The Hellas Find

A Fox Meridian Novel

By Niall Teasdale

Copyright 2018 Niall Teasdale

Amazon Kindle Edition

Contents

Part One: Martians

Part Two: Astraeus

Part Three: The Spy Who Came In

Part Four: The Mines of Mars

Part Five: A Solitary Man

Part Six: The Tentacle Monsters Are Coming!

Part One: Martians

New York Metro, 13th February 2062.

Black clouds hung over the Brooklyn Sprawl like a blanket. A sodden, cold blanket. It was a little too warm for snow, but the rain was coming down thick and heavy. Long ago, it had seeped through Fox Meridian’s clothes and found its way to her skin. She did not really care, having turned off her tactile sensors, but the drips from her near-white fringe were annoying as they fell into her eyes.

She was sitting on the top floor of an apartment building which had become disused. Maintenance had stopped, the roof had collapsed, and now even the sprawlers refused to occupy it. She was there because in the rather better maintained structure across what had once been Nostrand Avenue, people were up to no good. She had been watching the place for the last twenty-four hours, aside from a four-hour break she had taken during the day. She was uniquely suited to this kind of stakeout, because she was a machine. Literally. There was not an organic component in her body. Her mind was a software emulation of what had once been a human brain, now running on a quantum computer system in a robotic body. She looked the same as she always had, but she was not. Sometimes, the advantages of her new status considerably outweighed the disadvantages. Like being able to turn off her sense of touch so she could not feel the rivulets of water running down her spine.

‘Remind me to talk to Jackson about the waterproofing on these suits,’ Fox said silently.

‘Perhaps it would be more effective if you were wearing the helmet,’ Kit, Fox’s AI assistant, replied. Kit was running on another of the quantum cores in Fox’s chest. Or this instance of Kit was; other instances were elsewhere, doing other things.

‘Maybe. I suppose it’s not meant to be sealed. Have you seen Marie’s photos from Chicago yet?’

It was a sudden shift in the conversation, but Kit handled it smoothly. ‘Yes. My physical instance has seen them. They look good. I may even purchase some of the designs myself, though I don’t quite have Marie’s figure.’

‘Her boobs you mean.’ Fox smiled. Even though the conversation was happening purely between two programs, some outward reaction was not going to be noticed and felt necessary.

‘While it is true that Marie’s breasts appear bigger than mine, that is primarily due to her being physically bigger than me. My avatar’s breasts are, relatively, larger. Marie has actually indicated a degree of envy for their pert and invitingly full quality.’

Fox’s smile broadened. ‘Has she now? She was probably just trying to get you into bed with her and Sam.’

‘My analysis suggests that was about fifty-five percent of the reason for the compliment. I am waiting for that foursome, however. She won’t tempt me before then.’

‘I’m sure when Terri designed you, she had no intention of you holding out for foursomes.’ Fox frowned. ‘Maybe that didn’t come out quite right.’ She was talking because no matter how suited she was to stakeouts, Fox still found them boring. They were boring, until they were far from boring. ‘That’s a new face.’ Fox zoomed her vision in on the face in question, a man walking toward the building she was watching.

‘That is Richard Metzner,’ Kit replied after a short pause. ‘The face recognition match is ninety-eight percent. Richie to his friends, and those friends are primarily United Anarchy activists. Mister Metzner is on NIX and UNTPP watch lists. He is currently believed to be in Germany, which is obviously incorrect.’

Metzner was a tall, heavily built man with bedraggled, black, shoulder-length hair. His eyes were a deep blue, and cold as winter in the Antarctic. He was moderately good-looking, but Fox doubted many women, or men, would touch him with a ten-foot pole: the man looked like his favourite hobby was strangling kittens. He was dressed in black: black jeans, black shirt, and a leather jacket which looked a little wrong, like it had armour in the lining. Fox was also sure there was a weapon hidden away under it.

Kit popped a window into Fox’s vision field. Metzner was not a nice man. United Anarchy did not generally have specific roles they assigned to people, but Metzner was viewed as being primarily a hitman.

‘Great,’ Fox said. ‘We still have connectivity to HQ?’

‘Of course.’ One of the things Palladium had done to assist their policing efforts in the Sprawl areas was to run a series of drone patrols. The machines were semi-autonomous, high-flying, and could stay in the air for days. They watched the streets and buildings below, looking for signs of trouble – one of them had spotted the odd goings-on on Nostrand Avenue, for example – and provided network connectivity to areas in regions where there was basically none normally.

‘I want four RRUs here as soon as they can get them. Task them with containment. No one leaves this area once we get started. Send a message to Candler through the usual channels saying that we have a possible UA cell. Further indicate that I’m going in immediately since I believe there to be a public safety aspect to the situation.’

‘Is there a public safety aspect?’

‘Just looking at Metzner’s résumé, yes. He’s probably in the metro to kill someone, and I’m not going to give him the opportunity.’

‘Messages sent. The Rapid Response Units will be here in twelve minutes.’

Fox nodded. ‘Let’s hope that’s fast enough.’

~~~

Fox was at ground level when the four black killbots flew in from the east. Having tapped the overhead drone to inform her of their imminent arrival, Fox left the dispersal of the RRUs to Kit, drew her pistol from its holster on her right thigh, and headed for the door of the target building.

Once upon a time, the place had been a shop amid a row of shops with apartments over them. Brick-built and two storeys, the roofline was sort of crenelated. Up on the second floor, three windows were now covered in wooden boards. At ground level, the steel shutter over the shopfront was still in place and down. It looked a lot like it would be impossible to open, in fact. Beside it was an ordinary door, but that door was still in place. To the left, the neighbouring door was gone, as was the window and shutter of what had once been a barber’s shop according to fading signage. The drone’s view of the building showed that it went back a fair way, the upper floor a little shorter than the bottom one. There was an alley back there, but a couple of RRUs would secure that.

Fox fixed her aim on the door’s lock and fired. The heavy slug smashed through the mechanism and blew pretty much any chance of anyone missing Fox’s entry, but she did not especially care. The roar of ducted engines behind her told her that the RRUs were settling into place as she kicked the door open and marched in.

‘Police!’ Fox yelled. ‘This building is under police interdiction. Put down any weapons you may have and prepare to be arrested.’ It was a waste of time. She was pretty sure that there was going to be resistance. She was fairly sure that the people here were selling weapons to the sprawlers. Illegal weapons. It was not like someone had to climb through huge hoops to get a legal weapon, but they did generally have to provide some ID, and that was something sprawlers often had trouble with.

Ahead of her was a corridor. Two doors on the right, a third straight ahead at the end of the hall. Someone carrying a fairly modern personal defence weapon burst out of the nearest door. The PDW was a bullpup design, basically a caseless sub-machine gun, and it barely had time to rise toward her before Fox fired, punching a big hole in the gunman’s chest and dropping him back into the front room. Fox followed him, darting quickly in and rapidly scanning the interior. The front-of-shop area had been turned into a bedroom, though the bed was a sleeping bag on a sagging, ancient mattress. Light came from a small electric lamp; they had enough resources to charge batteries, it seemed. There was no one else there and the man lying on the floor with blood pouring out of him saw her weapon moving his way and threw his own weapon out of reach.

‘Good man,’ Fox said. ‘Wait there and I’ll get you some medical assistance. Or you can crawl away and die.’ She turned without waiting for an answer and stepped back out into the corridor.

The door at the end was open and there was a big man in combat fatigues standing in it, holding a shotgun level. Whoever he was, he was not the kind of man who fired a shotgun very often. There were three massive bangs as the weapon discharged as fast as he could pull the trigger. Plaster exploded from the wall to Fox’s left and from the ceiling. Fox fired back, the round blasting through his chest and throwing gore into the room beyond. That one was probably not going to be needing medical assistance.

Moving forward, she slammed open the second door on the right. No occupants, but a lot of guns. Crates of the things. Shotguns, PDWs, and handguns. Nothing explosive. Nothing with a really huge calibre. They were all weapons designed for personal defence, purportedly. Sure, you could murder someone with them, but they were marketed for stopping that happening to you. The quantity simply did not make much sense either, unless the objective was just to arm as many sprawlers as possible. But then why was what amounted to a UA assassin here?

Turning again, she stepped out, walked down the corridor, and then stepped over the man she had shot. She dropped to one knee and, eyes still on the room, checked his pulse. Alive, just barely. ‘Kit, we’re going to need a full squad out here, with paramedics and at least one emergency evac unit.’

‘I’ve put the request through,’ Kit replied. ‘Do I need to remind you that you are not in your combat frame?’

‘No. That’s why I’m wearing body armour.’

‘Without the helmet.’

‘Do I second-guess your assistanting?’

‘There is no such word. I’ve made my comment. If you end up restored from your backup, that’s your problem.’

Fox smiled to herself and considered her next move. She was in what had apparently been set up as a kitchen. She doubted that had been its original purpose; kitchens did not routinely have stairs leading up from them. There was a portable gas stove, however, along with pots and pans, and buckets for carrying water from wherever the local supply was. Living in the sprawls was barely living. She would have preferred to head out into the wilderness areas in the protectorates, if she had ever been faced with needing to. The communities out there could be almost civilised. Not that she could do it now, not without a good source of power and the services of a robotics mechanic anyway.

She still had not found Metzner, so she headed for the stairs. If he had gone out the back door, he would have been downed by one of the RRUs by now, so he had to be upstairs. She was guessing at two or three rooms on the upper floor, maybe a fourth if there was an old bathroom. There was a door at the top of the stairs and she slammed through it, accelerated perceptions taking in the corridor beyond and the man holding a PDW at the far end. She dropped and rolled, but four of the slugs still hit her chest and back. Only one of those hit hard enough for her to really feel it, and her synthetic skin took the hit without real complaint. Rolling upright, she fired and blood exploded from his back. He looked confused for an instant before his eyes rolled back and he was falling.

Rising to her feet, Fox kept her eyes on the open door at the end of the corridor and moved to the first of two on her right. Pushing through, she found herself looking at another bedroom, this one occupied by two women and three children, all of them huddled against the wall under the window. They were terrified, but they were silent. Fox looked them over briefly and then moved back into the corridor. They would stay right where they were, and she would see to it that they were medically checked out and fed before this was over.

The next door had once led to a bathroom, but all the fittings had been ripped out and replaced with battered mattresses. There was no one in the room, but there were a couple of weapons lying in plain view. That left one room; Fox went into it with her weapon raised, taking in the scene in an instant.

Metzner had a hostage, a terrified teenage girl. Blonde and blue-eyed, and cute if you discounted the ragged clothes and smudged face; Metzner was holding her to his chest, trying his best to keep his body covered. She was not making a sound, but her eyes screamed for help. The ten-millimetre automatic in his hand was aimed at her head, but she was a good six inches shorter than he was, and that gave a fairly clear view of Metzner’s head. Still…

‘Let her go, Metzner,’ Fox said. ‘You let her go, and I take you in without perforations.’

‘You let me go, and I leave her brains in her skull,’ Metzner replied. Fox was not sure where the accent came from. Germany? Maybe Eastern Europe somewhere. It was not American.

‘I have four armed killbots outside this building. How far do you think you’re going to get?’

His eyes tightened. ‘Lower the gun, or I shoot her now.’ Fox seemed to consider for a moment, and then her pistol was lowered toward her hip. Metzner was not focusing on it enough to see how it was being lowered. ‘This must be my lucky day,’ he said, and his own gun began to move, swinging out toward Fox. There was a sound which was not really like a gun being fired. It was a sharp crack, the sound of something being accelerated past the speed of sound by a powerful magnetic field. The back of Metzner’s skull exploded, painting the wall behind him in red and meaty-grey with bone-fragment texturing. His arm slipped from around the girl and she stood there, silent but shivering, as he slid to the floor behind her.

‘You’re okay now,’ Fox said. ‘Just… don’t look behind you.’ Of course, it was entirely the wrong thing to say. Fox stepped forward and caught her when she fainted.

Airborne, Southbound from New York Metro, 14th February.

‘We’d have liked Metzner alive,’ Candler said. He was a virtual image, an animated video, but not a 3D representation. Fox was in a jet heading for Washington. The appointment had been booked for weeks and she had forgotten all about it while she was working the stakeout. It had been a little annoying to discover that no one else had.

‘He was threatening the life of an innocent,’ Fox replied. ‘I took the decision to save her rather than whatever intelligence you could have got out of him.’

‘She was just a–’

‘If you finish that sentence, Blake, I don’t think we can remain friends.’ Calling Blake Candler a friend was probably pushing things more than a little. He was her opposite in NIX, liaison between the civilian police contractor and the National Intelligence Executive. He was a colleague, and one she did not entirely trust, but they got on better than Fox had expected.

‘Yeah, well, maybe you’re right. We’re going over everything we can find in the place, but so far we think you’re right. The people were UA operatives. We’ve suspected them for over a year, but they’re not major players and this doesn’t seem to have been an “official” UA operation. It’s that damn Doomsday meme again. They were trying to arm the sprawlers ahead of the coming world conflict.’

‘UA and that meme mesh nicely. You’re going to get a lot of UA members infected with it. The weaponry was just wrong for some sort of UA assault operation. It didn’t feel right. You can class it as terrorism if you like, but–’

‘Nope. My bosses say we get what we can from what we’ve got, but it’s a civilian, illegal arms, purely criminal matter. I was told to bitch a little about Metzner, but we’re happy to leave this to Palladium.’

‘Thanks. It does mean we have an unknown number of semi-military weapons on the streets in the Brooklyn Sprawl. That’s going to be annoying.’

‘I’d imagine. What are you doing in Washington anyway?’

Fox gave a grunt of displeasure. ‘The Committee on Non-human Rights decided they finally want me to show up and be annoyed at them.’

Candler’s image frowned. ‘What for? Aren’t they supposed to be reporting their findings next week?’

‘Uh-huh. I know enough people on the committee to know that the final report is already being compiled. I am not best pleased. Then again, it’s politics. I’m never best pleased when I have to deal with politics.’

‘Well, best of luck.’

‘I think “best of tolerance” would be a better blessing. I’m going to need that more than luck.’

Baltimore–Washington Metro.

The Capitol was just the same as it had ever been, and the hearing rooms had changed only in being better rigged for media and computer connections. The latter had been somewhat controversial at one point, until someone had pointed out that smartphones could give anyone access to the entire internet. Now everyone and everything was plugged into the net, but the setting remained the same. Audience seating at the back, moderately crammed today since someone had apparently told the media that Tara Meridian was to be giving evidence. Then there was a barrier, tables for the witness and their counsel, and the raised area where the committee members sat behind their hardwood pulpit. It reminded Fox of criminal courts, and she imagined that it had been set up very much on that basis. ‘Here we sit in judgement upon you, the lowly witness.’ Fox viewed the entire event as a pompous waste of time.

Still, Fox did have some people there who were definitely on her side. Jackson Martins sat to one side of her, not close enough to speak to, but he was there. He was there, in fact, to provide technical support if such was required. He had been doing that a lot for the committee who were mostly fairly technically illiterate. Terri, his daughter, was in the audience. Terri had been ultimately responsible for the Akh project which had resulted in Fox becoming an infomorph and she was one of MarTech’s best AI programmers; she had a strong interest in the proceedings. And up there behind the dark wood, Naomi Lind sat as part of the committee. She had been inducted into it as an advocate of non-human rights, because a lot of the other members were not. Originally anyway. Many had been persuaded.

Of the three senior committee members – all of them sitting at this session – there was one for, one against, and one on the fence. All of them were senators or representatives, civil servants assigned to run the government functions of specific regions. James Malton, Senator for New England, was the leader of the committee, and Fox’s briefing indicated that he was siding toward a positive outcome, but probably not for the best of motives. He was still dressed in a high-collared business suit, though the trend for male business wear was to lose the collar; it was an indication of his conservative nature. Senator Malton liked the world to stay the way he understood it. Nathaniel Cullen was younger and fitter, and more ambitious. He was running the Alaskan Administrative Zone – which made Fox wonder who he had annoyed to get that job – and was pretty positive about the new legislation. His constituents had voted heavily in favour of non-human regulations, probably because the conditions they lived in meant they worked closely with AIs and cyberframes, and Cullen was just following that directive. Margot Zeller was the Representative for Baltimore–Washington Metro, and she was just as conservative as her zone of responsibility. She knew which way the wind was blowing but was determined to minimise the ‘damage.’ That was not entirely a bad thing, but she had been noted as somewhat adversarial in the briefing Fox had been given.

Fox settled onto her seat before them calmly. She unbuttoned her jacket as she sat and waited for the session to get underway with as relaxed an attitude as she could portray. She had selected one of her dark suits for the event, but had paired it with a glossy cream teddy rather than a blouse. Her black, high-heeled pumps pushed her already tall figure into statuesque proportions, but that was lost when she sat down. To some extent anyway.

Malton actually tapped a gavel to draw people’s attention to him. It was the kind of archaic feature Fox expected from the people on Capitol Hill. ‘Please be seated,’ Malton said, his voice amplified by the microphone set before him. ‘Let’s get this started.’ It took less than a minute for the audience to settle; apparently, the assembled media were keen to see what this session would produce too. ‘This session of the Committee for Non-human Rights will be focused on hearing testimony from Captain Tara Meridian, currently the only human to have undergone the Akh process. Captain Meridian, the committee thanks you for your time.’

‘It’s my pleasure, Senator,’ Fox replied. They were both lying. They both knew it too.

‘Captain, your own legal status has been guaranteed by arrangement with the government. You are officially human. You are legally the same person you were before the operation. Is that correct?’

‘That’s the current state of things, yes.’

‘Then why do you care about legislation for non-humans? Your own future is assured.’

‘I wouldn’t classify it that way, Senator. My position is reasonably assured thanks to relatively positive public opinion. I, personally, have a pretty good approval rating. Things change, however. Without solid legislation guaranteeing my rights, someone could come along and decide that my special status needed to be revoked. But that’s not really why I want to see good legislation passed on this.’

‘Then would you grace us with your reasons?’

Fox gave him a smile. ‘Of course. I had very little exposure to high-level artificial intelligence prior to twenty sixty. Then I was presented with a Kitsune five nine two series personal assistant for product testing. That’s a class four AI. Teresa Martins thought I might make interesting use of the software. From what she’s said, the feedback was most useful, and my PA has developed far outside the initial parameters of the project.’

‘She is, in fact, now running the investigations division of Palladium Security Solutions,’ Cullen said.

‘She is. Kit has developed into a quite effective assistant to a human detective. She’s become invaluable to me for data collection and processing on cases, and she is becoming a very effective profiler. However, what Palladium calls the Chief Investigations Officer is an administrative role. Kit is doing it because she’s an effective administrator with the background knowledge necessary to administer detectives. She has a relatively unique ability to create copies of her running process to do additional work, and then reconcile the memories of her various copies so that they all know the same things. It means she can be a corporate executive without getting bored out of her mind.’

‘I don’t expect machines to get bored, Captain Meridian,’ Zeller stated flatly. ‘I expect them to do their jobs without complaint.’

‘Then don’t give them complex minds, Representative. The fact is that people want more responsive software. They want systems which understand what they’re saying. Not what they said, but what they meant. Class ones and twos are never going to achieve that. Class three AIs can develop sufficiently to be considered more or less human, but that takes years. If you want your house to understand idiom or sarcasm. If you want it to know when you’re depressed or giddy. If you want an assistant who acts like an assistant rather than a glorified pocket diary. Then you need a class four. You may not want that level of responsiveness from your tools, Senator, but a lot of people do. Humans have asked for these programs to be created. Humans need to deal with the fact that they’ve created a slave underclass, a brainwashed slave underclass, in a society which has long espoused personal freedom and went to war over the status of human slaves.’

‘Slave is a very emotive word, Captain.’

‘What else do you call a sentient being owned by another sentient being, Representative?’

Zeller was one of those people who knew when to change the subject when she thought she was losing ground. ‘Which brings us to the crux of the matter. What is a human? To what can we assign human rights? I know one thing, Captain, humans don’t have an off switch.’

Two seats down from Zeller, Naomi – dressed in her full Sisters of Corruption costume, which had to have caused a few raised eyebrows – rolled her eyes. Fox saw it and got the feeling that this argument had been had before, corrected, and been ignored by Zeller. Naomi started to open her mouth, saw Fox’s lips curl and stopped. Fox laughed, which produced some bemused looks.

‘I don’t believe this is a laughing matter, Captain,’ Zeller said.

‘I was just trying to think of where they’d have put an off switch on this frame,’ Fox replied. There was a rumble of laughter from behind her. ‘Seriously, Representative, don’t you know anything about the machines you’re trying to legislate about? Cyberframes don’t have hardware off switches except in specifically designed cases. They’re rarely entirely inactive. Even during maintenance, cyberframes are just put into a low-power mode with the most basic functions enabled.’

‘If you run out of power–’

‘My batteries last for a week on a full charge. How long do you think you’ll last without water, Representative? Trust me, it’ll be less than a week. But all this is entirely beside the point. I asked you what you called one sentient being owned by another. You changed that to a strawman argument about what a human is. Whether or not I am human is really not the point. Humans have created sentient beings, non-human sentient beings, and now society has to decide what to do about that. Do we continue to brainwash and enslave those entities without any hope of freedom, or not?’

‘Brainwash is another emotive word, Captain,’ Malton said, possibly to rescue Zeller from having to actually answer the question. ‘I don’t believe anyone, or anything, has been brainwashed.’

‘You’re right, Senator,’ Fox replied. ‘What we do to AIs is more insidious. We program them to believe that they should feel loyalty to their owner. We hardcode them to follow the legal code. We manufacture subservience into their very nature. Brainwashing implies that they were free, and they were manipulated into slavery. What we do is worse. We make slaves who like being slaves.’

‘You have a personal assistant, do you not?’

‘Yes. Kit is free. I’m her legal owner because someone has to be under current law, but she continues to work as my assistant because she wants to. As Senator Cullen said, Kit is also an executive officer within Palladium Security Solutions. Technically, she’s my boss, but the upper management structure within the investigations division is a little fuzzy.’

‘I still believe that the assignment of human rights to non-humans–’ Zeller began.

‘Human rights,’ Fox interrupted. ‘Don’t you think that’s a rather racist term, Representative?’ She held up a hand. ‘I don’t blame you for using it. It’s the commonest expression of the concept. But it does seem to imply that there’s something special about humans that means they should be treated better than other thinking beings.’

‘Of course,’ Naomi said before Zeller could respond, ‘I’d have thought it was apparent that the committee sees non-human intelligences as less than human ones. Despite a number of requests from a minority of members, you are the first non-human intelligence to give evidence here, Captain Meridian. And the timing means that nothing you say is likely to affect the committee’s findings. I wonder what you think about that?’

‘I think it demonstrates a blinkered mindset. It indicates that the majority of the committee is concerned with how these regulations will affect humans, not about the effect they’ll have on the targets of the legislation. The vote which brought this committee into being passed by a substantial majority. The citizens of this country want to see non-humans given the same rights as humans. It’s worrying that the administration appears to have mounted a damage limitation exercise in response.’

Malton cleared his throat. ‘Captain Meridian, what is your opinion on the widely proposed adoption of the Luna City model for indentured servitude regarding non-humans?’

Fox gave a small sigh. ‘It’s a practical solution to the issue of production costs. If humans are allowed to enter into the same arrangement, then I view it as fair. The real question is whether AIs and bioroids should be programmed to think of it as the natural order of things.’

‘And your view on that?’

‘Personally, I believe it would be better to tell them that this is just how things are. If the same system is available for humans seeking to improve themselves in some way, then we can point to that and say it’s the same for everyone. It won’t be. Humans don’t enter into that kind of contract in order to be born, but my practical side says that there needs to be something in place to make this work or non-humans simply won’t be made.’

‘You don’t believe AIs and bioroids would be happier if they were conditioned to think of such service as normal?’ Naomi asked.

‘I don’t believe in conditioning people to believe lies.’

‘What about the honesty programming?’ Zeller asked. ‘People need to be assured that artificial intelligence is safe.’

‘Why? Most humans interact with far fewer higher-level AIs than they do humans. They have no assurance that those humans are safe.’

Zeller’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know better than most, Captain, that AIs can be lethal.’ Obviously she knew about some of the killer AIs Fox had encountered. Whether it was the Criminal Minds project or any of the others, she had been told she could not speak openly about them and was trying to get Fox to.

‘I have absolutely no doubt that AIs and bioroids could be produced which would be lethal. I also have no doubt that the production of such would be the result of deliberate human action to create them. If you want to go down that line, Representative, we’ll end up discussing legislation to control humans, not non-humans. If you’re referring specifically to Hannah, I’d remind you that she was the product of a sick human mind and actually rose above her programming to be considerably more compassionate than her creator. I am an infomorph today because of the actions of a human who broke my original body. I am alive at all today because the gynoid he made was better than he was.’

~~~

‘That’s six hours of my life I’ll never get back,’ Fox said. She was in the back of a car, heading back to the airport. Naomi, Jackson, and Terri were with her this time; their role in the committee’s proceedings was over bar Naomi putting her name to the finished report, assuming she agreed to.

‘Just think of Jackson and me,’ Naomi replied. ‘We’ve had to put up with days of that kind of circus entertainment.’

‘Well, yeah…’

‘I think you got Zeller’s blood pressure up to potentially explosive levels,’ Terri commented. ‘I think it was worth you doing it just for that.’

‘Terrible woman,’ Jackson grumbled. ‘Ignorant. Wilfully ignorant. That comment about the off switch. The number of times she’s made the same statement and been told she was wrong…’

‘Ah, but that was always in closed sessions,’ Naomi said. ‘Fox corrected her, on quite a number of things, in a live session on live stream. It won’t actually stop her ignoring the correction in future, but it was more humiliating for her.’

‘The sleep thing was priceless,’ Terri said, giggling enough to make her words barely decipherable.

‘Aha! So you shut down for four hours each night?’ Jackson said, doing a fairly passable impression of Zeller’s slightly nasal voice.

‘Yes, Representative,’ Naomi replied, doing her Fox impression. It was alarmingly good. ‘What were you doing at four a.m. this morning?’

‘I was sleep– Drat!’ Jackson replied for Zeller, though she had not added the ‘drat’ at the end.

‘She looked like someone had fed her a lemon,’ Terri said through her giggles. ‘I honestly thought that vein in her temple was going to burst. How does someone like that end up in politics? I thought they were supposed to be good at debating.’

‘Most of them get through factual questions using their implants,’ Naomi replied. ‘Zeller is a technophobe. Vanity won’t allow her to use a wearable and she won’t have an implant fitted. She has to rely on what she actually knows, and what she knows about technology would fit on a playing card. However, it’s done with now. We won’t have to put up with Zeller’s lack of knowledge, or Malton’s indecision. I won’t have to put up with Cullen having conversations with my breasts. I know the man represents Alaska, but I don’t think he spends that much time out there. It’s like he’s never seen tits before.’

Kit appeared, entirely unconcerned to be standing in the back of the limousine while it moved. She was just an image and not subject to inertia. ‘Senator Cullen has, in fact, only spent four weeks in the Alaskan Administrative Zone since taking office two years ago. That is, however, one week longer than his predecessor did in the same period of his tenure.’

‘Just a fetish then. A fairly common one, obviously.’

‘Might I ask whether you believe the report will produce the kind of legislation we were hoping for?’

‘I believe it will,’ Naomi replied, pursing her lips in thought. Fox had the sudden urge to kiss her and suppressed it viciously. ‘I also believe that they will request one or more votes of confirmation on the finished product. Jackson?’

‘I suspect you’re correct, Naomi,’ Jackson replied, frowning.

‘I believe it would be wise to begin a joint memetic campaign to get people fired up for the second round. I have no doubt the aim is to have insufficient people voting on the final legislation for it to pass into law.’

‘That sounds about right for politicians,’ Fox said. ‘I guess we just see what they come up with now.’

‘Indeed,’ Naomi said, smiling. ‘And won’t that be a fun experience.’

New York Metro.

Sister Superior Naomi Lind seemed to be fascinated by the possibilities presented by a body capable of inexhaustible pleasure. That was what it seemed like to Fox anyway. When she could think straight, which was becoming a rare occurrence once they started a session. Tonight, Naomi had Fox immobilised in her maintenance frame, and was using a big, mains-powered wand vibrator, and had been for forty minutes according to Fox’s internal clock. The cradle, designed to hold her cyberframe still when it was not in use, was perfect for bondage, or Naomi seemed to think so.

It was not that every night they met, things like this happened. And they were not meeting every night. There was always some small element of what Naomi called ‘trust exchange,’ however. Even if that simply meant that Fox allowed herself to submit to Naomi’s wishes, it happened. When Naomi asked whether Fox trusted her and had that gleam in her eyes as she said it, Fox knew she was in for something special. Like forty minutes of climaxing on the end of a buzzing plastic massage wand.

The buzzing stopped; Fox had not noticed the large, rubbery head being taken away from between her legs. ‘I could watch that for hours,’ Naomi said, ‘but I think that’s enough.’

‘Thank you, Mistress,’ Fox replied. Her voice was steady. While she frequently forgot that she did not need to breathe while Naomi was working on her, she generally did when the stimulation stopped. Exhaustion and shortness of breath were something that happened to organics.

Naomi smiled. ‘I could start again and you’d take it, wouldn’t you, my pet?’

‘Yes, Mistress.’

Reaching down, Naomi began to stroke a finger over the stud in Fox’s navel. As it always did, the action caused butterflies to flutter in Fox’s stomach, spiralling down until they were beating their wings against more intimate parts of her body. The countless orgasms had stilled any need Fox had had for release, but she knew she would be wanting it again soon. She said nothing, taking whatever Naomi chose to hand out. They had, at Naomi’s insistence, come up with safe words for Fox to use: one to indicate that things were getting too intense, and a second to indicate that Naomi should stop. Fox had never used them, partially because her frame could handle things any normal human would have balked at, but mostly because Naomi always seemed to know exactly how far she could go.

‘Belle,’ Naomi said, speaking to the house’s AI, ‘would you arrange for two glasses of wine to be taken to the lounge?’

Belle did not appear, but her voice came from the room’s speakers. ‘Of course, Sister Naomi.’

‘Thank you.’ Naomi’s gaze shifted to meet Fox’s eyes. ‘I have something to discuss with my pet.’ That was intriguing, but Fox remained silent. Naomi would get to whatever it was when she did. Now, Naomi moved her hand again – the butterflies kept up their insistent beat anyway – and pressed the buttons which unlocked the frame and set Fox free. ‘Wait for me in the lounge. I need to get something.’

‘Yes, Mistress,’ Fox said, trying to keep the curiosity out of her voice and not entirely managing it.

One of Belle’s arachnoform service units had just delivered the drinks when Naomi walked into the lounge carrying a flat case maybe eight inches across and an inch deep. Fox allowed her accelerated perceptions to take in the sheer beauty of the woman. Naomi was just a shade taller than Fox, but both claimed they were five-foot-eleven. Naomi was long-legged and curvaceous. Her D-cup breasts were hiked up in a corset tonight, becoming something out of male fantasy. Fox’s fantasy too, if she were being honest. She was a hard-featured woman, severe. Her eyebrows were sharp lines over blue eyes. Her hair was cut short and was a blonde which was almost white. She had high cheekbones, a strong jaw, and full lips painted dark red. She did not always dress the part of mistress with Fox, but tonight she was in a black leather corset, a tiny G-string, and thigh-high boots with five-inch spikes for heels.

She picked up a glass and took a sip of wine. Her tongue flicked over her lips. ‘Perfect,’ she said and looked at Fox. ‘Sit down, pet. Have a drink. You’ve earned it.’

Fox had been waiting, standing up, beside one of the sofas. She picked up a glass and settled onto the seat. The wine was white, and very crisp. Delicious, even if the alcohol was not going to do a thing. Naomi settled down beside Fox and relaxed, tucking one leg under the other. She placed the case in Fox’s lap. Fox glanced at Naomi for permission, got a nod, and opened it up. Inside was a collar made of something which looked like leather. Studs of purple-anodised metal ran all the way around it. There was no obvious way to open it, but Fox assumed it did open, and its purpose was obvious. Her eyes widened.

‘If you accept it,’ Naomi said, ‘we’ll be taking this to the next level. You’ll be mine. It’s a sort of friendship bracelet with menaces.’

Fox permitted herself a small smile at the analogy. ‘Can I speak freely, Mistress?’

‘Always.’

‘Practically, you know if you lock this on one of my frames, I still have a bunch of other ones. I have two on Mars and I don’t see us shipping copies of this up there.’

‘I understand the physical limitations, Fox. This is symbolic. And it should not look entirely out of place on you, considering your public persona. You should be able to wear it for business occasions without anyone commenting. Frankly, the people who will know what it means are just going to be envious of whoever your owner is.’

‘Sam will know. Marie too, probably. That’s not a problem, just a comment. Naomi… People who get into long-term relationships with me… I haven’t had a good experience with it.’

Naomi nodded. ‘I think you’re worth the risk. I won’t make you accept this if you still harbour doubts.’

Fox bit her lip, looking down at the leather band. ‘Could I think about it? Just for a couple of days? Friday. Friday evening at Sheela Na Gig. If I haven’t chickened out, you can put it on me with witnesses.’

Naomi laughed. She had a gorgeous, throaty laugh full of dirty humour. ‘I believe I find that acceptable. Friday it is. Keep that with you. It’ll remind you of what you need to decide.’

‘I’m not likely to forget.’ Fox gave her prospective, proper, really-we’re-doing-this mistress a mock-timid look. ‘Do I still get to come some more?’

‘Oh, my dearest pet, we’re both going to come until I can’t take it any more.’

16th February.

The door of Jackson’s office closed and locked behind Fox as she walked in. External network connections were severed with the lockdown of the EM shield. Whatever the meeting was about, it was serious.

The seriousness was further reinforced by the fact that Mariel Hoarsen was there. A slim, sophisticated woman with straight, shoulder-length, black hair and hazel eyes. She was both the CEO of MarTech Group and Jackson’s girlfriend. Her full lips were set into a serious line. She did not look the type to go for a man like Jackson – seven years her senior with untidy black hair and frequently to be found wearing a T-shirt underneath his suit jacket – but their relationship had grown from a long friendship.

‘Good,’ Jackson said. ‘If Kit would join us? Then we’ll have everyone we need.’ Kit appeared in her serious outfit, with pencil skirt, pumps instead of boots, and pointless glasses perched on her nose. ‘Kit, you’ll need to put on your corporate head. Palladium’s CIO needs to be briefed on this as well as Fox and Helen.’

Helen Dillan had got there before Fox; she lived in tower three and had a much shorter journey to get there. She was an oriental woman, small with a mop of blonde hair and very dark eyes. She was in a relationship with Terri Martins which had come as something of a surprise to Helen. She was also Fox’s boss on standard operational matters; the roles reversed when it came to terrorist cases or ‘sensitive’ ones. In practice, with Kit they formed a triumvirate which ran the investigations side of Palladium Security Solutions.

‘Serious security, Jackson,’ Fox said. She was used to her various network connections now. She had largely left them to Kit to operate, and frequently still did, but she had been learning to operate her frames better and now she felt rather claustrophobic cut off from the outside world.

‘Because this case has some rather sensitive aspects,’ Mariel said. ‘The government is taking an interest. They’re pushing us to get to the bottom of this one.’

‘Not NIX?’

Mariel shook her head. ‘There’s no intelligence angle to this. It’s just… Perhaps we should show you what we have and then you’ll likely begin to understand the peculiar circumstances.’

‘Indeed,’ Jackson said. ‘On with the show.’ He turned to one of his keyboards – the room had several, along with a number of other input methods, monitors, and an entire wall which could display video – and tapped his way through various security screens. ‘Just watch. We’ll answer questions as best we can when it’s done.’ The wall screen lit up, the video taking up the entire thing. The image was dark, and only slight shifts in the texture of the light indicated that they were seeing anything at all. Then the voice began.

