Titans Page 10

My hopes waned each mile we marched into Attica. Xerxes' mobile polyglot nation burned our fields, stripped our crops, and flooded into Athens, which had been evacuated except for a skeleton force to defend the Acropolis. An empty gesture. Its walls went up in flames.

  Was Demostrate there? Somehow cut off from wherever the rest of Athens had run off to? If she'd made the trip, had she survived it? Or been raped and butchered by Persian scouts? Caught, even, by her own countrymen, starving Greeks displaced by the invading swarm? I had no way to know. If she lived, sooner or later she'd hear I hadn't—that I'd fallen into the straits, where my armor had, no doubt, taken me to the ocean's black floor. Each day I spent in chains was one more day for her to mourn me. To forget me. To replace me.

  As the Persians marched on, their victory as unstoppable as their masked Immortals, I began to forget my own life, to accept my place as a prisoner and slave. I learned their language. Played games with the cooks and wagoneers and logisticians, who found it hilarious that a mongrel like me could beat their friends at knucklebones and the athletic contests they held with strange, tapered pins. It was a laugh riot for us all.

  I had been captured in August of 480 BC. So what if the Greeks won some battles? So what if they fought and fought and fought until my chef friends began to mutter that maybe Xerxes had strayed too far from home? By June the next year, with the Allied troops breaking Persia's back at Plataea, I no longer cared. They would kill me rather than feed me all the way back to Susa. Demostrate, if she lived, wouldn't know I pictured her face every night. It was a stupid world, cruel and uncaring. When the Persians carried me back across the Hellespont to sell me into slavery, I'd grown to reflect the world's disinterest.

  Some part of me laughed when I was taken to my new master in rebellious Babylon. Had the homeland of my birth demanded me back? Then let it have me.

  If I'd found Demostrate at that point, I doubt she would have recognized me. The Greek victory meant nothing to me. I couldn't laugh unless I saw someone else get hurt. I was property, a useful dog.

  Shelby was being taken off to a labor camp of her own. By the time she got out, New Houston and its people would look as cold as the winds beyond the domes.

  * * *

  "I'm going to get drunk," I told the others, which was a bit of a trick, since I already was. "Then I'm going to go crack that old bartender's face like the Liberty Bell."

  "That won't be popular among his regulars," Pete said.

  "He sold us that video, then turned around and peddled it to the other team too. Only they left out the part where HemiCo's goons rolled in to straighten up the witnesses' stories."

  "We need to work on bringing Ms. Mayes' replacement up to speed," Baxter said. "Not get lynched by a drunken mob."

  "You guys are like earlobes. Pretty but useless. HemiCo needs to know they can't run us over."

  Baxter shook his head. "The only thing they're likely to learn is your blood is so flooded with alcohol they could use you as a Molotov cocktail."

  "Not true." Dismissively, I waved a bottle of deimos, the local Martian liquor named not for the moon but for the dog of war, at his fakey human face. Murky green, the liquor tasted like the algal compost it was fermented from. "Well, I'll see you guys in hell."

  Pete tried to clinch me on my way out the door. I wrestled him off, picked up the bottle he'd made me drop, and hired a minicab to the Old Outer Ring. The Mariner's iron anchor hung dumbly over the open mouth of its door. I threw some bills at the cabbie and strolled in.

  The old man behind the bar nodded at the bottle of deimos in my hand. "Can't bring that in here."

  "For three thousand ares I can do whatever the Christ I want."

  He stiffened, recognition blooming over his face, which to my impaired eye didn't look entirely right. "You. You get out of my place."

  "Not before I kick your head off," I said, unwinding a giant crescent kick that nearly toppled me. "Hyoo! I will chop your neck so that it bends around my hand."

  He laughed and swung his bandage-bloated right arm onto the bar. "Once again, they beat you to it."

  I goggled at his arm. Other than a trip through rural China, I hadn't seen a cast in a century. Then again, an uninsured Martian probably couldn't afford bone glue.

  "What happened to you?"

  "You care why?"

