There were things on the surface, including a bunker containing the city’s fusion reactor, landing pads for shuttles, and a garage for ground vehicles. The bulk of the city was under the rock and the ever-present sand. It was not exactly the prettiest city in the solar system. In fact, it was as uniformly grey as Fox’s apartment. Everyone used v-tagged decoration in Isis City. Even the public areas were tagged, allowing the citizens to either render their own cityscape or accept the offerings of the city’s administration. The latter were often designed by locals with artistic leanings. Fox generally avoided v-tags when she was unsure of who had originated the data, but here it seemed kind of rude not to see what was not really there. She suspected that if you did not do something to relieve the grey, you would go nuts after a couple of months.

  Isis City seemed to be all about the bright colours. Hampson’s designs had been bright, and it looked a lot like that was a common theme. Especially among the women, of which there seemed to be a disproportionately low number.

  ‘Yeah,’ Justin said as he showed Fox the high points of his home city. ‘In Isis City there are thirteen women for every twenty men. If you go on out to include the rest of the planet, it’s about five men for every woman.’

  Fox grimaced. ‘That has to suck. At least a little.’

  ‘Depends. It did result in the relaxation of prostitution regulations. The only requirement for earning money that way is that you undertake a monthly physical exam. Disease is a big thing around here, as you can imagine. Everyone has to have a quarterly physical anyway. Technically, the legislation change affects men as well as women, but about seventy-five percent of the female population has a licence. Only ten percent of those are full-time sex workers. The rest make a little extra money when they feel like it. Uh, Mars is kind of a frontier sort of place. A lot of people come here to get away from all the rules on Earth, so they tend to have… well, looser morals.’

  Fox smiled. ‘I don’t have a moralistic view of sex work. It’s work. It’s a job.’

  ‘Well, here it’s a hobby. For some people anyway. Psychologists say it’s partially responsible for the low incidence of rape here.’

  ‘Partially?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s kind of difficult to escape the law here. The deterrent factor is higher. Same applies to a lot of crime, but rape tends to be viewed pretty badly by the settlers. One bad apple might fuck it up for everyone if the women get too scared to stay here. A big majority voted through a change to sentencing. Conviction means being shipped to the Moon. Life sentence in Cold Harbour.’

  ‘Well, I’m not actually going to disagree with that policy.’

  ‘Figured you wouldn’t. This is what you might call the cultural centre of Isis City.’

  They had come out onto a broad, quite open area after a ride in an elevator and a walk down a corridor. To Fox, it looked a bit like a food court in a mall. There was a central open space – the double-height ceiling was held up on concrete pillars at various points – which had seating and tables at intervals throughout it. At the sides there were shops, several of them selling food but others selling various luxury items. As Fox took in the circle, she also spotted the entrances to a cinema and a theatre, and to a walk-in medical centre. Around the floor of the place, people were sitting and talking. Many of them were eating for sure, but there was a lot of talking.

  ‘It’s lunchtime,’ Justin commented. ‘I know you just woke up, but do you– Uh, you don’t actually need to eat, do you?’

  Fox grinned. ‘I like it when people forget. But no, I don’t. I’ll probably get someone to recommend something typically Martian at some point and give it a go. What’s the point in travelling if you don’t sample the food, right?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘If you want something, go ahead. We can chat for a while.’ That got a nod from Justin and he headed toward one of the food outlets.

  ‘So, what’s a kid from Chicago doing on Mars?’ Fox asked when they had found a place to sit. If there were Martian delicacies, you could not tell from Justin’s selection: coffee and a cheeseburger. Fox had a coffee too, mostly to be sociable.

  ‘Getting as far away from Chicago as I can.’ He paused to bite off a chunk of burger, chew, and swallow. ‘I grew up in the Sprawl. Got out initially through wrestling. Got into wrestling and got a better education as part of the deal. Then a scholarship from MarTech to get more education. When Palladium came along, I joined up. When they were looking for people to go to Mars, I jumped at the chance. There’s nothing in Chicago I ever want to see again.’