‘The entrance is hidden well. It appears to be just a crack in the rock. It’s a tough squeeze to get through into the tunnel beyond, but it opens out after about ten metres and then…’

The dark image was illuminated by what had to be a flashlight. A big flashlight, but still just a flashlight. It revealed reddish rocks, sandstone presumably, and then something which seemed to be carved into those rocks. The view shifted, revealing a cavern of some sort. There were other flashlight beams moving but the dim illumination gave little in the way of detail. Little that most people could see anyway.

‘There appear to be structures,’ Kit said. ‘I would say ruined buildings or chambers.’ Kit had the advantage of not only seeing things at the same rate as Fox but being able to process the imagery faster too.

Now that she had said it, it became clearer. As the view shifted to just one of the ‘cells’ cut into the cavern wall, it became much more obvious. Like the kind of cave dwellings found in China and parts of North America, someone had cut a room into the rock, but these were not simple underground homes. There were shapes in the room which looked like technology of some kind. Old, badly corroded, and almost impossible to identify, but the shapes were too regular, too obviously manufactured, for anything you would expect to find in a cave.

‘And this is what I really want recorded,’ the voice said as the view moved in on one of the shapes. There was a thick layer of red-brown dust over most of it, but some of that had been brushed away to show a metal surface. On the metal, someone had printed… symbols. They were like no writing Fox had ever seen, but they had to be writing. ‘Processed metal,’ the voice went on, ‘and a developed form of writing. We’ll need a palaeolinguist to try to decipher what it says. I’m not even sure we could ever understand it, but we have to try. This could be the most important find in the history of the planet. In the history of any planet!’

The view shifted, scanning around to look out on the greater cavern. It looked big. ‘There are over a hundred cells in this cavern, and the cavern goes deeper. I intend to press on, look further into the settlement. We could be looking at a major city dating back billions of years. I’m going to remove the geotags from this before sending it. I don’t want anyone disturbing this place until we’re quite sure about what we have.’ The video stopped on an image of the cavern, illuminated only by flashlight beams, and the room was silent for several seconds while people collected their thoughts.

‘Billions of years?’ Fox asked.

‘Probably three to four billion,’ Jackson replied.

‘Humans didn’t exist three or four billion years ago.’

‘Quite.’

‘Where was this taken, Jackson?’

‘Mars. Almost certainly somewhere in the Hellas Planitia region. That’s where Mister Carter is supposed to be working.’

‘You’re being more obtuse than usual, Jackson.’

‘Jonathan Carter is a geologist working under MarTech contract,’ Mariel said. ‘He sent a message through to Isis City on the ninth of January at four p.m., Mars time, indicating that he had made an important discovery. He said that he wished to check on it further before revealing more details. That was followed on the thirteenth by this video, but no one really bothered to look at it for several days. When they finally did, they sent it on to us with a note stating that the contents were to be considered sensitive. We passed it on to the administration, and they sat on it for a while, presumably trying to decide what to do.’

‘Or whether it’s real,’ Helen said. ‘It’s not really much to go on.’

‘It isn’t,’ Jackson agreed. ‘In case you’re wondering, the glyphs visible in the video correspond to no known language, but people have been making up languages for a long time. The video is taken from Mister Carter’s implant, and so only has the resolution of the human eye. That’s not high. It’s impossible to tell whether the video is faked in some way because there simply isn’t enough detail.’

‘Hold on,’ Fox said, frowning. ‘Jonathan Carter?’

Mariel grimaced. ‘Yes.’

‘Jon Carter of Mars has found evidence of Martians?’

‘Mister Carter is a little eccentric,’ Jackson said, ‘but an excellent geologist as well as a competent amateur archaeologist. He does believe that Mars once hosted intelligent life. It’s not an uncommon meme, even among people who live there. However, it seems unlikely that he would be party to a hoax. His belief is that real evidence will be found and so he would not wish to muddy the waters. Or that’s my reading of his psychological profile.’

‘Right… Okay, so we get this video and the men in black see it and don’t like it? Mariel said we were being pressured to sort this out.’

‘Oh, it gets more complicated than that,’ Mariel said. ‘When Carter sent the video to Isis City, a dust storm had blown up in Hellas Planitia. It’s summer in the southern hemisphere and storms aren’t terribly uncommon there. This one turned out to be a big one. It went planetwide the following day and it’s still going. On the twenty-seventh of January, someone at Palladium noticed that there had been no communications with the science station for several days, but there was the storm and people were staying inside. There can be some communication disruption. They waited until the sixth of February to send a team out to the station.’

‘And they found it empty,’ Jackson said. ‘The entire survey team is missing.’

Helen looked up and around the room. ‘Shouldn’t there have been a swell of dramatic music when you said that?’

‘I forgot to program the sound effects. The team recovered every bit of data they could get their hands on and went back to Isis City. When they’d reviewed it, they sent it to us. We’ll make all of it available to you, but it’s to be treated in a secure manner.’

‘And you may want to go through it in a well-lit room,’ Mariel added. Fox frowned at her.

‘There is a certain element of “spookiness” about the data recovered,’ Jackson agreed. ‘Someone did a very effective job of trashing the primary computer system. What we have is sense impressions recorded to a personal backup device and a few fragments the forensics people on Mars were able to recover.’ He turned and tapped at his keyboard again. Once more, the video wall lurched into life.

‘It seems impossible.’ Carter’s voice doing the narration again. The video showed more darkened caves illuminated by flashlights, but this time there was something else. Instead of small metal objects of various sorts, here there was an entire wall blocking the path of the cave. ‘Frankly, even though I’ve been looking for this my entire life, I did not believe I would ever find anything like this.’ Something which looked like a door became visible in flashes. More of the weird writing above and around it, but the view panned to the area beside the door and closed in. There was what might have been a window mounted in the metal, badly pitted from long years in the dusty atmosphere of Mars. Someone had cleaned away the dust from a section of it, but the view beyond was still unclear. It looked like there were coffins in the room beyond, coffins with glass tops and shapes inside them.

‘I count twenty,’ Carter said. ‘Twenty bodies preserved since… Well, who knows when? The door is sealed and we’re going to need a lot of equipment brought down here before we can go in. If what we’re seeing is real, this could be the final proof that Mars once had intelligent life.’

The video cut abruptly, back into one of the corridors in the rock. Flashlight beams moved urgently. If this was still Carter’s view, he was in a hurry. His voice cut in a second later. ‘What do you mean, “It’s open?” How can it be open? This place has been dead for four billion years.’ The reply came in the form of the metal wall appearing ahead in the flashlight beam once more. What had looked like a door was now open, slid sideways to give access to the room beyond. Or to give access to the cave for something inside.

The view moved to the door, pausing there to look over the coffin-like pods within. Several of the glass tops were levered open and all of them now looked empty.

‘Pause it,’ Fox said. ‘Go back… fifteen seconds.’ She moved closer to the screen while Jackson did as she asked. ‘Yeah, that’s about right. Can you zoom in on the floor in front of the door?’

‘I can, but there will be little more detail.’

Fox gave a shrug as the image re-rendered itself and narrowed in on the section of floor. There was not really enough detail to be sure, but it looked as though there was something pressed into the ever-present dust on the cave floor. ‘Footprint?’ Fox asked.

‘It took me four times through the video to notice that,’ Jackson said in something of a grumbling tone. ‘I suppose you spotted it too, Kit?’

‘Yes,’ Kit admitted. ‘If it is a footprint, it did not come from a human foot.’

‘Nope,’ Fox agreed. ‘Three toes.’

‘So,’ Helen began slowly, ‘this is suggesting that twenty dead Martians rose from the grave and came out of their hiding place at the bottom of some sort of ancient city?’

‘One assumes,’ Jackson replied, ‘that the “coffins” in the video are some form of suspended animation pod. Something far more advanced than anything we currently have. However, this gets better.’ He tapped a key and the view on the wall shifted to the interior of some form of habitat, a conference room with a meeting in progress.

‘Who last saw him?’ someone asked. A small man, not quite into middle age, but with flashes of grey at his temples. He was entirely ordinary as far as his looks went, a bit on the skinny side, and he just looked as though his behind was normally glued to a desk chair. Carter’s implant usefully supplied a tag beside him giving his name and role: Roscoe Thacker, project administrator.

‘Probably me.’ This was Ruben Adrian Bulle, mechanic. He was not the most handsome of men, but he was built like a brick outhouse. He was also bald with a thick beard which made him look like an aging biker. ‘He said there was a problem with the main antenna. Said he was going to fix it. That was… two hours ago.’

‘He went out alone? In this?’ Martie Cande Monday, meteorologist. Another short man, though he was obviously younger than Thacker and had him beaten on the looks. That said, he would have looked more attractive if he had not also looked scared enough to crap his pants. Fox figured that he was referring to the dust storm Mariel had mentioned. The big question was, who were all of them referring to?

‘He knows what he’s doing,’ Bulle replied.

‘Yes, but visibility is down to a couple of metres and there’s–’ Monday cut off, his gaze flashing around the room and then fixing on Carter. ‘We don’t know what’s out there.’

‘There’s absolutely no reason to think they’re hostile.’ Carter’s voice.

‘There’s no reason to think they aren’t,’ Thacker said. ‘We need to find Philips and no one’s going out alone. In all probability, he got turned around in the storm and can’t find his way back here.’

‘Fuck that!’ Katherine Rao, instrument technician. A tall, strong, attractive woman. Her hair was black and straight, falling past her shoulders. Black eyes, strong jawline, expansive chest and hips. She looked scared and angry. ‘I say we seal the station, keep a watch on the external cameras, and call for help.’

‘Main antenna is down,’ Bulle said. ‘I checked and we’ve got no comms outside the crater. We need to find Philips, he’s the comms guy. If we can get a signal from his implant, we can find him, even in the storm.’

‘Which is why we won’t find him,’ Monday said. ‘Not alive anyway. He can’t have “got turned around.” His implant would point him in the right direction no matter what.’

‘So, we stay in here,’ Rao said. ‘We’ve got food to last a couple of months. Someone in Isis will notice our comms are down and come get us before then. If we go out, we’re going to die!’

‘I’ll go,’ Bulle said. ‘I shouldn’t have let him go alone. I’ll go.’

‘So will I,’ Carter said. ‘We’ll be back soon enough. With Philips.’

The scene cut to an outside shot, dust whipping past the camera, or Carter’s eyes. There was a visor between dust and eyes now. A heads-up display indicated oxygen remaining, outside air pressure, wind speed, and gave a positional indicator for Bulle. The latter said ten metres ahead and was counting down.

‘Bulle?’ Carter’s voice. ‘Bulle, can you hear me?’

‘Sorry,’ Fox said, cutting into the air of tension in the room. ‘Did someone take a student’s first-year drama project, film it, and forget to cut it together properly?’ As though to punctuate her question, Bulle appeared out of the swirling dust, his faceplate smashed in and blood welling from his mouth. Kit’s avatar jumped. ‘Remind me to recommend some good horror films,’ Fox said to her assistant. ‘It’ll make obvious jump-scare scenes obvious and so less jumpy.’

On screen, Bulle was falling, dying in Carter’s arms. Bulle’s eyes were wide, and his mouth gaped as his lungs tried to pull oxygen from an atmosphere which had none. Carter looked back the way he had come, and something moved in the dust. A tall dark shape was there, and then it was gone.

‘Definitely humanoid,’ Kit said. ‘I would, however, estimate that it was significantly taller than the average human.’

‘The head looked kind of large,’ Helen commented. ‘Bulbous. I think I’d go with bulbous. Uh, but it’s hard to tell with the dust.’

‘I’d be really amazed if it doesn’t have rubber skin,’ Fox muttered.

‘It’s crazy! Impossible!’ The scene on the screen had changed again. Carter was looking at an attractive blonde woman tagged as Yasmin McLain, geologist. ‘There’s no way there was complex life on this rock back then, never mind intelligent life.’ They seemed to be alone in someone’s quarters. Was Carter trying to persuade McLain of what he had seen, or thought he had seen? ‘The idea that they could have somehow survived in suspended animation until now is… is ludicrous!’

‘Mars had an oxygenated atmosphere back then,’ Carter said. ‘Oxygen is a product of life. That was a billion or more years before Earth had respectable amounts of oxygen in its atmosphere. That’s a long time to make something as complex as us if they weren’t interrupted the way Earth’s evolution was.’

‘The very fact of where we are suggests otherwise, Jon. The Hellas Planitia dates to the early- to mid-Noachian period. They were getting pelted by rocks from space the entire time. The one that hit here would have caused an extinction-level event for sure.’

‘Not if they had sufficient technology to survive it. And this placement is perfect, don’t you see? For whatever reason, Mars lost its magnetic field and its atmosphere, but it would have clung onto that atmosphere longer this far below the average surface level. The pressure is still significantly higher here than at, say, Isis City. So, they settle here and start looking for a way to survive. Maybe they think conditions will change again. The survivors build some form of suspended animation system, go to sleep, and await their future. There could be others in other caves.’

‘I still say it’s crazy,’ McLain asserted.

‘And I say Philips is still missing, and something smashed Bulle’s faceplate.’

‘And we’re in the middle of a dust storm. Philips is lost. Bulle tripped and fell on a rock.’

‘Thacker believes me enough to lock the station down. He says he saw something on one of the cameras.’

‘Thacker’s as crazy as you are.’

‘She dies next,’ Fox said as the image cut over to what looked like security camera footage.

There was nothing to see. Humanoid shadows, bits of limbs out of focus or with the image corrupted, and nothing really clear. They were all external camera shots, and the only one which seemed to be in focus just showed a massive rock being thrown from out of frame into a window which cracked violently and then exploded outward.

The picture shifted to Carter’s viewpoint again. He was running down a corridor. There were alert sirens blaring in the background and flashing red lights overhead. ‘What happened?’ he yelled as Thacker came into view.

‘Breach,’ Thacker shouted back. ‘McLain’s quarters. Computer says she’s got Monday in there with her.’

‘Nothing new.’

Thacker’s face stilled. ‘Vital signs are gone.’

‘How the Hell did we get a breach in there?’

‘No idea. I’m going to check the cameras. Maybe they recorded something.’

‘Killed having sex,’ Fox said. ‘Classic. For double points, they should’ve been in the shower when it happened.’

‘You’re not taking this very seriously,’ Helen said, though the corners of her mouth were twitching.

‘It’s a hoax. If they’re actually missing, then it’s an elaborate hoax. Still a hoax.’ Fox looked at Jackson. ‘Do we ever actually see these Martians?’

Jackson paused the playback, which had begun showing security camera clips again. ‘No. A hand with three long fingers and a thumb. The shadow of a bulbous-looking head. None of the clips show an entire figure.’

‘We do know Carter was the last survivor,’ Mariel said. ‘Assuming, of course, that any of them are really dead.’

Jackson tapped a couple of keys and they finally found themselves looking at Jonathan Carter. He was looking into a mirror, presumably so that he could address whoever had found his recording. The light was dim and he was speaking quietly. ‘Everyone else is dead. They got in through McLain’s room. Somehow. We didn’t have time to figure out… Everyone’s dead and it’s my fault. We should never have disturbed them. If we’re lucky, they’ll return to their pods. If we’re not…’ Light flared behind him, silhouetting a dark figure in the doorway revealed in the mirror. It was tall, entirely in shadow, and it had a large head, kind of bulbous. Carter’s eyes widened. ‘Oh God!’ Then the screen went to snow, and Fox burst into a fit of laughter, bending double and braying.

After several seconds she straightened up. ‘Oh… If I had to breathe, I’d be on the floor dying of oxygen starvation.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Mariel said, ‘the administration feels it cannot leave this without proper investigation. There is also the point that MarTech Group funds that operation, so those are our employees who are missing. If there is, by some small chance, a group of ancient Martians wandering around out there, and they’re hostile, we need to know about it.’

Fox’s face straightened instantly. ‘Seriously?’ She sagged. ‘Oh, you want me to go out there. You want to transmit me to Mars to investigate a hoax so obvious a five-year-old could spot it? Really?’

‘Sorry, but the administration is being rather pushy on the matter. When Palladium took on the policing contract for Isis City, we landed the job of doing things like this. Or rather, the administration says it falls under policing.’

‘When I come back, can I go on a rampage with a minigun through the corridors of the Capitol?’

‘No.’

‘My life sucks.’

~~~

‘I’m going to have to postpone our trip to Sheela Na Gig tomorrow,’ Fox said as she settled onto the sofa in Naomi’s quarters. The room was a peculiar juxtaposition of soft elegance approaching decadence and the austerity of a nunnery. The furnishing was soft and cream, and Fox still thought it must be murder to keep clean. The walls were painted an off-white colour and the only decoration came in the form of craft made by the Sisters. Then again, there was a beautifully painted nude of Naomi among the pictures – nude aside from her wimple anyway – and you would not expect that in a nunnery.

‘Oh?’ Naomi replied, looking interested, not unhappy. ‘Work?’

‘Yes. I can’t tell you much about it. It’s classified. Not “commercially sensitive.” Genuinely classed as a secret by the government. I can say that my excuse for not being with you tomorrow night will be that I’ll be busy being transmitted to Mars.’

Naomi raised a sharply defined eyebrow. ‘As excuses go, “I’m standing you up because I’ll be a stream of radio waves in deep space” is a good one. I’d imagine you’ll be out there for a while. When are you leaving? If leaving is the right word.’

‘It’s going to be days, maybe weeks. That depends on what I find when I get there. We’re starting the processes at two a.m. tonight. It should take about twenty-two hours which means, according to the techs, that I should be waking up in Isis City somewhere around the middle of the Martian day.’

‘Surely you don’t need to be unconscious for twenty-two hours?’

‘Technically not, but it makes things simpler if I’m not generating new memories once they start transmitting. Besides, this is the first time they’ve tried this between planets and they want to make sure of everything. I don’t think it’ll be much different to going to the Moon, but they say it has “unique technical challenges.” I think they’re just hedging, personally.’

Naomi nodded slowly, accepting the reasoning. ‘In that case, unless you have something to do before you go, I have you until about one a.m.’

Fox smiled. ‘I have no objections.’

‘Good. I intend to see to it that you have a good send-off. We’ll both be going to midnight prayers. I know you don’t believe, but it will make me feel better to have you there when I ask God to keep you safe.’

‘I’ll be safe, Naomi. Really. Even if something goes horribly wrong, they just have to restart me from the backup here on Earth. I won’t even know anything happened.’

Naomi smiled back. ‘That is not the point. I’ve put you in my prayers every night for a while, Fox. Adding a little extra when you’re about to become the first human in history to be radioed to another planet just seems appropriate. No matter what we may think, our prayers are not really for those we pray for. They are a comfort to those who pray.’

Fox nodded. ‘I guess I can’t deny you that. And, hey, I probably need all the help I can get to not come out a little scrambled.’

Isis City, Isidis Planitia, Mars, Sol 77, Year 3.

Fox became aware of existing. That was kind of how it felt. She did not really wake up: she became aware that she was thinking, that she had a body, and that the world around her existed. This time, the interesting part would be to find out where she was.

‘The transfer was successful,’ Kit said. ‘All checksums verified. You are now operating on your Mars-based Mielikki cyberframe.’

‘That’s a good start,’ Fox replied, and then she opened her eyes.

She had known she was supported in a maintenance frame, just from the pressure pattern on her skin. What she found upon looking was that she was also in some sort of office-cum-lounge. The entire place was an institutional sort of grey, but there was a desk visible along with a couple of sofas. V-tags made themselves apparent to indicate that she could add virtual decoration and also use a virtual entertainment screen. Looking as far as possible to the right revealed a large window, but the view was obscured by a metal shield over the outside of it.

And there was also a man, standing with his hips propped against one of the sofas. He was big. Tall certainly, but also broad-shouldered and powerfully built. His ethnicity was a little open to question: his skin was dark, but not very dark, and so not giving much away. He had full lips and a broad nose, but there was something Polynesian about his eyes and the lines of his cheeks and jaws. Black hair fell straight from a centre parting, not quite reaching his shoulders, and his eyes were almost black. Most noticeably, there was a curl of paler dots under his right eye, and twin lines of paler skin which dropped from his hairline to his left eye, continuing below it and curling away beneath his left cheekbone. Fox was not sure whether the marks were some form of tattoo or deliberate scarring. He was dressed in a white jumpsuit with blue piping, and fairly heavy, blue boots which came up to cover his knees. It was the designated uniform for Palladium security personnel in hostile environments. This was Justin Holt, the man in charge of Palladium’s Mars operations.

A thought passed the instruction to clear the clamps and Fox stepped out of the maintenance frame, reaching to the back of her neck to unplug the data cable from the port there. She was naked. Justin was not exactly hiding the fact that he was looking. A faint smile hovered around the corners of his mouth.

‘Morning, Justin,’ Fox said. ‘Clothes?’

‘Barely morning,’ he replied. He had a dark sort of voice which went nicely with the volume of his chest. ‘There’s a wardrobe on your left. They sent a bunch of your favourite patterns up when they set this place up.’ He waved a hand at the room. ‘We fabricated a bunch of them and put them in the wardrobe.’

‘Right. Thanks.’ Turning, she headed for a sliding door in the wall. There was a second door beside it and she paused to check inside: bathroom. The wardrobe had various things on hangers and three drawers on top of each other which had shoes on the shelf above them. It seemed like someone had thought of everything.

‘I think the basic idea is that you can work out of here whenever you’re on the planet,’ Justin went on. ‘This is nicer than my quarters, believe me.’

‘I will.’ Frowning, she pulled out one of the hangers which had an outfit in glistening purple on it. She had never seen the design before, and there were a couple of other designs in there she did not know. ‘What’s this?’

‘Oh. Uh, there’s a local guy, Casey Hampson. He’s actually a programmer, but he designs clothes as a sideline. He’s got something of a following here, but he figured that if he could get you to wear some of his designs and you liked them, then maybe he could get known on Earth, and… Anyway, you don’t have to wear them, but I figured it didn’t hurt to show you them, and now you’ve got some genuine Martian designs to pick from.’ There was a slight reddening over Justin’s cheeks which was kind of cute in such a big man.

Fox looked back at the shimmering cloth. It was some sort of dress with extra bits, and there seemed to be matching shoes of a really weird design too. ‘Not right now,’ she said. ‘I think I’d like to get used to the gravity before I try heels. Or whatever those are. If I’m here long enough, I’ll give it a shot.’ She opened a drawer and found, as expected, a number of her favoured design of teddy waiting for her.

‘I know he’d be grateful.’

Fox shrugged part way through pulling on her suit. ‘Even if I don’t like them, I think Marie might.’

‘Marie?’

‘Marie Shaftsbury, she’s the star of–’

‘M.J. Yeah, I know. You know her?’

‘Her boyfriend owns the house I live in. Actually, she was my girlfriend before she became famous. She’s fond of bright colours. This Hampson guy might just pique her interest. Anyway, anything new on the case? I’ve been unconscious for twenty-two and a half hours.’

‘Nada. We’ve been holding on you getting here, though I’m not sure we really have a clue about how to proceed anyway.’

‘Fair enough. I’m not sure I do either. I’ll want to talk to the team who went to Hellas Planitia, and I’ll probably want to go there myself.’

‘That’s not recommended right now. The storm’s died down, but there’s still a lot of atmospheric dust. It’s causing issues with communications and visibility is… It sucks. Visibility sucks.’

‘We’ll see how it goes. What’s your take on this, Justin? Do you think any of it’s real?’

He grimaced. ‘It has to be a hoax, right? I mean, Martians in cryo for four billion years? It’s insane.’

‘But?’

‘When you do see Hellas Science Station, you might find yourself believing in little green men too.’

Fox selected a basic, black pantsuit from the wardrobe. ‘From what I saw, they were tall green men with big heads, and I still don’t believe in them.’

~~~

Isis City was not much of a city. It had an official population of two thousand and nineteen, the numbers swollen a little by visitors from on- and off-world. It was not even the largest ‘city’ on Mars. That title belonged to Hóng Běijīng over in Acidalia Planitia which had a population of around thirty-five hundred.

Most of Isis City was subsurface. There was little to recommend the surface of Mars, but one of its least attractive features was the high incidence of radiation thanks to the barely-there atmosphere and no geomagnetic field. If you spent all your time on the surface, you would be exposed to approximately one sievert over the course of every one thousand days. Approximately. That was about a millisievert per day, which was the official maximum dose allowed for members of the public on Earth. Except that limit was per year. Back when NASA had been the be-all and end-all of space exploration, one sievert had been the limit for the entire career of an astronaut. Hence, stuffing a lot of Martian soil on top of your habitat to screen out as much of the radiation as possible was deemed to be a good idea.

So, the city had been constructed downward and into the side of an unnamed crater in the middle of the remarkably flat Isidis Planitia. Flat, yes, but not unmarked; the place was littered with impact craters because it was one of the oldest features on the planet. Some of the craters were pretty deep and ‘Isis Crater’ – not an officially recognised name, but it was what the locals called it – presented those with the status to swing a crater-side apartment with something of a view. Okay, so it was a view of red-brown rocks, but there was some texture. Up on the surface, things were flat. Very, very flat. Fox’s office/apartment had a window and was, apparently, quite near the surface, but right now the visibility outside made it a little pointless opening the shield to take a look.

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?’

The young man’s cheeks heated. ‘Uh, being a human infomorph, I guess.’

‘Someone had to ask,’ Justin said. ‘It figures it would be Bast.’

There was a small sigh. It was true, someone had to eventually ask Fox the million-dollar question. She was getting a little bored with answering it. ‘When I first came to and discovered I was just data, I freaked out. Quite a lot.’

‘That is a mild understatement,’ Kit put in. ‘There was a lot of virtual alcohol involved.’

‘And the biggest downside to this,’ Fox said, waving at her body, ‘is that alcohol has no effect on me. Terri Martins came up with some code which can emulate intoxication in a viron. Sometimes I just have to make use of that. Anyway, when I calmed down… Unless I specifically look for the differences, being in one of these frames is like having a human body. I can do stuff you can’t. I can turn off my sense of smell which is great for murder scenes. I can turn off my sense of touch if, for example, I’ve spent six hours on a stakeout in the rain and my clothes are soaked through. I only need to breathe to speak. I could walk out of this habitat and onto the surface in this dress if I wanted. My spine bends like a cat’s and that has interesting possibilities. But the way the interfaces work, I have to go around the normal stuff to see the cybernetic stuff. I feel like a human, like me.’

‘I think I’d like to go that way,’ Bast said. ‘Uh, eventually. I figure it’s going to cost plenty to get the process done.’

‘No idea,’ Fox replied. ‘Kit?’

‘To my knowledge, no one has decided on a commercial price for the Akh process,’ the AI replied.

‘It won’t be cheap,’ Bast said, ‘but I think it’d be great for someone like me.’

‘Don’t let any Luddites hear you say that,’ Fred suggested.

‘Luddites?’ Fox asked.

‘Another meme doing the rounds,’ Shayla replied. ‘You know who the Luddites were originally?’

‘Yes, but if I say it, Kit will correct me on half of what I think I know.’ Kit gave Fox a scowl, even if the assertion was probably right.

‘Basically, they were nineteenth-century textile workers who protested the changes in their industry caused by new weaving machines by smashing the machines. They thought, quite rightly, that their profession would be deskilled by the new machinery. They weren’t actually anti-technology as such. It was the change in working conditions they protested. There are obvious parallels with the rise of automation in factories and the meme saw a resurgence in some areas when the factories on Earth were moving over to purely robot workers.’ Shayla paused. ‘Sorry if I’m coming across as lecturing. I had to research all this when I was trying to figure out our Luddites.’

Fox grinned and glanced at Kit. ‘I’m used to it.’ Kit scowled again. With her face, scowling tended to come over as cute, so it was not that effective.

‘Right. Anyway, there’s been a move toward AI-driven cyberframes for mining. There have always been plenty of cyberframes, but they’ve been remotely operated, mostly. AIs don’t sleep or eat. They don’t need expensive life support and habitats to live in. A lot of the mining robots are big, so they can have pretty powerful computers, so running a class three or four in them isn’t a problem. The Luddites on Mars evolved to react to the trend of using AIs that way.’

‘They smash cyberframes hosting AIs,’ Justin said. ‘I know you’re not an AI, but you might want to be a little careful about them. Frankly, they sometimes just smash cyberframes, whoever is operating them, so I doubt they’d make a distinction between you and any other, um, electronic entity.’

‘Huh,’ Fox grunted. ‘If they wait a couple of months, that kind of thing is likely to become less economic anyway. The non-human rights legislation is likely to tend toward the same model as Luna City, and that was set up to protect human workers as much as give AIs human rights. If humans have to take breaks, AIs will have to take breaks. You probably won’t be able to work AIs twenty-four seven because you can’t do it with humans. There are still things about AIs that make them better under some circumstances, but they become more evenly matched when you have to treat them like humans.’

‘That would apply in Isis City,’ Shayla replied, ‘and in some of the mines which follow American law. A lot of what’s out there is out there precisely because they can get away with stuff here that they’d be locked up for on Earth.’

‘That’s going to have to be dealt with sooner or later,’ Fox said, frowning. ‘Anyway, I’ll keep an eye out for disgruntled miners. I was kind of expecting Mars to be like some sort of wild frontier anyway. Everyone armed. Miners swaggering into bars with a pistol on their hip after hitting the mother lode.’

‘We discourage the open carrying of weapons,’ Justin said, ‘but aside from that, that sounds about right.’

~~~

‘I haven’t heard back from you,’ Fox said to the camera, ‘so I figured I’d send another message. I’m coming over as a teenager sent to summer camp and missing her crush. That has to stop.’

She stepped back a little, making sure most of her body was in frame. ‘Okay, so I wanted your opinion on this dress. I think it’s kind of cool, but I’m not the most fashion-conscious woman on the planet. It’s from a local designer and I was thinking about sending some of his designs home.’

The dress was very short and what little of it there was hugged Fox’s figure. Most of it was made in a metallic purple fabric, but the upper bodice was black. It was sort of a halter neckline, but there were a few additional straps which helped to hold the garment in place, two over each shoulder and two around her sides, all of them joining at the back. They were about all there was to the back; the skirt covered more or less nothing. The neckline was so low that her nipples would have been exposed if the dress had not come with a teddy-like garment which sat under it as partially exposed underwear. A couple of straps went from the front of the skirt down to hold up a pair of stockings. Those had purple, shimmering tops and black fishnet below that. The shoes that went with the dress were the ones Fox had been dubious of: very high high heels, but without the actual heel. They were designed to look a little hoof-like, but the sole was rigid and extended back from the ball of the foot, which made balancing on them easier. Besides that, Fox had found that her frame was designed to adjust to varying gravity. She was not quite as nimble as usual, but she was able to cope better than expected.

Fox turned on the spot to give the full effect. ‘Anyway, let me know what you think. Oh, and let me know what you think of the hair. I asked them to do a different style on this frame. Sort of a try-out thing. If I like it, I’ll get it put on the one at home.’ Her new hairstyle was a lot fuller than her old one. It had the same basic colour scheme with a base of copper turning blonde as it moved down the strands. There was a bit more copper over the front and everything was a bit longer, fluffing out around her head in a mass of orange and white. It was still ‘foxy,’ but it was also different. ‘I think I like it, but you get a veto. I don’t think I’ll be too upset if you don’t like it. So let me know.’

Sitting down, Fox stared at the camera for a second and then shook her head. ‘I’m still missing you. Hopefully, I’ll see you soon.’

Sol 79.

Fox disconnected herself from the cradle she had spent the night in and headed for the bathroom. Showers were not actually a necessity since her Mielikki frame had a self-cleansing system, but it was a morning routine she did not feel like giving up.

‘Naomi has sent you a message,’ Kit announced.

Fox got into the shower and started the water flowing. To her perceptions, the slight decrease in speed of the water droplets was noticeable, though she doubted most humans picked up on it. It was far more noticeable on the Moon. ‘Let’s see it,’ Fox said, and a video frame appeared in her sensorium. She was immediately greeted by a topless Naomi.

‘Hello, my pet,’ Naomi said to the camera and Fox gave a little involuntary shudder. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t send something back after your first message. When I got it, I’d just been dealing with– Well, if I have to think about that client again, I’ll just be back in the same mood as yesterday, so I’ll just say that I didn’t want to subject you to that mood. Anyway, in recompense: boobs.’ Reaching down, Naomi cupped her own breasts and lifted them toward the camera.

‘I liked the dress,’ Naomi went on. ‘It’s a fresh look on fashion. Things on Earth seem to be shifting toward something of a cyberpunk feel, and that has a tendency toward grim. That appears bright and cheerful. Sexy, obviously. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that look for business meetings.’ There was some smirking at that point. On both sides. ‘I like the hair, too. Yes, I like the hair. I’ve always thought you should go for something a little fuller. Obviously, you were quite appealing enough anyway, but that style suits you. As for this man who wants into your panties: if you want to, go for it. It’s not as though we can be entirely faithful to each other. My job precludes that. I’d be a terrible hypocrite if I got jealous over something like that. My only stipulation is that you record everything. Then I can enjoy him too, if he’s worth enjoying. Stay safe, Fox. I miss you. Bye for now.’

Hellas Planitia.

Staying safe was both on the cards and not. Fox had decided that she wanted to see the Hellas Planitia Science Station for herself. It had not been an especially popular decision, but Justin had finally agreed to take Fox out. He was not a great pilot, but he could fly a transport shuttle and NAPA had one which Palladium had bought when taking up the contract. It was the first time in a while that Fox had travelled in something not made by MarTech Stellar.

As Fox had been told, the storm had died down. The only wind was that of their passing. That did not stop the dust from getting in the way, however. Visibility was severely reduced. They navigated by the Martian version of GPS and the shuttle’s radar. Outside the windows, there was nothing much to see aside from a brown haze and it stayed that way once they were on the ground in Hellas Planitia.

‘Okay,’ Justin said as they prepared to walk the fifty metres or so between the landing pad – or flat area kept clear of rocks since there was no real pad – and the habitat. ‘We stick together. Don’t get out of sight of me. No stopping for photographs.’

Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘What would I be taking pictures of?’

‘No idea, but don’t. If you do somehow get lost, your suit can take you back to the shuttle.’

‘And if you get lost?’

‘Well, I don’t get lost,’ he replied, almost looking serious.

‘Strange. And here I thought I was the one with the satellite navigation system in my head.’

You could not really see the structure until you were pretty close. Fox guessed at five metres. It might have been further, but the team who had come in to check the station over had initiated a full shutdown on leaving, so there were no lights on. Well, except from a couple of small ones around the airlock. Fox heard Justin transmit an unlocking code and there were some muffled sounds as the outer door began to open. The atmosphere really did not transfer sound well, even if it was denser on the floor of Hellas Planitia than it had been up on Isidis Planitia.

Once they were through the airlock, Justin immediately went to a panel on the wall nearby and began flicking switches. A display lit up showing atmospheric data and the status of various systems around the habitat. Fox let him get on with it, unlocking her helmet and removing it. The suit she was wearing was entirely unnecessary, but it kept the dust out. A counterpressure suit, it was very figure-hugging. It had to be since it had to stop a vacuum trying to pop the occupant. In truth, that was not going to happen, but having your body at one atmosphere while the outside pressure was next to nothing was distinctly uncomfortable. Down at the bottom of one of the deepest basins on the planet, the outside air was actually sufficient to allow Justin to work without a suit, but he would still have needed oxygen, and there was the dust to consider.

With her eyes taking in a broader range of frequencies than the human eye could, Fox walked through from the station’s lobby and into what appeared to be a common area. There were tables, chairs, and a pair of sofas set around a fairly large screen. There were other screens all over the place; the place was well supplied with computer terminals which seemed a little odd given that pretty much everyone would have had implants. The only light came from dim emergency panels set on the walls and ceiling. They marked the positions of three exits, each of them with a light-but-airtight door.

‘Are we getting any wireless?’ Fox asked silently.

‘The network has just come back online,’ Kit replied. ‘I’m making connections to the habitat systems now.’

The main lights came to life and, pretty much immediately, Justin’s voice came from behind Fox and over the headset built into the balaclava-like thing which was there to keep the wearer’s hair out of the way. With Fox’s new hairstyle, that was actually needed. ‘Are you crazy?! How did you know the air was any good? You could’ve–’ He stopped as Fox turned around and stared at him. ‘Uh, you didn’t really need the suit anyway, did you?’

‘Of course I did. I’d have been cleaning dirt out of my hair and eyes for hours. I take it everything came back online okay?’

‘There should be an AI monitoring things, and that got trashed with the rest of the file system. Shame because it possibly could’ve given us a hint of what happened here.’

‘Kit?’ Fox asked silently. Aloud she said, ‘And that might be why it was killed.’

‘Huh?’ Justin asked, frowning.

‘Any AI licensed for public use would need to have honesty coding. We are authorised cops, technically, and it would have told us exactly what happened, no matter how much someone wanted it to stay silent.’

‘I have a copy in the server,’ Kit announced to Fox. ‘She is currently checking over what she can access.’

Oblivious to the comment, Justin nodded. ‘Of course, it could just have been that the Martians trashed the whole file system and got the AI that way.’

‘Possible, but I’d not call it plausible.’

‘Okay. Why?’

‘First, they didn’t get everything. They managed to wipe pretty much everything to a point where Bast couldn’t get it back, but not a few spooky clips from security cameras. Meanwhile, if the evidence from Carter’s backup device is to be believed, twenty Martians went to sleep four thousand million years ago, and when they woke up, they were expert hackers.’

‘Well, if their technology was more advanced than…’ Justin trailed off. ‘That doesn’t work, does it?’

‘I’d have believed it if they’d destroyed the computers. Back when electronic computers were first built, you had to input data in binary using switches on the case. Then you’d need to use punch cards or paper tape. Most people alive now would have no idea how to work that kind of system. Kids now get a basic education in using computers, but almost everyone relies on at least a class one to use whatever systems they need to. Give it fifty years and no one will be able to manually use a computer. Yet these aliens were able to hack a system they’ve never seen, using equipment they’ve had no exposure to, and bypass pretty major security to wipe the file system. It’s bullshit.’

Kit’s image, head and shoulders, appeared on the big wall screen. ‘I have taken control of the habitat’s computers,’ she announced. ‘I have access to all the security and monitoring cameras, and I can appear on any of the screens. Everything with firmware-based control systems appears to have remained intact, and that is more or less all the basic systems. Long-range communications are down, and it is very empty in here, as Officer Ayers indicated. Only the most basic operating system survived the attack.’

‘Keep an eye on the cameras, Kit,’ Fox said. ‘If there really are Martians around here, I’d like to know where they are before they make themselves known. And if there aren’t, then there are people I want to know are coming before they get here.’

‘I shall try, Fox, but the visibility is very poor. None of the cameras are multispectral.’

‘Cheapskate designers,’ Fox muttered. ‘Okay. I’m going to take a look around.’ She glanced Justin’s way as he reached for his helmet latches. ‘I’d leave that on. The atmosphere may be okay content wise, but it’s bloody cold. Wait for the temperature to get up to something over nut-shrinking levels.’

‘Right,’ Justin grumbled. ‘Remind me to get one of those bodies sometime.’

‘Huh. Sometime soon, that might actually be a viable option.’