  "Lately, I've been getting kicked around, too," I said. "Maybe by the same people."

  "Came upstairs right after you all left. Two bruisers. Asked what you'd wanted." The old man's mouth twitched. I realized why his face looked funny: mottled bruises painted the skin beneath his beard. "When I told them to blow, they broke my arm. I handed over the tape while I still could."

  "You had another copy?"

  He smiled with one corner of his mouth. "Had to cover my ass."

  "Don't we all." The meaning of all this hadn't quite penetrated the layer of deimos buffering my brain. I held out the bottle. "I bet you could use some of this."

  "Bet you're right." He gestured to a stool and plucked two shot glasses from below the counter. We clinked glasses and tossed them back.

  "Sorry about the way I came in," I said. "I thought you'd sold us out."

  "Reasonable suspicion."

  "It's different here." I waved my arms at the quiet bar, but meant everything beyond it. "Money runs Earth, too, but they're much sneakier about it. On Mars, it's right in the open."

  The old man poured another round. "When a place takes pride in living by the survival of the fittest, it's not long before everyone's grown some damn sharp claws."

  "I used to have claws. Teeth, too." I pulled a face, waiting for the deimos' mucky flavor to fade. "Oh hell."

  "You gonna puke?" he chuckled.

  "They would never have found that video if we hadn't led them to you."

  "Probably not. World going to end over it?"

  "It put a woman we were trying to protect behind bars."

  He pushed the bottle back across the bar. "Sounds like you got further business with this."

  "Can't." I stood and reached for my wallet before remembering I hadn't bought anything. Instead I got out my omni and printed off the contact info for one of the disposables in Pete's gear.

  "What's that?" the old man squinted.

  "Honesty gets a man in trouble. You ever find yourself in it, call me. I have friends in high places."

  "I get it," Fay said in my ear.

  I waited till I was outside to respond. "Did you get the rest of it?"

  "We screwed up, didn't we?"

  I nodded. "Want to make an even bigger mistake?"

  I jogged through a full dome before I could flag down a cab. It was past one AM when I busted into our hotel room, yelling for Baxter as I flipped the lights on and off over Pete's sleeping face.

  "We're going to break Shelby out of jail," I said.

  "This instant?" Pete scowled.

  I stopped strobing the lights. "Well, no."

  "Then why don't you reflect on this plan until my alarm goes off."

  I explained in blunt terms how our clumsy investigation had led HemiCo to the piece of evidence that sealed Shelby's conviction. Pete stared at his hands while Baxter stared at me.

  "You're serious," Baxter said. "A jailbreak."

  "It's our fault she's there."

  Pete shook his head. "She's only in lockup for six months. If we screw this up, she winds up with a life sentence instead. Why not leave her be? A half a year, it's not so long to wait to get your life back."

  I snorted. "Easy to say when it's not yours."

  Baxter punched his fist into his other palm. "A crime spree!"

  "I don't like this conversion of yours, Rob," Fay said. "You two are turning into a pair of conspirators."

  "They didn't play fair," I said. "Why the hell should we stick to the rules? You jackasses kidnapped me, didn't you? Shelby's a whole lot more important to the colonists than I am."

  "You can't just opt out of the social contract whenever you don'
t like the results!" Fay said.

  "Wrong," Baxter said. "They've always treated us as property, not citizens. If a toaster broke you out of jail, would you try to handcuff it?"

  "Why would I own a toast-maker when I don't even have a mouth?"

  "If it's unanimous," Pete said. "Including Shelby."

  "We're doing a lot of bad things," Fay said, the usual brightness of its voice dimmed considerably. "At what point does that make us bad people?"

  "You're the one with the brain made of other brains," I said. The guilt they felt, could it be as keen as ours? "Can you figure out a way to do this without casualties?"

  "I don't know! Every time I try to make a plan it's tripped up by a thousand things I should have predicted before they showed up. And it's exponentially worse whenever violence is involved."

  "Do your best and don't look back." Baxter's eyes lifted to the ceiling. "Now let us manufacture a plan."

