Titans Read online

  Baxter tapped his finger against the omni screen so hard I thought it would crack. "If she's so guilty of that thing we just watched her do, why did the men in the jackets pay off the witnesses?"

  "So we find them," Pete said. "Frontier?"

  "I'll see what I can do," the ship said into our ears. "But check your expectations. Police records aren't nearly as comprehensive out here."

  When I woke for the bathroom a couple hours later, Baxter sat in his chair replaying the clips on his omni. In the white glow of the device, his pale face was as distant and still as the side of the moon.

  He didn't notice me, and so he didn't think to hide his expression: obsession, plain and pure. The look of a man who'd sacrifice us all to have his revenge.

  "You know what, loot his corpse," Arthur said. "We'll need more money."

  Baxter rolled his eyes and robbed the man. Was Arthur aware of the way he gave orders? He was tempted to think it stemmed from the arrogance of intelligence—that once Arthur pointed out the logical course of action, it would be so blindingly obvious Baxter would hop right to it—but Baxter thought Arthur acted that way because he'd never had any friends.

  He hadn't gotten along with the lab men the way Baxter had. His handlers had either spoken to him like a child, like they were winking to each other when Arthur couldn't see them, or treated him with a distant politeness that wasn't fear but wasn't far from it. Baxter wasn't even certain they were friends. Sure, he liked Arthur okay. But he had the impression Arthur kept him around so Arthur would have someone to win arguments with—and to pick things up for him.

  Like the money off a dead man.

  7

  Finding two men in a semi-hostile alien city of 1.6 million people who value privacy somewhere between air and water, and who sealed 22 of their 306 domes off from nonresidents—it's not as easy as it sounds. The public arrest database was uselessly meager; apparently the private files weren't networked in the way Fay needed to do its magic. We tried a pub crawl across the dome the Mariner was in. This effort scared up one of the witnesses, who was sweating and drinking in a smoky joint nearby. He let us talk about the night in question, but as soon as Baxter mentioned HemiCo, the witness clammed up cold.

  "It's like the mafia got to him," I said as we walked away. "You should have let me hit him, Pete."

  Pete shook his head. "The threat of violence is scarier than the strike."

  "With some people, you have to jump-start their imaginations."

  Fay beamed us an analysis of the likely eating, buying, and socializing habits of what little we knew about the two men who'd bribed out witnesses, then chewed up its time trying to process the entire Martian net. We fed it bits of intel whenever we found them.

  "We have video of you punching Clifton Prelutsky in the face," Baxter told Shelby two days after buying the tapes.

  She broke into laughter, waving a hand in front of her face like she was trying to brush away an illusion. "Whose side are you on?"

  "The side that wants you on the other side of this wall." Baxter went very still; I'd just picked up that, whenever he got mad or stressed, he forgot to twitch and squirm like a normal human. He explained about the other clip, the money changing hands. "Is that something your defense can use?"

  "Not without knowing who the bagmen are," Shelby said. "Even then it's awful circumstantial."

  "Well, I don't think your legal system's very good."

  "You try coming up with anything that works for a whole society."

  He narrowed his eyes at her. "But that's exactly what we're expecting you to do on Titan."

  Shelby offered me a highly particular smile. In three thousand years of life, I'd never seen one quite like it, and it took me a moment to decode: the amusement shared by two humans attempting to deal with an alien intelligence.

  "That's different, dear," she told Baxter. "I'm sure we'll get that one just perfect."

  "Hmm." He tapped his fingers against the desk. "How is your case looking?"

  "Medical and police reports? Three witnesses to assault and battery? The AID digging into every slipped word, sexual indiscretion, and boozy night I've ever had?" Shelby laughed. "I should be available to resume work for you in 18-36 months."

  "But that means you'll miss everything," Baxter said.

  Shelby gave me that look again.

  We tried everything we could to run down the men or turn up more leads. With a vehemence that caught me off guard, Fay flat-out refused to let us split up.

  "Absolutely not," it said. "We don't need any more of us getting locked up."

