Red Planet Blues

FORTY

Ilooked down at my wrist controls to see what frequency my radio was using, then held up my left hand with three fingers raised, then changed it to four fingers.

Lakshmi dipped her opaque helmet slightly in a nod. Both she and Reiko touched their own wrist controls, presumably punching in frequency thirty-four. But neither of them said anything, instead waiting for me to speak. And so I did: “All right. The jig is up. Let her go.”

I glanced over my shoulder again, just to get a sense of where Ernie now was, and—

Oh. He’d never met either of them, and their helmets were polarized. He’d had to choose which woman to take a bead on, and he’d mistakenly chosen Reiko. I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped when a pair of hands reached for the butterscotch sky. One of the raised hands, I saw now, was holding a tiny pistol. But the person raising her hands in surrender wasn’t Lakshmi Chatterjee—it was Reiko Takahashi.

Lakshmi reacted instantly, her right arm lashing out to seize the gun, which she promptly pressed into Reiko’s side. In the second it took for that to happen, it hit me: it hadn’t been Lakshmi who had kidnapped Reiko; it had been Reiko who had kidnapped Lakshmi, so that she could force Lakshmi to show her where the Alpha was. Reiko must have broken her own door lock before going to get Lakshmi—preparing an alibi for when she returned home alone; no one would blame her if she’d had to off her captor to get away.

“Back off, Lomax,” Lakshmi said, “or the little bitch gets it.” She must have recognized my voice, since all four of us still had polarized fishbowls—which was half the reason I hadn’t figured out the dynamic between Lakshmi and Reiko; I hadn’t been able to see their expressions.

I kept my gun aimed at Lakshmi. “You won’t shoot me. I’m the only one who knows the code to turn your buggy back on.”

“If I shoot you,” Lakshmi said, “a seat opens up on that airplane—so I don’t need the code.”

I chinned the control that depolarized my helmet; the sun was high enough now that it wouldn’t be in my eyes facing this way. Lakshmi must have decided it was indeed better that we see each other, because her fishbowl grew transparent, too.

Ernie was on the same radio frequency as me, of course. He spoke for the first time. “My dear lady,” he said, “we’re all after the same thing. But the Alpha Deposit has wealth galore, enough to satiate the desires of each of us. There’s no call for anything disagreeable to happen here.”

“Who are you?” Lakshmi said.

“Ernest Gargalian,” he replied, with a portly, courtly bow. “Proprietor of Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.” He depolarized his own helmet, revealing his round face and slicked-back hair.

Judging by her expression, Lakshmi recognized neither his name nor that of his establishment, which was too bad because no one who did know Ernie would ever threaten him. His operatives would avenge his death—and some of them were transfers. “Just so you know,” I said to Lakshmi, “if this godforsaken planet has a Mister Big, he’s it.”

Reiko must have chinned her polarization control, too, because her helmet also grew clear. Her voice was filled with wonder. “You’re Ernie Gargalian?”

“At your service.”

“I—I didn’t know you were on Mars. I didn’t know you were even still alive.”

Ernie scowled. “Yes?”

“You… you knew my grandfather,” said Reiko.

“Ah, yes, indeed,” replied Ernie. “Alex here told me that you’re Denny’s granddaughter. I was just a pup when I first met him and Simon at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. I was one of the first dealers to do business with them.”

“What… what was he like?”

“An astute businessperson. As it appears, if I may be so bold, you yourself are. Why did you kidnap the lovely lady here?”

“She double-crossed me,” Reiko replied. “She told me she was going to write a book about my grandfather. I gave her access to my grandfather’s diary. I’d hoped she’d find a clue in there that would help us locate the Alpha Deposit, but when she did—”

“She didn’t figure out where the Alpha was from the diary,” I said. “Did you, Lakshmi? You had that punk, that kid—Dirk—you had him plant a tracking chip on me. And then you followed me here.”

Lakshmi nodded. “That’s right. The diary was useless. I found the Alpha without it.” She looked at Reiko. “So why should I cut you in?”

“Because it’s mine,” Reiko said. “My grandfather found it, so it belongs to me.”

Reiko still had her hands in the air. Lakshmi still had a gun pressed into her side. Ernie still had his rifle aimed at the two women. Ennio Morricone was still playing in my head.

There was movement in the distance. It might have been a dust devil; they were common on Mars. I wasn’t sure, though, and I knew better than to give away that I’d noticed anything. I kept my eyeline toward Lakshmi. Whatever I’d seen was still far away, so I sought to stall: “All right, then; okay. We have a little misunderstanding here, that’s all. But there’s no reason we can’t all just walk away from this.”