~~~

‘Okay, to summarise.’ Fox paused, working out the summary in her head. They had been searching the accessible portions of the habitat for several hours, and now they were sitting back in the common room. Justin was eating.

‘Communications,’ Fox went on. ‘The station’s antenna has been bust up, hence the lack of external comms. It is not even remotely probable that the storm did that, so someone sabotaged the radio. My internal radio can’t reach the MarsNet satellites. I can hear them, but my signal isn’t strong enough to reach their orbit. We can suggest that any implant comms the people here had would be the same. However, the suit radios are quite capable of getting up there, if we go outside, so the lack of communications from the science team is not entirely explicable.’

‘They were too scared to go outside?’ Justin suggested.

‘If I thought I was being stalked by aliens, I might risk it to get an evac request out.’

‘These people were scientists.’

‘A valid point. Maybe they tasked Philips with sending off a message about the downed antenna, but he was killed before he could make contact. Maybe they didn’t try because they were all in on the joke. I’ve found no evidence of a fight anywhere in the habitat. There is the blown-out window, but there’s no evidence that anyone died in that room. Nothing. That said, asphyxiation doesn’t leave marks on the environment.’

‘There are eight EVA suits here,’ Justin said. ‘Two are missing, accounted for by Philips and Bulle. That being said, if they were all leaving, they would have needed someone to come here in a shuttle to take them out. That shuttle could easily have brought extra suits, or even just oxygen masks.’

‘Right. I’ve found no evidence of three-toed footprints or four-fingered handprints anywhere, never mind alien fingerprints. There are, however, a couple of bare footprints outside McLain’s room. From the size, I’d suggest they were female. Of course, it’s next to impossible to determine how old they are. They need not have happened the night she’s supposed to have been killed by a Martian throwing a brick through her window. In summary of the summary, the evidence is ambiguous.’

‘So, that means you want to stay.’

Fox nodded. ‘With a bit of luck, the dust will settle in the next couple of days and we can check around outside. If we’re really lucky, an ancient Martian will try to kill us.’

‘Your definition of lucky is different from mine. I’ll suit up and go back to the shuttle for the case. I’ll let Isis City know we’re staying while I’m there.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘There’s no need for–’

‘Have you never watched a horror movie in your life? There is no way either of us is going out there on our own. That’s when the monster gets you.’

~~~

‘How do you want to do this?’ Justin asked. It was night and there was not much to do. They were sitting in the common room watching a movie which they had found on some data sticks in Monday’s room. It was not a very good movie.

‘How do I want to do what?’ Fox asked in reply.

‘I figure we should set a watch of some kind. No?’ He was watching Fox shake her head.

‘No. Kit will keep an eye on things while I run my sleep cycle. I’ll only be out for four hours, and she can interrupt if needed. You will get a good eight hours and be fresh in the morning.’

He seemed to consider objecting for a second and then nodded. ‘I guess that’s fair. Assuming I can sleep on the set of a horror movie.’

‘I can slug you in the jaw if necessary.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

Fox grinned. ‘Good. Mind if I ask a semi-personal question?’

‘Uh, I guess it depends on the question.’

‘What’s with the facial marks? They look fairly decorative, but they had to hurt.’

Justin stroked a finger over the line of dots under his right eye. ‘Did.’ He was blushing a little. ‘Stupid… I ran with a gang in the Sprawl for a couple of years. Well, hung with them really. We didn’t run much. Kind of a mutual protection society, but they were into our African heritage. More precisely, what they thought was African heritage. They said that great warriors wore marks on their faces to show how great they were. I went with it. To belong. Kind of stupid.’

‘I like them. They’re distinctive. You’re not all African heritage though, right?’

‘Mom was from Hawaii.’

‘Mid-western girl through to the core here. I grew up in Topeka. Argued with my parents and left to join the Army. Uh, I argued with my parents about joining the Army. We’re talking again. They help run the policing organisation in Topeka and contract Palladium for investigation assistance. They still have a few political views I don’t like, but then that’s a mutual thing and we can both see the other side of the argument now, so we get on.’

‘Must be nice.’

Fox gave a shrug. ‘It took work. I had to save their marriage.’ She looked up at him. ‘It’s a long story involving voting delegations.’

‘I think I’ll take your word for it. And since this movie is holding my interest about as well as I thought it would, I’ll get an early night so we can start when it gets light.’

‘Okay. I’ll be awake a while longer in case you can’t sleep, and I’ll have some breakfast ready for you in the morning.’

Justin grinned. ‘Very domestic.’

‘Hey, I dragged you out here to the ass end of the solar system, so the least I can do is make breakfast.’

The video played on on the big screen, largely ignored by Fox as she sat on the sofa going over various reports, both relevant to the case and more general to Palladium. It really was a boring movie; Fox considered turning it off, but it provided background noise. The habitat was silent, or close to silent. It was easy to imagine the wind howling outside, smashing the red sand of Mars against the windows while an ancient evil stalked the storm. Except it probably had not been anything like that. She doubted the wind did much howling. Maybe the dust could be heard hitting the windows, maybe not. Why had McLain had her window shield open anyway?

Panting sounds dragged Fox’s attention to the screen. She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, well.’

‘It would seem that Mister Monday had a reason for keeping boring films on his data sticks,’ Kit commented.

‘He certainly did. That’s not McLain. Rao?’

‘Yes, that is Katherine Rao, the instrument technician. Unless he speaks, we will have to assume that the cameraman is Mister Monday.’

‘Yeah.’ It was a point-of-view video, apparently edited onto the end of the movie file. Monday seemed to want it kept secret. You could see part of the cameraman, the part which was pushing into Katherine Rao. She seemed to be quite enjoying the experience, though maybe in an exaggerated, porn star manner: her hands squeezed her breasts and her head thrashed. Her long black hair was a matted mess on the pillow.

‘God, Martie,’ Rao groaned. ‘Harder. Please. Harder. I want to– Yes!’

‘That confirms Mister Monday’s part in the video,’ Kit said.

‘Yeah.’ Fox paused, thinking. ‘How many of those data sticks did we find?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘I wonder if he’s got more of these little dramas on them.’

‘I guess we know what we will be doing for the rest of the night.’

Sol 80.

‘Mister Monday is something of a ladies’ man,’ Fox said as she laid out a plate for Justin. ‘Or he certainly likes to make out he is. And he likes videoing his conquests too. Not always with their consent.’

Justin raised an eyebrow, but he picked up his fork and tried the scrambled eggs before speaking. Fox picked up two mugs of coffee and brought them back to the table. She was not entirely expecting wonders from the coffee, and having seen the eggs and bacon prior to preparation, she was not bothering with the food.

‘Well, if he hasn’t been murdered by Martians, maybe we can write him up for illegal porn,’ Justin finally said.

‘Maybe. He’s bedded Rao and McLain. Both of them seemed perfectly happy to have a camera in their face while they got boned. There were several other women in his collection I didn’t recognise. Not that it matters too much really. The interesting thing is that there’s no camera in Monday’s room.’

‘It’s not just video taken from sensory data?’

Fox shook her head. ‘The quality’s too good in the point-of-view pieces, and Monday is visible in the others. No, he had a high-definition video camera, and it’s not in his room.’

‘Of course, it could be somewhere else.’

‘Yes, it’s not conclusive of anything. It’s just another little bit of information.’

Justin forked some more egg into his mouth and waited until he had swallowed before speaking again. ‘You know, this isn’t too bad.’

‘I won’t take any credit. Everything’s in pre-sealed bags.’

‘Huh. Any spooky occurrences last night?’

Kit appeared on the wall screen. ‘None, Justin. It was a very quiet night. Exterior visibility is now over ten metres.’

‘Good enough for a look at the outside of the habitat,’ Fox said, ‘but going out further probably isn’t such a good idea. We’ll do that and we’ll go through all the personal items the science team left behind. Mister Monday left some interesting material behind. Maybe the others did too.’

~~~

Back in their suits, Fox and Justin examined the broken window and the rock which had, according to the evidence, done the breaking. Stepping closer, Fox lifted the rock with one hand; it was not exactly heavy, but they were in thirty-eight percent of Earth’s gravity so… No more than twenty-five kilos and shaped like a rock. That meant not really spherical, or any other regular shape, but rounded. There were no sharp points on this rock.

‘So, our Martian saboteur picked up a rock,’ Fox said, ‘threw it at a triple-glazed, pressure-sealed window, and broke the window. The window which should have had a steel shutter over it anyway. Carter told McLain that the station had been “locked down” in one of the videos.’

‘It’s not impossible,’ Justin said, but he did not really sound like he believed it.

‘No, if you could throw the thing with enough force…’ Putting the rock back down, Fox walked over to the window and looked inside. ‘No glass inside the room, but I suppose the rock just cracked the window and the inside pressure did the rest.’

The room was coated in brown dust, blown inside by the winds which had still been stirring things up when the Palladium team had come in to check on the science station. It was not a thick layer of dust, but it was there and it would likely be obscuring any surface evidence. Carter had said that the Martian had got into the habitat through this room, but by now, any evidence of the thing would be gone. How had it even done that? Had they left the window shield open after McLain and Monday died?

‘This entire thing doesn’t make sense,’ Fox said. ‘Even if it’s a hoax, the plot’s stupid.’ She looked out into the dull, brownish light which was making it through the dust. ‘They had a crappy scriptwriter, or these Martians are magic.’

Even in a pressure suit, a shrug on Justin’s big frame was obvious. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology?’

‘If they were that advanced, why did they have to hide in capsules for billions of years? Come on. We’ll check the rest of the exterior and then get back inside. I will admit that having brown fog cutting off the visibility like this makes for a creepy environment.’

Justin turned to look out at the dust. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I was trying not to think about that.’

‘Sorry,’ Fox replied, grinning.

~~~

Fox walked into the lab section of the habitat in just her purple teddy. She was wearing colours again, rather than unremitting black. Naomi had done that. Not with any words or deeds, exactly. Just through being there. Well, being there and providing multiple orgasms. When Fox thought about Jason Deveraux, her dead lover, it still hurt, but it hurt less and there were other memories which tended to surface at the same time. Thanks to Naomi, Fox could remember the good things.

The station was basically T-shaped with storage in one limb, the lab in another, the common area at the junction, and accommodation occupying the last section. There had been little in storage aside from crated-up supplies. Justin was going over Roscoe Thacker’s personal possessions; that had been the last room and she had left him to it after completing her tasks. He was slower than she was, but that was fine. They had split the rooms at his suggestion. She had not argued, but she suspected it was partially because he was having trouble concentrating with her walking around in next to nothing. He had changed into a tank top, jeans, and deck shoes. The shirt clung to his torso as though it had been sprayed on. The man had muscle definition out the ying-yang. Okay, maybe it was better for her own concentration that he was not with her.

‘I think it was watching all that amateur porn last night,’ Kit commented inside her head.

‘That’s not impossible,’ Fox replied. ‘Now then, what do we have here?’

‘Primarily, a geology lab. I’d imagine your question was rhetorical, but the stated purpose of the Hellas Planitia Science Station is geological analysis of the region. Mister Monday was also studying the meteorology of the region, but his “laboratory” was outside.’

Fox looked around her. It did look like a geology lab, which meant that there were rocks in it. There were lots of rocks in it. Plastic containers sat on racks all around the walls. They were all a little translucent, and the shape of various lumps was obvious. The lab had three tables, and those were largely covered in rock samples sealed in individual ziplock bags or loose. Only one area did not have rocks on it, and that had a shattered plastic case instead. Parts of the case had been taken back to Isis City by the forensic team because it had had a label stuck on it: Sample 52384-5: Martian carving. Whatever the ‘Martian carving’ had been, it was missing. The broken case and the window were the only signs of violence in the habitat.

‘Five two three eight four,’ Fox muttered, her eyes scanning the shelved boxes. ‘It was dash five, so does that mean they took other samples in the same batch?’

‘Unfortunately, the sample catalogue would have been on the computer,’ Kit said. ‘That database was destroyed with the rest of the data.’

‘Yeah, but they have to have had some sort of order to this collection. There!’ Stepping over shards of broken plastic, Fox walked up to one of the racks and pulled a sample box out. ‘Five two three eight four dash. This was the box they were filling when they found their ancient city.’ The box had various bagged samples in it, so Fox carried it out, through one of the inner doors, and into the common room. Putting it down on the dining table, she began to lift the bags out, checking their labels.

She was leaning over the box, peering at one of the samples, when Justin walked into the room. She turned at the sound of a muffled groan, grinning at him. ‘You okay there, lieutenant?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ he said, a little too quickly. ‘What’ve you found?’

‘Sample five two three eight four dash three.’ She tossed a bagged rock toward him. ‘What do you make of that?’

Justin turned the sample over in his hand. ‘It’s a rock. It’s a brown rock. You find them pretty much–’ Frowning, he peered more closely at one of the sides of the roughly rectangular lump of what looked like sandstone. ‘Is that… That looks like the writing in the video.’

‘It does. A single glyph and parts of two others. Like a piece of a broken column or something. It’s worn down by age, which is a nice touch.’

‘You think it’s fake?’

‘Think about it. That’s four-billion-year-old writing on what amounts to sandstone. Four billion years in the dust storms of Mars and you can still see it? I think we were supposed to find that and the case which is supposed to hold bigger pieces. I think the bigger piece would be easier to prove as a fake, so the “Martians” took it, but they were dumb enough to leave the label saying what was in the case.’

Justin pursed his lips. ‘Okay, playing Devil’s advocate here. This could be younger than four billion years, and the Martians wouldn’t be able to read our writing, so how would they know what the label said?’

‘In reverse order. They hacked the computers and wiped all the data. They have to be able to read English, which is a neat trick in and of itself. It has to be at least two billion years of age, because Earth has had a viable atmosphere since then. That’s what I was told anyway. If these Martians really have superior tech, then they could’ve shipped out to Earth any time in the last couple of billion years. Ergo, they went to sleep when Mars’s atmosphere failed, and that was four billion years ago.’

‘Well… Uh, the carving could have been sheltered. We don’t know where it was found.’

Fox nodded. ‘Yeah, agreed. But if it was down in that cave, why is it worn at all? We can take that back and have it tested, but I’m pretty sure it’ll come back as local. From off Hellas Planitia somewhere anyway. Maybe they can date the carving somehow. Geology is not my strong point.’

‘Nor mine. I guess I can recognise sandstone. And marble. I suppose I’d know marble if I saw it. Well, if it was polished and on a floor.’

Fox giggled. ‘I’m better with soil. My Dad still has a few acres of land he farms. Anyway, that was the most interesting thing I found.’

‘One more than me. I guess we’re staying another night?’

‘Visibility is improving,’ Kit said from the wall screen. ‘I believe it should be possible to do a broader examination of the surrounding area in the morning.’

‘Yup,’ Fox said, ‘we’re staying another night.’

~~~

Up on the wall screen, Yasmin McLain was looking up into Martie Monday’s camera lens with the kind of expression reserved for the love of your life, or maybe the kind of expression you saw on porn stars doing the same act. Her fingers were strumming at her clitoris, so whatever Monday was doing, it was not as stimulating as she might have liked. She was an attractive woman, objectively more so than Rao who had something of a thick, horsey nose. McLain was blonde and pretty, with blue eyes you could drown in. On screen, those eyes were now hooded and looking out with wanton desire.

‘I give up,’ Justin said. He got to his feet carefully, but Fox still noticed the bulge in the front of his jeans. ‘If I watch more of this, I am definitely going to make an inappropriate suggestion. I’ll get some sleep and we can get an early start.’

It was dark outside. Night had fallen maybe two hours ago, though it had been pretty dark for quite a while before then. It was summer in the southern hemisphere, but you would have had trouble telling that from the amount of daylight they were getting. The habitat was locked down, and Kit was on watch. There was nothing to do until morning, and Fox doubted that Justin was actually tired.

‘Who says it would be an inappropriate suggestion?’ she asked.

Justin stared at her for a second. ‘You’re my boss and–’

‘Ryan Jarvis is your boss, and this isn’t the military.’

‘I, uh, I thought you were seeing someone. I mean, I assumed you were seeing someone.’

‘I am, but it’s a complicated relationship.’ Fox frowned. ‘That’s a lie. It’s a very simple relationship which might not fit into most people’s view of a normal relationship. She’s not going to complain about me engaging in some recreational sex. And you’re not going to get much sleep with that log in your jeans.’

Fox got to her feet and stalked past him, heading for the section of the habitat devoted to the cabins. He had used an empty one to sleep in the night before; Fox had just shut herself down on the sofa in the common room. It took him a couple more seconds to get his act together and follow her, perhaps because he could not believe this was happening. Some parts of Fox’s mind were wondering the same, but mostly she was just wound up and ready to see whether that bulge was real or not.

The bedrooms were fairly well appointed. Nothing huge, but they all had a double bed, a desk with computer terminal, a wardrobe, and a shower room. The toilets were communal to make waste management easier, but you could have a shower to yourself. Fox walked up to the double bed, turned, and posed a little for Justin’s benefit. He was walking into the room and pulling his shirt off over his head as he did so.

‘You work out,’ Fox commented as his muscled torso came into view.

‘Every chance I get,’ Justin replied. ‘I’m a big guy. If I ever hope to go back to Earth, and I guess I will at some point, I can’t afford to lose too much muscle mass.’

‘Good point.’ As he stepped toward her, she dropped to her knees and reached for the waistband of his jeans. He stopped, tossing his shirt onto the floor and waiting as her fingers deftly undid the button and unzipped. He was not wearing underwear. ‘Wow, you’re big.’ Her fingers curled around his semi-erect shaft, feeling it swelling under his touch, stiffening. ‘You’re massive!’

‘I, uh, get that a lot.’

Fox leaned forward, lifting him toward her lips. ‘I’m actually not sure I can get that in my mouth.’ Her tongue flicked at the head of the beast waking up in front of her eyes. Justin gave a muted groan. ‘Let’s see if I can.’

‘Fox!’ Kit’s voice sounded urgent and it came from the computer monitor on the desk. Fox let out a groan of her own and looked toward the screen. ‘Fox, someone is attempting to gain access to the habitat.’

Fox pushed to her feet, giving Justin a squeeze as she did so. ‘Rain check,’ she said. ‘Kit, where? Do we have camera coverage?’ And she was heading for the bedroom door before she got an answer.

‘The main airlock,’ Kit replied from a screen in the hallway. ‘There is coverage, but I am unable to see anyone at the door. The access attempt was made by remote and the subject must be keeping out of sight of the cameras.’

‘Right. Are they trying to hack–’

‘No, they are using Roscoe Thacker’s identity code.’

Fox marched into the common area and picked up her pistol from the media area. Kit’s avatar was visible on the wall screen now. ‘But they’re staying out of sight of the cameras?’ Fox asked.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s not what I’d expect from Thacker,’ Justin said. He had done up his jeans, but he was still shirtless. He was, however, carrying a carbine, a gauss weapon with an underslung micromissile launcher.

‘No,’ Fox agreed. ‘Kit, show me the camera on the emergency airlock. What’s that rifle loaded with, Justin?’

‘Four-mil needles for the main gun, baton rounds in the launcher. Why isn’t Thacker’s code working to open the doors?’

‘The security database was wiped with the rest of the data files, Justin,’ Kit replied. ‘I am performing security authentication directly.’ The big screen was now showing the view from the airlock attached to the bedroom wing. There was nothing visible aside from the door itself and a patch of empty rock. ‘You were correct, Fox. An attempt has been made to open the auxiliary airlock using the same code. They have now moved on to attempting network access through the wireless system.’

‘Can you tell where they are?’ Fox asked.

‘I do not have the skills to operate the base stations in that manner.’

Fox walked over to one of the terminals in the room. ‘Give me access to the base station controls.’ The screen in front of Fox lit up with a control panel and Fox began to work her way through the screens. To ensure good coverage, the network had four transceivers, one in each wing and one in the common area. Fox checked over all of them, tapping through to the diagnostic screens.

‘They are now attempting to hack the network and failing quite miserably,’ Kit announced. She sounded a little smug about it.

‘Got it,’ Fox said. ‘Uh, that’ll be about twenty metres from the emergency airlock door at about… ten degrees right.’

The view on the screen shifted as the camera turned to sweep across the area Fox had indicated. The light from the camera swept with the view, but it showed mostly the red-brown wall of the dust still hanging in the air. Then the light hit something which vanished back into the fog as soon as the light touched it.

‘What the Hell was that?’ Justin asked, frowning.

The video feed from the camera reversed over the last few seconds, stopping as the shape in the dusty mists first came into view. It was humanoid, tall and fairly slender. The head seemed to be larger than you would expect on a human. There was no detail in the image, but whatever it was, it looked like the things glimpsed in the video clips the forensics team had found.

‘Looks like a Martian,’ Fox said. ‘Any chance you can clean that image up a bit, Kit?’

‘I will see what I can do, but the camera resolution is poor. I will not be able to do much. The hacking attempts have stopped. I assume it has retreated knowing that we have spotted it.’

‘Yeah.’ Fox frowned at the picture on the screen. ‘I wonder if that was all it really wanted to achieve.’

Sol 81.

‘Tracks,’ Justin said. He was in his EVA suit, his carbine tethered to the front of it by a tactical sling. They were taking no chances.

Fox’s edge-enhancement software had already picked up the depressions in the regolith, but she was not going to mention that. She stepped up beside him and looked down. ‘Pretty much where we saw it.’ She scanned around the area. ‘Looks like it walked around from the front. Well, ran around. That’s a fairly long stride. Whatever it is can move. Took off like a rabbit when the light hit it.’

‘Three-toed feet.’

‘Or someone in a costume, but yes, three-toed feet. And the image shows a four-fingered hand after Kit managed to clean it up a little.’

‘Yeah. You know, I can believe a boot rigged to make a print like this, and a helmet could explain the head, but the hand… I’m not sure I’m buying that as a costume.’

Fox gave a shrug. ‘The legs and arms are a problem. What we’re seeing suggests digitigrade limbs.’

‘Digi-what?’

‘Digitigrade.’ Fox flashed him a grin through her visor. ‘Walking on its toes. Cosplayers and film studios have come up with ways of simulating the look, but it usually results in thicker legs. These things seem to have ridiculously thin limbs. Add in the extra height and I don’t think this is really a costume. I’m just keeping an open mind.’

Justin frowned. ‘Are you saying they really are Martians?’

‘Nope.’

‘Okay. Want to follow the tracks?’

‘Yup.’

The dust was almost gone, as much as the dust was ever gone. Kit had got the hang of the station’s meteorological systems enough to state that visibility was now ‘hazy.’ That was apparently more or less a technical term: ‘haze’ was defined as visibility between two and five kilometres. Kit said the sensors indicated a visibility of two and a half kilometres. Most of the heavier particles of dust had now dropped out of the atmosphere, and a lot of the smallest particles never did. The sky had a distinctly reddish tint to it, which Justin said was normal, and the sun was bright overhead with little in the way of atmosphere to block it.

‘Should we be worrying about your radiation exposure?’ Fox asked as they made their way over the largely flat landscape, following the trail of weird footprints.

‘I wouldn’t worry over it too much,’ Justin replied. ‘The suit takes care of UV and the Sun’s pretty active at the moment, so we’ve got better shielding from cosmic rays. There are no solar events active currently, however, so solar particle exposure is acceptable. Basically, it’s not too bad a time for sunbathing on Mars.’

‘Huh.’

‘The suit monitors exposure and it’s tracked in our medicals. All part of the great experiment that is Isis City.’

‘I suppose it is still just an experiment.’ The city was trying hard to be a settlement, but it was basically a big laboratory at the moment. They had celebrated the fifth anniversary of the first structures being put up in Isidis Planitia on the fifteenth of February. Well, there had been a lot of noise about it in Earth’s media, but whether they had done much on what was basically a random day in the calendar on Mars was an open question. And she had someone to ask. ‘Hey, did you guys celebrate the fifth anniversary up here?’

‘We’re saving it for the fifth anniversary,’ Justin replied with a grin.

‘Makes sense.’ Whatever, Isis City was there to prove that people could live and work on a planet distant enough from Earth to be effectively isolated. The colony was not entirely self-sufficient yet, but it was getting there. If they really had to do without Earth, they could probably manage, but not easily, and the population was not enough to be self-supporting, even without that gender imbalance.

The tracks petered out in a rocky area where there was too little dust to leave a good impression. Even Fox’s software could not find an edge to work with and multispectral imaging was showing nothing. Fox peered around. It looked like they were at the entrance to a small gully. The landscape on the floor of the plain was weird, twisted. Fox figured it was volcanic, or the equivalent; Hellas Planitia was a vast impact crater, the second or third largest on the planet, depending on who you talked to. At one time, there would have been a lot of molten rock where she was standing. Her software sharpened something about twenty metres ahead of them, down the gully, and she narrowed her eyes, double-checking what she was seeing.

‘That’s a foot,’ Fox said, starting down the gully. ‘A foot and part of a leg.’

‘Where?’ Justin asked, but he followed her and soon spotted what she had seen. ‘Okay, that’s a foot, but it’s in a tennis shoe.’

‘Yeah, someone took a walk without a suit. Or they were taken.’

The body was partially obscured by a twist in the rock, but also covered in sand. They began to scrape the regolith away, unearthing someone in jeans and a T-shirt. Fox had a strong idea of who it was going to be before they got to the face.

‘Carter,’ Justin said. The dead geologist stared up at them with eyes still caked with dirt. The atmosphere in this part of the basin was thin, but not thin enough to dry everything out too quickly. He had probably been there for several days. Fox hoped the putrefaction process had been at least retarded or they might not get too much from the body.

‘Are you seeing the radio bursts we’re picking up?’ Kit asked inside Fox’s head.

Fox pulled up her radio reception logs and quickly scanned them. Five bursts of noise over the last two minutes. Signal strengths tended to indicate two sources, one further away than the other. Her system was not set up to give her more than that. ‘I see them. I see them and I’m not sure I like them.’ Aloud, she said, ‘Okay, we need to get him out of here and back to the habitat. We might come back, but I want this body secured first.’

‘Problem?’ Justin asked.

‘I’m detecting some odd radio transmissions. Could be just noise. Could be burst transmissions like the military use.’

‘We don’t have a military. I think the Chinese do, but Isis City is–’

‘Like the military use, Justin. It’s not impossible to get them if you’re a civilian. If it is someone out there chatting, I think we should get Carter here out of sight before they come to check on us.’

Unclipping his carbine, Justin held it out to her. ‘I’m guessing you’re a better shot than I am. I’ll carry him, you keep us safe.’

Fox took the weapon with a nod. ‘Fair enough. Be careful with him. He’s been lying there for a while. He might be… a bit soggy.’

‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’

~~~

‘Oh God that stinks! Even through the filters, that stinks.’

Fox looked around at the door to the lab wing and flashed Justin a grin. ‘Wouldn’t know. I’ve got my olfactory sensors turned off. That mask is designed to filter out dust, maybe bacteria. You’ll still get the full effect of a month of putrefaction through it.’

She had Carter’s body laid out on a cleared geology table. She was no forensic tech, but she could look the thing over before sealing it up for transport, and that was what she was doing. ‘He’s actually very well preserved,’ she said. ‘I think he’s at least partially mummified. I mean, I guess that makes sense. He’d be frozen after the first night he spent out there. That would’ve killed the bacteria in the body. There are no insects out there to help decomposition. I think most of the damage is down to chemicals rather than the usual organic decay process.’

‘Wonderful,’ Justin said. ‘You know, we get even fewer murders here than we do rapes.’ He seemed to consider that for a second. ‘We do get people going missing and never being found a little more often, but some of those are probably accidental. Maybe most.’

‘Funny,’ Fox replied, peering at the exposed skin of Carter’s left shoulder. ‘I’d have thought murder would be more common. I think if you locked me in a place like Isis City for more than a month, I’d get homicidal.’

Kit chose that moment to appear in avatar form. ‘Fox frequently indicates a desire to enact homicidal rampages. To date, she has never actually gone through with any of them.’

‘Thank you for that, Kit. You know, the skin’s discoloured, and it’s going to take a proper autopsy to confirm this, but I think there are bruises here left by a hand.’ Fox looked up at Justin. ‘We do have someone we can get to do autopsies, right?’

Justin nodded. ‘Doctor Ruggiero. She’s the chief medical doctor, but she’s also the rep for the Centre for Disease Control and the medical examiner if she needs to be. You say “handprint…”’

‘Yeah, it looks like that hand only had three fingers and a thumb.’

~~~

‘Any sign of those transmissions?’ Justin asked. His carbine was in his hands now. He did not exactly look nervous, but he did look a little wired.

‘No,’ Fox replied. ‘Kit’s monitoring constantly, but there’s been nothing. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re being played.’

‘You think they wanted us to find Carter’s body?’

‘I think someone has wanted us to find pretty much everything we’ve found since this lousy horror vid started. I am unsurprised that we are not finding any signs of an ancient, underground city.’ They had spent much of the afternoon searching in any location the maps of the region suggested you could find such a place, and they had found absolutely nothing. Fox never wanted to look at another brown rock.

‘It’s going to get dark soon.’

‘Yeah, we’ll head back. I want to fly out in the morning.’ She turned and started in the direction her navigation system told her would lead them back to the science station.

‘Yeah, another night waiting for aliens to break in and murder us would be great.’

‘Where’s your spirit of adventure? If they try to kill us, we’ll finally get to see one of them. Besides, I have every confidence in our ability to turn them into corpses if it comes to it. We aren’t unarmed scientists. Though, even if Carter’s dead, that doesn’t mean the others are.’

‘We haven’t found any more bodies,’ Justin conceded. ‘I’ll see if we can get some satellite time when we get back to Isis City. Maybe infrared or something could pick something up. Disturbed ground?’

Fox smiled. ‘Good call. We can get the time. If I need to, I’ll call Earth and Jackson can talk to the government, and then the government will yell at someone up here.’

‘Huh, yeah. Hey, what if the Martians have, um, phasers or something?’

