Authors: Dana Stabenow
One figure on Sean’s side of the shooting gallery was crawling toward the rover; three were already running in that direction, a fifth must still have been inside because it was moving toward them. The sixth turned, slowly, surveying the field behind him as if he had all the time in the world. He swung a little too far toward Sean to suit me, and I chinned on Channel 9, universal stand-by. If they had their ears on anywhere, it’d be there. “You sons-a-bitches attacking Gagarin City, you’re surrounded. Lay down your arms, now!”
There was a brief silence, broken by an amused drawl. “Well, well, well. Did you miss me so much you had to chase me all the way to Mars, darling Star?”
The voice echoed inside my helmet. “Who is this?” I said weakly, but I knew.
A low chuckle was my only answer, and the standing figure broke and ran for his vehicle. “Kwan!” There was no response and the running figure didn’t check. “Sean! Shoot for the rover! Aim for the solar panel!” I lit out, pounding down a futile pursuit that inevitably fetched up too short of its goal. The distant figure scrambled up the ladder of the wheeled vehicle and had barely disappeared inside before the segmented wheels began to roll. It climbed through a spot where the crater’s rim was lowest and vanished from view.
I swore, loud and long, and turned just in time to to catch Sean, running full tilt, against my chest. The collision rocked me back on my heels; I caught him by the arms and held on. Through his visor his face was congested, his eyes blazed. His voice over my headset sounded urgent and intense. “Come on, Mom, let’s get back to the
Kayak
. We can follow them and—”
“And what?” I said in my coldest voice.
In the middle of his first firefight, flushed with the bloodlust of his first victory, he didn’t want to hear it. “And wipe them out! Mom! We have to! That was Johnny’s rover! They probably killed him! We have to get them!”
“With what?” I said, at my most blighting. “The
Kayak
isn’t armed. You want to shoot at those guys through the ports, which are not gun ports, while they’re shooting back and taking out the envelopes?”
His flush began to subside. “But, Mom—”
“But nothing. It stops here, at least for now.”
“But—”
“No buts.” I held his gaze, my own stern. “Take a beat, a couple of big breaths. Do it,” I said, when he would have argued.
When reaction set in and he began to shake, I caught his weapon before it fell and helped him to a boulder. My own heart rate was 100, according to the vital signs I chinned from the inside of my helmet. I waited until it had dropped to 90 before calling the
Kayak.
“Paddy? You there?”
“I’m here, Mom.”
“Is the ship all right?”
“No problem, those guys didn’t come anywhere near us. Mom?”
“What?”
“That was Johnny’s rover, wasn’t it?”
“It looked like it. Have the Gagarins responded to our message yet?”
“Negative.”
I thought for a moment. “Okay. Paddy, we still got a breeze?”
“Yes, three knots southwest.”
“Do you have our location?”
“I can see you out the CommNav port.”
I waved. “Did you see that?”
“You just waved.”
I measured our distance from the habitat. “Okay, pop a jib and bring her over nice and easy, and drop the ladder.” Thirty minutes later Sean and I were inside and stripped down to our jumpsuits. “Still no response from Gagarin?”
Paddy shook her head.
“Okay, we drop the anchor and stay put in full view until we get one. After what they’ve been through today, they’re liable to be a little trigger-happy with people marching up to the front door.”
It took them until the following morning to respond to our taped message. “Vernadsky Habitat to
Kayak,
Vernadsky to
Kayak,
come in please.”
The words were in System English, a relief. “This is
Kayak,
Star Svensdotter speaking. Is this not Gagarin City?”
There was a slight hesitation. “Yes and no. Will you come inside?”
“Be happy to, ah, er, whoever you are.” I punched out of the net and looked around at the twins. “Come on. Let’s go meet the neighbors.”
The entrance to Gagarin City was a large lock reached by a broad, well-defined avenue packed solid from the passage of many feet and some kind of tracked vehicle. The whole habitat was backed up against the north side of the crater. It looked as if it had been built a dome at a time, each dome a different size and with a different level of roof, clustered together like kernels of corn and banked with red dirt. Many of the domes were misted over, behind which we could see bulky and interesting shapes. A tall, slender building, the only one I could see with four sides, rose up from the rear. I assumed it would house a sentry, but it wasn’t until we got right up to the lock that we saw any signs of life.