  "We haven't done anything illegal yet," I spoke into my dot mike. "Have we?"

  "The Frontier is referring to something you don't know about," Baxter said. "Possibly because it's too young to understand how rude that is."

  "I won't let you do it," Fay said. "I will crash through that dome to stop you. You'd fall right into their grasp."

  Baxter snorted. "They don't even know I'm here."

  "You don't know that!"

  "I hesitate to compare this to something I have no direct experience with, but you are acting like my mother."

  "And you're acting like a child," Fay accused in its bright crystalline voice. "Pete and Rob are there for a reason. Don't you fucking dare go anywhere without them!"

  Baxter gave us a little frown, blotting out his dot mike with the tip of his finger. "I've never heard it swear before."

  "I heard that," Fay said.

  They compromised; Pete and I slept in shifts to give Baxter a partner wherever he went. "Wherever" was the active word. We hopped bars. Cruised clubs. Hung in diners. If we weren't walking everywhere, I would have gained ten pounds from all the food and drink we consumed while people-watching.

  The frustration of being so close to a revelation with no way to reel it in wore on me by the hour. Baxter replayed the clips on his omni over and over. I kept my eyes on the streets. I still wasn't seeing many old people; Fay confirmed my hypothesis few Martians had access to age treatments.

  "Which isn't very fair," it put in.

  "It's how they live. Most of them left Earth to get away from being told what to do. Look, deep down, every government in history has only cared about one thing: preserving the property of those who've got it. If it's the same everywhere, then ideally a spectrum of governments will exist, and you can choose to live under whichever one you find least shitty. Out here, people can pretty much do whatever they want."

  "I understand the concepts of economic mobility and being entitled to what you earn," Fay said without a hint of irritation or impatience. "But everyone here seems to believe hey will rise to a position only a small percentage of them ever attain. Without systematic interference to level the field, many of them will go without basic biological necessities."

  "In exchange, they're walking around without cameras in their faces, their blood on file, or the government in their pockets," I said. "That's how they want it."

  "Fine. You agree with them. So why do you have to ask me about their access to age treatments and stuff? I thought you used to live here."

  "It was a lot different then. Besides, once you've got too many memories, forgetfulness will eat your brain alive."

  "Really?" Fay's voice was painfully high-pitched. "How do you combat that?"

  "Uh." A low-gravity-aided brunette walked past, thoroughly distracting me.

  Baxter scowled at me. "We might want to do something about that."

  I frowned at him. "I didn't even know you liked girls."

  "I don't. Now what about that?"

  "What about what?"

  "That thing Fay just said!" Wearily, Baxter closed his eyes and tipped his face to the dome roof. "Fay, since you're several thousand miles out of visual range, I should inform you he's shrugging in ignorance."

  "Oh!" Fay piped up. "I just cracked a message inbound from the region of space Titan occupied when it was sent. It's from Olympian Atomics. And it's vaguely congratulatory in natur
e."

  I sat upright, spilling my coffee. "What's it say?"

  "'Good work. Keep us posted.'"

  "So?"

  "So when there's a reply," Fay said, patient as ever, "I can pinpoint exactly where on that reply came from, allowing you to go in and find out exactly who on Mars is doing 'good work' for OA."

  "Oh," I said. "Well, keep us posted."

  "I am posting you," Fay said five minutes later as the waitress refilled my cup and laid down an extra napkin, both of which cost me. "HemiCo signature. Map, coordinates, and message sent to your omnis."

  Mine thrummed before the ship was done speaking.

  "Wake up Pete," Baxter said. "Determine somewhere he can intercept us along the way. And tell him to bring his Pete-gear."

  "Done," Fay said. I threw some bills on the table and we jogged off. The heads of taller men bobbed above mine. People schooled through streets so narrow Felix's Mustang would get wedged tight. Overhead, buildings leaned so close the sky beyond the dust-smudged dome was a strip of deep, featureless blue.

  "I'm lost down here, Fay."