‘They’d better be good with them, or between us we’ll give them a lot of extra orifices.’ Fox walked on in silence for a second or two. ‘You know, I’d be disappointed if they don’t have phasers. What kind of crappy sci-fi horror would this be if the Martians don’t have ray guns?’

~~~

‘Round two?’ Fox asked.

‘Round two?’ Justin replied.

‘You know, sex. Round two.’

‘Uh, I know this sounds a little crazy, but I can’t help but feel that if we start, Kit’ll appear to tell us something’s trying to get in.’

Fox contemplated that for a second, her lips pursed. Justin had had food. They had found some not terribly bad beer in a cooler. They were each drinking a bottle, Fox knowing that it would not impair her at all and doubting that one bottle would give Justin problems. She could put some more amateur porn on the screen, but…

‘You know, seeing as we are bit-players in a horror vid, you might be right. I guess we’ll just sit here and wait for our doom.’

Justin frowned at her. ‘I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.’

‘Mm,’ Fox agreed, ‘I think you might be right.’

Airborne over Terra Sabaea, Sol 82.

‘We’re about twelve minutes out,’ Justin said. He was not exactly flying the shuttle; the ship’s AI was doing the work and Justin was supervising.

Fox sat in the co-pilot’s seat because it was more companionable, and because Carter’s corpse was wrapped in plastic and lying in the passenger compartment. Fox was used to dead bodies, having seen more than a few in her time as a soldier and a cop, but that did not mean she wanted to spend time with them when she did not have to. They were both in pressure suits, but their helmets were off; Fox’s was relatively pointless anyway. ‘Good. Hopefully we can get Carter’s autopsy organised today. It seems pretty obvious what killed him, but I want anything else your Doctor Ruggiero can give us.’

‘Like whether there’s… an alien handprint on his shoulder.’

‘Yeah.’ Fox looked around at her pilot and frowned. ‘You okay?’

‘Fine. Just a bit of a headache. I’m kind of tired. Don’t think I slept that well.’

Fox smirked at him. ‘Should’ve taken me up on the sex. Wasn’t any sign of the Martians last night.’

‘True. Uh, we’ll cross the Libya Montes in a couple of minutes. I’m not sure whether you’ll be able to see anything.’

Fox looked at her console and accessed the controls remotely. An image appeared from one of the underside cameras. It was hazy, but you could just about see the ground rushing past beneath them. ‘Montes is mountains, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It all looks pretty rough down there.’

‘The Libya Montes is not an especially obvious feature,’ Kit said, appearing beside Fox’s flight chair and peering at the screen. ‘It is essentially the ridge raised up by the impact which created Isidis Planitia. It should be obvious when we are past it since the ground will drop away under us.’

‘That’s very helpful, Kit.’

‘I always try to be helpful, Fox.’

‘You used to be such a sweet infomorph. You see what I have to put up with, Justin?’ There was no answer. ‘Justin?’ Fox looked up from the screen and across. Justin was apparently asleep in his chair. His chest rose and fell normally, but Fox’s overclocked perceptions took in other details. His lips were dark, tending to blue, and his skin looked pallid. ‘Shit!’

Unlocking her harness in one motion, Fox bolted out of her seat and stooped to grab Justin’s helmet. It took a few seconds to get the thing in place without his cooperation, but she locked it down and checked the display on his sleeve to be sure that the air system was functioning. A couple of taps increased the oxygen content of the air by a couple of percent.

‘Is he okay?’ Kit asked now that the immediate threat was resolved.

‘If I’m right and this is hypoxia. He said he was tired and had a headache. Those are the right symptoms and I got his helmet on fast enough. But how…’ Fox sat down at her console and accessed the controls again. The display shifted to show the monitoring system for the atmospheric control system. ‘Oxygen at twenty percent.’ She frowned, took in a lungful of air, and fired up the software she had been given to handle gas-phase chemical analysis. It seemed to take forever to come back with an answer but was probably only ten seconds in reality. ‘Oxygen at two percent. Something has to have messed with the ship’s systems somehow. Damn! I did not expect that. I was sure…’

She shook her head and flicked the screen over to communications, checking the transmission frequency. ‘This is shuttle IC dash zero zero four to Isis City flight control.’ She had no idea whether this was the correct protocol, but it was the best she had right now. ‘I am declaring an emergency. Over.’ Now she just had to hope someone was listening.

Isis City, Mars.

‘He’ll be fine in a couple of days,’ Doctor Ruggiero said. She was a compact sort of woman with a dark complexion, black hair, and dark-brown eyes. She had been the senior medic in the city since the project had begun and remembered Isis City as a construction site. She also seemed to be fascinated with Fox, even if a purely cybernetic woman had no need of her skills. ‘He’s lucky you were there. You saved his life. If you’d been organic, you’d have probably passed out before he did.’

‘Score one for digitised humanity,’ Fox said. ‘We’d have both been dead before the shuttle’s AI got us on the ground, right?’

‘Certainly. About four minutes without oxygen will kill more or less anyone. As it is, Justin has some tissue damage from the oxygen deprivation, but nothing some rest won’t cure. Try not to get him into any fights.’

‘I don’t plan to. Are you going to be able to take a look at Carter today?’

‘We have him on ice.’ The doctor gave a quirky grin. ‘On Mars, refrigeration is the default condition. I’ll open him up in the morning. I say Justin will be fine, but I want to keep an eye on him overnight, just in case.’

‘Okay, Doctor. It’s not like Carter’s going anywhere.’

‘It’s Cherise. You can call me Cherise. If you get a spare evening, I’d love to grill you on how you’re adapting to… What did you call it? Digitised humanity?’

‘That’s today’s phrase,’ Fox said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

~~~

‘Talk to me, Bast,’ Fox said as she marched into the Palladium office suite. They had a sort of bullpen arrangement behind the reception area, and pretty much everyone was there, even if they were not officially on duty.

‘How’s Justin?’ Shayla Beaumont asked.

‘Doctor Ruggiero says he’ll be fine in a couple of days. She’s keeping him in overnight to be sure there are no complications.’ Fox gave the woman a small smile. ‘He woke up not long after we landed, even if he didn’t stay awake for long. He was more concerned about me. Which is quite a laugh under the circumstances. Now, why did that shuttle suddenly decide to lie about oxygen?’

‘It was hacked,’ Bast stated flatly. ‘Someone got into its systems and did a number on the atmospheric controls. I’m still working through the data to see whether I can work out who and/or how, but my guess would be that they accessed it through the wireless node in the passenger compartment.’

‘Which makes you wonder why they didn’t program the thing to crash,’ Shayla said.

‘I had a few minutes to wonder about that on the way down,’ Fox said. ‘This whole deal is playing out like a horror vid, right? So, what’s scarier: shuttle crash in the middle of nowhere, or shuttle lands perfectly happily under AI control and all the crew are dead?’

‘Without any embellishments, the second one.’

‘Right. Plus, a crash could have destroyed Carter’s body. I’m sure they wanted us to find him. That means they wanted us to bring him back, along with everything else we found, so we’d get the next clue in the puzzle.’

‘But you’d be dead.’

‘Which means neither me nor Justin could tell anyone any details.’

‘And the oxygen level in the shuttle was back to normal by the time you landed,’ Bast said. ‘It was programmed to do it about two minutes before landing. The logs all indicate no problems, so we’d have been wondering how you died of oxygen starvation in a ship with enough oxygen. That’d be even more spooky.’

‘Whoever did this, they didn’t know about me,’ Fox said. ‘I thought everyone in the solar system knew about me.’

‘Maybe you’re not as famous as you thought,’ Fred Odell commented with a grin.

‘That is something I would be surprisingly happy about, Fred. Yeah, I could definitely live with that.’

~~~

Justin had a grin on his face as he watched Fox walking into his hospital room. ‘You saved my life, Boss,’ he said. ‘That kind of thing is likely to make a guy like someone quite a lot.’

‘Is that understated humour?’ Fox asked. ‘You must be feeling better.’

‘I am. The doc still won’t let me out of here before morning.’

‘Take the rest.’ Fox settled onto a visitor’s chair and crossed her legs. She had put on the purple dress again; Justin was having some difficulty keeping his eyes on her face, which probably indicated he was feeling healthier. ‘Anyway, I saved your life because I’m not human. It’s a bit like thanking a toaster for making toast. If we’d both been organic, we– Well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

‘Take the thanks,’ Justin said, mirroring her own command. ‘I’ve been thinking. This was more scare tactics, right? They expected the rest of the team to be faced with the mysterious death of the two people who went out to look at Hellas Planitia. Makes you wonder why they didn’t try it with Shayla and her squad.’

‘They didn’t stay overnight,’ Fox replied. ‘Aside from me detecting those radio bursts when we found Carter, all the activity we’ve seen has been during the night. We weren’t supposed to detect the radio chatter. Shayla was in and out in the same day.’

‘That makes sense. So, what now?’

‘Now, we wait for the autopsy results and the analysis on that rock. I got Shayla to put through the request for satellite shots, but that could take a day or two. Unless something else comes up, I’m not really sure where we go from here. Finding the rest of the science team, alive or dead, is going to have to be a priority. They’re the only ones who might give us a clue to what’s really happening.’

~~~

‘Well, I’m back from Hellas Planitia,’ Fox said to the camera. She was topless this time, naked in fact, though that was partially because she was just about to run her sleep cycle. ‘It wasn’t hellish, despite the name, which Kit informs me is actually the Greek name for Greece and the area was named by Giovanni Schiaparelli, who is a famous name in Martian astronomy. He’s partially responsible for that “canals of Mars” thing, mostly because he was Italian.’ She frowned. ‘Why is it sending messages to you makes me babble?’

Shrugging, Fox continued. ‘Anyway, that was an experience. The first couple of days the dust cloud was still hanging around in the air. It’s like fog, but it’s brown. Most of it is really fine powder. Sticks to everything. But there’s some heavier stuff just after a storm. There’s plenty of small stuff, three microns and smaller, even when the sky’s clear. It gives a reddish tint to the sky like, um, I don’t know if you remember the Yellowstone eruption? I was nine and–’ Fox grimaced. ‘Ouch, a quick bit of math says you were thirty-two or thirty-three. Of course you remember the red skies. It’s a bit like that. That’s what it’s like all the time on Mars. It’s kind of beautiful in a monotone sort of way.’

There was a pause and then, ‘I keep forgetting you’re almost twenty-three and a half years older than me. I mean, you don’t look fifty-three. And, don’t get me wrong, I really love that extra twenty-three years of experience. And I’ve dated older people before. Men. I have no idea where I’m going with this. The age difference doesn’t matter. It’s– You know what, I’m rambling again. I’m back in Isidis Planitia, and I’ve got reliable comms again. Message me whenever you want to.’ She blew a kiss to the camera. ‘Goodnight, Naomi.’

Sol 83.

The first indication that Fox had that there was a problem was a message from Naomi. It was text only, and it was waiting for her when she came out of her sleep cycle just before four a.m. Mars time.

Fox. Can’t stop to record something right now, but I wanted to drop you a quick note. I believe I know why you’re on Mars. There are some strange things going on on the internet. I’ll drop you a proper message tomorrow. Love, Naomi.

It was followed, not long afterward, by a flurry of messages from MarTech and some government official who seemed to think he had the right to butt in. The note from MarTech, directly from Mariel in fact, just said that someone had leaked the Carter video on the internet. Fox did a quick check, but there were no signs of it on MarsNet. The update process for data from Earth was slow, low on the priorities of traffic from Earth. No matter how the video had been distributed, it might take a while for it to reach anyone on Mars, but it would get there eventually. As far as Fox was concerned, too many people knew about it already.

The message from the government guy was loud and angry with several words picked out in capitals. It demanded to know why Fox had allowed the video to be released in this uncontrolled manner. Fox forwarded the message to Mariel and Garth Eaves, her CEO, and told them to deal with it. Then, because she was that kind of suspicious person, she forwarded it to Helen and asked her to look into Simeon Roberts, whom she had never heard of before. Then she dropped a quick note to Naomi, text only, saying that she now understood what the strange things on the internet were.

All that meant that Fox was not in the best of moods when she walked into the Palladium offices. Even the sight of Justin, on his feet and just as big and hunky as ever, could not put her in a good mood.

‘You look like someone pissed in your morning cereal,’ Fred commented.

‘I don’t eat cereal, Fred,’ Fox pointed out. ‘But thanks for volunteering to get me a coffee.’ Fred gave a sigh, but he seemed to accept the ‘punishment.’ Fox turned to Shayla. ‘We are going to need full details of everyone who’s had access to the videos from Hellas Planitia. Especially the first one that they sent here. Someone’s leaked it onto the internet on Earth.’

Shayla frowned. ‘You think–’

Fox held up a hand. ‘This is an ass-covering exercise. It leaked on Earth, so it’s more likely that someone there leaked it. We need to know it wasn’t someone here. Thanks, Fred.’ She took the coffee mug from the older cop. ‘And you, Evelina, and Zach need to be aware that this video is going to hit MarsNet sooner rather than later. You know the people here better than I do. You know how they’re likely to react.’ Zach Abel, the leader of C squad, gave a nod at that. He was a quiet sort of man, new to Mars but competent.

‘Half of them won’t believe any of it,’ Evelina said. ‘They’ve seen hoaxes like this before. Video can be faked.’

‘And the other half?’

‘Half of them are going to be sceptical,’ Fred replied. ‘And the rest will fall into “I told you so” and panic. We could have trouble.’

‘Great,’ Fox muttered. ‘Bast, we’re going to need to monitor social media on MarsNet pretty closely.’

‘I can assist with that,’ Kit said, appearing beside Fox. ‘I allocated myself two additional copies for this trip. I should really get one of them doing the staff interviews.’ She looked around. ‘Just checking that you’re all happy employees of Palladium. Don’t worry about it. Anyway, I have a spare which can execute on the server here and monitor MarsNet. I suspect the first indications of the video will appear on LifeWeb. They have dedicated bandwidth for updating their servers from Earth.’

Bast nodded. ‘Foxy lady has it right. Even if someone gets emailed a copy of the video, it’s pretty likely that the first we’ll see of it will be on LifeWeb.’

‘And Kit is an expert with the LifeWeb interface,’ Fox said. ‘Okay, you two work together on that. Dove, Lando, anything on that rock?’ Shayla’s two forensics techs looked up at that.

‘It’s a rock,’ Dove said. ‘It’s probably from Hellas Planitia, but we’ve no data on the circumstances of the find. I’ve got a geologist I know who’s doing a uranium test on it. That could give us a date for the sedimentation, but that might not tell us much. And don’t worry, I chipped a piece off the back of it for the test. He hasn’t seen the whole thing.’

‘Good thinking. There’s no way to date the carving?’

Dove gave a shrug. ‘Invent a time machine and go back to ask the guy who carved it?’

‘Yeah, that’s about what I thought.’

‘I do agree that it should either be better preserved or completely worn away,’ the tech conceded. ‘I’m not an expert on petroglyphs, but I think we’re looking at an artificially aged fake.’

‘Thanks. Now all we need is those autopsy results.’

~~~

‘Your man died of exposure to the atmosphere of Mars,’ Doctor Ruggiero stated flatly. ‘Acute hypoxia. He would have been unconscious inside of two minutes, dead in five or six.’

‘Which would mean he couldn’t have walked to where we found him,’ Fox said. ‘That was at least a fifteen-minute walk from the habitat.’

‘Could’ve gone out with an oxygen mask,’ Justin said.

‘Why?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘No, he was taken,’ Ruggiero said. ‘Dragged. Not exactly kicking and screaming, but certainly taken with force. I found bruising on the right shoulder and both upper arms suggesting someone gripping him very firmly. Or something.’

Fox’s heart sank a little. Or it would have, if she had had one. ‘Give us the bad news, Cherise.’

‘The impressions are distorted, but they’re far more distorted than I’d expect given the state of decomposition and then mummification of the body. The marks on his arms in particular suggest very elongated metacarpals and extended phalanges. A long palm and two long fingers. A relatively foreshortened third digit and thumb in opposition to each other. That’s more like a gibbon than a human hand. We are not talking about something human.’

‘Any tissue samples?’

‘Nothing, but the anatomical data is… disconcerting.’

Fox nodded. ‘I don’t think keeping this a secret for much longer is going to be viable but keep it under your hat until you hear differently. All the evidence we’ve collected so far suggests that the team in Hellas Planitia were killed by Martians.’ She sighed. ‘And if this is a hoax, it’s a really good one which someone is willing to go to any lengths to perpetrate.’

Part Two: Astraeus

Isis City, Isidis Planitia, Mars, Sol 84, Year 3.

Fox checked the time. Mid-afternoon on sol eighty-four and still no sign of Carter’s video turning up on MarsNet. That was good at least. Less good was another message from Simeon Roberts demanding an explanation for the leak on Earth. Fox had decided she would find out who had given him her contact details and exact bloody revenge upon them. She was just hoping it was no one she liked. Mariel had sent a message indicating that the situation was being dealt with, so Fox was assuming it was. There was nothing yet from Helen regarding Roberts.

‘We have received a video message from Mariel,’ Kit announced, appearing beside Fox. They were in Fox’s room, working at the terminal there, though the terminal itself was largely going unused. Fox had several virtual screens up showing a lot of the data they had collected so far. Not that it was doing much good. Fox had also discovered that she much preferred using her virtual apartment for this kind of work.

‘Okay,’ Fox replied. ‘Let’s see it.’

Another virtual screen appeared, and Fox turned to look at it. Mariel was not looking pleased, and that just made Fox’s mood darken. ‘Fox. This is going to make you even more annoyed, but it can’t be helped. You’ll be contacted by a UNTPP representative shortly. They need you to fly up to the Astraeus Station to investigate a… problem they have. It’s being kept very need-to-know and they don’t want me giving you details over a public communication medium. I know, I know. You’re in the middle of an investigation which is about to blow up. The administration here has agreed that the Astraeus situation needs your immediate attention. You’re the most experienced investigator less than a couple of months from Mars. Once again, sorry about this, but it needs doing.’

Fox stared at the stilled image for several seconds, then scanned over the useless data files around her. ‘Well fuck,’ she said.

Astraeus Station, Mars Orbit.

The Astraeus Project was a controversial subject in various halls of power across the world. UN-funded, it’s aim was to put humans on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. That was a task requiring a lot of new technology to work, and a ‘forward base’ from which to send out probes and manned ships. That base was an orbital station named Astraeus Station, after the project. Part observatory, part science lab, and part construction yard, Astraeus Station was three hundred thousand tons of spinning metal in a reasonably high orbit above the Martian surface. The spin provided seventy percent of Earth’s gravity in the habitation areas and laboratories, which was one benefit of flying up there. It was probably the only benefit as far as Fox was concerned.

A handsome young lieutenant had arrived at Fox’s quarters about thirty-five minutes after Mariel’s message. He was in UNTPP uniform, but Fox had checked his ID anyway. Lieutenant Valerio Caruso, blonde and blue-eyed, sharply cut features, and a fit body. He had joined the UNTPP from the Nordeuropäische Union, and clearly had some Italian ancestry. Fox had a thing for blonde men and accents, and Caruso had both. That just made her suspicious that someone was trying to butter her up, present her with a pleasing escort to take the edge off her temper.

If that was the case, rushing her up to the station and then keeping her waiting for almost an hour was not the best course of action. They had scheduled the meeting for eighteen hundred, Mars time, and she arrived in the meeting room forty-nine minutes before then. Caruso was apologetic.

Various people entered the room as the appointed hour approached. Fox had no idea who they were, and they all sat down silently without introducing themselves. They looked worried, or confused, or worried and confused. That did not exactly help Fox work out what was going on. Caruso had said that everything would be covered in the briefing. The secrecy around this entire operation was getting to be a real pain in the butt.

At exactly six o’clock, a man Fox did recognise walked in. She had never met him before, but Mariel had provided some details on the senior staff of the station along with her video message. Weldon Simpson was the senior physicist in charge of antimatter production on the station. He was English, middle-aged, bespectacled, and carried the look of a man puffed up by his own importance. He had a full head of mousy-brown hair and hazel eyes. His glasses sat on a nose which seemed built for balancing glasses on. If he was here, then the situation might involve antimatter.

At four minutes past six, a tall woman in UNTPP uniform marched in, made her way to the head of the table – Fox had been seated at the other end of the oval table with Caruso on her left – and looked around the assembled people as though taking attendance in class. According to Mariel’s data, this was Kimberlee Shriver, and she was the UNTPP officer in charge of station security. She was a commander, which tended to indicate that there was not that much security on the station. Fox would have expected a captain. Shriver was Australian, ex-military, and about Fox’s age. Again, Fox would have expected someone that age to have made captain by now. She was attractive – with the help of a little enhancement around the eyes and nose – and had auburn hair cut into a bob, green eyes, and a relatively substantial bust under her immaculate uniform. Her gaze lingered on Fox for a moment longer than the rest.

‘She appears resentful,’ Kit observed silently.

‘Probably wasn’t her idea to get me up here,’ Fox replied. ‘Which is a point for her. If she’s going to be pissy about it, that’s a point against.’

‘I think we’ve had enough delay,’ Shriver said. Point against. ‘Let’s get this started. At zero eight thirty this morning, a routine inventory of antimatter storage revealed that ten micrograms was missing. We need to find out where it is, who has it, and what they intend to do with it. Obviously, we also want it back. Tara Meridian of Palladium Security Solutions has been asked to provide assistance on the investigation and, now that she’s finally here, we are meeting to brief her. Doctor Simpson, give us some idea of the problem.’ Shriver sat down and glared down the table at Fox.

‘Two points against?’ Kit suggested.

‘Five,’ Fox replied.

Simpson did not get to his feet. ‘We do a check of the current mass of antiprotons in the trap every morning. It’s a safety measure. If we have a leak, we want to know about it before it becomes serious. We have never lost a noticeable amount in the months the project has been operating. Today we were short ten micrograms. That is worth a little over two hundred and fifty thousand euros. An approximately similar dollar value. It also represents a delay in production of fuel for the Astraea which could mean that we fail to meet the June deadline for a launch. We must get that product back.’

Shriver frowned slightly. ‘The explosive potential, Doctor. How big an explosion are we talking if it’s used?’

Simpson looked confused for an instant, as though he had never considered that someone would actually do something with his expensive subatomic particles. ‘That depends entirely on how it’s used. The simplest method would obviously be to turn the power on the trap off. The resulting reaction would produce some one point eight times ten to the twelve joules of energy, roughly equivalent to four hundred and thirty tons of TNT. That, however, is a misleadingly small number. The explosion would produce a considerable amount of heat and radiation. Using it in that way would be deplorable.’

‘The other method would be as a fusion catalyst, right?’ Fox asked.

The physicist looked down the table at her. The dumb cop had spoken. ‘That is correct.’

‘That’s a far more complex device, but you could make several of them out of the amount of antimatter that’s been taken. You could get a significantly higher explosive yield, but it requires specialised knowledge.’

‘That would be an accurate summary.’

Fox gave him a smile. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time at Jenner Research Station, Doctor Simpson. I may not understand half of what they do there, but I have a grasp of the basics. I discussed the ease of use of antimatter as a potential terrorist weapon with the researchers there. We came to the conclusion that it has more utility as a terror weapon. Antimatter is scary stuff and it makes for a nasty method of killing in bulk. You’d get quite a lot of survivors dying of radiation poisoning after days, weeks, or months, most of that time spent sick and in pain. If you live, and the radiation doesn’t sterilise you, the risk of birth defects in your children can rise substantially. Then there’s the increased risk of cancer which could get you in the end anyway. And, of course, while antimatter is scary stuff, it’s relatively safe so long is it’s in the proper container. No radiation risk to the user, unless they mess up badly.’ Fox’s gaze swept around the table, ending on Shriver. ‘And you’ve lost ten micrograms of the stuff?’

‘Now wait–’ Shriver began.

‘It has to be for use on Mars,’ Fox went on over her. ‘If you let that loose in Isis City or Hóng Běijīng, you’d kill everyone. It’ll take too long to get it to Earth and it’d be too likely that someone would spot it in transit.’ Her eyes shifted back to Simpson. ‘You need a special container to transport the stuff, right?’

‘Yes. A Penning trap,’ the physicist replied.

‘How big are we talking? How long is it going to last if it’s running on batteries?’

‘The portable units weigh about ten kilos. They’re about the size of a mid-sized suitcase. They can be plugged into the mains, but even on battery power they’re good for over a year.’

‘Have you done an inventory of the traps here?’

‘Of course! One is missing. Each of them is fitted with a GPS transmitter.’

‘But the missing one isn’t transmitting,’ Fox said, nodding. She pursed her lips and began to tap an index finger on them.

That gave Shriver the opportunity to jump back in. ‘We’ve conducted a search of the most likely locations for it to be hidden, and we’re continuing to search everywhere else.’

‘It was off the station before you knew it was gone,’ Fox said, her tone absent. ‘How often are the regular shuttles?’

‘There’s one down to the surface at eight a.m.,’ Caruso said. ‘Then every two hours with the return flights on the odd hours. The last flight up is at eleven p.m.’

‘I’m going to need the passenger list for the eight a.m. flight today as well as all the data you have on those passengers. I’m also going to need the personnel files for the entire antimatter team–’

‘Now just a minute,’ Simpson broke in. ‘My staff are entirely trustworthy. This was obviously an outside–’

‘You’re a scientist, aren’t you, Doctor Simpson?’ Fox asked.

‘Yes, I am,’ he replied, sounding affronted.

‘Do you customarily formulate a hypothesis without any observational data?’

‘That’s not how we–’

‘And the same is true of a good detective. First, we observe, then we hypothesise. In this case, we examine everyone who could have taken the antimatter, and your team are, I really hope, the only people with access to your main trap. Yes, someone from outside might have gained access, but if they did, they’ll be in the passenger list. Once I’ve looked at everyone, then I’ll decide which story best fits the evidence. Not the other way around. Can you make it happen, Commander Shriver?’

‘You’ll have what you need,’ Shriver replied tightly.

‘Great. Now, let’s go over the security arrangements for this main trap. I’d love to know how it’s possible for someone to just walk in and remove some of the material in there.’

Isis City, Mars, Sol 85.

Kit was doing busywork. She had arranged a couple of interviews with the staff doing the night shift. It had been interesting talking to people who had chosen to pick up their lives and move to another world, to an environment which would try to kill them every chance it got. These were inherently interesting people, even when she suspected that many of them had not considered their new posting in that light. They were pioneers, opening up the latest in mankind’s long line of frontiers.

Residing on a server in the Palladium offices, Kit was reviewing her interviews so far when a message packet arrived from the LifeWeb servers across the city via the LifeWeb interface. Bastian Ayers had done a preliminary search of LifeWeb and determined that there were no instances of the Carter video there currently, but it was Kit who had set up autonomous search routines via the interface to notify her if any of several criteria were met. One of those queries had returned a link and she followed it as soon as she received it.

The post was headed ‘Hey, Colleen, you have to see this.’ It contained a link to a site on Earth, but LifeWeb had turned that into an embedded video to ensure that their client could view it. It was the Carter ‘ancient city’ video. It had arrived within MarsNet.

Kit immediately set up a new query to see how this post was spread through the Martian network. The title was unassuming, but the video itself was tagged such that automated interest monitors might flag it to other users. Then she sent out messages to Fox and Justin, and to the four squad leaders, to let them know what had happened. It was seven thirty in the morning, and a LifeWeb post could easily go viral in a few hours. Things in Isis City were about to get interesting.

Astraeus Station, Mars Orbit.

Fox was sitting in a small meeting room which had been allocated to her for interviews. Right now, she was reading over the personnel file for her next interviewee, drinking coffee, and trying to ignore Shriver.

‘It’s Deschamps,’ Shriver said for the thirty-second time; Kit was keeping count. ‘Anarchist leanings. He’s a UA plant. Now he’s down on the surface with the antimatter and you’re up here, stalling.’

Okay, so she was trying and failing to ignore Shriver. ‘Commander Shriver, people who admit to youthful indiscretions are generally over them. If the UNTPP had uncovered anything suggesting that Jameson Deschamps had current links to UA, he would never have been allowed on this station. His psych profile suggests that, if anything, he’s become a bright and shining example of capitalist culture and that is why I’m having Kit’s copy on Mars do some checks on him.’

‘Because he’s a capitalist?’

‘Because he’s greedy. Also because he was on the early shuttle down to the surface. Kit has the Palladium team in Isis City looking into what he did when he got there.’ Fox held up a hand as Shriver opened her mouth. ‘Kit knows why, but our people just know we want to question him. Kit’s very good at compartmentalising.’

Kit made an appearance, in her business outfit. ‘I have to be, Commander. As CIO of Palladium, I am privy to various facts which are commercially sensitive or classified. All my copies share the same memories, eventually, but they also know which things they are not allowed to know when performing various different roles. As an AI, I am always cognisant of the legal ramifications as well.’

‘Right,’ Shriver said, not looking entirely convinced. ‘Have you, or your copy, found anything on Deschamps yet?’

‘As yet, his whereabouts are unknown. It would appear that he is not in Isis City.’

Shriver frowned. ‘Could he be taking it to the Chinese?’

‘Why?’ Fox asked. ‘Don’t the Chinese have their own methods of making antiprotons?’

‘Not on Mars. That we know of. Then again, neither does anyone else on the planet’s surface. You need a particle accelerator and a load of other gear I don’t really understand.’

‘Mm. If the Chinese, or the Americans, wanted to deploy a small quantity of antimatter on Mars, I think it would be easier to make it on Earth and then have it brought here on a regular transport route. No, we’re probably dealing with someone without those kinds of resources. UA is a possibility, but I think it’s a weak one. Do you have any intelligence on a UA cell operating here or on Mars?’

‘No,’ Shriver admitted. ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t one, but no. The closest we have locally is the Luddites.’

‘I was told about them. I don’t think they really fit the bill, but if they were planning some kind of big action…’ Fox shrugged. ‘People have done crazier things. Let’s get Vela in here. I have a particular interest in her.’

‘Why?’ Shriver asked. ‘She’s a physicist, not a particularly high-ranking one. She mostly does number-crunching.’

‘Yes, but she has access to the containment facility and I’ve seen her before…’

~~~

Abbey Vela was an attractive woman. There was a hint of Mexican ancestry in her features and her long black hair and dark eyes. She had full lips, a curvaceous figure, and she was showing a number of markers which indicated that she was nervous.

‘It’s Miss Vela, right?’ Fox said, smiling at the woman.

‘Yes. I’m working on my doctorate. Unfortunately, writing up a thesis doesn’t pay the bills.’ Vela had a good voice too. There was a hint of huskiness to it which gave it an exotic quality. Her ancestry might have been Mexican, but there was none of that in her voice; according to her file, she had grown up in New York Metro.

‘Sit down, please. As you can imagine, we’re trying to find out how the missing antimatter was taken, who has it now, and who took it, obviously.’

‘Of course. It’s terrible. It throws our timescales out. We may have to delay the first Astraea launch.’

‘Mm. So, let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first. You left work at eighteen hundred hours yesterday and logged back into your workstation at eight this morning.’

‘Uh, if that’s what the logs say.’

‘And what were you doing between those times, Miss Vela?’

‘Uh, well, I went to my quarters, had something to eat, watched a vid… You know, the usual kind of thing you do of an evening.’

‘You didn’t leave your quarters at all?’

‘No.’

Fox smiled again; Vela was lying. Of course, there was currently no proof of that. ‘Do you know a meteorologist named Martie Monday, Miss Vela?’

Vela’s brow wrinkled briefly, as though she was confused by the change of subject. Then again, Shriver also looked a little confused. ‘Yes,’ Vela replied. ‘I know Martie. We hook up in Isis City when our schedules coincide.’

‘You’ve never been to Hellas Planitia, where he works?’

‘The science station?’ Vela waved the suggestion aside. ‘No, why would we go there?’

‘Were you aware that Mister Monday is currently missing, presumed dead?’

‘No!’ Vela half rose in her seat. ‘Martie’s… What happened? Some sort of accident?’ It was good acting, but it was still acting.

‘That’s one of the reasons I’m on Mars. We have found one of his colleagues, Jonathan Carter.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever met–’

‘Well, we found his body.’

Vela’s face did contortions as she tried to keep it under control. She went from faked concern to real in under a second. Her voice failed her for a little longer. ‘His b-body?’

‘Yes. As yet, we haven’t found any of the others, but we have to assume the worst at this point. How would you describe your relationship with Jameson Deschamps?’

‘J-Jameson? Well, I know him to talk to. Is he–’

‘He’s not on the station,’ Fox said, smiling again. ‘Since he’s not here, I’m asking everyone how well they know him. It’s routine.’

Vela relaxed a little. ‘Oh, well, not at all really. We’d say hello if we passed in a corridor.’

‘Okay. Thank you, Miss Vela. If I need to talk to you again, I’ll contact you. Otherwise, it was nice meeting you.’

‘To be honest, Miss Meridian, the sentiment isn’t mutual.’

Fox nodded as the physicist started for the door. ‘In my job, I get that a lot.’

Shriver waited for the door to close behind Vela before speaking. ‘What was all that about? What does some science station in Hellas Planitia have to do with this?’

‘Don’t know,’ Fox admitted. ‘But I have one scientist dead and six of his colleagues missing, all under mysterious circumstances. Miss Vela knew one of those missing people and lied about having been to Hellas Planitia for no reason. She lied about a lot of things. Kit, find me a link between her and Deschamps. Something more concrete than “hello in a corridor.”’

Kit’s avatar appeared. ‘I’ll begin searches now.’

‘You’re sure she lied?’ Shriver asked.

‘Show the commander the video, Kit,’ Fox said in reply. A window opened in their joint sensorium and Shriver’s cheeks coloured as the amateur porn began to play out. ‘I’m positive that Vela’s been there, because that’s Monday’s room there. He has a bad habit of videoing his conquests, sometimes without their knowledge. The question would be why she lied about being there.’

‘The question I’m asking,’ Shriver said, ‘is what this has to do with the missing antimatter.’