  ‘No family?’

  ‘Dead. The fifty-six epidemic.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I wasn’t really talking to them by then anyway. One of the reasons I took up wrestling was my father’s tendency to settle arguments with his fists.’ He shrugged. ‘Water under the bridge.’ He pointed his chin in the general direction of the surrounding city. ‘I like it here. I’m in on the ground floor. Isis City is going to grow, and Palladium has the contract for policing. Give it a couple of years and we’ll be expanding because we’ll have to. I have a good team, and the people here are nice. As nice as people get anyway, and I’ve seen people as not nice as they can get, so I know the difference. About the only thing that’d make me want to move is Palladium needing people on Titan.’

  ‘Even further from Chicago?’

  ‘Damn right. Uh, excuse the profanity.’

  ‘Ex-soldier, Justin. I’ve heard infinitely worse. I’ve probably used infinitely worse. Oh, I should introduce you to our boss.’

  ‘Our– Oh!’ Kit had appeared, dressed for business, beside the table. Her tail twitched a little as she gave Justin a smile. ‘You’re Kit, right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Kit replied. ‘Technically, I am not your direct boss, Mister Holt, but Ryan Jarvis asked me to talk to everyone while I was here. Being an infomorph, I am quite flexible about times and places, but I would like to get around all our staff before Fox completes her investigation.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure that can be arranged. Must admit, I’ve never worked for an AI before.’

  ‘Not many people have, but I assure you that I’m not that much different from any human you may have worked for.’

  ‘She only really gets bossy with me,’ Fox said. ‘She’s my PA, but she’s also the CIO of Palladium, therefore my boss and Ryan’s managerial equal. It gets a little complicated, but Kit’s good at keeping the roles separated.’

  ‘I didn’t actually say I disliked the idea of an AI boss,’ Justin said. ‘I’ve never had trouble with infomorphs or been troubled by infomorphs. Humans, sure. Plenty of issues with humans and some of them have been managers. Maybe we could start by arranging a little get-together. Tomorrow evening, maybe. One of the squads will be on duty, but we can get as many of the others together as possible, have a snack and something to drink, and you can both get to know my team.’

  ‘That sounds like an excellent idea, Mister Holt,’ Kit said, smiling.

  Justin grinned. ‘You can call me Justin, if that’s not too forward.’

