Red Planet Blues

FORTY-FOUR

The buggy continued to roll through the night. I looked over at Lakshmi, dimly illuminated by the dashboard. A couple of times her chin dropped toward her chest, but she shook herself awake; she was probably as exhausted as I was but terrified of falling asleep.

“You’re going to have plenty of time to sleep, sister,” I said. “Icing Diana—that wasn’t right.”

“I told you before, I didn’t kill her,” she said, looking at me.

“If you didn’t, who did?”

“I don’t know. She was dead when I got there.”

“I need something better than that. Your phone call from inside Weingarten and O’Reilly’s descent stage was overheard by the ship’s computer. You said Diana was your insurance policy.”

“Exactly!” Lakshmi exclaimed “She was no good to me dead. But, as I said to Reiko in that conversation, if I had Diana alive, I could control you.”

“But then you discovered that Diana was planting a bug for me at your place, and so you let her have it.”

“I didn’t, I swear.”

“I don’t have a lot of reasons to trust you.”

“Maybe not. But look at it this way: if I’m lying, fine—you’ve got her killer. But if I’m not, then somebody who wanted Diana dead is still out there—and you could be their next target.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

“The way you took care of her?”

That stung, but I refused to let it show. More kilometers passed by.

At last, we reached the vicinity of the dome. Blondie had effortlessly run the whole way. We headed to the north airlock station, since that was the one Lakshmi had logged the buggy out through, and, sure enough, Ernie’s ungainly airplane was parked near there, safe and sound.

Normally, I’d have left the buggy outside, but I still didn’t have a helmet, and so I drove it into the airlock tunnel. The outer door closed behind us, and we waited while the tube was brought up to one standard atmosphere; Blondie, meanwhile, went through the personnel airlock, which cycled much more quickly. By the time the door in front of me slid up, she was already on the other side waiting, along with, I was surprised to see, Dougal McCrae.

I swung back the buggy’s canopy and clambered out of the vehicle. Mac moved quickly to the passenger side. “Lakshmi Chatterjee?” he said.

“Yes?”

“You’re under arrest.”

“What for?”

“One of our leading citizens, Mr. Ernest Gargalian, says you pulled a gun on him.”

Lakshmi gestured dismissively. “What if I did? If it happened at all, it was outside your jurisdiction.”

Mac stood firm. “You’ll come with me,” he said. I was grinning. Lakshmi probably had thought herself clever buying Huxley’s support, but Ernie could afford to buy himself the top dog. The writer protested a bit more, but there really wasn’t anything she could do, and Mac soon had her cuffed. He turned to me. “Alex, I’ll expect a full report on everything.”

“Of course, Mac. I’ll drop by the station later.”

“You do that,” he said, and he led Lakshmi away—which left just me and Blondie alone here. The gorgeous transfer rushed over to me, and—

Wow!

She threw her arms around me and drew me close, and with that lovely mouth of hers, she planted a long, hard kiss on my lips. There was no doubt I deserved some thanks after all of this, and if this was to be the payment, I couldn’t really complain, but—

But the kiss went on and on, and when Blondie finally drew away, a giant grin spread across her stunning features. And now that we were in real air again, she could speak. I didn’t recognize the voice at all; it was sultry, sexy, and totally captivating. “Thank you so much!” she said. “As soon as we got close enough to phone, I contacted Ernie. He said Reiko went into surgery hours ago and is already out and in recovery; she’s going to be fine.” She gave me another kiss on the lips, then added, “Thank you, Alex!”

I noted, in good detective fashion, that she was on a first-name basis with Gargantuan, not to mention with me—but I still had no idea who this blonde goddess was. “You’re welcome,” I said. “But you have me at a disadvantage, Miss, um…”

I’d never seen a transfer’s eyes twinkle before, but hers seemed to just then. “Oh, Alex! It’s me.”

I shook my head slightly, baffled, and she took a half step back to appraise me. “Look at you! You’re a mess! Cut, frostbitten, filthy. Go off and get yourself fixed up, get some sleep, and be ready to go by 6:00 p.m.”

“Go where?” I said.

“Dinner, silly. You still owe me dinner at Bleaney’s.”

My jaw dropped, and it was a few moments before I could get it working again. “Diana?”

Her smile was a mile wide. “The one and only.”

My heart was pounding, and I’m sure I was grinning, too, but there’d been enough twists and turns in this case that I had to be sure. “Prove it,” I said.

“Your left testicle—”

“Fine! Fine. Fine. Diana! But—no, no. I saw your dead body.”

“You saw my discarded body.”

“With a bullet hole in the middle of its forehead.”

She waited for me to get it, and I did. “A frame-up,” I said. “You were framing Lakshmi for murder.” I thought about it. “Her gun, doubtless with her fingerprints, the body at her place—well, at Shopatsky House.” I nodded. “But why? And how? You couldn’t possibly afford to transfer.”

“It pays to have friends in the right places,” Diana said.

I’d been aware that she’d been seeing someone else of late, of course, but… well, well, well. “I didn’t even know you knew Reiko Takahashi.”

“Isn’t she adorable?” Diana gushed. “I fell for her the first night she came into The Bent Chisel.”

“But why frame Lakshmi?”

“She and Reiko were working together at first,” Diana said. “You knew that: Reiko willingly loaned Lakshmi her grandfather’s diary because Lakshmi supposedly had made a study of the Weingarten and O’Reilly expeditions; if there was a coded reference to the location of the Alpha in the diary, Lakshmi said she’d figure it out and split the riches with Reiko. But Lakshmi wasn’t going to do that at all; she had learned where the Alpha was, but kept telling Reiko she didn’t know its location—a double-cross. We had to get Lakshmi out of the picture, and, well, we did have a spare biological body that we had to dispose of somehow…”

“But if Lakshmi knew where the Alpha was, why frame her for murder before you’d found the location?”

“Because, my darling Alex, I knew that you knew where it was.”

“How?” But then it came to me. “Dirk. The switchblade. You figured if Rory Pickover was back to being my client, I was bound to eventually learn where the Alpha was, and so you arranged for me to acquire something that had a tracking chip in it.”

Diana nodded. “Sorry, baby, but, well, it was Reiko’s rightful claim, not yours and not Dr. Pickover’s. Lakshmi was already working with Dirk, and every time you returned to the dome, the tracking chip uploaded its data to the Shopatsky House computer—so Reiko and I took it when we planted the body.”

“Clever,” I said.

“Yes, but Lakshmi must have been anticipating something, because by the time we got it, she’d wiped the data from the computer. And, of course, by that point you’d figured out about the tracking chip and destroyed it.”

“Ah, and so you decided it would be easier to just force Lakshmi to show Reiko where the Alpha was than it would be to get the secret from me—and so you kidnapped her.”

“I didn’t; Reiko did. But I did tail them, running a couple of kilometers behind, just in case Reiko needed help—which, of course, it turned out she did.”

My head was spinning. She’d betrayed me, she’d used me, she’d outsmarted me. I took a step back and looked at her, absolutely stunned.

“You…” I said, my voice quavering, and I raised my right hand, pointing a finger at her. “You are…”

The blue eyes blinked. “Yes?”

“You are amazing,” I said.

“I am that,” she replied, and smiled. “Sorry, honey.”

“So what happens now?”

She lifted her blonde eyebrows and grinned lasciviously. “Now? Why, we go to Bleaney’s, of course.”

“But you don’t need to eat.”

“No, of course not. But I love to dance.”

“And after?”

She indicated her amazing new body with a sweeping motion of her hands. “A night we’ll both remember.”