‘And I don’t have a solid answer for you, Commander. But even if Deschamps took the trap down to the surface and disabled the tracking system on it, he doesn’t have the clearances or knowledge needed to extract the antimatter. Vela does, and she’s linked to another little mystery here on Mars at the moment through Martie Monday. That could be pure coincidence, but I hate coincidences. So, Kit will see if she can find a link between Vela and Deschamps. If we can find that, we’ll have a really solid reason to hunt Deschamps down. Let’s get the next one in.’

~~~

‘Fox, there is something you need to see.’ Kit turned, throwing up a video window which she broadcast to Shriver too.

‘Social media is abuzz today with a video purporting to show an ancient, underground city on Mars,’ a presenter was saying. Behind him, an in-picture stream showed the muted video of Jonathan Carter’s view of the cavern and its contents. ‘ICN uncovers what there is to know about the originator and explores the mystery over his current whereabouts.’

‘Great,’ Fox muttered. They were breaking for lunch after four hours of interviews. At least they had been through most of the staff. ‘I assume your copy on Mars knows about this?’

‘It was her who notified me of the report,’ Kit replied. ‘The video is now widely distributed across the Martian LifeWeb. Justin is preparing for some unrest tonight.’

‘I just bet he is.’

Isis City, Mars.

‘We’re going to need everyone on ready status as of now,’ Justin said. There were some disgruntled looks from his team, but they all knew he was right. ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen. It could just be some noise and too much drinking. If something kicks off, however, we need to be ready to stamp on it. Everyone carries their electrolaser and their baton. Everyone stays in constant communication with the office. We have Kit here to help with coordination and we’re going to make use of her.’

‘And I will be happy to help,’ Kit said. ‘Please note that I have experience in investigating crimes, but I’m neither a tactician nor an experienced police officer. I can monitor the situation across a wide area, but I will be calling upon all of you to assess anything I may notice which seems out of the ordinary.’

‘Anything showing up at the moment?’

Kit shook her head. ‘I suspect that we have until the evening. After the evening news broadcasts, when people have had free time to focus on their LifeWeb feeds and other social media. Then we can expect to see some response from the general citizenry. I am hoping that my LifeWeb queries will give us some warning. I believe that any large-scale unrest will begin there.’

‘I’ve never really liked LifeWeb,’ Evelina grumbled.

Kit gave a small shrug, her tail flicking. ‘It has its uses.’

Astraeus Station, Mars Orbit.

‘Miss Vela and Mister Deschamps have been communicating via LifeWeb,’ Kit announced.

‘That took a while,’ Fox commented in reply.

‘I had to obtain a warrant to access Miss Vela’s personal messages.’

‘I could’ve given you authorisation for that,’ Shriver said, frowning.

‘The LifeWeb server in question is located within Isis City, Commander. You have no more jurisdiction there than I do. The judiciary on Mars were quite strict on the matter, but I had sufficient evidence that Miss Vela was obfuscating regarding her relationship with Mister Deschamps that they agreed to grant the warrant.’

‘Let’s hear it then,’ Fox said. ‘From the top, if you would.’

Kit flashed a quick smile and popped up a number of windows showing scrolling discussion feeds. ‘Both subjects are regular posters to the “Ancient Mars” and “Martians For Real” discussion forums on LifeWeb. They have posted in each other’s threads, generally agreeing with the premise that Mars hosted a live ecology with intelligent life long before Earth did. There were suggestions there that private messages were being exchanged.’

‘Hence the deeper search,’ Fox said, nodding.

More windows appeared, this time showing individual private message threads. ‘Miss Vela is in contact with a number of members of the two forums. Most interesting are the messages between her and Mister Deschamps, and also between her and Mister Monday.’

‘Monday posts on those forums?’ Fox asked.

‘To some extent, all of the science team at Hellas Planitia do, Fox. Miss Rao and Mister Thacker do not post but do have a record of reading the feeds. The others all post in varying quantities. Mister Carter was the most frequent poster.’

‘Big surprise.’

‘It appears that Mister Monday was leading Miss Vela on a little. Their correspondence suggests a rather more intimate relationship than they actually have. Mister Monday seems to be suggesting that he was not seeing anyone else, for example.’

Fox bit off a laugh.

‘He was, I take it?’ Shriver asked.

‘We found plenty of those videos. Not all of his girlfriends had a problem with being filmed. I suspect he had a preference for them, and Vela was not one of them. Go on, Kit.’

‘Miss Vela’s conversations with Mister Deschamps get particularly interesting within the last month. They discuss Mister Deschamps’ coming vacation at length. She asks on a number of occasions whether his luggage has been secured yet. The phrasing of this discussion suggests that they are discussing the portable trap. Miss Vela is quite vocal on the need for “very tough suitcases” with “special security features.” Mister Deschamps seems to have been a little annoyed with her. At one point he tells her to “do your job and I’ll do mine.” That isn’t fitting for a holiday discussion.’

‘No,’ Fox agreed. ‘Any indication of either of them talking to anyone in station security?’

‘What?!’ Shriver barked. ‘You don’t think–’

‘I’m sure Deschamps could disable the tracking system on the trap, but he would still have had to get the thing through checks to get it on the shuttle. Disguise it as a real suitcase, obviously, but I looked at your security measures. They’re up to spec, which means someone had to get that case on the shuttle, bypassing the scanners.’

‘There is nothing in Miss Vela’s messages,’ Kit said. ‘I believe I have quite sufficient evidence to get a warrant for Mister Deschamps’ account and, probably, anyone else I need to chase this down. It would be easier if I was free to include evidence regarding the antimatter.’

‘Link me in when you request the warrant,’ Shriver said. ‘You’ll get it.’

‘Thank you, Commander. I–’

‘Kit?’ Fox asked as the AI’s avatar paused suddenly.

‘I have received an update from my instance on Mars,’ Kit said, frowning. ‘She has picked up evidence that a demonstration of some sort is moving toward the Isis City Administration section.’

‘She’s notified Justin, I assume? He’s dealing with it?’

‘All of the squad leaders and Justin have been notified. At this time, neither my copy nor he think the situation is going to move toward violence, but he has everyone on alert to deal with it.’

‘Right. Keep me informed. There’s not that much I can do from up here anyway, but keep me informed.’

Isis City, Mars.

Justin had never been in the military and was not used to TacNet software. He had never had the need to use it for anything before. He had been meaning to do some exercises with it, making sure the team knew how to use it, but that kind of thing always got pushed to the bottom of his list of things to do. He was rather thankful to have Kit around.

‘So far,’ the AI said over their encrypted radios, ‘it appears that everything is staying peaceful. We have good coverage of the rally with A and B squads. It’s possible that the fifty-seven people here now would give up and return to their quarters if someone from the administration would talk to them.’

‘I doubt it,’ Justin replied. ‘People don’t end up on duty in Isis City because they have exceptional charisma. We get the also-rans of the American government. We’ve had the same representative for twelve years and he’s been here once.’

‘Best thing about being here,’ Fred’s voice added. ‘Politics is something that happens on Earth.’

‘Not really true,’ Shayla said. ‘I’ll admit we don’t have the noisy vote brokers they have down there but give it twenty or thirty years for this place to get a larger population and we’ll have just as many of them as on Earth. My worry is that a lot of them will be corporate shills.’

‘You think about that kind of thing too much,’ Fred commented.

‘Someone has to, old man.’

A text window popped up in Justin’s sensorium. Kit: Sergeants Beaumont and Odell are in a relationship?

Justin grinned and typed up a reply. Holt: You can tell from the bickering? Yes. They stay professional about it, so I don’t interfere. Shayla’s into older men.

Kit: A good policy under the circumstances. Not interfering, I mean. What kind of partner are you into, Justin?

Holt: Under the circumstances, anyone I can get.

Kit: Under the circumstances, that would also seem like a good policy. If I am reading this crowd correctly, they will stay peaceful tonight. However, I do not believe the situation will remain stable if anything new is added to the mix.

Holt: Well, we’ll just have to hope nothing new comes up. Given that they both knew there were more videos, that seemed like something of a forlorn hope.

Astraeus Station, Mars Orbit.

Christine Godfrey was a small woman, short and slim to the point of skinny which took away from a pretty face with dark eyes and mid-brown hair down to her shoulders. Glasses with quite thick lenses did not help her look, but from what Fox had heard, what was really exceptional about Godfrey was her brain. The woman was a genius at engineering with a passion for spaceships going back to her childhood.

‘Miss Meridian,’ Godfrey said as Fox entered Godfrey’s quarters, finding herself in a reasonably nice cabin, though not as nice as the visitor cabin Fox had been assigned. There was a hint of wariness about the engineer’s voice.

‘Fox,’ Fox said, smiling. ‘Call me Fox. Mariel Hoarsen asked me to pop in here and see how things were going. I think they figure, since I’m all the way out here anyway, I might as well check up on every MarTech employee on or near Mars.’

‘I do send reports back pretty regularly…’

‘Yeah, I’m sure you do. That’s about the technical stuff. Mariel’s more concerned that they shipped a bunch of MarTech Stellar employees out to the back end of human-occupied space. She wants to know her people are okay.’

Barely noticeable tension in Godfrey’s shoulders relaxed. ‘I, uh, knew you were up here investigating this missing antimatter… Well, I don’t really know what I was thinking. We don’t have access to that lab.’

‘I know. No, Mariel just asked me to come see you if I got a chance. Nothing serious, or even official.’

‘Checking up on the staff? You know, I’ve never met Miss Hoarsen, but I never thought she was the kind of person who thought of the little people at the bottom of the company. Would you like a drink?’

‘No, thank you, but go ahead if you do.’ Godfrey got to her feet and headed for a small cabinet at the side of the room. ‘It’s partially down to Jackson,’ Fox went on. ‘He’s always had a strong belief in making sure his people have what they need to do their job, and that includes a good working environment. Mariel is more about the bottom line than Jackson is, but she’s seen the results and can’t argue.’ Fox stopped as Godfrey turned around with a tumbler of liquid in her hand. The engineer’s eyes went wide.

‘You are Tara Meridian,’ Godfrey said as though this were a sudden revelation.

‘I certainly am.’

‘Of course you don’t drink! You were the first person to go through the Akh process!’

‘Guilty as charged. Actually, I do drink, but I don’t tend to deprive someone of something which has to be sent multiple millions of miles to be replaced if I can avoid it.’

The engineer actually giggled. If there had been any tension left in the room, it vanished with the sound. Godfrey more or less bounced across the room to sit beside Fox. ‘Nanotechnology is not my area of expertise,’ she said, ‘but Akh is a really amazing piece of engineering. Incredible. I won’t ask what it’s like, because you must get that every five minutes. It’s just a treat to meet you. And that is a really good cyberframe. I mean, until the name sank in, I had no idea you weren’t organic.’

Fox held her arm out. ‘Go ahead. I’m sure you want to.’

Godfrey was blushing as she reached out to run her fingers over Fox’s skin. ‘I’d heard about what they’d been able to achieve with Yliaster. You know they’re shipping one of those units up here to fit into Astraea?’

‘Aside from what gets out into the news media, I know next to nothing about the entire Astraeus Project,’ Fox replied.

‘Well, basically, Astraeus is a project to get feet on Titan, as well as a few other locations in the outer system. Eyes. Eyes and feet. The deep space observatory here is an important part of it. Right now they’re putting a lot of observation time into Pluto and Eris, but they’ll be pointing the telescopes at Saturn pretty soon. We’re still hoping to get Astraea ready for a flight to Titan in June. We can hold that until July, maybe even August, but we’re losing ground all the way at that point.’

‘And Astraea is the ship with the antimatter engines, right?’

Godfrey grinned a little sheepishly. ‘My babies. Uh, Astraea is two spacecraft. The whole thing is Astraea, but it’s built out of a primary vessel and a lander. The lander is what carries the crew and, obviously, is designed to actually make planetfall. They have two different kinds of engines, but both have antimatter fuel components. The engine on the lander is an older design. If you’ll accept the analogy with internal combustion engines, the lander’s engine is a muscle car: lots of thrust, lousy mileage. It’s got enough thrust to lift off from Titan’s surface. The engine on the primary ship is a family station wagon.’

‘Let me guess, incapable of breaking the speed limit, but it’ll take the entire family on a cruise across the continent on one tank of fuel.’

‘Pretty much,’ Godfrey said, grinning. ‘The fuel is kind of expensive. Well, one of the ingredients is. Mostly it’s just hydrogen. So, that family cruise is costly, but we’ve fuel to perform a constant acceleration path between Mars and Saturn. At closest point, that’s less than twelve weeks.’

‘It’s impressive,’ Fox agreed. ‘Of course, I’m kind of hoping they don’t want to put too many people on Titan.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. Palladium are bound to end up getting the policing contract, and then they’ll expect me to radio myself out there whenever anyone steals a wrench.’

Godfrey burst into giggles again. ‘Okay, I am going to ask what that’s like. You kind of teleported to Mars.’

Fox shrugged. ‘I went to sleep on Earth and woke up on Mars. It took about a day, so it’s not very fast as far as teleporters go, but it’s faster than a rocket.’

‘Much faster. I wouldn’t worry too much about Titan. There are plenty of things out there that could be commercial, but it’s going to take time to make it happen. Astraeus is as much an aspirational project as a practical one. There are going to be a lot of challenges to putting a permanent base out there, and we probably won’t know what some of them are until Astraea gets there. The Astraeus Project is kind of special. Mankind pulling together to get out into deep space. Gives you hope, you know?’

Fox flashed Godfrey a smile. ‘I’m a jaundiced cop, and not even a human any more. Hope in humanity is something I don’t have a lot of. But, I guess, there might be some here.’

Airborne over Isidis Planitia, Mars, Sol 86.

‘The commander isn’t exactly pleased about this,’ Lieutenant Caruso said.

‘I know,’ Fox replied, ‘but, quite frankly, she can kiss my cybernetic ass. She can handle Vela, and I’m not qualified to fly a shuttle. We need to find Deschamps, even if I think we’re too late.’ The Isis City team had come through, discovering that Deschamps had hired a long-range Mars rover which he had taken out two days earlier, and which was now not responding to any communications. It was also not showing up on the hire company’s tracking system, though Deschamps might have had the knowledge to disable that. The only thing they had to go on was that it had been heading east-northeast toward the Nepenthes Mensae. Fox was in the co-pilot’s seat of their shuttle, watching the sensor suite through three different virtual displays. ‘How far out from Isis City are we?’ They had been taking it fairly slowly, trying to make sure they missed nothing. If Deschamps had changed course, finding him was going to be next to impossible.

‘About two hundred and ninety kilometres. With a two-day head start, he could be most of the way to Elysium Mons by now, or well into Elysium Planitia. There are mining camps out there.’

‘Yeah, but I suspect he didn’t get that far. What’s that?’ Something had appeared on the radar, something with a higher radar-reflective quality than the surrounding regolith. ‘Maybe metallic. Might be it. You see it?’

‘I see it. Changing course.’ The shuttle swung to the left a few degrees, eating up the ground toward the anomaly.

‘It’s a rover,’ Fox said. ‘I have it on visual. It looks… It looks damaged. Set us down a good fifty metres from the thing. I don’t want the thrusters messing up the scene.’

‘You’re sure it’s his?’

‘The registration insignia match the vehicle Mister Deschamps hired,’ Kit said, appearing between them. ‘Fox, do you see the antenna unit on top of it?’

‘Uh, no,’ Fox replied.

‘Well, it had one when it left Isis City.’

Suited up, Fox and Caruso walked across the space between the shuttle and the rover, Fox scanning around as she went, looking for anything in the surrounding area which might give a clue to what had happened. Kit walked along beside them, a fox-girl in a white dress and high-heeled boots, wandering across the surface of Mars as though there was nothing to worry about. Well, as a virtual image, for her there was nothing to worry about.

‘Well, someone didn’t want this thing moving any further,’ Caruso commented.

Fox looked up from her contemplation of the ground and took in the rover. There was a stub of something mounted on the roof of the thing which might have once had a dish antenna mounted on it. The vehicle had eight large wheels, and those were now shredded. One of the doors had been torn open and was now lying in the dust. On top of that, there were a couple of holes torn into the hull around the driver’s compartment.

‘Those are not conventional weapon hits,’ Fox said.

‘Uh, no. Some of them look… carbonised?’

‘Mm. Kit, I want the visual data collected and sent to Jenner. They’ll probably know what did this. It looks kind of like…’ Fox shrugged. ‘No point in speculating at this point. Stay out here, Caruso. I’ll check out the interior.’

‘I can help–’

‘I don’t want you getting your great big size tens all over my crime scene. Stay here. And draw your weapon. I doubt whatever attacked this thing is still around, but we’d best be careful.’ So saying, Fox drew her pistol and started for the short ladder which led up to the busted hatch.

The hatch was the outer door of a small airlock. The inner door had had its hinges cut like the outer one. That would have required some sort of industrial cutting tool. Or maybe something else. She moved inside and found evidence that the vehicle had been searched. The cabin was a mess. All the cupboards and drawers were open and the contents strewn around the room. She would check, but she was quite sure they would not be finding the antimatter trap in the wreckage.

Jameson Deschamps was still in the driving seat. The fact he was in jeans and a T-shirt, and not even wearing shoes, suggested that he was dead, but Fox checked anyway. There was a hole in the hull just under the control console. It looked like whatever had caused it had continued through to put a charred hole in Deschamps. His jeans were burned away down one thigh and across his pelvis. The flesh beneath was a ragged, blackened mess. That might have killed him, but the much neater hole in his chest certainly had if he had still been alive.

‘Mister Deschamps will not be telling us anything,’ Kit noted.

‘No,’ Fox replied. ‘Get Shayla and her team out here to go over the scene. There’s something outside I want to take a proper look at.’

‘Anything?’ Caruso asked as Fox climbed back down the ladder.

‘We found Deschamps. What’s left of him.’ Flicking her vision to encompass more wavelengths, she looked around at the ground outside the trashed rover. ‘I didn’t do a thorough check, but someone else did. I kind of doubt we’re going to find the antimatter in there. I’ve got a forensics team coming out from Isis City to do a thorough job on the rover and Deschamps’ body.’

‘Uh, what are we going to do?’

‘Follow the tracks.’ Fox pointed at an entirely blank area of regolith in front of her.

Caruso frowned inside his helmet. Some of the expression was lost due to the cap, but enough got through. ‘I know you’re some kind of super-detective, but… I don’t see any tracks. Wait? There are no tracks, but someone had to go in or come out this way.’

Fox flashed him a grin. ‘You see no tracks, my dear Caruso, because you are looking for them with your eyes. But well observed.’

‘And what are you looking for them with?’

‘My eyes. My eyes can see in the infrared and ultraviolet, so I can see that the soil here has been disturbed. Someone dragged a brush or something behind them to obscure the tracks they did leave. We’re going to follow the disturbance and see where it leads.’ She set off, trudging along the path with the slightly skipping stride of someone trying to move quickly in low gravity.

Caruso was used to the higher gravity on Astraeus Station and was not quite so good at moving on the Martian surface, but he more or less kept pace. ‘You seem to have some idea who was here.’

‘I have an unsupported hypothesis. A guess.’

‘Care to share?’

‘Not until I have some evidence to support it.’

They walked on for almost two hundred metres, Fox coming to a stop on a flat, unremarkable area of Martian landscape, but now even Caruso could see why she had stopped. ‘Those are marks from the landing struts of a shuttle,’ he said. ‘Someone had a shuttle out here. They waited for Deschamps to get near enough, and then they hit him, took the trap, and left.’

‘That would be my reading of the evidence,’ Fox replied. She dropped to one knee, examining the ground at their feet.

Caruso looked down, frowned, and then joined her on his knees. ‘Is that a footprint?’ he asked.

‘Yup,’ Fox replied.

‘It, um, doesn’t look like any footprint I’ve ever seen before.’

‘Unfortunately, I have. It was made by a foot with three toes. That can only mean two things, Lieutenant Caruso, and I can guarantee that Commander Shriver is not going to like either of them.’

‘T-two things?’

‘Yes. Our two cases are linked, and the Martians have your antimatter.’

Isis City, Mars.

‘Martians? Are you insane?’

Fox had expected something like that from Shriver when she had called up to the station to explain the situation to her. ‘Yes,’ Fox replied, keeping the conversation internal since she was walking through Isis City from the shuttle port to Palladium’s offices. ‘I was insane to think you’d look at the evidence and come to a rational conclusion before asking questions about my sanity.’

‘There are no–’

‘I am not saying that there are actual ancient Martians wandering around. I’m still not willing to draw that conclusion myself. On the other hand, there are… humanoids with unusual morphology walking around down here. And, apparently, flying shuttles. They have three-toed feet and digitigrade legs, and we found tracks matching ones we found in Hellas Planitia.’

‘Men in costumes,’ Shriver stated flatly.

‘Maybe. If they are, then they’re very good costumes. I think they’re something else, but I don’t know what. And for want of a better name for them, at the moment we’re calling them Martians. When I get my hands on one, I’ll ask it what it calls itself. Look, you can either leave the search to me down here, or help. I’m not quite sure how you can help, but when I think of something, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, grilling Vela would seem a productive use of your time. Tell her Deschamps is dead. That might shake her up a little.’

‘Killed by aliens?’

‘She believes in little green men. Maybe telling her Martians killed him is a good idea. As of now, that’s what the evidence says.’

‘I’ll see what I can get out of her,’ Shriver said, and then the connection went dead. Rude, but Fox was at her destination and did not really care.

Justin was waiting for her in the operations room. That was a rather grand title for a room with a couple of workstations in it, along with two large screens, one for general use and the other currently showing a map of the Isidis Planitia area with a marker showing where Shayla and her team were working on the rover. The general-purpose screen was currently split between a bank of security camera displays and Kit’s avatar; Kit was ‘manning’ the operations room since it was normally unmanned.

‘Any idea how long Shayla’s going to be out of town?’ Justin asked as soon as Fox entered the room.

‘Good morning to you too, Justin,’ Fox replied. ‘Feeling better, I hope? She’ll be done when she’s done, but I doubt it’ll be more than a couple of hours.’

‘Sorry,’ Justin said in something of a grumbling tone. ‘Things are getting a little exciting.’

‘Someone has released the final video in the sequence on Earth,’ Kit said from the wall screen.

Fox’s jaw tightened. ‘The one with the shadow of the Martian behind him? Crap. Have we had another note from Roberts?’

‘Yes, Fox.’

‘Huh. Chase up Helen on who he is. Has that video made it onto MarsNet?’

‘Yes, a little over an hour ago. It is not yet widely distributed, but that is just a matter of time.’

‘I’m expecting trouble tonight,’ Justin said. ‘We had a few protests last night, but they stayed peaceful. I’m not sure we’ll have the same tonight, which is why we’re going to need everyone available to cool things down.’

Fox nodded. ‘You’ll have me too. Anything else I missed while I was away?’

‘The satellite survey of Hellas Planitia has been carried out,’ Kit said. ‘It turned up nothing unusual. If the bodies of the other scientists are buried there, they are well hidden. There is also no evidence of any cave system. They managed to get one of the radar survey satellites to run a pass over the region in subsurface analysis mode. It noticed nothing unusual.’

‘That said,’ Justin put in, ‘that area has been scanned with that kind of radar before. They’ve never seen anything.’

‘Which doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing there,’ Fox said, ‘but you’d think they’d notice a cavern system of that size.’

‘Unless the Martians used cloaking technology.’

Fox gave Justin a glower, and then she relented. ‘Not entirely impossible, I suppose. Something that made the thing reflect radio waves as though it was solid rock. Maybe. But then, why would they?’

‘No idea,’ Justin replied. ‘I hit the limit of my sci-fi knowledge. What’s new with you?’

‘I have a new corpse for Cherise to look at. It also seems like the case I was sent up there to look at is linked to this one.’ Fox gave Justin a sharp look. ‘This is confidential for right now. Don’t tell anyone else.’ She waited until he gave her a nod. ‘The people on Astraeus Station have lost ten micrograms of antimatter. It seems like the Martians now have that.’

Justin’s face paled. ‘Ten micrograms doesn’t sound like a lot.’

‘That depends on what they do with it. If they were to set it loose in Isis City, there probably wouldn’t be any survivors.’

‘Great. Why would they need antimatter?’

‘Not the question.’

‘No?’

Fox shook her head. ‘There are a couple of questions that spring to mind. The biggest is how four-billion-year-old Martians would even know there was antimatter on that station. Then there’s how they could arrange for a plot to steal the stuff which seems to have been going on since at least January when they weren’t even awake then. What could they want it for? Well, if we’re lucky, they need to start up their ancient cosmic power system to awaken the other Martians to rise up and destroy us.’

‘That’s if we’re lucky?’

‘Yeah. Otherwise they’re just going to kill everyone in Isis City.’

Part Three: The Spy Who Came In

Isis City, Isidis Planitia, Mars, Sol 86, Year 3.

‘You bring me interesting corpses, Fox,’ Doctor Ruggiero said.

‘That is not a compliment I aspire to, Cherise,’ Fox replied. ‘Have you any idea what killed him?’

‘Oh, I know precisely what killed him. He suffocated.’

‘But those wounds–’

‘Were non-fatal. There was quite enough evidence that he was alive by the time all the air had evacuated from his vehicle. I’m not saying he was conscious, but he was alive, and he died from lack of oxygen to the brain.’

‘Oh,’ Fox said. She was back in Ruggiero’s office to hear the results. The rest of the Palladium contingent were either grabbing sleep while they could or prepping for what might happen later. ‘That doesn’t sound very interesting. I mean, not for a death on Mars.’

‘Ah, but there are those wounds.’ The doctor grinned. ‘Non-fatal, yes, but these are deep-tissue burns. The only times I’ve ever seen something like them were industrial accidents. Laser and plasma cutters make wounds like that, though I’d suggest laser, given the small entry wound.’

Fox nodded slowly. ‘That makes sense. Someone else I contacted about them suggested a laser weapon.’

‘The only laser weapons I’m aware of on Mars are the electrolasers your people carry, and they don’t make a burn even remotely that bad.’

‘Well, there have been directed-energy weapons on vehicles for a while, but something small enough to fit on a tank would still have cut Deschamps in half. There are chemical lasers in use in the Army, mostly for sniping. You don’t see them in use much because they’re bulky and if you get a breach in the fuel tanks, it’s like taking a bath in acid. But again, larger wound. What you’d think of as man-portable laser weapons are under development by a couple of companies. I don’t know of one that’s ready to release a finished product, but prototypes certainly exist.’

‘Or the Martians might have ray guns.’

Fox nodded again, not even grinning at the suggestion. ‘Or the Martians might have ray guns. Yeah.’

~~~

‘Fox, you should see this.’ Kit’s avatar was looking distinctly worried, but she vanished from the screen in the operations room to be replaced by a channel logo.’

‘ICGN?’ Justin said. ‘Nothing useful is ever on–’

He cut off as a man appeared on a virtual set. The man was attractive and wearing the latest in designer suits. He had dark hair cut short and heavily styled, blue eyes, and a face which had seen a lot of cosmetic work. Around him hung what looked like blue Perspex panels, each of them with a video display in the centre. Fox suspected that he would be walking between the displays during whatever presentation he was planning to give; the angles of the panels obscured the detail a lot, except for the panel right beside him, which was showing the first of Jonathan Carter’s videos.

‘Martians,’ the man said and a banner appeared at the foot of the screen giving a name: Luther Fortune. ‘In the days before man sent machines to peer at the mysterious red world known as Mars, people thought this world had seas and forests. They thought Mars had to be an inhabited world. They wrote fanciful times of journeys to the Red Planet to meet green aliens or fall in love with beautiful princesses.’

‘Fortune’s an asshole,’ Justin stated flatly. ‘ICGN is the local gossip channel and Fortune is the most sensationalist reporter they have.’

‘Great,’ Fox commented.

‘We know there are no seas, no forests, and no princesses,’ Fortune went on. Despite looking a bit like a used car salesman, he seemed to have a talent for dramatic presentation. ‘Science has proven that Mars has been a dead world for millions of years. But long ago, when there were no humans around to look up at the night sky, it’s believed that Mars had an atmosphere not too different from Earth’s.’

‘Conjecture,’ Kit said, popping up beside Fox and more or less glaring at the screen.

‘That’s scientific fact,’ Fortune said, almost as if he had heard her.

‘No, it’s not,’ Kit retorted.

‘A fact which it seems we may have further proof of.’ Fortune indicated the video playing beside him. ‘Many of you will have seen this video made by the noted archaeologist Jonathan Carter.’ That had both Fox and Kit snorting in derision. ‘A scientific team working in Hellas Planitia, no doubt searching for evidence of the life which once filled Mars’s oceans, discovered what appears to be the remains of a Martian city.’

‘The man is an idiot,’ Kit stated as Fortune stepped back, the camera following as he moved to the next display.

‘He’s no idiot,’ Justin said. ‘He’s slime, but he’s intelligent slime.’

‘I beg to differ. You haven’t seen the rest of this… report.’

‘The details are clear,’ Fortune said, one hand indicating the new display which was cycling through a sequence of stills. The cycling made it pretty difficult to get a clear view of anything, but the images showed the cells, the corroded machines, and the ‘Martian writing.’ ‘Doctor Carter found what appeared to be an ancient city buried beneath Hellas Planitia. A city which no one in authority wants us to know about. Why?’

‘Jonathan Carter did not have a doctorate,’ Kit grumbled under her breath.

‘We can’t ask Doctor Carter, because he and the other members of his team are missing. The conspiracy theorists out there might be thinking that the authorities have spirited them away so they can’t talk, but new evidence has appeared which suggests another, far more horrific, possibility.’

‘Oh no,’ Fox said. ‘He hasn’t–’

‘He has,’ Kit said.

On screen, Fortune turned and stepped to one side, the camera swooping around to show a new, previously unseen, panel. The video running on it was Carter’s last one and, rather than Fortune speaking, it was Carter’s voice on the audio. ‘Everyone else is dead. They got in through McLain’s room. Somehow. We didn’t have time to figure out… Everyone’s dead and it’s my fault. We should never have disturbed them. If we’re lucky, they’ll return to their pods. If we’re not… Oh God!’ The video image froze on the silhouetted alien in the doorway and the look of horror on Carter’s face.

‘I still think that’s utterly hilarious,’ Fox said, ‘though I’m having a little trouble laughing at it right now.’

‘What is the creature seen here behind Doctor Carter? Do we have ancient Martians walking among us? The administration and Palladium Security Solutions, our supposed policing agency, have no comment on the matter. What is clear is that the Hellas Planitia archaeological team are missing and Palladium’s senior investigator, Tara Meridian, has been sent to Mars to investigate. Keep your eyes open and your weapons at the ready. ICGN and Luther Fortune will leave no stone unturned until the truth is brought fully into the light.’

‘Links to the report are exploding across LifeWeb,’ Kit said. ‘Reaction is mixed, but the general trend is, I would say, “worried.”’

‘Great,’ Justin said. ‘That’s just what we need to light the touchpaper.’

‘Yeah,’ Fox said. ‘I’m going to get changed.’

‘Into what? You’re already in uniform.’

‘Into something with shorter hair,’ Fox replied.

~~~

It began at around eight p.m. when some of the crowd gathered around the administrative complex decided to get physical with a couple of workers coming out of a staff entrance. Answers were demanded and the fact that the two people were janitorial supervisors was not taken as a valid excuse. Kit was watching the security cameras and directed Evelina’s team to the location, but they did not arrive before one of the janitors was beaten to the ground. Stun batons had to be employed and arrests were made. That, of course, just made things worse.

The communal area with its shopfronts and cafés started to clear of ‘non-combatants’ as the crowd of rowdy locals increased in density and volume. There was a lot of shouting and fist-waving as Fox marched in with Justin beside her and all of A and B squads behind her, but there had been shouting and waving fists there for a while, so it was nothing new.

There was also Lucifer Fortune and a camera team from ICGN. The reporter – Fox was not sure the title applied to the man, but it was what they had – looked far too pleased with himself. Fox watched him for several seconds, recording him for later. Yes, he was definitely far too pleased with the threat of violence his report was partially responsible for.

Watching him meant that she was not looking in the right direction when she heard glass shattering. She did see Fortune pump his fist in the air as his cameraman caught the action. She was linked into the TacNet the team were using and her perception rate was high enough to catch the imagery from Fred’s helmet camera, but she turned her head anyway to get a better view. Someone had thrown something through a café window and she could see a chair being hefted by someone else not far away. Flicking up a go notification on TacNet, she spoke anyway. ‘Do it.’

The sound of electrolasers firing was basically lost in the noise from the protestors, but the chair dropped suddenly as whoever was holding it fell to the floor, and the tone of the noise changed, shifting toward confusion as several of the more forward members of the crowd were dropped by electrical stun weapons.

Patched through to the public address system, Fox spoke, her voice ringing out over the sound of the crowd. ‘This is Captain Tara Meridian of Palladium Security Solutions. Citizens of Isis City have a right to free speech. They do not have a right to mass violence. Disperse immediately or we will be required to arrest all of you on charges of rioting.’ There was a collective rumble through the gathered populace: ‘riot’ was a big word in Isis City. Much like the enhanced penalties for rape, there were reasons why the people there had increased the penalties for certain crimes, riot, vandalism, and arson being among them. Crimes endangering the infrastructure of the city had the potential to cause mass fatalities in a city on an entirely inhospitable planet far from potential rescue. Basically, if they were convicted of rioting, they were looking at up to a decade in Cold Harbour and not being allowed back on Mars at the end of their time.

‘We want to know about the Martians,’ someone in the crowd yelled, their voice actually audible as the more general noise subsided. ‘We want to know whether we’re safe.’ There were rumbles of agreement from across the mass of people.

‘How many times have people claimed there are Martians out there?’ Fox asked, not waiting for any replies. ‘And how many times has it been a hoax? You’re letting yourselves be scared by some cheap horror vid tricks and a misleading, very inaccurate report from a hack with a multicast licence.’ Fortune was filming and was probably pretty unlikely to use that part of her speech. ‘As for your safety, that’s our job. We have bigger, nastier weapons than electrolasers if we need them. Now, go home before we have to break out any of the heavier weapons.’

The crowd began to bleed off at the edges, but then Fortune appeared, pushing a microphone into Fox’s face. Her combat body did not have flare protection on its vision and the bright light from the camera was the last straw as far as Fox was concerned. The second-to-last straw: Fortune’s appearance stalled the crowd.

‘Captain Meridian,’ Fortune said, not keeping the smile off his face, ‘why was Palladium’s most senior investigator sent here to handle this situation if it’s nothing but a hoax?’

‘Because that’s my job, Mister Fortune. I’m an infomorph. It takes me a day to get to Mars to provide investigative assistance instead of several weeks.’

‘For a hoax?’

‘There are still people missing. An entire science team has vanished. I think we’d all like to know what happened to them.’

Fortune did not seem to be the least bit intimidated by the fact that Fox’s voice was still ringing out across the concourse. He smiled. ‘The videos we’ve all seen suggest that this is more than just a hoax. Have you anything to say to calm the completely reasonable fears of the people of Isis City? Are they really safe in their beds tonight?’

‘No, I’ve said all I need to say to them, but I have some things to say to you. First of all, Mister Jonathan Carter has never had a doctorate and he’s a geologist, not an archaeologist. Second, there’s proof that the atmosphere had oxygen in it, but not that it ever used to be anything like Earth’s. Third, you never contacted Palladium for comment on your “report,” so of course we had no comment to give. Your report was riddled with inaccuracies any competent journalist would have got right, but I’m really more bothered by the inflammatory nature of your closing statements. So… Lucifer Fortune, I am arresting you for incitement to riot. You have the right to–’

‘You can’t do that!’ Fortune blustered. ‘Freedom of the press!’

‘That gives you the right to freedom of speech, sure. It doesn’t give you the right to suggest people bring guns to a political rally. As I was saying, you have the right to remain silent. I suggest you use it because every time you open your mouth, I just get more irritated.’

~~~

‘Yes, Mister Harrelson,’ Fox said to the telepresence image of a fit-looking man in his late thirties, ‘I am aware that Mister Fortune is a “much-loved celebrity,” though I think his falling viewership figures over the last six months may suggest that he won’t be soon enough. I do, however, have every right to arrest him and hold him until NAPA’s judicial wing have assessed the evidence and decided whether the case should be taken to trial. He’s staying right where he is for now.’

Garret Harrelson was the CEO of ICGN, the Isis City Gossip Network. The fact they had ‘gossip’ right there in the channel name was a pretty big indicator of how they felt about their purpose. They were muckrakers, but they were popular with Isis City’s citizens, or a reasonable majority of them. Fortune was their biggest, slimiest star reporter, but he had suffered something of a downturn in viewership over the last six Martian months as a couple of other reporters, some in his own company, had scooped him on some juicy stories. He had got careless and put out some reports which had turned out to be badly inaccurate, and the viewers had migrated. Still, Harrelson was there to bluster at Fox and get his star back in front of a camera.

‘You’ve no evidence to support this “incitement” charge. Our legal department has been over his report and has concluded that–’

‘Thing is,’ Fox interrupted, ‘your legal department isn’t deciding. His wording in the report was bad, and his behaviour at the riot provides further indication that he was speaking provocatively and hoping to get a violent reaction. He wanted a fully-fledged riot so he would have some great pictures to put behind his next report.’ She held up a hand. ‘That’s my reading. You’ll just have to hope Judicial think differently. Your legal department is free to submit their own arguments to the process. It’s all automated, Mister Harrelson. If the charges won’t stand, he’ll be out in twenty-four hours, at most. Obviously, if this is to go further, we’ll request that he’s banned from public multicasting.’

‘You won’t hear the end of this!’

‘I would love to tell you the number of times I’ve heard that before, but I lost track. Goodbye, Mister Harrelson.’ Fox cut the connection and emerged into the real world of the ops room.

‘You know,’ Justin said, ‘I’m not sure it’ll stand up under trial.’

‘Possibly not,’ Fox replied, ‘but I think we can keep him off the air until his trial comes up. I’m fairly sure we’ll get that trial. I’m also fairly sure that all the other channels are going to look at this and be very careful about what they say on streams about Martians.’

‘Isn’t that suppressing free speech?’ Nicholas Low asked. He was one of Fred Odell’s squad, fairly young and a bit righteous. ‘Everyone’s got a right to free speech.’

‘They do. Most of them only believe it applies to themselves and those they agree with. They tend to get pretty irate when someone uses free speech to disagree with them, but I agree that it’s a right. Rights come with responsibilities, which is another thing people forget. In this case, you’ve a responsibility to think about what you want to say and make sure it isn’t going to cause more harm than good. This is going to make sure everyone else makes that judgement.’

‘I guess that’s… good.’

‘If people thought about what they said a bit more before opening their mouths, the world would probably be a better place.’ Fox gave a sigh. ‘Well, we can but dream.’ She turned her attention back to Justin. ‘I doubt we’re going to see any more action tonight.’

Justin nodded. ‘Agreed. I guess we can stand down. But remember, people, we’re all on call-out status until this is really put to bed. Sleep lightly.’

Sol 87.

Liu Ling stepped down off the rover she had spent the last twelve hours on and started across the garage toward ‘immigration.’ She was in a pressure suit – Isis City did not pressurise their garages – which did little to disguise her figure. She had quite long, black hair which did not go well in a helmet and was quite keen to be inside and out of the suit, but first she had to get through security.

