Mission: Tomorrow - eARC (10 page)

Our next story takes us to Mars where a corporate troubleshooter has his hands full working to make peace amongst conflicting parties and investigating a murder . . .

IN PANIC TOWN,
ON THE BACKWARD MOON

by Michael F. Flynn

The man who slipped into the Second Dog that day was thin and pinch-faced and crossed the room with a half-scared, furtive look. Willy cut off in the middle of a sentence and said, “I wonder what that
Gof
wants?”

The rest of us at the table turned to watch. An Authority cop at the next table, busy not noticing how strong the near beer was, slipped his hand into his pocket, and VJ loosened the knife in his ankle scabbard. Robbery was rare in Panic Town—making the getaway being a major hurdle—but it was not unknown.

Hot Dog sucked the nipple of his beer bottle. “He has something.”

“Something he values,” suggested Willy.

VJ chuckled. “That a man values something is no assurance that the thing is valuable. It might be a picture of his sainted grandmother.” But he didn’t think so, and neither did anyone else in the Dog.

All this happened a long time ago. Mars was the happening place back then. Magnetic sails had brought transit times down to one month, and costs had dropped with them, so the place was filling up with dreamers and scamps and dogs of all kinds, out to siphon a buck from the desert or from the pockets of those who did. There were zeppelin pilots and water miners, air squeezers and terraformers. Half the industry supported the parasol makers of course, but they needed construction, maintenance, teamsters, and rocket jocks, and throughout history whenever there was a man and a dollar there was another man willing to separate them.

We were friends, the four of us dogs hooching that day; but the kind of friends who rarely saw one another except across a bottle. Hot Dog’s name was Rusty Johnson, but he eschewed that for a gonzo nickname. He flew ballistics for Iron Planet, taking passengers and cargo up to the Dogs or around to the antipodes. He had the glam, and women lined up and took numbers, even though he wasn’t much to look at and even less to listen to. Maybe it was the cute freckles.

VJ’s name was Viktor Djeh and it was fairly easy to figure how he’d gotten his nickname. He did maintenance on PP&L’s converter out by Reldresel, where they pulled oxygen and other useful crap from the ilmenite. His job was not nearly as glamorous as Hot Dog’s, but he made it up in morphy-star good looks. He was a joker, and always ready with a favor. He had saved my ass once when I was on a job in Reldresel and the high-pressure line sprang a leak, so I always paid his freight when we crossed paths at the Dog.

Willy’s name, to complete the trifecta, was actually Johann Sebastian Früh, but a childhood friend had given him the moniker from an old movie and it stuck. Willy clerked for the Authority, so he had neither good looks nor glamour, but he got by on a willingness to listen. His earnest expression invited confidences, a circumstance that provided him with a steady, if clandestine, income.

Pinch-face crossed to the bar, where Pondo was serving. Dogs move in microgravity like they’re underwater—in slow, gliding steps and grip shoes. I once saw Jen Wuli chase Squint-Eye Terry M’Govern down the Shklovsky-Lagado tubeway and it was the funniest damn thing I ever did see.

Pondo and the stranger traded whispers, then sidled into the office. Everyone relaxed, and the Authority cop took his hand out of his pocket. A few minutes later, they reemerged from the office with smiles all over their teeth.

“Who was that muffer?” someone at another table asked when the stranger was gone.

“I seen him around, down below. Works outta Port Rosario.”

Willy smiled when he overheard this, and VJ gave a thoughtful nod.

Hot Dog pulled his handi from his coverall pocket and checked his schedule. “I’m dropping down to chair a Guild meeting in a couple days,” he told us. “Pig Hanson has a run out to Marineris and I have to sub. I’ll ask around.”

That’s how it started, though at the time we didn’t know it.

The next day I called at Aurora Sails in Under-Gulliver, where they ran an assembly hangar. The superconductor loop sets up a magnetic field that acts as a sail and takes up momentum from the solar wind. It doesn’t harvest much acceleration, but the velocity keeps building, and you don’t have to carry fuel. By adjusting the loops you can change the size and shape of the field and sail damn near anywhere at respectable speeds. When you kick amps into a superloop, the current keeps going like a bunny with a drum until you quench it.