Lakshmi shook her head, brown hair brushing first one then the other side of her fishbowl. “Reiko told me on the way here that you’ve recovered her grandfather’s body, isn’t that right?”

I nodded.

“That’s the way that had to go down,” Lakshmi continued. “Even back then, when only three people knew where the Alpha was. First Denny O’Reilly and Simon Weingarten decided to cut Willem Van Dyke out of the picture. Then Weingarten decided to get rid of O’Reilly. It’s the only way something like this can go down—with one person taking everything. That’s human nature.”

“My dear woman,” said Ernie, “there are riches enough over yonder”—I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone say “yonder” before in real life, but something about being out here, at the edge of the frontier, seemed to lend itself to using that word—“to satisfy even my appetite, and yours as well. We can all profit here. You’ll need a sales agent, after all.”

I didn’t often wish I was a transfer, but I did just then, if only for the telescopic eyes. The thing—whatever it was—was still indistinct, but I thought for sure that it was getting closer. Still, maybe it was just a dust devil or—

—or maybe it was something moving so quickly that it was kicking up a plume of dust behind it.

Ernie’s conciliatory comments had been directed toward Lakshmi—after all, she was the lady holding a gun—but it was Reiko who answered. Not many women could still look pretty while sneering, but Denny’s granddaughter pulled it off. “She double-crossed me,” Reiko said. “No way she walks out of this with anything.”

The Martian landscape was infuriatingly fractal: that crater there might be a meter across or a hundred; that rock might be man-sized or mountainous. It really was hard to gauge the size of the thing that was approaching—or how far away it still was. But it was getting nearer, I was sure of that, and it now filled enough of my vision that I could assign it a color: turquoise, a thoroughly un-Martian hue.

“Double-crosses happen all the time on Mars,” I said to Reiko. “Ernie here calls me Mr. Double-X. Shrug it off.”

“Really?” said Lakshmi. “I thought he called you that because you don’t have any balls.”

By now the turquoise object was even closer. It was still beyond my ability to resolve in detail—maybe I needed to see an optometrist, or maybe no one with biological eyes could have made it out—but it had moving parts, of that much I was certain.

I still wanted Lakshmi to go down for killing Diana, but with Huxley having presumably removed the body, I didn’t see how to make that stick, at least not yet. I’d figure a way, though, if—when—I made it back to New Klondike. And getting there meant getting the writer-in-residence to lower her gun. “Lakshmi,” I said, “what happens on the planitia stays on the planitia. Let Reiko go, then head back to Shopatsky House and work on your book—whatever it really is about.”

The turquoise object was getting ever closer. It was… yes, yes! It was a person. But a biological couldn’t run that fast; it had to be a transfer. I stole a glance at Ernie. His expression gave no hint that he’d seen anything, and, indeed, he seemed intent solely on the women in front of him.

The runner shifted his course slightly; he was now mostly eclipsed by Lakshmi and Reiko. I could have changed my own position or craned my neck, but Lakshmi would doubtless notice that; I now regretted having depolarized my helmet.

Of course, there was no reason to assume that whoever was barreling in was coming to rescue Ernie and me. Just as likely, he was coming to help Lakshmi, who perhaps had somehow managed to get a signal out that she’d been kidnapped, or to help Reiko—or maybe it was a free agent and would do us all in and seize the riches for himself. If any of us had been transfers, that might have been difficult without a broadband disruptor, but if the runner had a pump-action shotgun or a machine gun—not that I’d ever seen one of those on Mars—he could easily take all four of us out.

Ernie decided to weigh in. “Young lady, Mr. Lomax is right. I have connections that could make any difficulties disappear, and—”

And Ernie must have felt the ground shaking slightly beneath his feet; a guy like me doesn’t have much that jiggles, but he was a walking distant-early-warning system, and Lakshmi had clearly seen something in his face. She suddenly turned around, swinging Reiko around with her. My view of the incoming transfer was restored—and my jaw dropped in astonishment.

Rushing toward us was a stunningly beautiful woman—a gorgeous transfer with a supermodel’s face and long blonde hair bouncing behind her. I didn’t recognize her, but she was wearing a turquoise tracksuit that hugged her curves. Her large breasts were bouncing delightfully as she ran, but there was no sign that her chest was heaving. She wasn’t breathing hard; she wasn’t breathing at all.

And perhaps in a few seconds, none of the rest of us would be, either.