  * * *

  Baxter and Fay worked on various schemes. Pete scraped up equipment and maintained our escape route if HemiCo decided to call the AID down on us after all. In another ten days, Shelby would be allowed visitors; I volunteered to talk to her. Privately, I was insulted the others cared about her wishes. When I hadn't wanted to do what they asked, they'd knocked me out and smuggled me off like an illicit bride

  Maybe they'd learned something since then. In any event, I'd been in Shelby's position before, more or less, and if she had any doubts or illusions, I'd be most qualified to talk her through them.

  Past the heavy doors, scanning machines, and armed guards of the Creative Reform Services security center, which I passed without trouble (we'd dismissed hiding a camera on me, deciding not to take any more risks until the big day), you could almost forget it was a prison. An assistant served me coffee at a couch in the receiving room—it felt like I'd spent half my life in waiting rooms lately—and informed me Ms. Mayes would be allowed to see me shortly.

  Unlike the public center where Shelby'd been held pre-trial, every angle of the CRS facility was covered in cameras. A liability thing, I imagined, but Martians seemed to get much less finicky about your rights once you ended up in prison. All the cameras upped the difficulty factor. I would not be able to blurt, "Hey Shelbs, how would you feel if an angry god blasted this place to rubble as we skip merrily away to freedom?" Even so, no big deal. A thousand years ago, I'd made a career of subtlety in Milan.

  Shelby seated herself opposite me at one of the round tables scattered across the reception room. "You just can't stay away."

  "How's prison?"

  "Restrictive."

  I sighed theatrically. "If only I could take you away from here."

  Amusement sparked in her blue eyes. "What makes you think I'd go for that?"

  "Is it the leaving you'd object to? Or the leaving with me?"

  "I wouldn't normally be this forward, but you're rushing away to another planet soon, and it turns out being locked up is socially liberating. When your cell mate tries to crawl between your bra and your skin every time you close your eyes, conventional etiquette goes out the window."

  I cocked my head. "I thought this was a pretty safe place, all things considered."

  "It is. I'm exaggerating." She smiled at me, friendly, but with the suggestion it wouldn't matter to her if she had to turn hostile. "So: are you trying to turn our professional relationship into a relationship? I think you'd be disappointed in this facility's conjugal rules."

  "Why would you think that?"

  "Because the only rule is 'No.'"

  "I mean about the relationship."

  She shrugged. "You do most of the talking when your compatriots are here. You were there every day of my trial. And when you look at me, it's like you can see right through me."

  "I haven't even managed to stare through your clothes yet." I stopped myself. The conversation was getting away from me. I figured a swift wave of truth would clear up the interesting confusion arising between us. "You're pretty. You're brilliant. I get the idea you know what you want. Six months from now, when you're out of work-jail and I'm done securing the freedom of a bunch of people I've never met, I'd be happy to take you out for a drink." I made a face. "So long as it's not deimos."

  She tugged her uniform sleeve past her wrist. "You're shorter than I usually go for."

  "Well, I don't normally see the hullaballoo about blondes." I glanced toward the receptionist, who was busy fielding a call on his omni. A couple tables down, another inmate conversed with a man in quiet tears. "I need to change the subject now and I need you to think very carefully about your answer."

  "That almost sounds like a threat."

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. "How much would you give up to help draft that constitution yourself?"

  "Everything," she said.

  "Evidently you've already given up your sense of hearing. I said think about it."

  She shook her head, annoyed. "Offering to represent the colonists at all was a bad career move. I specialize in corporate labor law. If I take on Olympian Atomics and set a case precedent they don't like, they'll spend the rest of their life crushing me. In that fight, I'd put my money on the other guys. A company tends to outlast an individual."

  "Usually." I reached across the table. I patted her hand and she flinched. "If nothing else, we'll take you with us to Titan in spirit."

  I know enough to leave a woman wanting more. I got up, passed back through security, retired to the hotel. I opened the door and bumped right into Baxter.