The problem the client had at the time was that some of their sails wouldn’t kick amps. They thought there might be something wrong with the kicker, but they didn’t know how to prove it. So the Authority tasked me to settle matters because the bickering in Under-Gulliver was growing intense and nothing soothes internal squabbles like an external consultant.

Technically, I work for the Ares Consortium, an alliance of corporations formed to run the Martian parasol business. Aurora strings the parasols and Pegasus ferries them to the target asteroid, where Sisyphus rigs the harnesses in place. My ultimate boss was actually old man Bryce van Huyten, but Phobos Port Authority coordinates the local action, so I carry an Authority troubleshooter’s badge.

I told Aurora to set up two loops in the test beds: one that worked and one that didn’t. They balked because any loop that worked was immediately installed on a parasol and packaged for transit, while the defective ones were salvaged for parts. Parasols were urgent, high-priority work, and they couldn’t let loops sit around for me to play with, and blah-blah-blah. The usual. So I told them to call me back when they were ready to get serious and I cut the link.

It took them two days while they pondered what the Authority would say if they blew me off. Then I got a call from Antonelli, the sail prep boss. He had two loops set aside, he told me, “but hustle your ass out here because Logistics is giving me the stink-eye.”

Antonelli and his engineers managed to conceal their delight when my ass arrived. They floated at a respectable distance. Everybody wanted to be close enough to the problem to count coup in case I succeeded, but not so close that they’d get cooties if I failed.

I forgot their names as soon as they were introduced, except for one fellow from Logistics named Moynihan Truth, whom I remembered both because of his unusual name and because I saw him again later. He was ten years old, but that’s in dog years; double it for Earth-equivalent. He’d been born in Golden Flats on Mars, where they have the monument to the first Rover. You’ve probably seen images of Farzi Baroomand’s famous statue, the one that shows all the aliens lined up behind the Rover where the camera can’t see them, laughing themselves silly. Everyone there takes the last name Truth to honor the Rover. The Kid was the only one in the locker smiling and I remember wondering what the big joke was.

Four test beds took up most of the horizontal space. Hobartium loops were tethered to beds A and B. I pointed to A and said, “This one’s not working?” Nods all around. The neon-yellow
Hold
tag was my clue. “And that one works?” More bobble-heads. It was green-tagged. “And you think it might be the kicker?” Grudging assents, but dissenters mentioned other components, assembly errors, you name it. Paralysis of analysis. Smart people with a dozen smart ideas, but not smart enough to try any for fear of being wrong.

But the first rule of troubleshooting is: Start somewhere. When you don’t know crap, whatever you learn moves you ahead. “Take
this
kicker,” I pointed, “and install it on
that
loop; and take
that
kicker and install it on
this
loop.”

When the switcheroo was finished I told them to kick amps, and the superconductor on A began to circularize from the hoop stress, while the one on B now remained flaccid. I nodded.

“Yep. It’s the kicker, all right.”

Antonelli swelled up. “For
that
, we pay Port Authority two ounces troy
per diem?
We could have done that ourselves!”

“No you couldn’t,” I reminded him. “You couldn’t even get the two hoops set up without my prodding.”

“Big deal,” said one of the engineers. “We already thought it was the kicker.” No matter what the solution turns out to be, there will always be
someone
to say
I told you so
.

“Sure,” I said. “But now you
know
. Now take the top assembly off this kicker and switch it with the top assembly on the other. If nothing changes, the problem’s in the bottom half. If A fails but B works, the problem’s in the top half.”

Antonelli sucked lemons. “What if they both start working?”

“Then it gets interesting.”

The secret of my success doesn’t come from knowing all the answers, but in knowing how to ask the questions. Disassembly and reassembly successively narrows the search zone for the cause. Three iterations homed in on the damper circuit subassembly. After that, it was a matter of screening the other kickers in stock and finding the ones with defective dampers. Antonelli wrote a
stern letter
to the Earthside parts manufacturer, which let him wrap things up on a suitably righteous note of indignation. Nothing makes a man happier than the prospect of blaming someone else.

When I returned to my rooms toward shift-end, I found a message from Pondo asking me to stop by the Second Dog as soon as I could. I finished repacking my go-bag for my next assignment, then took the tow line up Dilman’s Bore, where I found Pondo waiting just inside the Dog.