  Kit’s smile became just a little timid. ‘Thank you, Justin. I’m sure we’ll get along quite well.’

  ~~~

  ‘Well, I’m here,’ Fox said to the camera mounted over a display screen on her desk. She was recording messages home. The basic ones saying she had arrived safely had been done for the Palladium board, Jackson and Terri, and her parents. Now she was on to the one she was sending to Naomi. ‘As far as I can tell, I’m the same person I was when I left Earth, so the transfer worked.’

  She paused, not really sure what else to say. According to her various chronometer displays, it was thirteen forty-five on Saturday back on Earth. It would take about eighteen minutes for the message to get to Naomi, plus a little extra for routing. ‘It’s about ten minutes to midnight here and early Saturday afternoon there. In case you didn’t know, the day here is thirty-seven minutes and twenty-two seconds longer than on Earth, so the dates slip slowly. Not that they use the same calendar. It’s a flat count of “sols” here and it’s year three. A lot of people still reference the Earth date, but it’s nearly two Earth years for every year here. Oh, and it’s winter here. In the northern hemisphere, which I am. Mars has a lot of characteristics like Earth. It’s weird. Almost the same axial tilt and rotation. Of course the seasons are twice as long, and the orbit is more eccentric which makes the seasons a bit more pronounced. I am rambling so much.’

  Another pause. ‘Another thing that’s weird is that I’m missing you already. We’ve not seen each other for longer than this before now. Being on another planet is making it worse. Maybe. Huh, the lieutenant here, Justin, is a bit of a charmer. He was here when I woke up. Oh, you can see the rest of my palatial quarters here.’ She leaned back to allow the camera to see the twin frames at the back of the room, one of them still occupied by her combat cyberframe. ‘No bed, which would be a nuisance if you were here. Anyway, Justin was here when I woke up, so he’s seen me naked. Pretty sure he wants into my panties, but he was flirting with Kit too, so I think he’s a bit of a letch. Nice about it, but a bit of a letch. Can’t blame him given the gender ratio here. You’d love the prostitution laws here, by the way. You might want to have your people look into them. See how they’re working out. Anyway, I’m going to stop rambling and go review reports. I miss you, Naomi. Bye for now.’

  Sol 78.

  Typical Martian food was beginning to look a lot like typical American food. Palladium had taken over the small NAPA facility in Isis City when they had taken over policing in the city. It included a conference room which was just about big enough to house everyone. Kit had made sure she had a spare instance she could spawn off on Mars, and that was busy monitoring the switchboard and security camera network; there were people in uniform who might have to rush out to handle something, but the entire Palladium contingent was present to meet Fox and Kit.

  They were a varied bunch. There were eight who had been with NAPA on Mars before Palladium took over the policing of the city. Several of those had been around for quite a while. Then Palladium had brought in people from all over the place to meet the needs of the contract. Not everyone was American, but then that applied to Isis City as a whole; various nationalities had applied to come to Mars and most had been accepted because America wanted to appear open about their settlement.

  The two oldest members of the team were Frederick Odell and Evelina Abram, the leaders of A and B squads respectively. They were ex-NAPA. Fred had been on Mars since the earliest days of the city. Evelina had been around for just over a Martian year. They were some of the most experienced staff in the group, and they had heard a few stories.

  ‘Happens once or twice a season,’ Fred said. ‘We get a miner in here spouting stories about something he’s seen or found. Maybe once a year we get a proper “I heard that someone found an ancient Martian city” story.’

  ‘Independent miners tend to be a little crazy,’ Evelina commented. ‘You have to be to do what they do.’

  ‘True,’ Fred countered, ‘but most of them are pretty sensible. Have to be. Mars is not exactly a habitable world outside the habitats. I figure they saw something. Maybe not what they think they saw. Maybe it was mostly in their heads.’

  ‘It’s mostly down to memetics,’ Shayla Beaumont said. She was the leader of the investigation team. A detective Palladium had recruited in London, England, Shayla knew at least something about most aspects of criminology, including some psychology. ‘There have been stories about Martians around for… I’m not sure. When was War of the Worlds published?’

  ‘Eighteen ninety-seven,’ Kit supplied. ‘In serialised form. The first hardback publication was the year after.’

  ‘Since then. Huh, we’re not that far off its two hundredth anniversary.’ Shayla shook her head, grinning. ‘Anyway, since then Mars has been home to all sorts of alien races, in fiction, and people have been believing there really were aliens here for longer than that. They thought they saw oceans in their telescopes, so there was water, so there was life. It’s stuck. Believe it or not, the incidence of people believing the “live Martians” meme is higher here than on Earth. And people see what they want to see.’