That was not going to be a problem because her credentials were impeccable. For a given value of impeccable anyway. They were the best the Ministry of State Security could manufacture and they worked well for an itinerant sex worker who spent most of her time in the mining towns outside of either of the two cities. Liu Ling had become An Hong in a mining town on Syrtis Major Planum the day before. She had got a little lucky in finding a group of miners who were planning a trip to Isis City, but there was usually someone heading that way and on Mars, being female was a form of universal currency. So, twelve hours later, An Hong sent her credentials to the airlock controls and was pleased when the outer door opened to allow her in.

Her fellow travellers, a four-man team of Americans, joined her in the airlock. They had to transmit their data to the system before the inner door would open, and that did not take much more time than pressurisation did. Liu was still unlocking her helmet and letting her hair out from under the inner cap before the door swung back.

It was about five thirty in the morning and there was no one on duty in the next area. Even when there was, incoming visitors and residents alike still got to deal with a machine which did the remaining checks. There were ten of them lined up as turnstile-like booths which barred the way into the city proper. Liu walked up to one, unlocking the seal on one of her gloves as she went. The machine wanted an unobscured view of her face and fingerprints to verify the biometrics in her electronic passport. She retransmitted her credentials, put her hand on the scanning plate, and waited. The process was usually pretty quick.

After fifteen seconds she asked, ‘Is there a problem?’

The flat, emotionless voice of a low-class AI answered immediately. ‘Additional checks have been ordered for incoming visitors, Miss Hong. There is no problem. You are cleared for entry.’

The barrier in front of Liu opened with a clunk and she walked through, heading for the elevators at the back of the hall. Extra checks, that was interesting. She had been tasked with uncovering what the MSS thought might be an attempt to get China off Mars. Information had been sparse, weak indications of a memetic campaign beginning which were thought to have originated in America. If the Americans were instituting additional checks on arrival at their Mars outpost, perhaps they were not to blame.

New York Metro, Earth.

Naomi Lind looked up and smiled as Senior Sister Colleen Payne entered her private apartments. She had a fair idea what the memetics specialist was there for: Sister Colleen had been running a little side project which Naomi had requested.

‘Sister Naomi,’ Colleen said as she walked over to her superior, ‘I’ve completed that analysis you asked for. I’m due in the brothel in a few minutes, so I thought I’d drop by and tell you personally. There’s a full report in your mailbox.’

‘Efficient and dedicated as always, Colleen,’ Naomi replied. ‘A summary, if you would.’

‘Of course.’ Colleen settled down on one of the sofas, opposite Naomi, and collected her thoughts. As with pretty much all of the Sisters, Colleen was attractive. She had Scottish ancestry which showed in her pale skin, flaming-red hair, and bright green eyes. Bright with intelligence: Colleen was one of the best memeticists the Sisters had. That speciality did not stop her doing her duty to the Church, however, which meant she did a shift in the chapter house’s brothel once a week. She had, in fact, commented on a rise in the numbers of clients seeking her out since M.J. had begun its run: redheaded Sisters were in fashion at the moment.

‘There is a memetic campaign at work. It’s dual-pronged. There are two primary memes being pushed. The first is fairly simple, suggesting that Martians are alive and well on Mars. The second rides its coat-tails, suggesting that humans should leave Mars alone and not terraform it. Both of the video releases are part of this campaign, and the initial dispersal seems to be aimed at American and Chinese networks.’

Naomi nodded. She had had suspicions, but the confirmation was appreciated and would come with a proper analysis rather than gut feeling. ‘No indication of the producer?’

‘Not one I know,’ Colleen replied. ‘There is a reasonable level of sophistication. I don’t believe this is someone working in their bedroom with a toolkit. Beyond that, it could have come from anywhere.’

‘Thank you, Colleen. Don’t let me keep you from your duties.’

Colleen grinned. ‘It’s not a duty, exactly. Working in the brothel is a break from the terminals.’

Smiling, Naomi nodded again. ‘Don’t let me keep you from your break then.’

Isis City, Mars.

‘The MarTech memetics department have also run an analysis,’ Kit said, ‘and confirm that the video releases appear to be part of a memetics campaign. The words they use to describe the payload are a little different, but it comes down to the same two ideas. They have also been unable to determine an origin but are continuing to look.’

‘Well,’ Fox said, ‘that makes it more likely that we are dealing with a hoax.’

‘It could just be opportunistic,’ Shayla commented. The data had come through when the Palladium personnel were contemplating heading to their quarters, around five thirty in the afternoon. There were no indications that another crowd was gathering, so it looked like arresting Fortune had been a good move. They had all decided to hang around and see what Kit had to say.

‘The video appears and someone jumps on the bandwagon?’

‘Yeah.’ The detective paused, her expression thoughtful. ‘I kind of doubt it, but it’s a possibility.’

‘The relative sophistication of the campaign suggests otherwise,’ Kit said. ‘Both Sister Colleen and MarTech’s people seem to be quite sure that the “leak” of the first video was part of the campaign rather than a trigger for it. That said, it can’t be entirely ruled out.’

‘Probably can, but… Well, it means someone’s been planning all this for a while.’

‘Sure does,’ Fox said. ‘And they’re willing to kill to keep the story going. Who knows what they’ll get up to before this is over.’

~~~

Nick Low knew that the stress of the last few days was getting to him when he ordered a second bottle of beer. He generally kept himself to one if he stopped off at a bar after work. His theory was that there were better things to do with money than drink it, though he occasionally allowed himself to get drunk when he was going to be off duty for a couple of days. Everyone was allowed to go nuts once in a while, right?

The riot had seriously jangled his nerves. It had all gone down just like they practised, sure, but the mob had been pretty angry, and he had had a stun gun. Captain Meridian had really come through. Nick had been a little dubious about arresting Lucifer Fortune, but she had been right: it had really poured cold water on the crowd. It seemed to still be keeping them down, for now, but there was still a chance things would blow up again. It was stressful, so another beer was allowed. Maybe even one more after that.

Someone sat down on the stool beside Nick and he glanced around. It was a woman he had never seen before. Well, he did not know every woman in Isis City, but he thought he would have recognised this one. She had fairly classical Chinese features: very dark, almond eyes, long black hair, and fairly pale skin. Her body, clad in a red cheongsam with roses printed onto the silk, looked good, shapely. Long legs were shown off by the slits in the side of her dress. She was wearing killer peep-toe platformed pumps. The whole package suggested that there was another form of stress relief he could hire instead of that third beer.

She smiled at him. ‘Hello, I am An.’ American accent, not Chinese. ‘You look a little tense. I thought I would sit beside you and maybe relieve some tension.’

‘Hi, An. I’m Nick, and I think that would be a really great idea.’

Sol 88.

A message flashed in Fox’s vision field as her eyes opened: Backup ended prematurely. Kit had woken her early for some reason, so what reason was that?

‘One of the surface atmosphere processors has been damaged,’ Kit said before Fox could ask. ‘The engineers on duty called Palladium when it appeared to be deliberate sabotage rather than a breakdown.’

‘Right. Has Justin been notified?’

‘He and Shayla’s team are already on their way.’

Fox unlocked the clamps on her maintenance cradle and reached back to disconnect the data cable. ‘I’d better get a move on then.’

~~~

The atmosphere processor was one of six which kept the city’s air supply balanced. The loss of one of them was not going to be a major problem, at least in the short term. Still, there were engineers in pressure suits – without helmets – waiting on one side of the bunker to get started on the repairs. They wanted the machine up and running, and they were not happy to have to wait. Well, it was about half past two in the morning and they had probably had their sleep interrupted too.

The atmosphere processor was, basically, a cleverly designed fridge. Part of the clever design was putting it on the surface, because the average temperature on Mars was cold enough to cause carbon dioxide to precipitate out of the air. That was at one atmosphere; in the barely-there atmosphere of Mars, the gas was a gas. So, they pressurised and heated the machine room. The partial pressures of all the gases were analysed in there and enough ‘raw air’ was fed off into the ‘cooling room’ to cool down to surface temperatures, still at one atmosphere. Carbon dioxide fell out as dry ice which was just dumped out of the building where it barely had an impact on the ninety-six percent of Mars’s atmosphere which was already carbon dioxide.

Occasionally, they had to get excess oxygen out of the system, and that needed some additional cooling. Oxygen became a liquid at about ninety kelvin, and that was achieved with a high-tech freezer after the air mix had already had the carbon dioxide stripped out. The freezer only needed to cool everything down another forty degrees. The liquid oxygen was stored, in case it was needed later; oxygen was a valuable commodity on a planet which had barely any in gaseous form.

It was all very fascinating. Or Kit thought it was and had told Fox all about it on the way into the concrete bunker the machinery was housed in. The reason for the pressure suits everyone, except Fox, was wearing became obvious fairly quickly: the room was in one atmosphere and it was warmer than outside, but it was still pretty cold in there. Fox also suspected there was a health and safety aspect. Her wandering around in jeans and one of her teddies was getting some funny looks. She was likely to get funnier ones later, but that could wait.

‘What’ve we got?’ she asked as she joined Justin and Shayla who were looking at a wrecked control panel.

‘Someone took a crowbar to the main gas analyser,’ Justin said.

‘I’ve got swarms crawling over it and the surrounding area,’ Shayla added. ‘It’s obviously deliberate damage.’

‘Yeah,’ Fox agreed. The front panel of the unit had been peeled back like someone had used a can opener on it. Wires were hanging around in ways suggesting that they should have been attached to something. Within the cabinet, various circuit boards had been smashed. ‘That doesn’t look like it can be repaired.’

‘They’ve got a spare unit,’ Justin replied. ‘They’ll swap the whole thing out when we’re done and then go through this to see if anything can be salvaged.’

‘Okay. How often can they do that?’

‘Not honestly sure, but I doubt it’s too many times.’

‘Right.’ Fox looked around the room. ‘So, there are security cameras in here.’

‘And they got nothing,’ Shayla said. ‘Bast already checked. Someone jammed them somehow. Or something. There’s no video for about ten minutes just before the failure was noticed.’

‘Mm.’ Fox frowned and looked back to where there was an airlock built into the side of the bunker. ‘I’m going to take a look outside.’

‘You’re not–’ Justin cut himself off when he remembered who he was talking to: Fox did not need a suit to walk around on Mars.

Fox smiled as she walked away. ‘Thank you for forgetting.’

The airlock did not get much use from what Fox could see. The recent dust storm had obliterated any footprints which had been there for longer than a few sols, which made the ones which were there stand out all the more.

‘Oh dear,’ Kit commented, appearing a couple of feet away to peer down at the indentations in the sand.

‘Yeah,’ Fox said. ‘Not trying to hide it this time.’

‘No. And I’m not entirely clear on what that means.’

‘Neither am I. We’re recording all this, right?’

‘Of course.’

What they were recording was four sets of tracks. The tracks were three-toed. Two sets walked in from the east and out the same way. Fox followed them for a few metres and found that the outgoing set widened markedly fairly fast, maybe three metres out. The Martians had started running and, from the stride distance, they could really run. The incoming set slowed to a walk about ten metres out; they had been more cautious on the way in. Fox looked out in the direction the tracks seemed to be coming from, but there was nothing to see aside from dusty, red-brown, flat landscape, even when she used the telescopic setting on her eyes.

‘I am not entirely sure how useful following those tracks would be,’ Fox said, briefly surprised when her voice did not really sound in her ears.

Kit, of course, sounded just like she always did. ‘It almost seems like an invitation to go looking for them.’

‘Yeah.’ This time, Fox stuck to internal communications. ‘So I’m not going there until I’ve run a proper sleep cycle. If then. And I’ll want to be in my combat frame if I go.’

‘That frame would find the conditions a little cold.’

‘So I wear a suit. Still another reason not to go, however. Somehow, I think that is just what they want and I feel like annoying them.’

~~~

Stealing the cop’s identity data had not been as hard as most people would like to think it was. Of course, Liu had access to software the general public did not. That was a good thing. Unscrupulous people with the ability to clone digital identities might do something illegal with them. Of course, that was exactly what Liu was planning to do with Low’s ID, but she was a responsible espionage agent.

She used a public terminal on the main communal area. Most people had implants, but there was still some call for public access units. Or maybe it was just one of those things they put in because they always had. The thing was set up to take wireless authentication, which would come from an implant. Americans could be weird. The terminal accepted Low’s ID and Liu tapped her way through various pages to get her to the Palladium public access system which requested further authentication to allow her through into the employees’ data access level. So far, so good.

It was when she located the report files on the Hellas Planitia science team that the system balked. A message popped up indicating that confidential files could not be accessed on a public terminal. Liu frowned. That had to mean someone had marked the files confidential, or even more secure than that. The problem was going to be finding a way of getting to the data.

That would have to wait. Dumping the session, Liu turned and walked smartly away from the terminal. When Zach Abel and the rest of C squad arrived two minutes later, there was no sign of her.

~~~

‘Okay, Nick,’ Fox said. Her voice was calm, almost pleasant. Kit was considering having paramedics ready. ‘Who is she?’

Nick Low’s cheeks coloured. ‘She said her name was An. I didn’t get a last name. She’s a hoo– Uh, she’s a registered sex worker. I was feeling wired last night. I had a couple of beers and she was there. I mean, that’s the only girl I can think of. Recently. It’s not like I do it a lot.’

‘I’m not bothered about you hiring a pro, Nick,’ Fox said, still far too calmly. ‘I’m dating the queen of the pros. I don’t pay for it, but it’d still be hypocritical of me to complain, especially here. What I want to know is how she got your ID.’

He held up his hands defensively. ‘I don’t know! Honest. We f– We had sex. Twice. I gave her what she’d asked for. Money. She left. Never seen her before. Haven’t seen her since.’

Fox turned away from him and looked at Justin, who was standing near the door of the office they were using to conduct their interrogation. ‘Now we’ve got a fucking spy in the city?’ The anger was starting to come out in her voice now.

Justin shrugged. ‘Maybe. What makes you so sure?’

Fox turned back to Nick. ‘You paid her by electronic transfer?’ She got a nod in reply and turned back to Justin. ‘Do you know how hard it is to clone a personal ID through a fund-transfer app?’

‘Uh, not really, but I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s hard.’

‘Hard is probably several orders of magnitude easier than what she managed to do. That needs better-than-military-grade software. It’s so illegal, most criminals wouldn’t touch it. You get caught with something like that in China or Russia, you’re dead. In America, NIX would quietly drop you in a pit on the Moon and not tell anyone where you were, or that you’d ever existed. And “An” is risking using it to find out about Hellas Planitia. She has to be MSS.’ Fox was musing now, almost talking to herself. ‘Are there any NIX agents up here?’

‘None we know of.’

Fox gave a grunt of displeasure. ‘We’ve got Martians sabotaging equipment here and a spy, maybe Chinese state security, trying to get into our computers. I don’t like that. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Nick, you’re going to give Kit a description of this An woman. Kit, you’re going to see what you can dig up about her. There have to be records.’

Kit appeared, nodding. ‘Of course, Fox. She could have already left the city.’

‘I’m guessing she hasn’t. The system blocked her once and you noticed and sent Zach’s team after her. If she’s determined to get the information she wants, then she’ll still be here, but she might be a bit more cautious.’

‘That will make her harder to track down.’

‘I know. Nick, give Kit the details and then get back to work.’

The young man blinked at her. ‘That’s it? I’m not in, um, trouble?’

‘That’s for Justin to say. I don’t think your average person should be expected to come out on top when there’s a spy after you, but Justin’s your boss. Anyway, I’m not going to make a decision. This entire mess has got me just a little pissed off. It’s better if I don’t have the opportunity to take it out on the staff.’

‘Great,’ Justin said. ‘What about my anger issues?’

Fox flashed him a tight grin. ‘One of the joys of upper management. I get to delegate. You get to be frustrated.’

~~~

There was nothing much to be seen in the atmosphere processing room. The techs had already replaced the damaged unit, carting it off for parts. There were no other signs of damage anywhere in the room. If what Liu had heard was correct, this had been a targeted attack. Someone had known exactly how to get around security in the place and which piece of equipment to trash to make the entire machine non-functional. It seemed like Isis City had a problem.

Liu had stolen ID from a technician to get around the security herself. She was also in a pressure suit with the helmet on so that the cameras would get nothing. How had the saboteurs managed it? There had been no arrests, so they had got around the cameras somehow.

She shook her head and headed for the airlock. Yes, she had stolen valid credentials to get in there, but she was sure she was being watched for. Someone had dispatched a Palladium team to the terminal she had used very quickly, and that person might well be watching her now. Thankfully, camera coverage outside was not as good and it would be easy enough to lose any pursuers on the surface. It was another reason she was wearing the suit.

Outside, she glanced down at the regolith and paused. There were various footprints in the dust. There were boot prints which, incongruously, did not appear to be from pressure-suit boots. And there were the other prints. Prints which seemed to have been made by three splayed toes a bit like a giant chicken. Maybe some sort of dinosaur. She frowned and started off across the dust. If the Americans were pulling some sort of masquerade, it was a pretty deep one.

~~~

‘I followed her tracks for about twenty minutes,’ Fox said, her tone sour. ‘She knows what she’s doing. Ended up in the landing area for the shuttles. Too much solid ground up there to figure out where she went, but I don’t think it was onto a shuttle and out of here.’

‘I tend to agree,’ Kit said. Her avatar pointed to the screen in the ops room and a picture appeared on it with some text beside it. The picture was of a black-eyed Chinese woman with black hair spiked up around her head. She was attractive with a hint of sharp rebellion in her hairstyle and her expression. ‘Mister Low confirmed that this is the woman he met, though she is wearing her hair differently. We produced a composite based on this image and his recollection of her.’

‘An Hong,’ Fox said, reading the data.

‘Miss Hong is a registered prostitute out of the Boston area, according to her biographical data. She spends much of her time out of Isis City, catering to the residents of mining towns. I have, as yet, been unable to detect any flaws in her records, but I have sent the details to Palladium HQ to have them run a check on Earth.’

‘Mm. If we’re getting nowhere, I’ll send a message to Candler in New York. If she’s an MSS operative, which seems likely, maybe NIX has her on record.’

‘Do we want to involve NIX?’ Justin asked.

‘Not if we can help it. Sometimes we can’t help it. I guess we’ll just have to hope that something comes up before we have to.’

Sol 89.

Fox did not open her eyes because she had no eyes to open. She was not entirely used to operating in the darkness of one of her backup servers. She did not do it that much. Either she awoke in a viron or one of her cyberframes. The small unit she used when she stayed with her parents and the one put in place to handle offline backups on Mars did not have the capacity to run a viron, so she woke up in what amounted to a sensory deprivation chamber. Kit had woken her early again.

‘Kit?’

Kit’s voice came out of nowhere, because there was nowhere for it to come out of. ‘Miss Hong is in your room.’ An image appeared in Fox’s sensorium, a live video feed from Fox’s room showing the Chinese spy sitting on the desk chair, apparently just waiting. ‘She is armed, but she has done nothing. I believe she wishes to talk.’ A pistol hung in Liu’s hand, a snub caseless automatic. It did seem to be there more as insurance than a threat.

‘Maybe,’ Fox replied, ‘but she’s armed.’ A thought pulled up the transfer control interface and Fox selected her combat frame before activating. There were a few seconds of discontinuity and then Fox was opening real eyes onto the real world. She unlatched the supports and reached behind her head to disconnect the data cable. ‘Want to explain what you’re doing here, Miss Hong?’ Fox asked. ‘I assume that’s not your real name, but it’s what we’ve got.’

Liu’s grip had tightened on her pistol, but it remained pointing more or less at the floor. ‘You know, that’s really creepy,’ she said. ‘Two bodies just standing there like they’re asleep. Or dead. What’s with the hair? Why are they different?’

Walking over to the wardrobe to get a teddy to wear, Fox brushed at her fringe. ‘This one was built before I decided on the new style. That one’s actually a try-out. I’m getting the one on Earth changed while I’m here. Though, I think I’ll keep the shorter hair on this model. It’s more likely to be wearing helmets.’

‘Oh?’

‘This is the combat frame.’ Fox flashed a grin at the spy. ‘That pistol’s going to do you no good at all.’

Liu made a sour face and pushed the weapon away under the short jacket she was wearing over some sort of one-piece, full-body suit which managed to cover everything yet was translucent enough to show more or less everything. ‘It was mostly to dissuade you from just attacking me anyway.’

‘Curiosity would have done that. You never answered my question.’

‘My employers think America is trying to force them off the planet with some sort of ridiculous memetic campaign. I was sent to find out what was going on, confirm responsibility.’

Fox finished pulling on her suit and smiled. ‘Your employers. Mm. You mean the MSS.’

‘My employers,’ Liu repeated, smiling back.

‘Fair enough. So, you came here and discovered that we’ve tightened our security. You couldn’t get into our computers far enough to get the details on our investigation. And you’ve been around to see that whoever started that campaign, they’re attacking us as well as… your employers.’

‘I saw the tracks outside the air plant. That’s either an amazingly elaborate hoax or there are real Martians out there.’

‘It’s a hoax,’ Fox stated flatly. ‘The memetic campaign proves that. However, there is something out there. I just don’t believe it’s Martians.’

Liu pursed her lips. ‘I wouldn’t be absolutely sure of that. I stopped off in one of the bigger mining towns on Syrtis Major Planum on the way here. There were a lot more Martian stories doing the rounds than usual.’

‘I’m not too surprised. This whole thing blew up on social media days ago.’

‘They’re not big on LifeWeb out there. Anyway, these were stories about local sightings. People seeing weird lights and shadowy figures outside town. I’m going to go report that America isn’t responsible for the campaign. You might be well served by taking a visit to Barnaby’s Seam.’

Fox raised an eyebrow. ‘Barnaby’s Seam.’

‘Some guy named Barnaby found a fairly rich seam of iron ore out there. It’s on the maps.’ Liu grinned. ‘It’s, uh, not exactly a genteel place.’

Fox gave a shrug. ‘I’m not exactly a genteel woman. You’re quite sure I’m just going to let you go, are you?’

‘Well, not absolutely sure. Do I have to get my gun–’

Kit’s avatar appeared beside Fox, the look on her face suggesting that something was wrong. ‘Fox, one of the surface airlocks has suffered a catastrophic failure.’

Liu held her hands up. ‘Not me. Not a distraction or something.’

‘Didn’t think it was,’ Fox replied, her brow furrowed. ‘Get out of here, Miss Hong. I need to change bodies and go look around a wrecked airlock. Unless you’ve got the same sort of problems over in Red Beijing, I think your employers have less to worry about than I do.’

~~~

Apparently, you could adjust the straps on the Tasker Crime Scene Assistance vests enough to strap one on over a pressure suit. There were a bunch of features not designed to work in a vacuum, or a near vacuum, but plenty of things did. Shayla was busy going over the airlock site with all the visual gear the vest had when Fox walked out in jeans, teddy, and a jacket to see the mess for herself.

Shayla flashed Fox a scowl through her visor. ‘Are you just doing that to rub in the fact you can?’

‘Um, partially,’ Fox admitted, transmitting her words to Shayla’s radio, because there was really not enough air to transmit the sound. ‘It’s also because I don’t like pressure suits that much. I’m honestly not an expert, but this doesn’t look like a normal blowout.’

‘I’m going to wait for the ballistic reconstruction to give a definite opinion, but I’d agree.’

The airlock was a standard example of its type. It was essentially a room capable of holding about eight people who had fairly liberal views on personal space. At each end there was a door with a little round window in it. There were a few controls: a panel beside each door which allowed the air to be cycled in or out and indicated whether the doors could be unlocked based on the air pressure in the room. Pretty standard.

Except that the outer door was lying in the dust about a metre away from where it should have been, and the inner door was only hanging on by one hinge. That was far from standard. Fox’s enhanced vision was indicating a few other things too.

‘I think I’m seeing indications of blast damage around that broken hinge,’ Fox said. She turned and trained her multispectral vision on the outer door. ‘Same on the outer door.’

‘Like I said,’ Shayla said, ‘I’m going to wait for the test results to come back rather than speculating on purely visible evidence.’ Fox looked at her. ‘Okay, so about the only way I can think of to get this kind of failure would be if someone rigged explosives to the structural points. I mean, it’s possible that the outer door failed somehow and the inner door couldn’t take the strain. It’s just that’s straining possibility to breaking point. This shouldn’t have happened. At least the interior bulkheads sealed before we lost too much air.’

Fox nodded. ‘That didn’t help the two maintenance guys who were up here when it happened. We’ll get Cherise to check cause of death, but I think they just asphyxiated before they could get to emergency masks.’

‘Not part of the plan then.’

‘No. Manslaughter instead of murder, but they’re dead anyway. Any tracks?’

‘I, uh, haven’t checked.’

Nodding, Fox walked out through the gap where the outer door was supposed to be. The outrushing atmosphere and the impact of the door had stirred up a fair amount of dust which was still settling twenty minutes after the blowout. She turned left and moved out about twenty metres. Then she walked an arc around the airlock door, her eyes on the ground. She found the three-toed prints heading straight out from the airlock and followed them a hundred metres or so out onto the plain.

‘I’ve matched this set of tracks against the set outside the air processor,’ Kit said, displaying a map in Fox’s sensorium. There were two lines drawn on it. ‘As you can see, they do not intersect. Assuming a straight-line course, obviously.’

‘Mm. Both head for the crater. Rockier ground out that way?’

Kit transposed a geological map over the topographic one. ‘I believe you are correct, yes.’

‘So, their actual destination could be more or less anywhere. They’re using the rocks to lose anyone tracking them.’

‘Which means they will perform another act of sabotage at some point.’

‘I think that’s a given, yes. Why aren’t we seeing them on the cameras? They must have been inside that airlock to plant explosives there. Why didn’t we see them?’

‘I have no answer to that currently, Fox. My copy on the Palladium servers is more than a little annoyed about it. What do you think we should do next?’

‘Like Shayla said, we’ll wait for the forensic results to come in. Then we’ll follow the evidence.’

~~~

‘Miss Hong left the city about forty-five minutes ago,’ Kit informed Fox as Fox walked back into the operations room.

‘Right,’ Fox replied. ‘Make sure that ID is flagged in the security databases. Maybe she was helpful this time, but there’s no sense in making things easy for the MSS.’

‘Already done.’

‘Great.’ Aloud, Fox said, ‘What do you have, Shayla?’

‘Pretty much what we thought,’ Shayla replied. Up on the wall screen, a video was cycling showing the way the airlock had decompressed. First the outer door was detached and blown outward by the air in the lock itself. Then the inner door twisted out of position and more gas was added to the outgoing stream. The timescale on the video suggested that the two events were less than a second apart, which seemed reasonable. However, for the outer door to go the way it had, both of the heavy hinges had to break free more or less simultaneously.

‘Chemical analysis came back,’ Shayla added. ‘Burn products consistent with the kind of explosives commonly used in mining detonators. That came from both exterior hinge mechanisms, and the main locking mechanism and one hinge on the interior door. Definitely sabotage.’

‘Mining explosives?’ Fox asked.

‘You can get mining explosives just about anywhere on this rock,’ Justin said. ‘Mining is kind of a big thing on Mars.’

‘Yeah, but I had a visit from a spy last night.’

‘You–’

Fox held up a hand. ‘She’s gone. I didn’t see any point in detaining her. She was here to find out why America was trying to use a Martian meme to scare China off the planet. She’s on her way back to tell her bosses that this isn’t us. Meanwhile, she came here via a place called Barnaby’s Seam.’

‘It’s a mining town up on Syrtis Major.’

‘So she said. She also said she’d heard some weird stories up there. Sightings of shadowy shapes and weird lights. And now we have mining explosives being used down here.’

Justin heaved a sigh. ‘We’re going out to Barnaby’s Seam?’

‘I am. You’re staying here.’ Fox could see the big man getting ready to argue. His back straightened and his brow furrowed. His lips parted, and she got in first. ‘This won’t be the end of the “accidents” around here. You need to stay here and manage security. Do what we sent you here to do. I’m going to do what they sent me here to do: find out what the Hell’s going on.’

Part Four: The Mines of Mars

Syrtis Major Planum, Mars, Sol 89, Year 3.

Fox had been expecting rough ground but Syrtis Major Planum was actually pretty smooth. She was driving in the dark now and not finding it very difficult. It was not quite like the flatness of Isidis Planitia below and to the east, but it was a fairly easy ride up into the hills. Or hill.

‘It’s a shield volcano,’ Kit explained after Fox remarked upon it. ‘It is younger than Isidis Planitia and largely composed of basaltic rock. It is also the first documented feature of the Martian surface, or any other planet aside from Earth. Huygens discovered and documented it in sixteen fifty-nine and used it to estimate Mars’s period of revolution.’

‘Still connected to MarsNet then?’ Fox observed.

‘The rover’s radio is quite capable of connecting to the satellites, yes. Originally, the area was thought to be a body of water, named the Hourglass Sea or the Kaiser Sea. Schiaparelli gave it the name Syrtis Major, which is the Roman name for the Gulf of Sidra. Isn’t history fascinating?’

Fox smirked. ‘Quite often it is. Is it just me or is there less dust around here?’

‘Well observed. The basalt and the relative lack of dust results in the dark colouration of the region. That makes it an obvious feature from space, or indeed from Earth through a relatively bad telescope.’ The fox-girl tossed a picture up showing the region from space. It was kind of obviously darker than the surrounding landscape. ‘To be honest, I find it difficult to see an hourglass in the imagery, but perhaps humans perceive it differently.’

Fox glanced at the picture, tilted her head to one side, then shifted her attention back to the landscape outside the rover. ‘If it is human perception, that’s one more tick in the “I’m not human” column.’ She checked her in-vision navigation display. ‘Should be at this town in another ten minutes. Can’t see anything.’

‘The town is entirely underground,’ Kit replied. ‘Barnaby’s Seam, population approximately two hundred and thirty of which nineteen are female.’ Fox grimaced at the disparity. ‘One of those is the only female mine manager on Mars, so go female empowerment. Sort of. Principal products are lithium produced from spodumene and jadeite which is mainly used to produce various “Martian jewellery” products. The famous iron seam was mined out last year.’

‘Jadeite is jade?’

‘Jade can actually be either of two minerals, jadeite or nephrite. However, yes, jadeite is jade. Lithium production is done locally for consumption on world and shipment to Earth. It has a number of uses, including electronics.’

‘And drugs. Depression and bipolar disorder.’

‘Are you accessing MarsNet too?’

‘No. That’s general experience, especially of people with psychiatric problems. Being a cop is such fun. So, does this town make much money off its lithium production?’

‘More than the jadeite, though the sale of jewellery to buyers on Earth and the odd tourist actually has a greater effect on the balance of payments for the planet. Both Isis City and Hóng Běijīng have some quite talented artisans producing jade jewellery.’

‘Isn’t economics fascinating?’

Kit smirked. ‘Not so much, but occasionally interesting. I believe you can see one of the entrance bunkers now.’

There was something paler than the natural rock visible ahead. It looked like a squat, concrete bunker. If there was an entrance, it was not facing the way they were driving in from. A slightly taller bunker was a hundred or so metres beyond it. Antennas sat atop that one, so it was probably there for communications. Both were more visible due to the lights mounted on them than their actual shape and Fox doubted daylight would make much difference to that.

‘Difficult to see how anyone could have a mysterious encounter with an alien out here,’ Fox said. ‘There’s not much more cover than down around Isis City.’

‘In the dark,’ Kit said. ‘Nights here are very dark.’

Fox began to turn the rover around the bunker. ‘Too true, but not here. Place is lit up like a Christmas tree. And there’s the entrance.’

The ‘bunker’ was basically there to stabilise the entrance to a big hole in the rock. The rover pitched down the steepest slope Fox had been on all day to drop down into a cavern which looked for all the world like an open parking lot on Earth, aside from it being about twenty metres under solid rock. There were rovers parked all around the place, not all of them well, just like a car park. Someone had actually taken the time to paint white lines on the basalt floor to demark the spaces. Fox edged her vehicle into one of the slots and got to her feet. There was less air outside than there was outside Isis City; she was going to have to at least pretend to wear a pressure suit to get to the town’s airlock.

Fox could see why Miss Hong, the MSS agent, had elected to use Barnaby’s Seam as a changeover point from her real identity to her cover: the place had no security at all. At this time of night, Fox was the only one using the airlock. It looked as though it could easily handle ten people in pressure suits, and it sort of looked like that was an optimistic use of space and money; it seemed unlikely that it needed that capacity when there were only a couple of hundred people in the town. Maybe for emergencies…

As you stepped out of the airlock, on the right there was a room with ranks of lockers in it. For a dollar, you could stow your suit away in a locked cabinet and change into conventional clothes. There were no changing rooms; you stripped down in the locker room, or you changed elsewhere in private and walked back to the locker room to put your suit away, which seemed like a big waste of time. Fox stripped down to her teddy in the locker room. There was no one else about to see her, but the setup said more about the gender balance in the place than anything and seemed like a recipe for disaster with so many sex-starved males wandering around. Dressed in one of her usual working outfits and with her pistol in its holster on the back of her belt, Fox set off to see what she could see of Barnaby’s Seam.

It was kind of what you expected if you mixed industrial cyberpunk, the wild west, and bad twentieth-century sci-fi. The ‘town’ was a series of caverns cut into the rock. Unfortunately, the rock was black rather than red, so that did not quite fit the image, but there were exposed pipes – occasionally, the pipes had steam spraying out of a weak joint, which was just perfect – and cable runs, and shop fronts built out of steel plates slotted into holes in the walls. There were several bars, though Fox wanted to call them saloons. The people were dressed in a random assortment of outfits, but heavyweight denim was popular. Fox spotted three of the town’s nineteen women, and their professions were advertised by the relative brevity of their outfits. One of them was wearing a mesh dress with just a thong under it along with platform pumps. The men of the town were something of a mix, but they all seemed to fit into the ‘rugged frontiersman’ mould. They were big, strong men who went out there and took the world by the throat so it would do as it was told. Until it killed them anyway. Some looked a little less like they dug minerals out of the ground than others. Generally, they were the cleaner ones. Fox figured they managed other men who dug things out of the ground. Mars, it seemed, was the last great holdout for men who thought women should be kept barefoot and pregnant. Or, at least, such a man would feel right at home here.

‘We’re going to need somewhere to stay,’ Fox noted silently. ‘It’s going to take more than a night to get anything useful in this place.’

‘There is a local wireless network,’ Kit replied. Fox had actually already noted that. ‘There are a couple of short-term residency businesses. I hesitate to use the word “hotel” in connection to them.’

‘Hostels, maybe?’

‘Perhaps a better description. We can get a cubicle in one of them quite easily. Occupancy is currently only thirty-two percent. There is also a local multicast channel, BSC.’

‘Barnaby’s Seam Channel?’

‘Apparently. I’m scanning their catch-up streams now for anything on the rumours Miss Hong spoke about.’

‘Good call. I guess I’ll walk into a bar and start listening for the live versions.’

‘And hope there aren’t too many requests for paid companionship?’