Small as Phobos was, you’d think an illicit bar would be a tough thing to hide. Scientists back in the day had known that Phobos was partly hollow and that puzzled them some. They also realized that the moonlet resembled a Main Belt asteroid, but they couldn’t figure how Mars could capture an asteroid, circularize its eccentric orbit, and rope it onto the Martian equatorial plane—not until they discovered that the Visitors had been tricking it out back in the day. About a third of the interior had been gutted by the Visitors, and the rooms, warrens, and passageways they dug totaled two thousand cubic kilometers usable volume. But volumes can be made operationally larger when people look the other way, and the pocket under Kepler’s Ridge had somehow escaped notice when volume was platted out.

Koso Bassendi, the owner, was a hard man to cross and was big enough to make it harder still if you did manage it. I never heard of anyone crossing him twice. Come retirement, he and his brother Pondo took their bonus money and started the Second Dog. They served beer stronger than the wretched double-deuce that the Prague Convention allowed, but they served an honest measure. You can’t ask more than that of any man.

“Mickey,” Pondo said, “I understand yer going Mars-side tomorrow.”

I didn’t ask him how he knew. My schedule was not exactly classified, and the Authority likes to rotate its employees into gravity wells to keep up their muscle tone and bone calcium.

“Maybe you’ll have time to do my brother and me a little favor.”

Doing favors for the Bassendis was risky. So was refusing. I figured they wanted me to smuggle up some potables in my Authority packet, so I said, “Sure.” Technically, Phobos is “outer space” and Mars “planetary surface,” so the Prague Convention covers one, but not the other. Go figure.

Pondo guided me into the office, where Koso bobbed in microgee with his arms crossed and his scowl directed toward the thick, open door of an Eismann and Hertzog safe.

“Somebody got into our vault,” Pondo explained, in case I couldn’t figure it out. Koso said nothing, but his face tightened like a hangman’s knot.

“You call the cops?”

Both brothers looked at me and I let it go. “So, what’d you lose? Money, securities?”

They shook their heads. “Not even the Bassendi Brothers Benevolent Fund was touched,” said Koso.

I didn’t ask who the fund was intended to benefit.

Pondo said, “Remember that fellow, Jaroslav Bytchkov, what give us something to keep for him the other day? Well, it’s gone.”

Which meant that whatever that packet contained, it was worth a great deal more than what was left untouched. At least now I knew Pinch-face’s name.

“And what was it?”

“How would we know?” Pondo said. “My brother and me sell trust. Who would trust us with their keepsakes if we stuck our noses into them?”

The brothers might be shady, but they had a code. “What do you want me to do?” I said, though I could already guess.

“Yer a troubleshooter,” said Pondo. “Find what caused our trouble.”

Koso spoke. “We take care of the other part.”

The brothers figured the taker had been in the bar the night Bytchkov had brought his precious. Who else would have known it was there? I reminded them that I had been there and Koso smiled. “The vault software was tickled during the day, when all decent men are sleeping. You was out to Gulliver the whole time.”

So I had an alibi, which was comforting; but the Bassendis wanted me to work for them, which was not so comforting. We went over the surveillance videos and identified everyone present, weeded out those too honest or too inept, and they asked me to investigate the ones who had dropped Mars-side.

That included Hot Dog, of course, who had that Guild meeting to run. And Willy’s job, like mine, required periodic commutes. But VJ had also dropped, taking some personal days to “bone up” at a calcium spa. Among the handful of Martians in the bar, only a petite ice miner—Gloria “Iceman,” from Rosario—had already gone home.

“And we’d appreciate it, Mickey, if ye’d look up our depositor and find out what he given us.”

Koso said, “And it shows up for sale, we might trace the taker.”

“But we’d rather you not tell him it’s been stolen.”

“Bad for business.”

I had a private notion that Bytchkov already knew it was stolen. He just didn’t know it had been stolen from him.

Port Rosario sits in Arabia, a densely cratered, heavily eroded upland in the Northern Territories. Despite its name, it sits over some of the richest ice-bearing strata on Mars. Old water canyons wind through the terrain and onto the lowlands, an ancient ocean bed. The dome is set in a deep crater and protected by hobartium loops that deflect incoming cosmic radiation. Mars is a hardscrabble world and attracts hardscrabble folk. No one would go there, if it weren’t for the archeology and the asteroid-capture program.