyes. Or trying to, anyway. There was something familiar about her, as though we had met before, and recently at that. On the shuttle? In the terminal? Yes, I thought I remembered a frightened face, a gun, and a dart whirring past my head.

Yeah, she’d been there, and, even more importantly, she understood what was happening. I had already taken a step in the woman’s direction when a hand fell on my shoulder. It was the black guy again. “Wrong direction, sweet cakes. The lock is towards the ass end of this kidney-buster. Follow the mule in front of you.”

I turned in the proper direction. The guy in front of me had “Screw you!” spray-painted across the sand-blasted surface of his oxy box. It seemed like the perfect sentiment.

The vehicle braked to a jerky halt, failed to throw any of us to the deck, and vibrated in frustration. The line shuffled forward and I followed. It soon became apparent that the lock held five people at a time, so there were a number of pauses while we cycled through. I had seen no sign of guards other than the black man, so I made plans to run. A quick check assured me that he was seven people back, well clear of the group I would share the lock with, and apparently uninterested in my activities. Good. Once clear of the lock, I would have about five minutes to disappear.

The lock cycled open, my group entered, and immediately sealed their face plates. I did the same and took the opportunity to run one last check on my suit. Unlike the one I had worn in orbit, this baby was new. So new that the chemical smell made my sinuses hurt. Because I planned to escape, the suit’s six-hour air supply, four quarts of water, and two days’ worth of emergency rations took on added importance. I was still in the process of wishing that I had more of everything when the lock cycled open.

The exterior landscape had a reddish tint to it and was thick with man-sized rocks and boulders: a barrier that might or might not explain why we were about to take a “little hike.” Wind-driven sand peppered our suits and rattled across our helmets. I decided that I liked Mars less with each passing moment.

I followed the others away from the vehicle and turned to get the lay of the land. It was then that I gave up all hope of escape. No wonder the black guy was so relaxed. Outside of the long, tank-shaped vehicle, and the tracks left in its wake, there was not a single sign of civilization for as far as the eye could see. Six hours worth of air wouldn’t begin to get me where I needed to go. I pulled a three-sixty.

A rock-strewn plain stretched off towards what my suit informed me was the south. Hundreds of dry gullies cut the west into an eye-numbing maze of channels and banks. Rocks, boulders, and ragged-looking hills marched off to the north, where they terminated at the base of the most amazing sight that I’d ever seen.

According to the video I had watched aboard the shuttle, Olympus Mons towers fifteen miles above the equivalent of sea level, making it a full-grown giant when compared to the relatively puny Mt. Everest, which stands little more than five miles high. Not to mention the fact that Olympus Mons boasts a caldera that is forty-five miles across and a base that would extend from the Montreal Urboplex all the way to what’s left of the Big Apple.

But no set of statistics could possibly do justice to the out-and-out magnificence of what I saw. Olympus Mons was nothing less than a brooding presence, squatting there like an ancient monument, measuring everything against its own enormous bulk.

As for the land to the east, well, it wasn’t any better, consisting as it did of a rock face fronted by a jumble of sharp-edged boulders. I noticed that while some of my companions were scoping things out, most were oblivious to their surroundings, as if they’d seen it all before or just didn’t care. They stood in clusters, their helmets pressed together for private conversations, or just staring at the ground.

The lock opened and the last group shuffled out. An indicator light appeared inside my helmet, and the black man’s voice filled my ears. He had a stylized “X” painted on the front of his otherwise unadorned suit. I tried to see through the polarized face plate but couldn’t.

“Alright, boys and girls…listen up. For those of you who haven’t already heard, my name is Dawkins, Larry Dawkins, Marscorp Field Supervisor extraordinaire, and one mean bastard. I ain’t no lifer, and I ain’t no ass-kisser, which means I got where I am by out-surviving a whole lot of dumb shits like you. So, if you work hard, and do exactly as I say, you might live long enough to get paid. Got any questions?”

Silence.

“Good…So here’s the scoop. The company lost a shuttle about thirty miles north of here. The pilot and copilot bought the farm, but the ship’s artificial intelligence thinks the cargo can be salvaged. And, since the cargo consists of ten Class IV Cargo Walkers, the first to make it dirtside, it’s worth our while to go in after them. Questions?”

This time there was. The voice identified itself as Swango. and was clearly male, but I had no way of knowing which suit it belonged to. “Yeah, I’ve got a question. Why walk when we could ride?”

