5

Barsoom

To: pangurban@wide-relay.net

From: drtsangmo@contract.arachne.spacex.com

Subject: I have something that belongs to you

Hey, Marcus, sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you. Things have been crazy around here after the accident. We're pulling double shifts managing traffic on fewer docks, and the rebuild will probably take months to complete.

About your little problem… sorry I couldn't be more helpful. But I still can't. Word and hand. Can't tell you anything I put on the ship. That would be breach of contract. I'm very careful about what contracts say I can't do, and about what they don't.

Hey, when you get back, come look me up, I'll buy you a couple of rounds so we know there's no hard feelings, stet? Besides, I seem to have somehow wound up in possession of an empty shipping container that belongs to you. One of the twelve-meter ones. I'll have my boys put it somewhere. Wherever you wanna store something like that. No charge.

- Dorje

I mark the message as read and banish my neural lace display. This week just keeps getting weirder and weirder. Why would Dorje write me from his SpaceX contractor account, instead of his personal one, or his own business email? Why would he repeat that stuff about the contract? It's like one of those bits in bad stories where the butler and maid have a loud conversation about things they already know, just so the audience can get up to speed.

And why would he have one of my empty shipping containers?

There's something… odd… about this message. Like, each thing he's saying is innocuous, but no one talks that way. Not really.

Wait.

Can't tell you anything I put on the ship.

Very careful about what contracts say and what they don't.

Oh.

He can't tell me anything he put on the ship.

That's it. Dorje, you sly old crook. I'll bet you went over that contact with some legal assistance software and a fine tooth comb. It may have a nondisclosure agreement over what you did, and what you loaded onto the Cat… but it didn't say anything about not disclosing what you have, did it?

Like an empty shipping container. If he has it, he must have taken it off the Cat. And he'd never have done that unless someone told him to. Only one reason for that—to prevent me from noticing the one she wanted him to put on.

Pretty sure that one ain't empty.

The burns on my back and side twinge as I punch the air in triumph, but I don't care. Dorje, when we meet up next, I'm buying. Even if it's that crazy fermented-rice stuff that tastes like death and kills you if you brew it wrong.

Now I have one more thread to pull. There's something aboard the ship she doesn't want me to find, maybe a bunch of somethings, if some of them are smaller than a twelve-meter shipping container. I don't know what they are, but if she doesn't want me to find them, they're important. Maybe I'll learn something useful. Maybe I can blackmail her right back.

Maybe a lot of things.

She expects me to repair the drive tomorrow. If that means she'll refrain from coming after me with those drones until then, then I have… tonight. After she falls asleep, assuming she falls asleep instead of just resting in a coffin packed with soil from her native Carpathia, or hanging upside down from the rafters before flying out at night to drink the blood of the innocent.

I can search the ship, top to bottom.

And then… I dunno. Something. Depends what I find. Point is, I'm not out of moves just yet.

A nudge from my neural lace jolts me out of angry and restless dreams I can't recall. A fight somewhere, a struggle, flashes of swarming metallic things like insects, and a feminine, childish voice—not hers—singing? Laughing? Never mind. It's gone.

I squirm out of the zero-g net on my bunk, sweating, panting. Too much adrenaline over nothing. It's just the alarm I set myself. After midnight, Mars time. Sleep shift. There's no light leaking around my cabin hatch.

I listen a moment, and there's nothing but the white-noise hiss of air cyclers. Odds are she's sleeping like a damn baby, dreaming dreams of avarice.

Should be safe to move.

A command to my neural lace adjusts my implant eye to thermal infrared, and a grainy white image of my cabin appears, bright where my body has warmed the hammock, dark for the cool steel of the bulkheads and deck.

I swing my feet towards the ceiling, and hang inverted in zero-g, reaching for the storage cabinet under my rack. Gotta go slow or I'll just push myself away, and bounce off the opposite wall. Ease open the catch and probe the darkness with my fingers. A folding multitool. Charging cables. A pill case. Where's the—

Oh. There it is. Recognize it by feel. A handheld signal analyzer. So cheap and basic that it just has a screen instead of a neural interface display. It's turned up too bright, and I have to squint my natural eye while I turn it as dim as possible. There's no infrared display setting. Hope she's a heavy sleeper.

I slip out of my cabin, drifting slowly, pushing off walls real careful. Quiet-like.