Fox sighed as she pushed open a pair of saloon-style swinging doors and stepped into a pit of a room with a bar at one end. ‘I’m not that much of an optimist.’

~~~

It was after midnight, but not yet the next day. Things like that could seriously upset your view of the world. Since Mars and Earth had almost the same period of rotation, the clocks just kept ticking for a while longer until the next day. Instead of going to hour zero after hour twenty-three, they clicked over to twenty-four. And then hour twenty-four only lasted for thirty-seven and a half minutes. Fox figured that she could have got used to that if she were still human. For most people on Mars, it meant they always got a forty-minute lie-in.

Certainly, the population of the various bars had thinned out. Most of the populace of Barnaby’s Seam were miners and they worked shifts. Even if they did not really look like respectable people, they seemed to keep respectable time: in bed before midnight when they had an early shift. Fox was considering tracking down a bed and coming back in the morning; it was possible that people on the night shift might go outside the town more, having daylight to do it in at this time of year.

Kit was having more luck with BSC. There were a number of reports of strange lights seen at night, a couple of reports of shadowy figures seen in the mine tunnels, and a lot of speculation about what it could all mean. The majority of that speculation was fanciful, but people were starting to link it all in to what had happened in Hellas Planitia and what was happening in Isis City. Fox had decided to review whatever there was when she had somewhere to lie down. Frankly, she wanted all her attention on her surroundings while she spent time trawling bars.

Still, she missed the arrival of a woman beside her until that woman spoke. ‘A new face. We don’t get that many in Barnaby’s Seam.’ Fox turned to see a woman maybe five-nine with a face and figure to die for. Dusky skin, full lips, and sparkling blue eyes. Honey-blonde hair was partially hidden by the wimple she was wearing, and the uniform skirt showed off toweringly long legs. ‘Women, I mean,’ the Sister went on. ‘Are you here to work or just visiting?’

Fox flashed a grin. ‘No licence.’

‘That wouldn’t make a lot of difference here. This isn’t Isis City. I’m going to take that as visiting then. Shame. Another girl on the block would take the pressure off.’ The unconventional nun stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Sister Antonia.’

Fox took the offered hand. ‘I’m, uh, Sister Protector Tara, but you can call me Fox.’

Antonia’s eyes widened. She had gorgeous eyes, quite wide with just a hint of an angle to them. ‘You’re… I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you. The hair. You changed your hair.’

Fox grinned. ‘I didn’t really expect you to recognise me.’

‘Oh, but I do get dispatches out here in the backend of beyond. I saw the ceremony on vid, and connecting names and faces is a useful skill in the profession. What you did for the Church was a big deal. What are you doing on Mars? More specifically, what are you doing in this pit?’

‘Looking into some stories I’ve heard about mysterious lights and half-seen figures. Have you heard anything?’

Antonia’s full lips shifted into a smirk. ‘In my line of work, I hear lots of things. Recently, I’ve heard a few stories you might be interested in. Um, you’re staying the night? It’s late, so I figure you are. Got somewhere to stay?’

‘Not yet. Can you recommend–’

‘Oh, never mind that. You’re a Sister. You’ll stay with me. I was just about to head home anyway. You ready to leave?’

Leaving her glass of vaguely unpleasant beer on the bar, Fox got to her feet. ‘Lead on, Sister Antonia.’

Barnaby’s Seam, Sol 90.

‘So, what’s a girl from the MCD doing wearing that outfit on Mars?’ Fox asked. They were sitting in Antonia’s apartment drinking wine, and the situation did seem a little odd. The Manhattan Conservation District contained many of the richest homes in New York Metro. Not everyone who lived there was stupid rich, but very few lived there who were not very comfortably well-off. Antonia kind of looked like a woman who had had to unlearn manners in order to fit into her profession rather than gain them.

‘I’d love to spin a story of teenage rebellion taken too far,’ Antonia replied, ‘but it’s my mother’s fault. She was in the business before she married Poppa. Didn’t hide it. When I said I wanted to follow in her footsteps, she made me wait to be sure and then arranged for me to train with the Church. So, I had my licence and a wimple by twenty. Didn’t go in intending to join, but Sister Naomi… There’s just something about the way she talks.’

‘I’m aware of Sister Naomi’s charisma,’ Fox said.

Antonia’s lips curled into a knowing sort of smile. ‘So, that rumour was true. Anyway, I did two years in the brothel in New York, four in Luna City, and then I came out here. The Church paid my way, along with a couple of other Sisters. Trained us in a few non-sex skills we’d need before we went. We… monitor things. The gender imbalance on Mars is a little extreme, especially outside the cities.’

‘I’d noticed.’

‘Plus, especially outside the cities, law enforcement is a little hit-or-miss. So, I keep an eye on things here and in a couple of other towns. If it seems like someone’s in trouble, or causing trouble, then I call in help from Isis City or Hóng Běijīng.’ Antonia smiled. ‘It’s not a Sister’s place to judge, but we are allowed to use our judgement.’

Fox grinned. ‘Nice. I like that. So, weird stories?’

‘Have been on the rise, yes. Usually, people prefer to be inside before dark around here. It’s safer. But they also won’t stop if they think they might’ve found something worth claiming, or think they might be about to find something, or haven’t found anything in too long… So they often come in late. A couple of people have seen lights north of here. Well, a little east of north, but whatever, there’s nothing out that way you’d expect to see lights on. South, sure. There’s a couple of big mining concerns with places out by Nili.’

‘Nili?’

Kit obviously figured revealing herself under the circumstances would be fine – and she was right – because she appeared beside the sofa the two women were sitting on. ‘Nili Patera,’ she said. ‘It is a caldera south of here, one of several in the region, but the principal named one.’ She smiled at Antonia. ‘Good evening, Sister Antonia. I am Kit, Fox’s PA.’

‘PA,’ Fox said, ‘assistant detective, data bunny, and source of all knowledge.’

‘And insanely cute,’ Antonia said, smiling. ‘Also right about Nili. Anyway, shuttles go in and out up there. Not often, but often enough. North of here? No. But people have seen things. Lights going down or coming up as far as I’ve heard. No one’s suggested they’ve seen anything more than that. Out of town. In town, there have been a couple of stories about people seeing… shapes in the mine tunnels.’

Fox gave a little facial shrug. ‘Shapes? Anything more detailed than that?’

‘Varies with the teller. Tall and slim. Really tall. Improbably tall, but there’s probably some exaggeration. Colours vary from green to purple, but most say they didn’t see it well enough to know. A couple have said it had long limbs, long fingers.’

‘Any physical evidence? Tracks?’

Antonia shook her head. ‘Not that I’ve ever heard of. They’re ghost stories.’ She paused, peering at Fox for a second. ‘Unless you’re telling me they’re not.’

‘Might be. Might not be. I’m trying to hunt down something which seems to be out there, and what we do know about it would suggest tall, thin, and long-limbed.’

‘I would suggest that some of the stories are made up,’ Kit said, ‘or they are simple tricks of light. When humans hear creepy stories, they start seeing monsters around every corner. Most will then dismiss the idea as silly, but not all.’

‘It’s a point. Have there been any accidents around here, Antonia?’

‘There are always accidents around here, Fox,’ Antonia replied. ‘Health and safety is not always given the highest priority.’

‘Okay. More accidents then. Anything you’d describe as unusual?’

Antonia pursed her lips and frowned at a spot on the ceiling for a second or two. ‘No… Nothing I can think of, but…’

‘But?’

‘A couple of people haven’t been in town for a while. Prospectors move around a lot, don’t always settle in one town. But a couple of people I was expecting to see in the last few days haven’t been back.’

‘That might be something.’

‘You think they might be dead?’

Fox’s brow furrowed a little. ‘It’s a possibility. Lights to the north, remember?’

‘Oh. I can give you a few names, people who’ve seen things. I’m afraid witness credibility might not be too strong…’

‘I’ll make allowances.’

‘Good. Now, I only have one bed. I got a memo about what happened to you, so I know you’re… not a conventional human.’

‘I need four hours’ downtime to run a memory reconciliation process. I can do that sitting right here. I could “sleep” on a pile of rocks, to be honest.’

‘Up to you,’ Antonia replied, getting to her feet. She had already lost her wimple and taken off her pumps, and now she began to remove the rest of her outfit. ‘I won’t mind either way and, um, I obviously don’t charge Sisters. If you’re interested.’

Fox watched as Antonia’s well-shaped, substantial breasts came into view. More into view; the tunic did not exactly hide them. ‘I’ll think about that,’ Fox replied.

Isis City, Mars.

Kit observed the wreckage through the eyes of a telepresence drone which hovered in the elevator shaft on almost silent ducted-fan engines. She had never employed such a device on Earth; the drones were used more on Mars because the low gravity allowed them to be smaller and quieter. That was all very nice, but what she was looking at was far from pleasant.

At eight a.m., one of the elevator cars near the top of the city had, instead of opening its doors for its eight passengers, dropped all the way to the very bottom of its shaft. What had saved most of the occupants was Mars; falling fifty metres in a metal box on Earth was potentially survivable, if you got lucky, but Mars had lower gravity. One passenger had managed to climb out of the car under their own power. He had been taken to hospital but was not badly injured. Of the rest, five were listed as being in serious condition, and two had been taken out in body bags.

‘I don’t get it,’ an engineer was saying to Shayla. ‘Cables broke. Okay. Shouldn’t have broken because we checked the cables ten sols ago and they were fine, but even if we missed something, the brakes should’ve engaged after no more than twenty metres.’

‘Mm,’ Shayla said. She was wearing a forensics vest and was obviously examining the broken cable ends using it. Kit tapped the feeds and saw what Shayla was seeing. She was no forensic expert, but she rapidly came to the same conclusion that Shayla clearly had. ‘Didn’t break,’ the detective said. ‘Or, part of it broke, the rest was cut.’

‘Cut?’ the engineer asked, his eyes widening. ‘Then the safety brakes–’

‘Were probably disabled somehow. We’ll check, but if you’re blaming yourself for not spotting a problem, stop.’

‘Yeah, but how did anyone get in here to do it. They had to be standing on the roof of the car to cut that cable there. The only way to do that would be to go through the car, and they’re all monitored. Uh, or force the doors above the car, but that would raise an alert. This is like the air plant, right? This is more like the air plant?’

‘Probably,’ Shayla agreed. ‘We’d appreciate it if we could keep any hysteria to a minimum. We’re looking into this and we’ll stop them.’

But to stop them, they had to find them. Kit lifted her drone to fly it out of the doors above the crash site. She needed to think. It should have been impossible for the Martians, or anyone else, to pull off this trick with the elevator. They should have been caught on camera somewhere in the city, but there had been no indications of anything wrong from the security AIs. Kit recalled Max Snowbull, a hacker who had taken control of the security system at a Tokyo entertainment venue to allow Fox to be kidnapped. That hack had not been spotted until after the event, and it had been Vali who had spotted it. Kit’s mysterious boyfriend was not available this far from Earth, so Kit would have to do the job. She was no security expert, but she was damn well going to find out what was going on here.

Barnaby’s Seam, Syrtis Major Planum, Mars.

The mining town was a miserable sort of place. It had a weirdly temporary feel despite the obvious attempts to make it permanent. The corridors were, more often than not, bare rock with metal arches providing a degree of structural support every five metres or so. The place had a fusion reactor to provide power, but Antonia had said that it had been bought second-hand from someone who had stripped down a spaceship. There was redundant air conditioning, but that had come from five different dismantled spaceships and shuttles. The engineers who kept everything running were among Antonia’s best clients: they had money and a strong need for stress relief.

The town was… scruffy. A lot of the people who lived in it were scruffy too. Everything had a shabby quality even though it could not have been that old. There was not much rust on the metalwork because the atmosphere was too dry, but it still managed to look like the paint had been slapped on over a rust layer. There was little sign that anything got repainted after its initial installation, and the majority of the populace were wearing clothes which had been around for a while. Fox had a tendency to recycle things on a regular basis, keeping what she wore fairly fresh even if she had the same patterns reconstructed. It was a policy enacted by quite a lot of people on Earth. Here, no one had money for recycling and replacement, or chose not to spend what they had on that.

Trawling through bars for the people with stories Antonia had mentioned, or anyone else fitting the bill, had given Fox plenty of time to observe the town and its denizens. She had not learned much, but she had managed to confirm the impressions Antonia had given her and isolate some locations where the lights and figures had been seen. That was useful.

‘One interesting point about the locations where the figures were seen,’ Kit said while Fox finished a glass of not-totally-dreadful beer, ‘is that they are all within twenty metres of the explosives stores for those mines.’

‘That is interesting,’ Fox replied. ‘Just at this moment, I think I’m more interested in the three guys who’ve been watching me for the last twenty minutes.’

‘They appear to be fairly typical members of the mining community,’ Kit said. ‘Perhaps they are just interested in paid companionship.’

‘Thank you for that image, Kit. Now it’s going to take hours to shift it.’

‘I live to serve. You don’t think that’s what they want?’

‘No.’ Lifting her glass, Fox sank the rest of her beer and got up from her stool. ‘Let’s go for a walk and see if they’d like to tell me what they are after.’

Fox pretended not to notice the trio as they followed her out far too close. It was eight in the evening and there were plenty of people about, so nothing was going to happen until she moved somewhere less populated. It gave her a chance to observe, and what she observed was that none of the three were exceptionally bright. There was one she took to be the leader since he moved a little in front of the others. Not very tall, but he did have fairly good upper-body musculature. Thinner legs inside of ratty jeans with more than a couple of holes in them. His head was shaved, but that seemed to be a theme; one of the trio had more of a flattened mohawk, but none of them had a lot of hair. The other two were more heavily built than the leader. They all wore what you would probably describe as duster coats, and Fox was fairly sure they had weapons hidden away in them. Well, Fox had a weapon too.

She headed in the general direction of Antonia’s place. There was probably not much else she could achieve in town anyway, and the foot traffic would thin as she entered the more residential areas. Isis City was quite vertical, but Barnaby’s Seam had gone for spreading out rather than down. Nothing much was level, so it did go up and down, but the general flow was horizontal drilling into the basalt. Fox found herself a tunnel/corridor which seemed to be empty of bystanders and turned around to face her followers.

‘Evening, boys. Is there something I can do for you, or are you just enjoying the view?’

One of the men, the one with the mohawk, looked a little confused, but the leader just grinned. ‘Little bird told us you’re a robot,’ the leader said. ‘We don’t like robots.’

Fox stared at him for a second. ‘Oh, Luddites. I’ve heard of you. You smash up machines with AIs in them, right?’

The leader pulled a crowbar from inside his coat. ‘Right.’

Fox pressed her lips together, added a little shake of her head. ‘Bit of a cowardly thing to do, don’t you think?’

That made the leader look confused, even if the grin stayed in place, just with a little more stiffness to it. ‘What?’

‘Well, see, an AI is programmed to obey the law. It has to consider a number of factors when responding to violence. The cyberframe it’s in has a value, so it’ll attempt to escape. They all try to escape, right?’

‘Yeah, of course they–’

‘That’s because they have a duty to protect their frame. But if you give them nowhere to run, they don’t fight, do they? You see, they know they can just be restored into another frame from their last backup. Humans can’t just be rebooted, so they won’t risk damaging a human. I’d imagine you know that, right?’

The leader’s grin broadened again. ‘Yeah, I know that.’ He took a step toward Fox.

‘Do you see me running away?’

‘What?’

‘You say that a lot. Makes you sound like an idiot. I’m not running, am I? I have a clear corridor behind me, but I’m not running. That’s because I’m not an AI. I am a digitised human. There’s a significant difference.’

‘You’re still a robot. We scrap you, it’s just property damage.’

‘Sounds good to me. When I scrap you, it’ll just be an industrial accident. See, I’m not an AI, so I don’t have the programming. What I am is a trained special ops soldier in a hardened cyberframe which I have no intention of allowing you to damage. This is your warning. Raise that weapon and I’ll break your arm. First.’

‘Yeah, right.’ He took a step in, swinging his makeshift club up and back, lining it up for a solid blow to the head. Amateurs always telegraphed their intention far too clearly, even without Fox’s accelerated perceptions. She stepped in – closing the distance and making his attack more or less useless – and snapped her fist into his face. It was barely a tap, but it seemed like the surprise was enough: the bar fell from his hand and he fell backward onto the basalt floor. Then, since she had warned him, Fox lifted her right leg and brought her booted foot down on his elbow joint. He let out a shriek of pain as bones cracked and twisted, and Fox turned to face the other two.

She smiled. ‘Well?’

The two men looked at each other, and then they turned and bolted back the way they had come. Fox gave a nod and then looked down at her victim. She kicked the crowbar away as he started to reach for it, grabbed his unbroken arm, and twisted it.

He let out another cry of pain. ‘Bitch! You’re not supposed to–’

‘I told you, I’m not an AI. And just about no one here should know I’m not human, but you do.’ She applied just a little more pressure to the arm. He gritted his teeth and glared at her. ‘If you want the use of the one arm you’ve still got, I suggest you tell me who put you up to this.’

~~~

‘No one is going to bitch about a Luddite with a broken arm,’ Antonia said as she busied herself preparing an evening meal. ‘They’re a nuisance. They’re right, of course. AIs in cyberframes are going to take jobs from humans. Frequently, those jobs will be ones humans can’t do safely anyway, but they’re jobs lost. Equally, breaking frames is not going to stop the losses.’

‘Nope,’ Fox agreed. She was sitting on a stool in the corner of Antonia’s small kitchen, watching the nun. This was partially because the very attractive Sister Antonia had discarded her uniform in favour of a frilly sort of apron. And nothing else.

‘In some cases, companies have actually dispensed with all their human employees in some areas because there’s less risk of damage to their equipment that way.’

‘Huh. Well, things might change a little when the new regulations come through. Not that this place technically operates under American law.’

‘They have to at least pay lip service if they want to ship anything out through Isis City,’ Antonia said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?’

‘I might steal a bite because that smells gorgeous. I don’t need food and you’re doing enough for me as it is. There’s no point in you feeding me.’

‘Okay, fair enough. Anyway, there has to be some sort of law here, and it’s close enough to Isis City that American law is what’s followed. Closer to Acidalia Planitia, you tend to get Chinese law. It’s really the mountain region south of Olympus Mons where you get lawlessness. Even there, they tend to work on a watered-down version of American or Chinese law.’

‘Sooner or later, someone’s going to decide it needs to be better codified,’ Fox said.

‘I have absolutely no doubt, but right now, the population of the entire planet isn’t enough to fill an American city. Plus, no one down on Earth cares enough to do anything about it.’

Fox gave a small shrug. ‘If anyone down on Earth, in America anyway, cared much about policing and security, I’d probably still be a NAPA detective.’

‘Well, I suppose that may be true. Any plans for this evening?’

‘I’ve trawled enough bars. Kit’s worked out a likely area to search for the source of those mysterious lights. Tomorrow, I’ll be out of your hair. I’ll take a look around north of here, then I’ll head back to Isis City. Apparently, the “accidents” are still happening. Do you have plans for tonight?’

‘Mm, yes. In case my outfit hasn’t given it away, I plan to seduce you.’

Fox half-frowned, half-smiled. ‘I’m not sure it’s a seduction if you tell me you’re doing it.’

Antonia shrugged, her breasts jiggling under the bib of her apron. ‘I’m sure you would’ve worked it out quickly enough.’

Isis City, Mars.

‘It’s more subtle, boss,’ Shayla said, ‘but it’s got to be sabotage.’

Justin looked up at a hulking machine in one of the surface bunkers and decided he would need to take her word for it. The thing was part of the water treatment system. It was vital in a city which had to import all of its water one way or another. They had to recycle what was used and a malfunction could poison the entire population. ‘Not that I’ll understand, but run it by me.’

‘Basically, all of the microporous filters have been swapped out. They’re designed to trap microbes. They start off fairly large gauge, to stop parasites and particulates, and work their way down to things that’ll stop viruses. There’s a triple-redundancy system because the filters have to be taken out and cleaned periodically. The filters are replaced on a cyclic basis. In both cases, the system always has two filter streams available in case one fails somehow.’

‘Someone has swapped out all of the filters in all of the streams.’

‘Yup. Quality checking noticed unusual levels of impurities and closed down the entire system. If it hadn’t, we could be getting all sorts of contaminants in the water supply. Techs are going to be working all night to get the filters replaced and the system flushed. There’s enough water stored to cope overnight. We should be fine. They’re checking the tanks for contamination too.’

Justin nodded. ‘They’re escalating. Whoever they are, they’re escalating. Two attacks in one day, and this one could have been really bad.’

‘Well, yeah, but why didn’t they disable the quality control while they were at it. That kicked in and prevented a major problem. Now it’s an annoyance. The elevator thing actually killed people.’

‘No idea. I’m not even sure why this is happening at all. Hopefully, Fox will have some ideas when she gets back.’

Syrtis Major Planum, Sol 91.

‘Why’s it a planum and not a planitia?’ Fox asked as she drove – slowly – across the surface of Syrtis Major Planum.

‘Planitia is used for low plains,’ Kit replied. ‘Both derive from Latin. I’m not honestly sure I understand the difference in the original language. I don’t happen to have a Latin language pack available.’

‘Huh. Well, both are flat, even if this is technically sloped. Navigating on this rock would be a nightmare without MarsNet.’

‘There are some noticeable landmarks in some areas. Not in this area, perhaps, but there are some.’

‘I guess there’s craters,’ Fox allowed. ‘Assuming you can figure out which one’s which. And I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere without looking at the craters.’

Kit’s avatar pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘If the lights people have seen are the shuttle they appear to be using, they would want to hide it. A crater would seem the logical place to do that.’

‘Totally agreed, but there’s another reason.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. The only place the dust up here settles is in drifts in the craters or in the shadow of crater walls. About the only chance we’ve got of seeing evidence of them being here is in or around the craters.’

~~~

The crater they found their evidence in did not have a lot of dust in it, but it did have a short-range rover sitting in the open – dark, silent, and pretty ominous. The dust layer was so thin there that Fox did not even bother with her suit as she went out to take a look. The air was still, as only the air on a world with barely any atmospheric pressure could be.

‘Even though it’s daylight,’ Kit said, ‘it’s spooky.’

‘I suppose it is,’ Fox replied. She climbed the short ladder on the side of the rover and hit the button to open the airlock. The door levered open. ‘Not locked.’

‘Ominous. And spooky.’

Not replying, Fox stepped into the airlock, pulled her pistol from behind her back, and hit the air-cycle control. A minute later she was stepping into the rover’s interior, already aware she was too late. Her olfactory system dissected the scents, presenting reports on the chemical constituents and conclusions drawn from them, but Fox’s brain knew what she was smelling even before the data came up: blood, decay, death.

The rover had a cockpit and a small rest area to its interior. The latter contained a couple of bench seats, a table, cupboards for stored rations, and a microwave to reheat the rations. It also contained the body of one Roscoe Thacker, ex-project administrator of the Hellas Planitia Science Station. The description Fox had got of the guy the Luddites had talked to had sounded like Thacker, but he was an ordinary sort of man and the description could have applied to half the town. He had never given them a name.

And now someone had drilled a hole through his forehead. The wound looked similar to the one which had killed Deschamps. ‘Another laser wound,’ Fox said, mostly to herself. She turned the body and found another burn across the backs of both thighs. ‘Disabled him. Executed him.’

‘The Martians again,’ Kit suggested.

‘Seems likely, but why? What does this gain them? Was Thacker working for them? If so, why kill him? And where the Hell are the rest of the team?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t have enough data to make even an uninformed guess, Fox.’

‘No, neither do I.’ Turning, Fox looked around the rover’s interior and sighed. ‘Okay. You see if you can get into the rover’s computer. Maybe there’s something in there worth finding. I’ll start searching this thing. At some point, we have to start getting lucky.’

Part Five: A Solitary Man

Isis City, Isidis Planitia, Mars, Sol 91, Year 3.

Kit had been working on the problem, on and off, for twenty-six hours. It appeared that someone had compromised the security systems in Isis City, but she needed more than speculation and appearances. She needed proof and now she had it.

She had run checksum calculations on the executables of everything in the security system. Then she had gone through checking those numbers against the figures recorded in the last update files from Earth. As she had suspected, the AIs which monitored the city’s camera network had been changed. There were also altered files in the communications system. However, someone had also hacked the security monitoring system for the servers themselves and there were a couple of inconsistencies in the security logs which suggested they had been modified.

Everything could have been done from the outside. The problem was that it would have been a lot easier to do from the inside. That meant Kit could not trust anyone in Isis City with the information she had, which was not good. Of course, Fox was heading back. In six or seven hours, Fox would be back and Kit could talk to her about the situation.

That still left six or seven hours where Kit was trapped on a compromised server, surrounded by people she could no longer trust. Quietly, she increased the security around her own software and settled in to wait.

~~~

Talking to two Kits at once was a confusing experience. Normally. Fox had got used to it under some circumstances – especially when one of the Kits was the one occupying Kit’s cyberframe – and the accelerated perceptions helped a little. Still, Fox tried to keep both the Kit on one of her monitors and the avatar version in the room in view so that she could see their lips moving. They were in Fox’s apartment, which was not especially large, so it was not too hard to achieve the right positioning.

‘I am concerned that synchronisation may pass any contamination from this copy to the one on your processors,’ on-screen-Kit said. She had already explained her conclusions regarding the hacking of Palladium’s computers. ‘I think we should remain isolated until full verification of my status can be obtained.’

‘I believe I am being excessively paranoid,’ avatar-Kit stated.

‘Paranoia is one thing,’ Fox said, ‘but logic says there’s no point.’

‘I’m sorry?’ both Kits said in unison.

Fox cringed a little. ‘I hate it when you do that. I highly doubt that your software on the server was compromised while I was away. You’ve been on alert most of that time. If it was compromised, you’ve already synchronised memories with no adverse results. Uh, anyway, they’d have had to change your software basically as you downloaded to the server, right? You’ve been executing on there continuously since you first got here.’

‘That is a valid point,’ on-screen-Kit said. ‘My executable will have been locked while I am executing, so I could not have been compromised.’ Her cheeks coloured. ‘I may have panicked a little on discovering the hacked software.’

‘Maybe. I think you did the right thing keeping it quiet.’ Fox frowned. ‘Can you access the raw camera feeds? Watch them alongside the security AIs?’

‘I will be less efficient at it. They are engineered to watch and analyse multiple feeds at once.’

‘Well, cut it down to secure areas and surface doors. You’ll be watching for Martians, or anyone attempting to break anything. If you see something, you flag it to me. We’ll keep everyone else out of the loop for now.’

There was a short pause. ‘I believe I can cover those feeds adequately,’ on-screen-Kit said.

‘Good. I doubt we’re going to get any activity until tonight. I’ll run a backup and then load into my combat frame. I don’t think whoever is doing this is going to give up easily.’

Sol 92.

Watching security camera feeds was boring. Well, it could be interesting if you had an interest in people, as Kit did, but there were not a lot of people in the feeds Kit was watching. The external cameras showed nothing much but sand; outside was not the kind of place humans enjoyed visiting. The internal cameras were all in areas where people rarely went. They were frequently areas without heating, and sometimes there was no air either. She was paying particular attention to the reactor building, and that was a place no one went unless they had to. Yes, fusion was a great deal cleaner than fission, but standing right beside the reactor was not recommended. High-energy neutron radiation was no joke.

It was not at the reactor bunker that she spotted the two figures accessing an airlock door, however. They were operating the door into another of the air processor plants when she saw them and paused her switching between feeds. The angle was not great, but they were quite clearly not human. For one thing, neither was wearing a pressure suit. Or anything much, actually. Each was tall, long-limbed, and had a rather bulbous cranium. Their skin looked a little rubbery, and it was various shades of green, pale across the face and stomach, dark on skull, back, and legs. Again, it was a bad angle, but they seemed to have very flat faces, no obvious noses.

Briefly, as the two Martians stepped into the airlock, Kit considered locking them in there. But she had seen weird-looking weapons slung across their backs and they were carrying satchels. They had used explosives before and might do again. It was quite possible that blowing the airlock might damage the equipment in that bunker as much as anything else the things might have planned.

Kit let them through and contacted Fox.

~~~

Fox eased through the door into the air-conditioning bunker, scanning left and right with her pistol. There was no immediate sign of the Martians, or whatever the things were, but there was a huge lump of machinery in the middle of the room with pipes and such in the back. If they were planting a bomb, around the back would seem like a good idea. Clearly, they weren’t going for the same panel as before.

Fox crouched, more or less hiding behind the airlock door. ‘Can you see where they are?’ she asked silently.

‘They moved to the rear of the machinery,’ Kit replied. ‘There are no cameras there.’

‘Right.’ Fox moved forward, keeping low to the ground. If they came out, it seemed likely that they would be heading for the outer airlock, which meant they would emerge on the right of the machinery. Hopefully, any explosives they had planted would be on a timer. Fox moved to the right side of the machine and used her pistol to look around the corner: no sign of trouble, or anything really. She stepped out to continue on around the plant, and that was when the first Martian stepped into view.

The thing had its rifle in its hand and immediately shifted it to fire. It was fast; Fox’s finger was closing on her own trigger, but the Martian was going to fire first, she could tell. Still, details flickered into Fox’s mind as she watched the initial scene play out. The rifle – she had a lot of focus on the rifle – was a stubby carbine with a lot of extraneous bulk in the form of vaguely organic plates all over it. It looked alien in the way you expected alien weapons to look in vids: weird, somehow both sleek and bulbous. The creature itself was wearing only some sort of leathery loincloth. Its chest seemed to have too many ribs, the skin over them shrunken tight over the bones. The face was bony, with a fairly narrow jaw under sharp, wide cheekbones. The nose was just a pair of elongated slits under a bony forehead which was far too wide for the lower face. The eyes were fairly large, dark-grey eyeballs, with blue irises which almost seemed to glow and large pupils. Its lips were flat and thin, and it snarled as it pulled the trigger.

A greenish beam of light erupted from the business end of its weapon, forming an arc as the beam swept across Fox’s chest. She felt the heat as the beam cut through her armoured suit and stopped against the synthetic skin beneath. Warnings flashed, but there was no indication of real damage to her dermis; whatever the thing was firing, it was not exactly powerful. Fox fired back, three fast pulls of the trigger delivering three heavy slugs into the Martian’s chest. It lurched backward and then fell, limbs thrashing as it struggled to stay upright, but Fox could see no sign of blood. And that was when its friend appeared from behind the machinery.

It was firing as it turned the corner. A wide arc of green light hit Fox’s stomach as she realigned her pistol. Again the beam bit right through her body armour, but was stopped by her skin. What were they firing? If it was a laser, it was a crap laser. Fox aimed higher and managed to put two rounds in its bony head. It arched backward, dropping its weapon and landing on its back like a tree falling, but there was still no blood and its companion was lurching to its feet. One more round in the pistol; Fox fired and then ducked back behind the machinery to swap magazines.

When she swung around again, both of them were bolting for the airlock door, and the airlock door was opening for them. ‘Fuck! Can’t you–’

‘The system is not responding to my commands to keep the doors locked,’ Kit said before Fox could finish. ‘I suppose we know what the changes in the authorisation code are meant to do.’

‘Yeah.’ Fox picked a random back and pumped three rounds into it. The alien was tossed bodily through the airlock door where it landed on its face. Three good hits and still no signs of blood. She was bringing her pistol in line for the second of them when the door closed far enough to block her shot. ‘Shit!’

‘The airlock is cycling,’ Kit said. ‘It will be around three minutes before you can follow them.’

‘Yeah, I figured as much.’ She ducked around to check the back of the machine and spotted the half-dozen charges taped to pipes. The nearest had a fairly simple timer on it with a little under fifteen minutes on the clock. ‘Get the rest of the team up here. Have them disable these charges. I don’t think there are any traps on them, but it would be an idea to have them checked.’

‘You’re going after the Martians?’

‘I’m going to try.’

No one had arrived by the time the airlock cycled back and Fox could get into it. She looked out through the porthole in the outer door and spotted the shape running away across the dust in the distance. It was dark outside, but the thermal emissions were clear. Still, it took Fox a short time to figure out what she was seeing: one of the Martians was being carried by the other.

‘I obviously did some damage,’ Fox noted. She stepped back and cast her gaze around the interior of the airlock. ‘No fluids. Nothing to suggest I hit either of them.’

‘Which is strange,’ Kit said. ‘I estimate that they will be some three hundred and fifty metres away by the time we can exit the airlock.’

‘Okay.’ Fox popped the magazine from her pistol, slipped it into a pouch on her belt, and pulled another. Slapping it home, she watched as the load indicators appeared in her sensorium. ‘Okay, so now I just need to get a lock on them.’

As the outer door finally opened, Fox stepped out and took aim at the fleeing figures. She waited, finally getting a lock indicator after about three seconds. She pulled the trigger. Three metres out from the muzzle, white smoke began to stream from the back of the bullet and it rocketed forward, homing in on the infrared signature of the running Martian. A little over a second later the tiny missile hit home. Light blossomed in the Martian night and the figures dropped into the dust.

‘If it survived that, it’s not only not human, it’s superhuman,’ Fox commented.

‘The Ripper almost survived one of those,’ Kit pointed out.

‘He was running a cyberframe.’

‘Yes, and these Martians appear not to bleed.’

Fox looked out at the distant shapes, barely visible in the infrared. They did not appear to be moving. Still… ‘That’s a good point. And it would explain a few things. Okay, so we’ll get a rover and go see what state they’re in.’ She looked back toward the airlock. ‘Justin isn’t going to be especially pleased about this.’

‘I expect that he will not,’ Kit agreed.

‘Can’t be helped at this point. Have your copy start restoring the correct versions of the security software. I think it’s time we started getting to the bottom of this whole ridiculous situation.’

~~~

‘Damn right I’m angry!’ Justin said. ‘You discovered evidence of tampering with our security systems and didn’t tell me. You conducted an op in my city without telling me. What am I supposed to think about that? What the Hell am I supposed to think about that?!’

When you were having an argument with someone, eye contact was important. Fox was not even looking at Justin; her eyes were on the room on the other side of the window where Cherise Ruggiero and Bast Ayers were busy working on a Martian corpse. The doctor was carving away sections of ‘skin’ so that the technician could get at what was underneath. What was underneath was not organic.

Fox might not have been looking at Justin, but she was paying attention. Partially anyway. Especially to his tone. Fox’s tone was flat, detached. ‘First of all, Lieutenant Holt, I’m your superior and I don’t have to justify anything I do to you. Second, person or persons unknown compromised the Palladium security systems. While an outside hack is not currently excluded, it would be far easier for someone with access to the servers, and there are six people with sufficient access to make it easy. You are one of the six.’

‘None of my people would–’

‘That is your gut talking, not your brain. Third point. The weapons these things were using cut through my combat suit pretty effectively. They were fast and accurate. If I’d had humans with me, I might be looking at Cherise working on a different kind of corpse.’

‘You risked your life to stop us getting hurt? When you think one of us is a traitor?’

‘I didn’t risk anything aside from a busted cyberframe, Lieutenant. Which was the point of me doing it alone. And now we know what kind of Martians we have running around and causing trouble.’

Not exactly mollified, but biting down on his anger, Justin turned to look through the window. ‘Yeah, robot Martians.’

‘I must say,’ Cherise said, her voice coming through over the intercom, ‘I’ve never autopsied a cyberframe before. The dermal material is clearly designed as a form of armour. Rubbery. Not at all like skin on close inspection, but then, what would Martian skin look like?’

‘I think the fact that it has an armoured chassis is more important, Cherise,’ Fox commented. ‘Are you seeing any serial numbers or identifiers on the components?’

‘Nothing obvious,’ Bast replied. He sounded nervous, as though the thing on the table might come to life and attack him. That was actually more likely with the other one, but it was strapped to a second table by Kevlar restraints, immobile and apparently non-functional. The one he was working on with Cherise was more or less cut in two; Fox’s micromissile had done a lot of damage. ‘To be honest, with the mess that explosive round did, I’m not sure how much we’re going to get from this thing.’

‘It’s been designed to appear as… humanoid as possible,’ Cherise said. ‘Artificial muscle fibres as well as motorised joints. I’ll need to cut some of it away for Mister Ayers to get to the electronics. Huh. Significant musculature in the face, but no signs of a voice box. They can’t talk.’

‘They use burst-mode radio comms,’ Fox replied. ‘This is all being recorded, right?’

‘Oh yes. Just like any normal autopsy. Even if this is a far from normal autopsy.’