“Well, gee,” Dawkins said sarcastically, “I wonder. You don’t suppose it would have anything to do with those friggin’ boulders, do you? Or those god-damned rocks? You know, the ones in our way?”

“Oh,” Swango said self-consciously. “Sorry.”

“You certainly are,” Dawkins agreed. “Anyone else?”

I don’t know what came over me, but the fog cleared off long enough for a thought to surface, and the words popped out of their own accord. “What about oxygen, water, and food? Will we be resupplied?”

The Field Supervisor’s reply was more accurate than he knew. “Well, I’ll be damned, a mule with half a brain. The answer is no, we won’t. We have enough air, water, and food to reach the wreckage. Once there, we will take shelter in one of the remaining airtight compartments, resupply our suits, and recover the walkers. And here’s the good news, folks: once the walkers are up and running, we ride out.”

The supposedly good news left everyone silent. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a whole lot of things could and probably would go wrong, that the company had left us with practically no safety margin, and that Dawkins was standing in the same pile of shit we were. I thought about what he’d said earlier, about not kissing ass, and wondered if that explained why he had pulled such a rotten assignment.

“Alright,” the man in question said, “enough dorking around. Line up and draw your loads.”

The crawler remained where it was. Vapor outgassed into the thin atmosphere as a hatch slid open. The compartment was filled with a jumble of strange-looking equipment. Dawkins motioned us forward, grabbed what looked like a high-tech backpack from a row of similar packs, and handed it to the first person in line. I wondered why. If not supplies, what would we carry? The answer blew what was left of my mind. It quickly became apparent that our loads consisted of cyborgs! Walker Wonks, to be exact, specially engineered to pilot the huge machines, and more than a little weird.

Though human in the technical sense, the cyborgs looked like little more than gray metal suitcases to which shoulder straps and a waist belt had been attached. They had their own life support systems but were dependent on whoever was toting them for mobility and communications. Until they were united with their machines, that is, when they would take on super-human powers, and go to work on whatever task Marscorp had brought them here to do.

The line jerked to a halt, and a scuffle broke out. I missed the first part but saw the mule twist away from Dawkins. It was then that I recognized the greenie’s suit. I hadn’t been smart enough to wonder which side she was on, but the answer became obvious as she broadcast in the clear. “Resist the evil plan! Free the cyborgs from their devil bodies! Rise up and smite the…”

We didn’t get to hear the rest of the woman’s diatribe because Dawkins overrode her transmission. “I don’t have time for this shit. Carry the load or die.”

Silence ensued. Nobody moved. A woman stood next to me. I put my helmet next to hers. “What’s going on?”

“Dawkins cut her air supply.”

“He can do that?”

“You bet he can. Yours too. That’s why we do what he says. That and the fact that there’s no place to run to.”

I thanked her and pulled away. No wonder a single guard was sufficient. Our suits were rigged so he could control them. The corpies think of everything. The woman surrendered about a minute later. She was gasping for breath. “I’ll do what you say. Give me air!”

“A wise decision,” Dawkins said, doing whatever he did to restore the woman’s air supply. “Don’t do that again. We’ve got a long ways to go, and time equates to air, water, and food. Come on…hurry up.”

I received my cyborg two minutes later. The added weight was negligible thanks to the relatively low gravity, but the additional mass would take some getting used to. It felt as if the load was pulling me backwards and off-balance. I leaned forward to compensate.

A green indicator light appeared in my heads-up display as Dawkins shoved a jack into my external patch panel. I waited for my passenger to say something, but heard nothing beyond the hiss of an open channel. It seemed as if this particular cyborg was the antisocial type. Well, that was fine with me, since I needed what there was of my brain for other things. Like negotiating my way over the rock-strewn ground, for example.

I tongued a couple of pain tabs into my mouth and washed them down with a sip of recycled water. It tasted like what it had once been.

Once loaded, we set off in the direction of Olympus Mons, winding our way through a maze of hard-edged boulders, going where no one had gone before. Or so I assumed. It was a strange feeling after the humanity-packed cities of Earth, where you had the feeling that every corridor had been walked by thousands before you, everything you saw had been seen a million times, and “new” meant “disposable.”

But the thrill of trail-blazing soon gave way to renewed anxiety over Sasha’s whereabouts and the neverending task of placing one foot in front of the other. It was cold outside, minus 24 degrees F according to my helmet display, but I soon started to sweat. Turning my thermostat down helped a little, but the problem remained. Try as I might, I had a difficult time internalizing the fact that the sweat was inside rather than outside my high-tech skin. We had traveled about five miles by the time my passenger broke the silence. Her voice was synthetic, and sounded vaguely familiar, as if she’d modeled it on a holo star. “I’m sorry.”