Time to go to work. Whatever tech gear she brought aboard the Cat, it'll be tied into the wireless network. Or running its own. Which means signals.

I hold down SCAN for a moment, and the screen lights up with a scrolling list of network nodes. I can sort through most of them fast… fusion reactor and drive core, lidar array, master nav computer, SMES hypercapacitor battery packs, high-, low-, and medium gain-antennae, primary and secondary cooling systems, life support banks zero through three, high-energy particle detector… I go down the list, marking each network presence “Ignore” as I identify it. When I'm done, I should have the culprit.

But after a few minutes, I have sixty-three unknowns.

Damn. How much stuff did she bring aboard? Where did she hide it all? That doesn't make any sense. Not that her behavior ever does.

It's the same question my brain keeps coming back to. Rich brats like her, whoever she is, don't do anything themselves. They just give orders to other people. So why is she even here, instead of a horde of hirelings? People like her don't deal with people like me, except through six layers of management. People like her wouldn't touch my kind with someone else's ten-foot pole.

And why blackmail me at all, instead of just hiring someone?

There must be some information I'm missing. Some puzzle pieces that fit this all together. A corner, an edge, something to start making a picture from.

Okay, so… look. Stop speculating and work the problem. Sixty-three signals? Okay, then, one at a time.

Three signals are strongest in the direction of the second cabin door. Dad's door. Her door. Most likely barred from the inside. One's got to be her neural lace, and the other two, probably those VIP protection drones. The crab-spider-octopus things.

At least I hope so. I really don't want to run into one of those things wandering around in the dark.

I mark all three to “Ignore” and move on.

I find the first of the sources not long after—a square spot of IR light inside the airlock on the observation deck, right over the inner hatch, just a bit warmer than the ambient temperature of the Cat. I grab the top of the hatchway with my left hand and pull myself off the floor to get a better look, pointing the signal analyzer's screen like the dimmest of flashlights.

It's a webcam. A tiny box made of cheap black Jovian plastic, its lens no bigger than a pinhead, on a flat disk like old-fashioned “coin” money, stuck on with some sort of double-sided tape. If she's trying to plant bugs on the Cat, it's a ridiculously amateurish attempt. It's not even painted to match the thick gray epoxy paint it's stuck to. On the other hand, I might have missed if we weren't in zero gravity. It's above the line of sight.

No one ever thinks to look up.

Weird, though. Why cameras? Is she recording everything that happens on the ship? Why would she do that? Do her mysterious backers, whoever they are, want to know everything? In that much detail? Why?

I pull the little camera off the bulkhead, let go of the hatch rim, and push off back out of the airlock. I tighten my fingers as I fly, about to snap the thing in half.

Wait a sec.

There's a lot of signals. I could be finding these things all night. But if most of the signals are just cameras like this one, the network profiles should be similar. Perhaps I can speed this up a bit. I point the analyzer at the plastic case in my hand, and select “Detail Scan.” Long hexadecimal internet address. Four “ports” open… I don't recognize any of the protocol names, but none of them are sending any large amount of data. Certainly not enough for video.

So it's not sending, but is it recording?

There's no way to tell. Best to dispose of it instead of putting it back up. I slip it in the pocket of my sweatpants, and check the signal scan again… yes, lots of signals with the same pattern, a scrolling list full of them, in fact. Suppressing a sigh of frustration at the tool's clunky interface, I go down the list, manually selecting each one and then “Ignore.”

After several dull minutes, the list is… empty.

Well, shit. That doesn't make any sense. Where is all this video she's recording supposed to go? Is it being stored on the White Cat's own servers? Could be. No access, no way to tell. But why? Clearly she wants video for something.

Maybe it has to do with that shipping container Dorje's guys put in the hold. Could be something in there receiving the data. Let's go up and locate it… maybe do a quick sweep on the way, figure out where most of those cameras are.

I've lived on the White Cat, off and on, for the better part of six sidereal years, so coasting around without gravity in the dark is the most natural thing in the world. The distant hiss of the carbon dioxide scrubbers, the hum of heatpumps venting environment heat to the external radiators, orients to me to my position in each space. I wouldn't even need my infrared vision. Not really. Not when I know every divot in the floor and walls, the individual sound of each circulation fan.

I glide up through the access tunnel, deck by deck, stopping at each and panning the analyzer around for a signal count.