There was a handle which wouldn’t turn. There was a buzzer next to the lock and I held it down. At almost the same moment, the shield on the viewport next to the lock slid back. Sean said, “Mom. Over there.”
There were three people staring out at us, two men, one enormous and one not so enormous, and a diminutive woman. “Hello.” The big man pointed to my left, where next to the viewport there was a plaque with a radio frequency on it, which I chinned my transmitter to. “Hello again. I’m Star Svensdotter. These are my children, Sean and Patricia. We are on an exploration and mapping mission for the American Alliance.” I felt Paddy look at me, and plowed on. “You can see the
Kayak,
just inside your crater.”
The big man looked confused for a moment; then his face cleared and he nodded. “Your ship, yes?”
I had to smile. “Our ship, yes.” I gestured at the charred pockmarks of battle dotting the habitat. “You saw us yesterday?” They all nodded. “There has been trouble elsewhere. Perhaps we could exchange news.”
There was a vociferous argument which looked as if it almost came to blows. It ended with the smaller man stamping off in a rage and the big man and the woman looking relieved. “I, Nikolai Yevtushenko. This, Tatiana Tchiakovsky. You go to the airlock, Star Svensdotter, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. I turned, and he said, “Wait.” I looked back at him. He patted the holster strapped to his side. “Weapons you must leave outside.”
My reaction was instinctive and immediate. “No. We keep our weapons with us.”
“Then you don’t come in.”
I didn’t like it, not one bit. Paddy broke the staring match, unstrapping her belt. “Mr. Yevtushenko? We’ll take them off and you can store them inside for us. Would that be all right?”
Yevtushenko looked at her. He smiled suddenly, a wide smile full of perfect white teeth that split his flowing black beard and gave him the twinkly look of a youthful Father Christmas. “It is all right, Patricia Svensdotter. Your weapons we will hang by the lock.”
Paddy looked at me. “All right,” I said, still reluctant. “By the lock.”
The lock popped and we stepped inside. It closed immediately behind us, and I got that panicky, claustrophobic feeling I always get in a lock when someone else’s hand is on the cycler, but air hissed in, and after a few moments the red light on the ceiling blinked green and the interior door popped. As we stepped inside, the little man who had stamped off in a rage came stamping back, this time carrying a small tray. He thrust it at Yevtushenko and snapped off a terse sentence in Russian, if anything in Russian can ever be terse. Yevtushenko gave a small, grave bow. The woman hid a smile behind one upraised hand. The little man favored us all with an impartially hostile glare and stamped off again.
“Grigori reminds us to mind our manners,” Yevtushenko said solemnly, and held out the tray, laden with the traditional Russian greeting of bread and salt. “Welcome to Vernadsky, Star Svensdotter.”
It was real bread, round loaves of brown rye, and real rock salt, in lumps smaller than peas but not by much. “I thank you, Nikolai Yevtushenko,” I replied. The bread had a slightly bitter aftertaste, and the salt was, well, salty. We nibbled politely, and the amenities observed, Yevtushenko relieved us of our side arms, hung them on pegs next to the lock, and led us at a brisk pace through a bewildering labyrinth of corridors constructed of panes of a thick, plasticky material that was by turns opaque, translucent, and transparent, held up by a triangle-based webbing of gray tubular frames. The design was muscular yet delicate, a bow to Shelob and at the same time a salutation to Charlotte. I winced away from a bright ray of sunlight that stretched in through one of the transparent panes. Yevtushenko noticed. “Not to be afraid. The panels are polarized.”
He led the way into the mess hall, a serving line at one end and tables and chairs scattered across the floor, most of them occupied. Conversation halted as we entered, to resume again sotto voce. We followed Yevtushenko through the serving line, loading our trays with borscht and blini. Their coffee was terrible; their fresh fruit, including three kinds of grapes, was sweet and firm and juicy; the water tasted vaguely of chemicals but was drinkable.
We sat down and Yevtushenko salted and peppered everything with a lavish hand and dug in. We followed suit, ignoring the curious stares directed our way. No further word was spoken until Yevtushenko pushed his tray to one side and leaned back in his chair. “So, Star Svensdotter.” He regarded the three of us. “You have information to share, yes?”