I gauged the ledge ahead, decided I could make it thanks to the lower gravity, and jumped. Slow-motion dust geysered up and away from my boots. I checked the path and started after the mule ahead. “Norgleszap? I mean, sorry? Sorry about what?”

“About you having to drag my nonexistent ass cross country.”

I sidestepped a rock and laughed in spite of myself. “It isn’t your fault. Or I assume it isn’t, anyway.”

“No,” the voice said, “I’ve got an alibi. I was sitting in a crate aboard Roller Three when the shuttle crashed.”

“Sounds airtight,” I agreed politely. “Well, I sure hope you and the others know what you’re doing, or this is gonna be a one-way trip.”

“Oh, we know what we’re doing,” she said confidently. “That’s not the problem.”

“It isn’t?” I asked stupidly. “Then what is?”

“Why, the condition of the shuttle,” she answered calmly. “What if the shuttle went in hard? The walkers were in the main cargo bay. They could be spread all over the place.”

I skidded down the side of a ravine and tackled the other side. “But the ship’s artificial intelligence said the cargo is okay.”

“The ship’s artificial intelligence ‘thinks’ the cargo is okay,” my passenger corrected me. “But doesn’t really know, since it’s bolted into a panel somewhere.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “That’s the prognosis, alright. My name’s Loni. What’s yours?”

“Max. Max Maxon.”

“Glad to meet you, Max. Any chance you’d do me a favor?”

I swore as the mule in front of me came to an unexpected stop, forced me to do likewise, then started up again. “Sure, what do you need?”

“I’m tired of the darkness, Max. Tell me what you see.”

Suddenly I knew something I hadn’t known before. I knew that whatever I had lost, others had lost even more. Loni’s brain was intact, but the eyes, ears, arms and legs designed to serve it had been taken away, either through bad luck or a conscious decision on her part. I thought of the darkness within her box, the isolation from the rest of humanity, and shivered. I turned the heat back up a notch and did my best to sound cheerful. “Okay, but I spend a lot of time looking at my feet, so I’ll start there. They are size fourteen or so, large enough to qualify as battleships, and covered with reddish Mars dust.”

Loni laughed, and thus encouraged, I continued. Describing what I saw to my sightless passenger forced me to realize how beautiful my surroundings were and made the time pass quickly. It seemed as if little more than a few minutes had elapsed when Dawkins announced the halfway point and declared a ten-minute break.

Mules headed in every direction as they looked for places to sit. Talking to Loni had been pleasant, but Sasha was very much on my mind, so I waited for the greenie to light on rock and ambled over. Loni was telling me about her VR-driven training, but I cut her off in mid-sentence. “Sorry, Loni, but I’ve got a personal matter to attend to. Hold that gafornk.”

The greenie turned her helmet in my direction but made no effort to avoid me. There was plenty of room on the rock she had chosen, so I sat down beside her. My helmet thumped against hers. It’s hard to be brain-damaged and subtle at the same time. I wasn’t. “You shot at us.”

Her reply was direct. “Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why shoot at us?”

“Because I was ordered to do so.”

“By whom?”

“Screw you.”

“What about the girl? What happened to the girl?”

The woman shrugged. The suit fit fairly well and shrugged with her. “Beats me. The gas put me out.”

I swore. The woman hooked her thumbs under the pack straps that held her cyborg in place. I could barely see her eyes through the sand-abraded face plate. Was it sympathy I saw?

“You really like her, don’t you?”

I was confused. “Like who?”

“The girl.”

“Yes, I really like her.”

“Well,” the woman said, “think about her before you unleash whatever technological hell you’re working on.”

“I’m not working on a technological rebonk.”

“Really?” the woman asked. “Then what are you doing here?”

Part of me wanted to give the obvious answer, to say something about protecting my client, but the rest knew she was right. There was something more going on, something Sasha at least partially understood, assuming she was alive, that is.

“On your feet,” Dawkins ordered. “We have about twelve miles to go and barely enough air to get there. Let’s haul ass.”