  ‘You just love sucking the romance out of things, Shayla,’ Fred said. He was grinning. ‘Probably right, but there you go. The most common sighting is something humanoid moving about in a dust storm. All they see is a shadow or a shape, but there it is moving about in the dust. Must be a Martian, right?’

  ‘Shouldn’t that be a sign it isn’t?’ Fox asked. ‘I mean, it’s out in one of these storms, so…’

  ‘Storm doesn’t quite mean the same thing here as it does back on Earth,’ Justin said. ‘We’ve had a global one we’re just easing out of. The whole atmosphere’s full of dust. The sustained wind speed was around twenty metres per second with gusts up to a hundred. On Earth, that’s a gale, but Mars doesn’t have Earth’s atmosphere. It’s about equivalent to a moderate breeze if you’re standing in it, but it’s enough to pick up the fine dust and that will just hang in the air for weeks after a big storm.’

  ‘It’s a big problem for the Chinese settlement,’ Evelina said. ‘They use solar cells a lot more than we do, and the dust can really mess up their primary power supply.’

  Justin nodded. ‘But the point is that you could walk around in a dust storm, it’s just a really bad idea. Visibility is reduced. The dust gets into everything. It’s electrostatically charged, so it sticks to everything, and it causes some radio interference. Seeing something walking in a storm is unlikely, but it’s not impossible.’

  ‘I’d have thought Martians would have more sense,’ Fox said.

  ‘That we can agree on,’ Fred said. ‘This thing in Hellas Planitia is a bit more complicated than we usually get from miners.’

  ‘I just know the place creeped me out.’ That was from Dove Lim, one of two forensic technicians under Beaumont’s command. She looked Chinese but was actually from Boston. She sounded like it too. ‘Something happened there. If this is all a hoax, I want to catch the people who did it so I can express my displeasure. Maybe with a shock baton.’

  ‘Well, that’s why I’m here,’ Fox said. ‘Uh, I should probably say that me being here isn’t a reflection on your ability to handle the situation. It’s more of a reflection of how freaked out the government is back on Earth. Someone down there really seems to think this might be real.’

  ‘If it’s a hoax,’ Shayla said, ‘it’s an elaborate one. We went over the habitat in Hellas Planitia, and what we found matched up with the data Bast pulled off their computers.’

  Fox looked around at Bastian Ayers, the team’s computer and security tech. He gave her a slightly timid smile back. He was one of the younger members of the group. He had been a NAPA tech for about eighteen months, getting his posting to Mars just before the metro policing bill had made his job essentially obsolete. Palladium had picked him up with no trouble. ‘Someone did a real hatchet job on the file system,’ he said. ‘I scraped together what I could. And there were the files from Carter’s backup device. That was hidden under his bed. Apparently the Martians didn’t find it. It’s, uh, all in the report.’ He was a good-looking man, but a little on the timid side. Fox could imagine him not getting laid too often, and she had decided to wear one of Hampson’s outfits which, when it was actually on her body, showed a lot of skin.

  ‘Seems like you were pretty lucky to get what you did,’ Fox said.

  ‘Yeah. Depends on what you mean by lucky. I haven’t slept that well since seeing that stuff.’

  Fox gave him a smile. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about Martians coming in here and killing you in your sleep.’

  ‘You think it’s another hoax,’ Fred said. It was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Fox replied. ‘The video is just… It’s scripted. It looks like someone put together one of those “found footage” horror movies, but never quite got to finish editing it. If something comes up that suggests it’s all real, well, I’ll be the most surprised infomorph on the planet, but for right now, it’s a hoax. It’s usually better to assume that to begin with and be persuaded otherwise anyway. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’

  ‘Carl Sagan,’ Bast said, grinning.

  ‘Popularised in that form by him, yes,’ Kit supplied. ‘The French mathematician Laplace stated it more precisely considerably earlier. “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”’

  ‘Never argue with the walking internet,’ Fox said, grinning.

  ‘Can you do that?’ Bast asked.

  ‘Technically, anyone can if they’re plugged into the internet. Kit’s faster at it because she’s better at manipulating data. It’s an AI thing. My brain is a software emulation, but it’s still a brain. Believe me, it’s annoying. I still have to read reports. I asked if they could pipe them straight into my memory, but no. I can read them a bit faster now, but it still takes the same amount of time to process the information and get it into my head.’ Pause. ‘My chest. Technically, my brain is in my chest.’ She reached up and tapped her right temple. ‘Up here it’s pretty much all sensory equipment.’

  ‘You have basically the same sensors as the Tasker harnesses, right?’ Dove Lim asked.

  ‘Similar vision capabilities. I don’t have the ladar or terahertz radar. I get microscopic and telescopic vision, gas-phase analysis via my nose, chemical analysis by taste, and complex auditory analysis the way you’d expect. The units customised for me also have amped-up tactile sensors, but that’s nonstandard.’

  ‘What’s it like?’ Bast asked.

  Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s what like?’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22