I pushed my tray to one side. “Yes. But first, do you know who was attacking your habitat yesterday?”
His face darkened. “No, we do not. Do you?”
“Yes,” I said, “but tell me what happened first.”
He frowned. “They came in the rover, a day before you. We thought they were a friend who visits here sometimes, so we are not suspicious.” Except for a few mixed-up tenses, his English was very good. “When we saw there is more than one, we locked them out and demand they identify themselves. They try to force entry through the main lock, and when we drove them off, they try to come in through one of the emergency vents on the second lung.”
“They didn’t make it inside?” He shook his head. “How did you stop them?”
He threw back his head and laughed, a big, booming laugh that shook his several bellies, turned every head in the cafeteria, and probably ran the air pressure all across the habitat up at least one millibar. “We waited until they were inside the entrance to close off the other two lungs and direct all the air in the habitat to Number Two. By then the sun is up and the air expands inside the habitat. The exhale from Number Two Lung was, how do you say, healthy, yes, healthy. Viktor was watching from the tower, and he said that when those”—here he used a Russian word that probably meant just what it sounded like—“managed to pick themselves up, they were half a kilometer from the vent.”
The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I grinned, and he said, his eyes twinkling, “It is no more than you would have done, Star Svensdotter, yes?”
“It may even have been much less,” I admitted, and he whooped and struck his hands together. “So that’s when they started shooting?”
“That’s when they start shooting,” he confirmed, nodding. “We made them angry, I think. But their weapons are small, and did little damage.”
I looked at the hundred or so people seated around the room. “Why didn’t you counterattack? You definitely had them outnumbered.”
“The patching crews were keeping up with the damage.” He shrugged. “And then you came, and there was no need.”
This was entirely too relaxed an attitude to take, in my opinion, but it wasn’t my habitat. “So who are these people?” he said.
I told him everything I knew about Kwan, including the earliest meeting, which I had kept from Paddy and Sean. I ended my story with our landing and the meeting with Johnny Ozone. “That was his rover, wasn’t it?”
Yevtushenko nodded, frowning. “He was a friend. Do you think—”
I shook my head. “No, he’s dead. It’s a habit, with Kwan. If there is anyone left alive after one of his attacks, it is strictly an accident.” I told him of the
Tallship.
“I see.” Fingers stroked his beard. “And then?”
I recounted our subsequent wandering, the dust storm, our involuntary arrival off the southern slopes of Pavonis Mons.
The mess hall was backed up on what looked through the translucent partition like some kind of giant terrarium, and as I spoke, every now and then I heard noises I couldn’t put a name to. As I finished, there came a flurrying sound, as if air were being beaten together in a bowl, and half a dozen loud, indignant, and definitely inhuman calls. Paddy cocked her head and asked, puzzled, “What is that, Nick?”
“What’s what, my little Padrushka?” he replied before I could reprove her for her familiar address.
“That noise. Listen.”
We did. There were three long, clear notes on a descending scale that I had heard before. I looked at Nikolai, incredulous. The notes were repeated, from farther off. “That,” Paddy said. “What is that?”
Nikolai smiled at me. “That, Padrushka, as your mother well knows, is a golden-crowned sparrow.”
Paddy looked blank, and I realized neither she nor Sean had heard a songbird before. The geodomes on Outpost had no animals other than the bees, halibut, crab and oysters we engineered into their ecosystems and harvested for food. The seafood in the New World showcase aquarium was just beginning to mature when we left. The only animal I remembered seeing around Outpost or down on Ceres, or for that matter anywhere in the Belt, was the ubiquitous
Felis catus.
Nikolai rose to his feet and led us into the next room. It was immense, the ceiling twice as high as the room we had just left, and so crowded with vegetation that I felt instinctively for a machete. Nikolai marched over to a bin, thrust a hand inside, and came out with a fistful of grain. “Do as I do,” he told the twins, “and be very still and quiet.”
They followed him out into the middle of the forest, a collection of palms, bamboo trees, and what I thought I recognized as rubber plants, maybe. In a small clearing, Nikolai scattered some of the seed and sat down in the middle of it, motioning to the twins to follow suit.