The next two and a half hours were difficult. Perhaps some of the others had thought to catheterize themselves prior to departure, but I hadn’t and needed to pee. Add to that the fear of what we might find when we arrived at the crash site, and my concerns for Sasha, and it made for a hard, cold lump that rode my gut for the rest of the day. It was twilight by the time we hit flat ground and the mule called Swango saw the first chunk of wreckage. He sounded worried and ecstatic at the same time. “Dawkins! There it is! A piece of wreckage!”

“Good boy,” Dawkins said calmly. “Now stay away from it until I get there and take a look-see. It could be dangerous.”

“Or it could be loaded with goodies like oxygen,” Loni said over our private intercom.

I hadn’t thought about that but knew it was probably true. If the mules stumbled across some O₂, the Field Supervisor’s immediate authority would be considerably lessened. And, while the mutineers wouldn’t have any place to go after their rebellion, Dawkins could be more than a little dead in the meantime.

The wreckage consisted of a huge engine, one of four required to keep a shuttle aloft in the planet’s thin atmosphere, and glittered with a coating of diamondlike ice crystals. I figured some sort of liquid had been liberated when the engine tore free; then it had vaporized and frozen in a matter of seconds.

We were close now, and picked up the pace without being asked to. It was relatively easy to follow the trail of debris, which, thanks to the lighter gravity, was much longer than it would have been on Earth. Judging from the wreckage, and the huge scars scored in the rocky soil, the shuttle had cartwheeled for two or three miles after it hit before finally coming to rest.

We found more and more wreckage as we followed the trail. I described it to Loni. “And there’s something that looks like a piece of wing with part of an engine still attached.”

The cyborg sounded concerned. “But no sign of the fuselage?”

“Nope, not yet.”

“Good. The walkers can take a lot of punishment, but they’ll do best cradled in the cargo hold.”

The bits and pieces gradually grew thicker until someone spotted the main part of the wreckage. “There it is!” a woman exclaimed. “Straight ahead.”

I arrived five minutes later and was amazed by the sheer size of the downed shuttle. The hull towered three or four stories over my head and stretched hundreds of feet in both directions. There were no signs of a fire, which wasn’t too surprising, since there was very little oxygen available to feed on. All the damage was impact-related. A huge circle served to contain the Marscorp “M” and adorned the side of the hull. It was split down the middle, a fact that eliminated the need to find a hatch.

Dawkins ordered us to wait and entered through the crack. I checked my oxygen supply, saw that I was down to eighteen minutes’ worth, and thought about the assumptions the corpies had used. That we would make the trip inside of six hours, that we would be able to salvage the oxygen we needed from the wreck, and that at least some of the walkers would be operable. Then I realized something that should have been obvious from the start. It didn’t matter if we got back. As long as the borgs made it to the crash site, and Dawkins installed them in their machines, the corpies would deem the mission a success. Which explained why Mars fodder like the greenie and myself had been selected as mules. We were expendable.

Suddenly I saw Dawkins in a new light. He’d known what I’d just managed to figure out all along, and not only planned to carry out his mission, but save our asses as well. The fact was that we had been lucky, very lucky, and I wondered if our luck would hold.

And much to my amazement it did, as Dawkins emerged, announced that six of the walkers were operational, and started the search for an airtight compartment. We spent ten minutes on the task, but couldn’t find one. So, with our air running uncomfortably low, we were forced to inflate one of two emergency shelters carried aboard the shuttle.

The second was missing. A more imaginative person than myself might have spent a significant amount of time considering what might have happened if the first tent had been destroyed, but I felt no desire to do that. No, it was much nicer to cycle through the lock with the warning buzzer sounding in my ears, strip off my suit, and seek the solace of a small but well-designed inflatable rest room.

It was only after I had taken a much delayed pee that I remembered Loni and the fact that I discarded her along with my suit. I hurried back. The shelter had been designed to accommodate twice our number, so there was plenty of room. I wound my way between people, unoccupied suits, and built-in equipment to find that a pair of mules were disconnecting Loni from my suit. I put on one of my most intimidating frowns. “Hey…what’s going on?”

The man had his face plate open. He looked in my direction, then looked again. “Dawkins told us to collect six borgs and connect them to the walkers.”

I nodded my understanding. “Great…but let me say goodbye.”

The man looked unhappy but decided to go along. “Okay…but make it snappy.”

Loni’s umbilical was still connected to my suit. I left her on the floor, lifted the suit, and draped it across my back. The helmet felt natural after wearing it for so long. “Loni?”

“Well, if it isn’t my own personal chauffeur. You disappeared.”

“Sorry. I had to pee. But I hurried back.”