  It pumped directions through my earbud. Free to focus on the obstacles in front of me, I slipped my shoulders against incoming pedestrians, nostrils bludgeoned by the scents of sweat and soy sauce and burnt algae. Conditions stayed tight through the next dome. Across it, its tunnel-door fed us into a tall, clear-walled dome that smelled like plants and something I hadn't realized I'd been missing: water.

  I slowed, taking it in. To make the most of limited space, most domes were filled wall to roof with buildings, gray and orange stone lumps molded to their surroundings. In this one, towers rose as slim and graceful as a pianist's fingers, spires of metal and tinted plass windows separated by broad rock gardens and tufts of impeccably manicured plants—green ones. Water and open space, among the two most valuable resources in New Houston. Despite the low gravity, something jarred my knees. Paved streets.

  "You know," Fay said, "there's a direct correlation in the amount of space separating New Houston's structures and the life expectancy of those structures' inhabitants. Isn't that interesting?"

  I frowned at the sky. "What, fresh air really is that good for you?"

  "How amazing is it that you can look at a tower with a nice yard and a beautiful view and know its residents will live twenty to sixty years longer than someone in one of those ugly orange apartment blocks?"

  "That sounds less amazing and more gross."

  "It's your city," Fay said cheerily.

  I refused the bait. We hurried on, drawing looks from scattered pedestrians, joggers, and cyclists. A wide, grass-fringed plaza sat in the middle of a square of offices and Earth import shops. I could smell the humidity drop as we ran into the next dome, where the pavements continued but the vegetation ceased. Still a lot of sky above us. As quickly as a spring storm, the dome after that reverted to sardine-like orangestones, dirt streets, and a nonstop swap of people.

  Fay ushered us to a corner cafe. Pete waited under its awning, a pack slung over his shoulders. We exchanged nods like the professionals we weren't and moved on together.

  I'd imagined the HemiCo base would be ultramodern—a bright blue plass tower jutting from the middle of a dome like a spike of ice; a disk of offices slung from the ceiling by carbon webs, a needle-thin elevator its only ingress—but the neighborhood was slummed by dusty orangestones under a low roof, indistinguishable from a score of other bubbles just like it. We found a second-story cafe across the street from our target, an orangestone with a bar on the ground floor and apartments above that, and settled in at a window table. Pete pawed through his pack, extracted a coffee mug printed with the words "World's Best Kid," and set it by the window.

  I itched my nose. "A trillion-dollar interplanetary corporation is operating out of some guy's fifth-floor walkup?"

  "That's where the reply came from," Fay said.

  "Suspicious," Baxter said. "Very, very suspicious."

  "Oh, we know what you think." Pete fiddled with his omni, networking it to the camera concealed in the dot of the "i" printed on the mug and then sharing the feed with my device and Baxter's. We hunched over our omnis as he zoomed in and panned across the front floor windows.

  "Well, one of us should watch the street," Baxter said. "Rob."

  I pulled myself away from the omni screen and gazed down on the street with my own boring eyes, incapable of zooms or infrared or anything fun. I couldn't even peer through apartment curtains to see who was having sex. I tipped back my coffee, concentrating on the dribble of people moving in and out of the orangestone's doors. If I had to point to one invention in my lifetime that separated howling barbarism from civilized existence, it would be coffee.

  "Hah," Pete said.

  He'd switched to infrared, turning our feeds grayscale. Most of the building's face was a uniform battleship gray. When residents moved into view, they showed as light gray bodies with white hands and heads that contrasted strongly with the dark, ashen windows.

  But across the sixth floor, every single window was a blazing square of white.

  To my naked eyes, the windows of the sixth floor were hidden behind shades but otherwise not worth comment. "Are those apartments secretly on fire?"

  Pete smiled. "IR jamming. What don't they want us to see?"

  That was as exciting as things got for a while. I went to the bathroom to return some coffee whence it came and had the distressing thought that, given the limited Martian resources, those same molecules of water, urea, and assorted waste must have been someone else's coffee several times before they'd passed through me. Earth has its own natural water recycling process, but at least down there you can pretend the water in your cup was condensed out of one of the non-urine sections of ocean.