Galley and stores above observation, then cabins, then medbay. Bunch of identical signals on each. I'll have to check later if she hid one in my room.

Four on the bridge. I leave them in place.

I skip the computer cores and the server room, leave that deck for last. Checking in and around that much shielded equipment is not a prospect I relish the thought of. Above that is just storage tanks, pressurized argon, liquid oxygen, coolants… nothing interesting there.

Hydroponics and life support. Engineering. Just one or two. She seems to be sticking to spaces made for people.

There's even a couple in the machine shop somewhere, though I don't bother to run them down. Panning along the outer wall seems to indicate she didn't cover the fuel system access crawlways. Looks like she took a quick walk around, or someone did, and just stuck them up, rather than following any sort of blueprint of the ship.

That doesn't account for all sixty, though. Maybe I missed some. Time to check the hold.

Within, the air is still, dry, and crisp. Cargo container racks, mostly empty, circle the outer hull, receding away into darkness. I push off the back wall, then an empty section of cargo rack, and glide down a dark row of container spaces. Without an IR illuminator, or a source of heat, the view from my cybernetic eye doesn't reveal much, just dimly visible cool edges of container racks. The analyzer has nothing to say but “No Signals.” Strange. Whatever's in that container isn't active on the wireless network.

Let's find it. Gonna need light to figure out which container it is. Infrared vision can't read labels.

If I recall correctly, there should be breach kits near the personnel hatches, and—ah-hah, yes, right next to the bay doors. I grab a rail, swing around, and launch myself down another row.

There. I catch myself neatly on an arm hinge the size of my entire body, designed to allow the massive bay door to swing out or in. There, near the pressure seal where the door meets the hull, is an orange plastic breech kit box, although it looks cool gray in my infrared vision.

And, inside, amid the oxygen tank, suit sealers, spare mask, medikit, and other tools, is a small LED flashlight. Jackpot. I pan it around, and familiar shapes loom out of the darkness. There's the cargo crane on its track around the cylindrical outside hull, the barrel sections of the disassembled and stowed railgun, the row of spare EVA thruster packs, a bunch of twelve-meter shipping containers. They're spaced out around the edges, carefully positioned to balance load under thrust.

Waaaiiit a second. Those containers should all be the same brand—Maersk Orbital. White star on a blue background. But one of them isn't. It's marked with a double triangle, green and yellow. DCM Hyundai.

Oh, well, now that's just sloppy.

Imagine thinking I wouldn't notice the wrong brand of container. On the other hand, last time I came through, I didn't. And I seldom come up here, anyway. Without Dorje's email… she might have gotten away with this after all.

Still, I'll bet whoever it was packed that container before knowing what I had on the White Cat. That's why they didn't get the brand right. Which means maybe it was delivered from somewhere else, rather than loaded up right on the Arachne docks?

I glide to the box, ignore the chill shock of cold metal as I wedge one bare foot into a door anchor point, and begin turning the hatch crank. The door accordion-folds outward, and aside, slowly. I don't wait to get it all the way open, just half a meter or so to shine the light in.

Tables. Modular computer workstations. Oscilloscopes. Other cabinets of gear I don't recognize at all… everything hastily stuck down with cheap zero-g fixative putty, the kind you buy in big tubes with a squeeze handle. And wires… wires everywhere, a rat's nest of them, not bundled, but festooned every which way, hung as if someone just pushed everything in here and reattached it, quick and dirty.

Everything's powered down, dark, silent. No indicator lights glowing or cooling fans moving.

Packed, mothballed, and shipped from somewhere, and then put in… sideways? This all would have been sideways, under thrust. When someone put this makeshift lab together, they thought it would be set down the other way.

But what sort of lab is it? What's it for?

In the center of the mess, trailing an untidy tail of cables, is a white coffin, clamped down with steel bands bolted to the container wall. No, not a coffin, just something that size, flat-sided, but sort of rounded in the corners in a way that makes me think of eggs. Or overpaid design professionals in hip retro glasses, who know how to sketch things, and assign arcane meaning to ordinary words like “composition,” but have never held a welding torch in their entire lives.

There's a holo display smoothly integrated into its upper surface, flat gray and unpowered, and next to that, in some sort of special typeset that can only be a corporate logo, a single word.

BARSOOM

Okay, well… what the hell is a “Barsoom?”