“All is forgiven. Thanks for the ride. Try to get assigned to my walker, so I can return the favor.”

“Will do. Wish we could talk some more, but they’re waiting to take you away.”

“No problem. If I had lips I’d kiss you.”

“Traddlemop.”

Then they took her away. I didn’t know what the others thought about the tears that trickled down my cheeks and didn’t really give a shit.

Things went relatively well after that. It took about twelve hours to grab some sleep, refill our oxygen tanks from the shuttle’s supply, and bury the pilots. The sun had just started to peek over the horizon when we started the service. The walkers were equipped with a variety of attachments, and what would have taken us hours they accomplished in a matter of minutes. The graves were laser-straight and perfectly aligned.

It was a strange funeral. The sun rose higher in the sky and sent long black fingers down across the plain. Eleven space-suited mourners sang “Amazing Grace” while five four-story-tall machines stood at attention. The sixth walker, the one controlled by Loni, served as the only pallbearer, lowering the space-suited pilots into their neatly excavated graves with slow, deliberate movements of her long, spindly arms.

Dawkins called for a moment of silence, and I wondered if anyone else was struck by the fact that not a single one of us had known the pilots, or what kind of people they’d been. And what, I wondered, was the difference between the cyborgs, who lived on after the death of everything but their brain tissue, and the pilots, who were gone wherever dead people go? Was that what we were? Chunks of brain tissue? And if so, what about me? Seeing as I had lost a goodly amount of mine, did that make me less of a person? My head started to hurt, and I let the questions drift.

And so it was that a few cubic yards of rocky red soil was pushed in on top of the pilots and carefully welded metal crosses were erected at the heads of their graves. They looked kind of lonely as we turned our backs on them and boarded the walkers. And I did manage to ride in Loni’s machine, not that it made much difference, since the inside of one cargo space is pretty much like another.

The good news was that it took the walkers less than two hours to traverse the ground we had covered in six. The bad news was that the ride consisted of an unending series of jolts, each one of which threatened to drop my stomach through the bottom of my feet, or lift it up through the top of my head.

But all things come to an end, even bad things, and the ride was no exception. Unfortunately, however, the end of one bad thing can signal the start of another, and such was the case.

I know that the walkers intercepted the huge machine-city called Roller Three, and were admitted via one of the hatchways provided for that purpose, but didn’t actually witness what took place. For what seemed like obvious reasons, the cargo hold was not equipped with niceties like vid screens, and Loni was far too busy to provide a blow-by-blow description. So the first thing we saw was a pressurized vehicle bay, some tool-toting technoids, and the troops sent to pick me up. It took them about ten seconds to spot me, separate me from the rest of the group, and order me out of my suit.

The guards wore red berets with Marcorps Special Forces badges on them and were very, very good. I could commit guard-assisted suicide and nothing more. The smaller of the two, a woman with corporal’s stripes, handed her weapon to a steroidal sidekick and moved to pat me down. Assuming I could take her, which was a lot of assuming, Frankenstein would put a dart through my heart. Not an especially attractive option.

The corporal finished her search, took two steps back, and allowed Frankenstein to slap the gun into her outstretched hand. It had the look and feel of a well-rehearsed drill. The weapon seemed to leap into the cutaway holster and snap itself in.

“Okay, Maxon. Head for door number two.”

I looked. Door number two had a big numeral “ 2” painted on it so idiots like me could see it. I noticed there were no threats, no promises, just “head for door number two.” The woman scared the hell out of me. I shuffled towards door number two. The greenie with the piercing blue eyes yelled something, but I wasn’t sure what.

I was pretty good at slip-slide walking by now and managed to stay in contact with the oil-stained deck. It vibrated as Roller Three advanced over another half-inch of Martian soil. We passed through door number two and entered a hall that was wide enough to accommodate the machinery used to build it. Airtight doors lined both sides of the corridor and were closed against the possibility of a blowout. Each bore an electro-sign. Eventually, after a trip up multiple flights of stairs, and down what seemed like miles of heavily traveled corridors, legends like “Machine Shop” and “Cybernetics” gave way to more administrative titles like “Logistics” and “Records.” The corporal ordered me to stop in front of a sign that read “Executive Offices.”

Frankenstein frowned, punched a code into the keypad located by the door, answered a question over the intercom, and stood aside as the door opened. The corporal gestured for me to enter, and I obeyed. I saw a receptionist backed by an entire compartment full of freelance number-crunchers. Most were wired to their computers and didn’t bother to look up as we entered. The receptionist was a scrawny little guy with an artificial arm. It whirred as he jerked his bionic thumb towards the other end of the room. “Park him in the conference room.”