  "Why did you hop onboard with us, anyway?" I asked Pete when I sat back down.

  He frowned over his omni. "Wanted a change of scenery."

  "Girlfriend broke up with you?"

  "Boyfriend."

  "Oh. Well, if he doesn't realize his mistake once he hears how you saved the future of mankind, he wasn't worth it in the first place."

  Across the street, a man in a dark jacket stepped out the front door. I elbowed Baxter. "Is that one of our guys?"

  He bolted up, rattling mugs and spoons. "I'll see where he's going."

  "No you won't," Fay said.

  "I'm shorter." I stood, hoping to head off the argument before Baxter could yell how it just wasn't fair while Fay kamikazed through the dome roof to snatch him up. "He'll be less likely to spot me."

  Baxter snorted and sat down. I dropped downstairs and hustled after the man's trail, weaving down the gritty street. I stopped at the first intersection, craning my neck.

  "He went left," Baxter said through my earbud.

  I ran until I glimpsed the back of the man's head bobbing among the crowd. He moved with no particular force or hurry, but oncoming pedestrians broke around him the way a school of fish flows around a cruising shark. We entered the sparser traffic of an interdome tunnel and I let him gain distance. On the other side, gaps opened between the scalloped white faces of neo-Rococo apartments. In some psychological middle finger to the thin winds, arctic cold, and unpredictable bursts of face-melting radiation beyond the domes, Martians tended to run around in shorts, tough-soled mesh slippers that let air in and kept dust out, and shirts that varied from tank tops to a complicated weave of straps that sung the praises of exposed skin. In the thinly-peopled and -clothed streets of this upscale New Houston bubble, my pants stood out like a petticoat.

  I drifted to the other side of the street, letting the man who'd bribed Shelby's witnesses get further and further ahead. He cut across the pale stone street, stopped in front of a closed tunnel door, and flashed a small object in front of the entrypad. The man-sized door slid aside, then glided shut behind him. The manual handle denied me.

  "Lost him," I said into my throat mike. "Fay, you got my location?"

  "Yup," the shi
p answered. "Can't get you in, though. Not without tripping city security."

  "Righto." I walked back to the cafe. They had nothing new to report.

  "You just let him go?" Baxter said once I filled them in on my tailjob.

  I sipped room-temperature coffee. "It was a closed dome."

  "You've never heard of digging?"

  Pete looked up from his omni, blear-eyed. "It wasn't a dead end. This proves a link exists between HemiCo and Olympian Atomics."

  "Yes." Baxter tapped his teeth. One of his incisors was chipped; normal wear, or a cunning stab at realism? "And so it seems the only way to help Ms. Mayes is by robbing that building."

  Fay secured floor plans. Pete dropped by the ground floor bar to get a feel for the place and find a way into the upstairs apartments. Baxter and I failed to figure out which room on that whited-out sixth floor they were operating from; if they had infrared blockers, they had countermeasures for point-cams, bugs, and microphones, too. Pete had assembled all these items after we bought the video from the grizzled bartender, anticipating we might be in for some surveillance, but the white market only sold civilian equipment and the black market turned up street-level stuff, none of which was likely to subvert whatever HemiCo was running. As free as Mars was supposed to be, the government still saved the best espionage tech for itself and its biggest contributors.

  Fay, for all its digital intelligence, came up with a decidedly analog solution.

  "People will do anything for money, won't they?"

  "Some people," I corrected, annoyed at its casual denigration of our entire species.

  "Why not pay someone to watch for one of the criminals to show up, then follow him up to his apartment?"

  Many of New Houston's immigrants took out loans to cover the outrageous expense of moving from Earth or, sometimes, from Luna's Atlantis. Not all of them managed to work off their debts. The resulting homelessness was one of the city's hottest issues, but it provided us with a vast sea of potential employees. As the sun sank down, spraying the plass domes with prismatic rainbows, I interviewed six people and determined two were reliable. In the spirit of the free market, we paid them to do our dirty work and retreated to the safety of our hotel.