Part 6 (1/2)
After a couple weeks of his new bad Italian food and cheap c.o.c.ktails routine, his terminal finally rang with an incoming voice request. He knew it couldn't be from Naomi. The light lag made a live connection unworkable for any two people not living on the same station. But he still pulled the terminal out of his pocket so fast that he fumbled it across the room.
The bartender Chip said, ”Had a few too many of my margaritas?”
”The first one was too many,” Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. ”And calling that a margarita should be illegal.”
”It's as margarita as it gets with rice wine and lime flavor concentrate,” Chip said, sounding vaguely hurt.
”h.e.l.lo?” Holden yelled at the terminal, mas.h.i.+ng the touch screen to open the connection. ”h.e.l.lo?”
”Hi, Jim?” a female voice said. It didn't sound anything like Naomi.
”Who is this?” he asked, then cracked his head on the edge of the table climbing back out and added, ”Dammit!”
”Monica,” the voice on the other end said. ”Monica Stuart? Did I catch you at a bad time?”
”Sort of busy right now, Monica,” Holden said. Chip rolled his eyes. Holden flipped him off, and the bartender started mixing him another drink. Probably as punishment for the insult.
”I understand,” Monica said. ”But I have something I'd love to run past you. Is there any chance we can get together? Dinner, a drink, anything?”
”I'm afraid I'm on Tycho Station for the foreseeable future, Monica. The Roci is getting a full refit right now. So -”
”Oh, I know. I'm on Tycho too. That's why I called.”
”Right,” Holden said. ”Of course you are.”
”Is tonight good?”
Chip put the drink on a tray, and a waiter from the restaurant out front popped in to carry it away. Chip saw him looking at it and mouthed Want another? at him. The prospect of another night of what the restaurant laughably called lasagna and enough of Chip's ”margaritas” to kill the aftertaste felt like slow death.
The truth was, he was bored and lonely. Monica Stuart was a journalist and had serious problems about only showing up when she wanted something. She always had an ulterior motive. But finding out what she wanted and then saying no would kill an evening in a way that wasn't exactly like every other evening since Naomi left. ”Yeah, okay Monica, dinner sounds great. Not Italian.”
They ate salmon sus.h.i.+ from fish grown in tanks on the station. It was outrageously expensive, but being paid for by Monica's expense account. Holden indulged himself until his clothes stopped fitting.
Monica ate sparingly, with small precise movements of her chopsticks, almost picking up the rice one kernel at a time. She ignored the wasabi altogether. She'd aged some too, since Holden had last seen her in person. Unlike Fred, the extra years looked good on her, adding a sense of experience and gravitas to her video-star looks.
They'd started the evening talking about little things: how the s.h.i.+p repairs were going, what had happened to the team she'd taken on the Rocinante back when the Ring was a new thing, where Alex and Amos and Naomi had gone. He'd found himself talking more than he meant to. He didn't dislike Monica, but she wasn't someone he particularly trusted either. But she knew him, and they'd traveled together, and even more than good food, he was hungry to talk to someone he actually sort of knew.
”So there's this weird thing,” she said, then dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin.
”Weirder than eating raw fish on a s.p.a.ce station with one of the solar system's most famous reporters?”
”You're flattering me.”
”It's habit. I don't mean anything by it.”
Monica rooted around in the satchel she'd brought and pulled out a flimsy roll-out video screen. She pushed plates out of the way and flattened the screen out on the table. When it came on, it showed the image of a heavy freighter, blocky and thick, heading toward one of the rings inside the slow zone. ”Watch this.”
The picture sprang into motion, the freighter burning toward a ring gate at low thrust. He a.s.sumed it was the one that led from the solar system to the slow zone and Medina Station, but it could have been any of the others. They all looked pretty much the same. When the s.h.i.+p pa.s.sed through the gate, the image flickered and danced as the recording equipment was bombarded with high-energy particles and magnetic flux. The image stabilized, and the s.h.i.+p was no longer visible. That didn't mean much. Light pa.s.sing through the gates had always behaved oddly, bending the images like refraction in water. The video ended.
”I've seen that one before,” Holden said. ”Good special effects but the plot's thin.”
”Actually you kind of haven't. Guess what happened to that s.h.i.+p?” Monica said, face flushed with excitement.
”What?”
”No, really, guess. Speculate. Give me a hypothesis. Because it never came out the other side.”
Chapter Six: Alex.
”Hey, Bobbie,” Alex said to his hand terminal's camera. ”I'm gonna be downstairs in Mariner for a week or two, stayin' with a cousin. I was wondering if you wanted to get lunch while I'm in town.”