The corporal was not one to waste words. She motioned with her head. “Move.”

I moved.

A weary-looking zombie sat chained to a console. A jumper cable connected his brain to a mini-comp. He followed our progress with dull, uninterested eyes. No one else even glanced in our direction.

It made me wonder if prisoners were so common that their comings and goings were regarded as normal, or were these men and women so dedicated to the Marscorp bottom line they cared for nothing else? Both possibilities were equally depressing.

The conference room door had been decorated with fake wood grain. It had peeled along the edges and I wanted to tear it off. The door slid out of the way and we stepped inside. I saw Sasha and felt my heart leap into my throat. She was alive! Tired, edgy, but alive!

In spite of the formal nod, and the noncommittal expression, I saw relief in her eyes. It made me feel warm inside.

The corporal gestured for me to take the chair next to Sasha, and I did. The room had no decorations to speak of and didn’t need any. A large picture window took care of that. A dust storm moved across the distant horizon. It drew the eye like the flames in an old-fashioned fireplace, filtering the landscape through a reddish-brown haze, and shifting with the wind.

The door swished, and I turned in that direction. A man had entered. Either Mother Nature or the biosculptors had been very good to him. He had a handsome face, ruddy complexion, and snow-white hair. His body was tall and athletically graceful. Energy crackled around him. He smiled and I smiled back. It was impossible not to.

“Mr. Maxon! Ms. Casad! Thanks for coming.” The way he said it removed us from the category of prisoners and made us feel like honored guests.

The man turned to the corporal and treated her to one of his high-voltage smiles. “Thanks, corporal. I’ll take it from here.” The corporal, trained killer that she was, smiled bashfully, said something incoherent, and pushed Frankenstein towards the door.

The man leaned across the tabletop to shake hands. His grip was cold and limp. I let go as quickly as I could. He smiled. “Howard Norton, General Manager, at your service.”

“Max Maxon. Glad to meet you.”

He turned to Sasha and offered his hand. “Ms. Casad. Welcome to Mars. How’s your mother?”

Sasha looked hopeful. “She was fine the last time I talked with her. You know my mother?”

Norton nodded and sat down across from us. He leaned forward. A tidal wave of cologne rolled over me. “Yes, your mother and I worked on a project prior to the war. Different disciplines, of course, but she struck me as a competent scientist, and I was impressed by the quality of her ideas.”

“Mom’s impressive, all right,” Sasha said evenly. “We are, or were, on our way to see her.”

Norton nodded sympathetically. “Yes, I’m sorry about the ambush. Marscorp had nothing to do with it. While we are aware there are differences of opinion between Trans-Solar and the Protech Corporation, we have positive relationships with both companies, and would like to keep it that way. That’s why we put the surviving Trans-Solar people on a ship and sent them back to Earth.”

“And the greenies?”

Norton looked my way. The smile was predatory. “We have a labor shortage. The tree-huggers were convicted of assault and assigned to a variety of functions.”

I nodded. “Such as hauling cyborgs across the surface of Mars.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow but I chose to ignore it. Norton cleared his throat. “Yes, Marscorp would like to apologize for the unfortunate mix-up. Someone had the crazy idea that you were connected with the greenies. By the time my office learned of your whereabouts and sought to intervene, you had arrived at the crash site and were headed back. Safely, thank god.”

I started to say something, started to object, but stopped when I saw Sasha frown. The signal was clear. Go along with the program and shut the hell up. I forced a smile. “Mistakes do happen.”

“Exactly,” Norton said smoothly. “Thanks for your understanding. Although Marscorp does not wish to take sides, we will do everything we can to smooth the way, and remove barriers that might otherwise prove troublesome.”

We must have looked relieved. Norton smiled. “You might be interested to know that no less than three different parties inquired about your health immediately after the ambush.”

Sasha beat me to the punch. “Who were they?”

Norton’s eyes were icy blue. They twinkled merrily. “A representative from Trans-Solar, a woman since identified as a greenie sympathizer, and Colonel Charles Wamba, Mishimuto Marines retired. He claimed to be a friend of Mr. Maxon’s.”

The name had a familiar ring, but I couldn’t place it. The idea that I might have a friend seemed strange indeed. Sasha looked at me and I looked at her. We needed help, and the choice seemed obvious. Colonel Charles Wamba.