  I scowled. "How long have you been waiting there?"

  "What did she say?"

  "She's in," I said. "Let's do some crimes."

  "Why in the world would we want a criminal?" Baxter said.

  "For the IDs," Arthur said in that tone of his that was grossly impatient but too excited to get angry at. "They won't let us on a flight without IDs."

  "One ID. You're just a toy."

  "And if your body were more like mine we wouldn't need to jump through these hoops this in the first place."

  "Well, come on," Baxter said. "Let's find a bar."

  The box was silent a moment. "Ah. Because criminals spend time at bars. How will you know which bar to choose? They're not going to be wearing signs on their chests."

  "Maybe they'll have tattoos on their foreheads." Baxter touched his earbud. "I suppose we'll just have to ask."

  The dome wall rose almost vertically from the soil before it began a pronounced curve about thirty feet up. The two of them followed the road around its rim to the north exit, a broad, tall passage that, so the engineers claimed, could be sealed at both ends in the event of a dome failure. In the 39 years since the first dome went up, including the Cor-Wars where the Baxter he'd been named for and all the other corporate soldiers had fought under those very bubbles, the city hadn't had to seal off one. What if HemiCo got desperate? Could they?

  9

  The alarm raged through the Creative Reform Services detention facility before we'd even got to Shelby. It whooped an up-and-down cry of panic and fear exactly like an old air raid siren. Like they were trying to evoke some primal memory of hiding under desks while nuclear fire stripped the world to ashes. Like they meant to scare us.

  It was working.

  The plan, like all good ones, had been simple: Pete and I would go in as Shelby's visitors while Baxter, whose artificial body couldn't pass the security scans no matter how cunningly it resembled the real thing to human eyes and touch, waited outside with a rented electric getaway cart. Fay, tapped into CRS' security network, would unlock a path back to the front doors while sealing off everyone else. We'd grab Shelby and run outside.

  Worst case, we'd have to karate chop a receptionist or a stray guard on our way back to the street. Baxter's idling cart would then whisk us to the spaceport's private gate, where a local pilot would rocket us to Fay, who'd be running interference the whole time, keeping CRS locked down and isolated—and ensuring nobody tried to do anything insan
e like seal us in a dome or cut off the spaceport.

  "Simple" was Baxter's description, not mine. To me, it sounded like running through the heart of enemy territory with a limited number of exits, all of which could theoretically be blocked off from us. Fay assured me if we moved fast enough, no one would be able to react in time to pin us down. Even if it was wrong, and CRS had their shit together enough to get a security force to the spaceport—and how would they even know we'd be at the spaceport?—Fay could, as a last resort, respond with violent force.

  As the alarm keened up, freezing me in place as I shuddered like a dying engine, I was reminded, for the millionth time, how we don't always get what we want.

  "That does not sound like a positive development," Baxter said through our earbuds, barely audible over the whooping alarm.

  I sprinted deeper into the deserted reception room, as if expecting Shelby would materialize like an anti-mirage once I got close enough to see her. "What's going on?"

  "Badness," Fay said.

  "More badness." Pete pointed to a door sliding open in front of us. He roundhoused the first face that showed itself. The white-uniformed guard collapsed in the doorway and tripped his partner onto the tile. With his face so close to my foot, I gave the tripped man a kick, then knelt to punch him out. Pete stripped them of their stunners and lobbed one my way.

  "To define 'badness,'" Fay said with a brightness that carried more curiosity than concern, "if they somehow knew about our plan in advance, they could have moved Shelby. She could be anywhere."

  "They don't know what you can and can't monitor," I said. "If they moved her, they'd have risked tipping you off."

  "If they thought I was that powerful, why bother resisting at all?"

  "Because we can't all be as smart as you! Now tell me what the hell to do here."

  "Well," Fay said, "abort, return to Baxter, and get up here with me. Or try to get to Shelby's cell, which may or may not contain a Shelby. They shut me out by switching to a backup network, but I can still help you get to her cell."

  The air raid siren switched off.