He ended the message and sent it, put his hand terminal back in his pocket, fidgeted, took it out again. He started paging back through his contacts, looking for another distraction. With every minute, he came closer to the thin exosphere of home. They were already inside the orbit of Phobos and the now invisibly thin scatter of gravel that people called the Deimos Ring. The drop s.h.i.+p didn't have screens, but from here he'd have been able to see the ma.s.sive steel of Hecate Base spilling up the side of Olympus Mons. He'd been a boot there after he joined the Navy.
Mariner Valley had been one of the first large-scale settlements on Mars. Five linked neighborhoods that burrowed into the sides of the vast canyons, huddling under the stone and regolith. The network of bridges and tubes that linked them were called Haizhe because the westernmost bridge structures and the trailing tubes made a figure like a cartoon jellyfish. The later high-speed line to Londres Nova was a spear in the jellyfish's crown.
Three waves of Chinese and Indian colonists dug deep into the dry soil there, eking out a thin, perilous existence, pus.h.i.+ng the limits of human habitation and ability. His family had been one of them. He'd been an only child to older parents. He had no nieces or nephews, but the variety of Kamal cousins in the Valley were enough that he could go from one guest room to another for months without wearing out his welcome at any one of them.
The drop s.h.i.+p shuddered, the atmosphere outside thick enough now to cause turbulence. The acceleration alarm chimed pleasantly and a recorded voice instructed him and the other pa.s.sengers to check the straps on their gel couches and put any objects more than two kilos into the lockers set into the wall at their sides. The braking burn would commence in thirty seconds, and reach a maximum burn of three gs. The automated concern made that sound like a lot, but he supposed some folks would be impressed.
He put his hand terminal in the locker, cycled it closed, and waited for the braking rockets to push him back into his couch. In one of the other compartments, a baby was crying. The countdown tones began, a music of converging intervals distinguishable in any language. When the tones resolved into a gentle and rea.s.suring chord, the burn kicked in, pressing him into the gel. He dozed as the s.h.i.+p rattled and shook. The atmosphere of Mars wasn't thick enough to use it for aerobraking on their steep descent path, but it could still generate a lot of heat. Half-awake, he ran through the math of landing, the numbers growing more and more surreal as the light sleep washed over him. If something had gone wrong a change in the burn, an impact shudder pa.s.sing through the s.h.i.+p, a s.h.i.+ft in the couch's gimbals he'd have been awake and alert in an instant. But nothing happened, so nothing happened. As homecomings went, it wasn't bad.
The port proper was at the base of the valley. Six and a half kilometers of stone rose up from the pads, the strip of sky above them hardly more than thirty degrees from rim to rim. The processing station was one of the oldest buildings in Mariner, its ma.s.sive clear dome built with the dual purposes of blocking radiation and providing a view that would impress with its scale. The canyons ran to the east, rugged and craggy and beautiful. Lights glittered from the canyon's sides where the neighborhoods impinged out from the rock, the homes of the insanely wealthy trading the safety of deep stone for the status of an actual exterior window. A transport flier pa.s.sed, hugging low to the ground where the relatively thick air gave its gossamer wings a little more purchase.
Once upon a time, the data said, Mars had been the home of its own biosphere. Rain had fallen here. Rivers had flowed. Not, perhaps, in the geologic eyeblink of human history, but once. And would, the terraformers promised, again. Not in their lifetimes or their children's, but one day. Alex waited in the customs queue, looking up. The pull of the planet, only about one-third g, felt strange. No matter what the math said, thrust gravity felt different than being down a well. Between the magnificence of the canyons and the eeriness of his weight, Alex felt the anxiety growing in his chest.
He was here. He was home.
The man processing the arriving travelers wore a thick mustache, white with a tinge of red. His eyes were bloodshot and his expression glum.
”Business or pleasure?”
”Neither one,” Alex drawled, ”I'm here to see the ex-wife.”
The man gave a quick smile. ”That going to be a business meeting, or pleasure?”
”Let's call it not-business,” Alex said.
The processor stroked the screen of his terminal, nodded toward the camera. As the system confirmed that he was who he claimed to be, Alex wondered why he'd said that. He hadn't said that Tali was a shrew, he hadn't insulted her, but he'd leaned on the a.s.sumption for a quick joke. He felt like she deserved better from him. Probably she did.
”'Joy your stay,” the processing man said, and Alex was free to enter the world he'd left.
His cousin Min stood in the waiting area. She was ten years younger than him, the last vestiges of youth falling from her and the first comfortable heft of middle age creeping in. Her smile belonged to a little girl he'd known once.
”Hey there, podner,” she said, the Mariner drawl probably half a degree thicker than it normally was. ”What brings you round these parts?”
”More sentiment than sense,” Alex said, opening his arms. They embraced for a moment.