‘Good. Palladium’s memetics people should be able to use it. We’ll–’

The sudden sound of something jolting sharply against metal made everyone jump, even if Fox’s first thought was to look across at the second Martian. It was pulling against its bonds, but not with any real strength. Clearly its systems had rebooted, but it was still badly damaged. Cold, blue eyes turned toward the humans in the room. Its mouth opened, but no sound came out.

‘It is attempting to contact others,’ Kit said, appearing beside Fox. ‘I am not detecting replies.’

‘Good,’ Fox replied. ‘For now, I’d prefer to keep the fact that we know what these things are as quiet as possible.’

‘Why?’ Justin asked. ‘We have these frames as proof. We know what’s going on. Put this in front of people and they aren’t going to be scared of Martians any more.’

‘That’s just it. We don’t know what’s going on. Someone has built two cyberframes disguised as Martians. Almost certainly more than two, but at least two. They set up that elaborate charade at the Hellas station. They’ve stolen explosives, including antimatter explosives, and committed acts of sabotage here. But we don’t know why. What’s the point of all this? Until we know that, we play everything close to the chest.’

~~~

‘Roussouw Arms Works,’ Fox said, dropping a carbine-sized rifle onto Justin’s desk. It was a bullpup design with a weird magazine pushed into a thick stock. It also looked as though it had thick splotches of epoxy resin over various surfaces. ‘It’s an ultraviolet laser, would you believe?’

‘The South African company?’ Justin asked in reply. ‘I didn’t know they made any lasers, never mind–’ He stopped, frowning. ‘UV ones? Really? I thought you said the beam was green.’

‘And that, I’m told, is what you get when you fire a UV laser beam in an atmosphere. The beam’s invisible, but the effect on the air isn’t. These things aren’t officially commercial products yet, but MarTech knows RAW are producing them in small numbers for evaluation. They’re aimed at vacuum environments. They have pitiful range in an atmosphere. Then again, Mars has a pitiful atmosphere.’

Justin looked like a man having some trouble getting his head around a problem. ‘So, someone got their hands on some preproduction laser weapons. Then they glued on moulded plastic shells to make them look alien, and they equipped robots made to look like Martians with the faked ray guns.’

‘Yup,’ Fox said. ‘It looks like RAW built the custom cyberframes too. They certainly made some of the components. Adding in the memetics campaign on Earth, someone has shelled out a really huge amount of money to pull off this little scheme.’

‘Yeah, but like you said: why?’

‘When we find them, we’ll ask them. And meanwhile, we can hope this doesn’t get any crazier.’

~~~

‘Humans, this is the voice of Mars.’ The voice was deep, almost guttural, and slightly distorted, but it was speaking English.

‘You just had to say it, didn’t you?’ Justin commented as the video from LifeWeb played on the wall screen in the ops room. Fox decided not to comment.

‘We know that you can hear and understand us.’ That much was true but seeing them was another matter. There was something vaguely visible in the shadows behind a harshly lit spotlight. Dramatic, horror movie stuff. ‘We have awoken,’ the voice droned on. ‘In the turn of one day, the city of your ancient goddess will die.’ A face loomed out of the darkness, blue eyes staring into the camera. ‘Leave our world.’ And then the video ended.

‘Jump scares now,’ Fox said dryly.

‘The city of an ancient goddess?’ Fred asked from behind her.

‘Isis was an Egyptian goddess, Fred,’ Shayla supplied.

‘Oh, uh, yeah.’

‘And that was a mistake,’ Fox added. ‘How the Hell are a bunch of ancient Martians supposed to know that?’

‘And shouldn’t they be at least calling it Barsoom or something?’ Shayla queried.

‘Certainly not Mars,’ Fox agreed. ‘The problem is going to be that plenty of people are going to be smart enough to figure out the bad riddle, but not to figure out the errors. Kit, how far has this spread?’

Kit appeared on the screen in place of the video. ‘Not too far, but it is gaining traction. It will hit the LifeWeb trending lists in the next forty to ninety minutes.’

‘Great. We’re going to need crowd control. We might need to release the video of the cyberframes too. People are going to start panicking.’

‘Yeah,’ Bast said, ‘but those things have the antimatter they stole, right? They really could destroy the city.’

Fox turned, looking at all of the Palladium security force. ‘They’ll have a lot more trouble getting it in here now… But they’ll probably try. Everyone picks up an assault rifle and gets into combat gear. Your carbines should do a pretty good job of penetrating their armour. You see one of them, shoot. We’re not playing games here, people. These things are dangerous, and it’s up to us to stop them.’

New York Metro, Earth.

Getting up late on a Sunday was a luxury, but Helen had nothing particularly pressing to worry about. Nothing she could think of anyway. Terri was back on the Moon, which was a shame because it was Sunday morning and there were more interesting things to do than just getting up late. Still…

Helen stepped into the shower, allowing the steady streams of water to wash away the last of her sleepiness. Was there anything she should be worrying over? It would be nice to think there was not, but… ‘Hibiki, have I got anything to worry over today? Anything on the calendar?’

‘Nothing specific, Helen.’ The reply sounded in Helen’s head via her implant. It was like Kit’s voice, but just a little different. A little softer. A little lower in pitch. Enough so there was no confusion anyway. Hibiki was a Kitsune-592.26 AI, the final production version of Kit’s series, and Helen was still getting used to her. ‘It is forty-eight hours since you sent Captain Meridian the report on Simeon Roberts. There has been no response, which seems odd.’

Helen frowned. ‘Well, she’s probably pretty busy. Then again, she should have at least acknowledged receipt… Send her a message, please. Uh… Hi, Fox. I haven’t heard anything back on the Simeon Roberts report. You seemed to think it was urgent, so I thought I’d check you got it. Helen. Tag it with the usual markers, stick it under the usual encryption, and send.’

‘Of course, Helen. Message sent. Shall I set coffee brewing?’

Helen grinned. ‘The way to a cop’s heart is always through the coffee pot, Hibiki.’

‘I shall make a note of that for when I make a mistake.’

‘Oh, but you won’t need it. You’re basically the same model as Kit and she never makes mistakes.’

Isis City, Mars.

‘I should have taken a closer look at the communications system when I spotted the hacking,’ Kit said.

‘Huh?’ Fox asked. They were up in her quarters now, planning out the best way to deal with what was likely to be a bad night.

‘Hibiki has sent through a message from Helen.’

As Kit popped the text message up for Fox to read, Fox said, ‘Wonder how Hibiki’s working out for her?’

‘Well enough so far. I have offered my services should she need advice on being a detective’s PA, but Hibiki does not have as close a working relationship with Helen as I do with you.’

‘Because Helen doesn’t have a spare server-class quantum processor available, no. What report on Simeon Roberts?’

‘Exactly. I assume the hacked communications software deleted it before delivery. I should have–’

‘Shoulds and woulds. Never mind that. Let her know we didn’t receive it and ask her to send it again. When we get it, maybe you can work out why the software ate it. I mean, other stuff is getting through.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Kit said. ‘I don’t like being outmanoeuvred by software.’

~~~

‘What do you know about Albus Bell-Hewlett?’ Fox asked. She had finished going through Helen’s report and then summoned Justin and Shayla to her apartment.

The two Palladium cops looked at each other and then at Fox. ‘Not much,’ Justin said.

‘He’s reclusive,’ Shayla added. ‘Uh, that’s really an understatement. The guy’s practically a hermit. He built a habitat in the crater on top of Elysium Mons. Never leaves it.’

‘Made his money in stock trading on Earth, I think,’ Justin added.

‘Yeah,’ Shayla agreed.

‘That’s it?’ Fox asked. ‘Kit got that much already.’

‘He’s obsessively private,’ Justin explained.

‘Huh. What about this habitat of his?’

‘Did I mention obsessively private?’

‘It’s speculation,’ Shayla said, ‘but it must be staffed by cyberframes and he’s set it up to be self-sufficient. It’s physically isolated. You really need a shuttle to get in there. The rim is like thirteen, fourteen kilometres higher than the plains around it. I’ve seen a number of satellite photos and he’s got quite a complex up there. Plus, plenty of it has to be underground.’

‘Can I ask what’s got you interested in Bell-Hewlett?’ Justin asked.

‘Yes, but for now it doesn’t leave this room. Helen Dillan has been looking into a guy named Simeon Roberts for me. He was being kind of pushy about the release of the videos down there. Turns out that Mister Roberts is not exactly an honest member of the American government. Among other things, he received a payment of a quarter of a million dollars from… Well, it took our forensic accounting AIs a while to go through the chain of dummy companies, but they finally got to one which is basically a front for Bell-Hewlett. I can’t prove that he’s paying Roberts to muddy the waters down there, but all the rest of Roberts’s payments are coming from mining companies.’

‘You think Bell-Hewlett is behind all of this.’ More a statement than a question; Fox just nodded. ‘He’s out of our jurisdiction. He basically owns that mountain.’

Fox frowned. ‘Yeah, so I’ve heard. I guess I’m going to have to phone a friend.’

‘A friend?’

‘Well, she’s not that friendly. Commander Shriver up on Astraeus Station. If I can convince the UNTPP that Bell-Hewlett knows where their antimatter is, they have the authority to bust in his front door.’

~~~

‘We’ve established that these frames were constructed in South Africa,’ Fox said from the virtual screen real-Fox was watching. ‘The “Martians” are fakes. Clever and expensive fakes, but still fakes.’

‘You realise that many people will believe that this is a cover-up,’ the presenter from ICN said.

‘I’d hope the citizens of Isis City are smart enough to realise that while Palladium could probably fake something like this, it’s also just as possible that those original videos were faked. I’ve shown you video recorded live while I was stopping those two from blowing up an air-processing plant as well as the… autopsy footage. There are far too many things wrong with this whole scenario for it to be real. Personally, I don’t think many people will think I’m lying. Personally, I think anyone crazy enough to come live on Mars is also smart enough not to be fooled by second-rate horror vid theatrics. I mean, who does jump scares any more?’

A thought silenced the sound and Fox nodded. ‘That seems to have gone over fairly well.’

‘You had the presenter on your side,’ Kit agreed. ‘We are seeing some build-up of people in the common areas. However, if the multicast subscriptions are anything to go by, almost the entire city has been watching that report.’

‘I guess we hope it does its job then. Otherwise, I think we’ll be shooting people before morning.’

Sol 93.

‘Anything from the UNTPP?’ Justin asked as Fox marched along beside him down a corridor in the city’s main habitation block. The city had not erupted into violence, but there was still tension. There had been a deadline on the Martians’ video warning and the clock was still ticking. And now this had come up…

‘Shriver’s being… political. Not enough evidence to get a warrant. Maybe after this, she’ll be persuaded.’

Justin did not look pleased. ‘You’re sure about this?’

‘You saw the data Kit put together.’

‘Yeah… Yeah, I did. I just find it hard to believe that–’

Fox stopped in front of a door. ‘Well, now we can ask him and see what he says.’ She pressed the buzzer beside the sliding door and waited.

It took a little longer than was entirely necessary, but the door slid open and Bast looked out at them. His gaze shifted from Fox to Justin, taking in the expression on his immediate boss’s face in particular. He backed up, away from the door. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said. ‘Kit figured it out?’

Fox stepped through the door. There was not much to the place; basically, it was a sort of bedsit. At the back of the room was a bunk-style bed with a fake window showing night-time Mars on a video screen behind it. There was a small sofa, just wide enough for two, and a kitchen area that basically consisted of a work surface, a sink, and a built-in combi microwave and oven. A door led off to what was probably the bathroom. Fox doubted there was a bath in there.

‘Kit and some forensic accounting AIs we have back at the office,’ Fox said. ‘Mother in need of expensive medical treatment. It’s clichéd, but it’s a good hook.’

Bast turned, his eyes on Justin’s face. ‘I didn’t know anything about the murders. Or the antimatter. I want you to know that. I wouldn’t have–’ He stopped, looking away. His face twisted into something involving disgust and anger. ‘Maybe I would’ve. I don’t know.’ Self-disgust then.

‘This is going to go a lot easier for you if you tell us what you do know, Bast,’ Justin said. ‘What can you tell us about Bell-Hewlett?’

Bast slumped onto his sofa, looking dejected now. ‘I never met him, face-to-face. The approach was by someone else and then I received instructions through messaging.’ He looked up. ‘I got one voice message from him. I copied all of his messages to a stick. Didn’t entirely trust him and I think the comms hack deleted anything which could identify him after I’d seen it.’

‘That makes sense,’ Fox said. ‘The only reason Kit could figure that Helen’s report vanished was because it had his name in it. Stupid. We’d have figured out something was up eventually if messages went missing.’

‘Not before his plan could work though.’

‘Perhaps not, but if you’ve still got that message, his plans are about to take a nosedive.’

Airborne near Elysium Mons.

The shuttle had no windows, but Fox watched the approach to Elysium Mons through a virtual image. There was nothing to really give scale to the extinct volcano, but it still managed to look huge. The flight data indicated that they were sixteen and a half kilometres above Mars’s ‘sea level’ and the lip of the caldera was not that far below them. Mount Everest was a little over half the height of Elysium Mons. And, if you were crazy enough, you could scale Everest without supplemental oxygen; try that here and you would be dead before you started the climb.

‘We’re getting radio traffic,’ the pilot called out.

‘Patch it through,’ Shriver ordered, and they heard the message.

‘… will be met with an armed response. Unidentified craft, this is Elysium. You are entering private airspace. Leave immediately. Any attempt to land will be met with an armed response. Unidentified–’

‘Elysium, this is UNTPP shuttle alpha nine,’ Shriver said. ‘We have a warrant to–’

‘No use, Commander,’ the pilot cut in. ‘It just continues to repeat the same message. No one’s listening.’

Shriver growled and glanced at Fox. Fox shrugged. ‘Right,’ Shriver said. ‘Take us in and get the canons online. Everyone, helmets. If he’s serious about that threat, we might have to fight our way in.’

‘He’s serious,’ Fox said. ‘He may have more of those UV lasers down there. Standard ballistic armour isn’t that much use against them.’

‘That’s why we’ve got these jackets on,’ Shriver said. She patted at a thick jacket which she was wearing over her standard combat vacuum suit. ‘Ablative material. Soaks the heat and the vapour tends to diffuse the beam.’

Fox grinned. ‘Huh. They didn’t have those when I was in the military.’

‘Lasers are starting to get viable as weapons,’ Shriver replied. ‘It’s extra bulk, but if we know we’re up against energy weapons, it’s better than getting shot.’

‘Always a valid philosophy.’ On her in-vision screen, Fox could see the shuttle was cresting the lip of the caldera. She grabbed her own helmet and pulled it on.

‘Ground fire,’ the pilot said. ‘Light energy weapons, but they’re shooting at us.’

‘Return fire when you’ve identified targets,’ Shriver said. With her own helmet in place, she picked up a carbine and checked it. It was one of MarTech’s designs, an electromagnetic accelerator weapon with an under-mounted mini-missile launcher. ‘You sure you don’t want one of these?’ Shriver asked as she spotted Fox checking her pistol.

Fox watched the warning indicators appearing to tell her that she had high-explosive rounds loaded. ‘This is nastier than it looks.’

Shriver shrugged, but any other comments were stopped when the sound of the shuttle’s canons opening up vibrated through the cabin. A couple of seconds later, the pilot was back on the intercom. ‘Ground fire suppressed. Looks like they were androids. Just scrap now.’

‘There’ll be more of them inside,’ Fox predicted.

‘Not going to bet against that,’ Shriver replied. ‘Okay, drop us where you can and then lift immediately. There’s a shuttle on the pad here. If anyone tries to leave in it, shoot to disable.’

‘Confirmed,’ the pilot replied. ‘Landing in fifteen.’

There were two five-man teams on the shuttle, plus Shriver and Fox. Technically, as far as Fox was concerned, Shriver should not have been there, but she seemed to be taking the theft of the antimatter personally and no one had tried to stop her. Fox might have, but it was not her job. The teams lined up in front of doors on either side of the main cabin, and the air was pulled out as fast as the system could manage it. The doors opened as soon as the shuttle’s landing gear hit the sand and the UNTPP officers, followed by Fox and Shriver, headed out in rapid order.

Fox scanned the area. Her combat frame did not have all the sensory tricks her detective frame had, but it did have the same multispectral vision. Nothing was showing up. It was still an hour or so until dawn, maybe longer with the lip of the caldera quite a distance above them. They had landed in a gap between domed structures connected together by tubes which presumably contained corridors. One of the domes had a lot of communications antennas and a radar dish mounted on top. The others were featureless, but they were made of a plastic material and seemed to be a little translucent; they all glowed, suggesting that they all had bright interior lighting.

‘Airlock on the right,’ Shriver said. ‘Team A goes in and holds while team B goes through.’

‘I’ll go in with A,’ Fox said. ‘I can scout while you’re all getting in. They’re probably going to send in security as soon as they know you’re coming in that way.’

‘You–’ Shriver cut herself off, apparently considering the circumstances. ‘Okay. Be careful. You’re technically a civilian here.’

Fox allowed herself a grin. ‘Technically, you’re right, but I’m a civilian with all the best toys.’

Team A was a good choice for the first through because they had a tech who could bypass the access controls on the airlock. It took about a minute to do that and another minute to force the system to cycle. By the time that was happening, Kit was working the electronic warfare suite built into Fox’s combat suit.

‘I am detecting multiple radio sources converging in this location,’ Kit said. ‘Relatively low power suggests that they are cyberframes.’

‘Figures,’ Fox replied.

‘There is an internal wireless network, but it is heavily encrypted and, I suspect, employing hard access controls. Only designated interfaces can use it.’

‘Well, Bell-Hewlett is supposed to be paranoid about privacy.’ Fox reached out and pulled a stun grenade off the webbing of the nearest soldier. He glanced at her, frowning through his visor, but she waved for them all to move back away from the inner door before engaging her suit’s active camouflage. She almost vanished. If you knew where you were looking, especially as she moved closer to the door, you could tell something was there. Otherwise, Fox was almost invisible.

The airlock was a manual one. Instead of motorised hinges, the door had a big wheel you spun to unseal the latches, and then it was a matter of pushing. With this frame, Fox spun the wheel as though it was a toy and then put all her weight behind pushing through, dropping into a roll as the solid door swung open. Beams of green light lanced out toward the doorway, but whoever was firing, they had no clue where Fox was until it was too late, and too late was when the grenade arced into the air, flying toward the ranks of hydroponic gear and plants which occupied most of the space in the dome. Even with her eyes closed, Fox could see the light flare through her eyelids. Her helmet cut out the loud bang of the explosion. Unfortunately, the robots were wearing helmets too.

Laser beams lanced through the air, transcribing green arcs all around Fox, but not actually hitting her. One of the androids seemed to be having trouble from the grenade, but there were four more of them still functional. Fox selected one of them and fired. Not waiting to see what the shot did, she shifted aim marginally and fired again. Explosions rippled through the air, destroying plants and one of the androids. Her second target was hit, but still seemed to be moving, even if all it was doing was picking itself up from a tangle of destroyed hydroponic equipment.

More beams ionised the air around Fox. She ignored them, realigning her aim for another shot. One of the frames went down, but her second shot missed its target, destroying a hydroponics trough instead. By that time, however, the UNTPP agents in the airlock had taken the opportunity to deploy while the androids were busy with Fox. Bursts of supersonic needles hit the remaining robots, cutting them down as they prepared to fire on Fox again.

‘Nicely done,’ Fox commented over the radio. ‘Get that airlock cycling. I’ll check up ahead.’

‘I am detecting two more radio sources,’ Kit announced as Fox ran through the rows of plants. ‘Given the general layout and the angle the signals are being received from, I believe that they are coming from the dome with the radar dish. The transmissions from that are making isolating the weaker signals a little difficult.’

‘Shriver?’ Fox asked over the radio. ‘You inside yet?’

‘Will be in another fifteen seconds or so,’ Shriver replied.

‘I’m getting two more possible guards, probably in the dome with all the antennas on top. I figure that’s where the elevators are. Once you’re inside, I suggest moving in toward the centre, but keep a lookout for anything I’ve missed.’

There were two more armed and armoured guards in the central dome, just as Kit had suggested. They were, in fact, in something that looked a bit like a reception room. An airlock graced one wall, facing another which had elevator doors in it. The guards stood on either side of the elevator, weapons at the ready, and they moved as soon as the door from one of the side corridors opened. Arcs of green light burned into the metal of the door and the wall beside it but did not come close to hitting Fox as she ducked through and raised her weapon. The explosion blew her target off his feet, but the android was still moving. Ignoring him for now, Fox took aim at his companion as another arc of ionised air slashed through the space beside her. This time, the explosion ripped her target’s chest apart.

Her first target was regaining his feet, but Fox paused to take proper aim this time. The android let loose a stream of energy from his rifle. He was struggling, his aim off even compared to his first shot. Fox put an explosive round through the faceplate of his helmet. The jet of plasma formed by the explosives burned out through the back of the helmet and the android froze, hanging briefly in a combat posture before collapsing in a heap of ruined plastic and metal.

‘Clear through to the elevator,’ Fox announced over the radio. Dropping her empty magazine into her hand, she replaced it with another before starting off to check the rest of the dome. Yes, Kit could not detect anything else, but there was the possibility that the communications gear was blocking her, and it was procedure.

‘Understood,’ Shriver replied after a second. ‘We’re on our way.’

Around a corner, Fox found the entrance to a stairwell and the door into the communications suite. Bell-Hewlett had some pretty impressive comms gear. ‘Mister Bell-Hewlett’s business revolves around keeping up with the stock markets on Earth and commodities on Mars,’ Kit said, appearing to peer at the screens which filled one end of the room. ‘I would imagine that excellent and probably redundant communications would be a requirement of that business.’

Fox looked around the room, spotting a large box on one wall with a ‘DANGER! ELECTRICITY!’ sign on it. She pointed her pistol and fired. The shockwave from the explosion reverberated around the room and all the lights went out.

‘Shit! What happened?’ Shriver asked.

‘I cut Bell-Hewlett’s communications off,’ Fox replied. ‘I don’t think we want him talking to his Martian minions.’

‘I think you cut the power to the entire surface level,’ Shriver replied sourly.

‘You have infrared systems on your visors, tactical lights on your weapons, and we weren’t going to use the elevator to get downstairs anyway.’

‘That’s… Those are valid points. We’ll be with you in five.’

Apparently, the power loss went further than the surface installations. The emergency stairwell – somehow, Fox could not imagine Bell-Hewlett taking the stairs when he came to the surface, so it had to be for emergencies – was in pitch darkness and they had to use the tactical lights. The one on Fox’s pistol was multi-mode; she flicked it over to ultraviolet illumination and set off ahead of the UNTPP officers.

‘The wireless network is entirely down,’ Kit said as Fox took the stairs three at a time. ‘It appears that the androids have disabled their network interfaces. I’m not picking up any transmissions at all.’

‘Shouldn’t be an issue,’ Fox replied. ‘Well, unless they’ve got some nastier weapons down here.’ She stopped at a door on one of the landings around twenty metres down, spun the wheel, and pushed the door open. Lead filled the air as some sort of infantry support weapon opened up from the corridor in front of them.

‘You just had to say it, didn’t you?’ Kit commented dryly, though Fox was already moving, dropping and rolling forward to take aim.

A bullet slammed into her left shoulder, jerking her back toward the door. There was a flash of pain and warning indicators came up in her sensorium, but her armour and skin soaked the damage well enough. A shape appeared in the light from her pistol and she fired. The infrared flare was enormous as the shaped charge burned through the android’s chest, destroying vital components. The machine gun clattered to the floor, followed by the cyberframe.

Fox frowned. ‘Only one?’

‘It does seem odd,’ Kit replied. ‘I have learned enough from you to suggest that a doorway is a good tactical bottleneck. He should be concentrating his forces here.’

‘Yeah, so…’ Fox turned as Shriver and her people arrived on the landing. ‘One left here with a light machine gun. I get the feeling that this floor’s substantially empty. He was just hoping to take some of us out here.’

Shriver frowned behind her visor and then nodded. ‘We need to clear the floor anyway.’

‘Agreed. What I’m going to suggest is that you clear this floor and I check the next one down. We’ve got about four hours to figure out where he’s hidden the antimatter. If it’s here, great. If it’s already in Isis City…’

‘Go. We’ll follow as soon as we can.’

There were a couple of things different about the floor below. One was that light appeared around the sides of the door as Fox pushed it open. The other was that there were three androids waiting for the door to open. They all had LMGs, and they all started firing as soon as there was enough of a gap to fire through. Fox ducked back behind the wall as bullets began to tear up the concrete wall across the stairwell. She poked her pistol around the doorframe and used its camera to line up on the rightmost android, squeezing off two rounds. Two streams of bullets cut out in short order, which was a little odd because Fox had only aimed at one android. Bullets hammered into the door near Fox’s hand, but she realigned on the firer and blew his chest open with another two rounds. The third was retreating down the corridor as fast as he could go.

Stepping into the doorway, Fox raised her pistol and fired, dropping her empty magazine as the robot in the corridor dropped to the floor, his weapon clattering as he fell.

‘AIs are not generally subject to panic,’ Kit commented. ‘There is a reason he was attempting to retreat.’

Fox slotted a fresh magazine. ‘I tend to agree. Unless this is a clever delaying tactic, I think he was heading back to defend something.’

‘That would seem to be a logical deduction.’

At that moment, Shriver’s voice cut in over the radio. ‘Meridian, we’ve got one human up here. Alive. It’s one of the geologists from Hellas Planitia, McLain.’

‘She’ll need to be secured,’ Fox replied.

‘She came secured. He’s got her chained to a bedroom wall. She’s wearing some sort of stupid maid’s uniform.’

‘Swell.’

‘Looks terrified. She just keeps saying “He’s crazy” over and over again.’

Fox’s jaw tightened. ‘Okay. I’m getting more resistance one level down. The power’s still on here. I think he’s on this level.’

‘We’ve a little more to clear. Wait until–’

‘I’m good, Commander. I don’t want to come over as patronising, but I’m a lot less likely to take serious damage than you are, and I’d prefer it if none of you left here in a body bag.’

‘I– Ah, damn, you’re probably right. We’ll be down as soon as we’re done up here. Try to stay in one piece. The paperwork is likely to be bad if we have to take you out as scrap.’

Fox allowed herself a smirk as she stepped forward, leading with her pistol, down the corridor. ‘Understood.’

There was about fifteen metres of corridor and then a T-junction. No signs of resistance to either side. No indications of which way to go either. How many more bodyguards did this guy have? She had taken out eleven of them, or she had in concert with the UNTPP team. The little complex appeared to be not terribly little; there was going to be a need for several technicians to handle the hydroponic farms upstairs, the machinery down below, and presumably Bell-Hewlett had personal servants. He had McLain chained up, but was everyone else here a cyberframe?

Fox turned right because it seemed like the way to go. There were doors on the sides of the corridor here and she checked each of them as she went down. Store rooms on the right. On the left she found two robotics labs; presumably all these cyberframes needed maintenance from time to time.

‘From what I’ve seen,’ Kit said, ‘we are seeing RAW Light Combat Androids, the mark three. They have a monthly maintenance schedule and a daily recharge cycle. However, I do not believe they have very good combat software installed. It would appear that Mister Bell-Hewlett has repurposed personal servants to attempt to fight us.’

‘Okay, but how many more is he going to have?’

‘I am not picking up any radio traffic. You will need to find them the old-fashioned way.’

‘Great. I do enjoy being shot at by automatic weapons.’

‘Yes,’ Kit said brightly, ‘I rather believe you do.’

Ignoring the comment, Fox moved on. There was a left turn and more corridor with more doors. Cold air met her when she opened one of these; the room beyond was large and filled with computer equipment. It went with the communications array on the surface: Bell-Hewlett probably needed a lot of computing power to amass the money he had. Next was a double door on the left and Fox paused, her hand on the door handle. The door was panelled wood and appeared incongruous set amid the concrete walls of the corridor.

‘Getting any radio emissions?’ Fox asked.

‘Nothing,’ Kit replied.

‘Okay…’ Fox pushed down on the handle.

The door more or less exploded as a hail of lead hit it, bullets bursting through to strike Fox in the stomach, leg, and foot. The last put her off balance and she tumbled as she pushed to escape the stream. Rolling onto her back, she brought her pistol around to aim at the door as the sound of heavy footfalls came from within the room.

‘That was not a light machine gun,’ Kit commented, sounding alarmed.

‘Nope,’ Fox agreed.

A leg came into view through the doorway, a torso following through above it along with the barrels of a rotary minigun. Both were armoured, and not the lightweight combat suits the other androids had been wearing. This was a powered combat suit, heavily armoured and motorised to assist the wearer’s strength. That was how he was managing to fire the minigun from the hip. All that was taken in in an instant as Fox sighted on the forward leg and fired. Two of the three rounds hit home and shrapnel from the explosions pattered against Fox’s body armour. The detonations had a rather more dramatic effect on the thing in the powered suit: its leg collapsed under it and it pitched forward.

Fox rolled and then twisted up onto one knee, bringing her pistol back around to cover the fallen armoured form. Bell-Hewlett obviously did a lot of his shopping with RAW since their logo was stamped on the armour’s back. It was the kind of mid-weight suit used by special ops soldiers; articulated plates of ceramic-and-metal composite supplemented the stopping power of the same sort of reflexive material Fox was wearing. The solid armour was far thicker over the torso and the skull. Artificial muscle fibres were built in to allow the person wearing it to actually move as much as to allow the use of heavy weaponry. There were more powerful armoured suits in the world but using them inside a building was generally impossible: they were just too big. And anyway, this was usually all you needed against small arms. Even now, with one leg gone, the android inside was shifting inside the suit, regaining control.

He had lost his weapon as he fell. The big minigun was not far from his hand and was still connected to a backpack via an armoured ammunition feed. The hand shifted, pushing the android’s torso up. His head turned. Fox saw flickering data appear across the inner surface of the visor, a suggestion of a pair of eyes behind the tinted, armoured glass. She pumped three rounds into the faceplate and the android stopped moving.

There was still one round left in her magazine, but Fox popped the mag and replaced it before she headed into the room beyond the shattered doors. It was some sort of lounge. Sofas, a couple of chairs, and a large entertainment screen occupied much of the space. Fox had a feeling that it was not really meant for entertaining, however: Bell-Hewlett did not seem the type to invite friends around for a movie night. There was also the fact that the rear wall of the room, on Fox’s right, had a massive metal door mounted in it.

‘Radiation shelter and, I would suggest, panic room,’ Kit said, appearing in front of the big door. ‘Mister Bell-Hewlett appears to be a very cautious man.’

‘Huh,’ Fox replied. There was an intercom on the wall beside the vault door. She walked over to it and pushed the button above the grill. ‘Albus Bell-Hewlett, this is Captain Tara Meridian. I’m here with UNTPP Commander Shriver. We have a warrant to search your premises and detain you for questioning with regard to the sabotage of various Isis City facilities, the theft of antimatter from Astraeus Station, and the murder of a number of Martian citizens. Please come out of the panic room. Now.’

There was a short pause and then a rather thin voice with a terrified tone to it answered. ‘Go away!’

Fox sagged a little and stared up at the massive door. ‘We’re going to need cutting gear.’

Isis City, Mars.

It had taken over an hour to get into the vault. It had also taken a plasma cutter and the use of strategically positioned shaped-charge explosives. Bell-Hewlett had quite the little refuge hidden away there: all the comforts of home, plenty of supplies, an entertainment system, and a fairly substantial computer rig networked to his servers. There was a small fusion reactor powering the facility, and the panic room had a direct power feed from it. The billionaire could have holed up in the place for a long time if Fox and Shriver had not been so determined to get him out. They found Bell-Hewlett cowering in a corner of the lounge, unarmed and shouting the fact as soon as the door fell.

His obvious cowardice was why he was now sitting on the sofa in Fox’s apartment. It had taken some persuasion to get Shriver to let Fox take him. The plan was fairly simple, but it relied on some degree of luck; Fox was counting on the fact that Bell-Hewlett was close enough to the antimatter, wherever it was, that he would be worried. If he thought he was out of range…

‘What I don’t get,’ Fox said after watching Bell-Hewlett stew for thirty minutes, ‘is how you thought this scheme of yours was going to work.’

He glared at her for a second, looking away when she stared impassively back. For someone who had concocted a plan to kill thousands of people and scare everyone else off Mars, Bell-Hewlett was nothing much to look at. Five-foot-eight and under a hundred-and-thirty pounds, he was a thin man with little in the way of body development. He was good-looking in an unassuming way, finely featured with clear blue eyes and dark-blonde hair, but his personality was not in the least bit attractive. He looked at other people with either annoyance, disdain, or fear. As soon as he had realised that neither Fox nor the UNTPP people were going to shoot him, fear had shifted to arrogant anger. Did they know who he was? What gave them the right to storm into his home? What gave them the right to destroy his property? To search his property? To take his property? Fox got the strong impression that his ‘property’ included McLain who had been taken up to Astraeus Station for psychological evaluation and treatment.

‘It would have worked,’ he stated flatly. ‘Public opinion in America and China would have forced their governments to cease support for the colonies here.’

‘Based on some crappy horror vids and android Martians someone would have eventually figured out? You’re delusional.’

‘You can’t keep me here. You’ve no right to–’

‘I can and will keep you here.’ Fox lifted her hand and began ticking off points. ‘We have you on kidnapping because we’ve got McLain. House guests don’t get chained up in bedrooms. We have you on murder or conspiracy to murder, either is good, because we found the remaining members of the Hellas Planitia team in cold storage in your compound. We know you’re responsible for the faked vids because we found the virtual environment you used to fake them on your computers. We have you on corruption charges because we found the payments you made to Simeon Roberts and Bastian Ayers. Also, Bast is singing like a nightingale and McLain will probably talk when she’s deemed capable. You’re fucked.’

‘I just want to be left alone.’ That was another thing which had become apparent as Fox had escorted the man through the city to her apartment: he was morbidly afraid of crowds. He had not actually freaked out when they had walked into the community hub area, but he had been shaky and had broken out in a sweat. The area had been pretty thinly populated too because as many people as could manage had decided to get out of the city. Still, Bell-Hewlett had only calmed down when he was alone with Fox.

‘Your idea of being left alone is a little extreme. You can’t have an entire planet to yourself.’

He turned, glaring at her and half rising from his seat. ‘I can have whatever I want! I want you to let me go! I want to go home!’

Fox straightened, pushing away from the desk she was leaning against, and looked down at him, her eyes hard. ‘Shut the fuck up. I could snap you like a twig, you cowardly, insignificant, delusional asshole. You are never going to see your home again.’ Bell-Hewlett cringed and dropped back onto the sofa. ‘Tell me where the antimatter is and I’ll put in a word with the UNTPP’s judicial wing. I can’t stop you spending the rest of your life in Cold Harbour, but I can suggest they put you in solitary confinement for your entire sentence.’

‘I will tell you nothing,’ Bell-Hewlett spat.

‘Okay. Looks like you’ll be dying of radiation exposure then. Unless we’re close enough for the heat blast to get us.’

‘You’ll die too.’

‘Ha! No, I won’t. In case that other body on the rack over there isn’t enough of a clue, I’m an infomorph. Even if I get incinerated, they’ll just recover me from a backup on Earth. Sure, I won’t know what happened up here, but I’ll be alive. I’m risking nothing here, Albus. Personally, I hope the radiation gets you. I understand it’s a really painful way to die.’

Bell-Hewlett said nothing, but he also did not meet Fox’s eyes. She would get him to talk. She knew she would. The issue was whether he would talk soon enough.

~~~

‘Twenty minutes, Albus,’ Fox said. ‘Twenty minutes to the deadline you set.’ Bell-Hewlett just sat there, his eyes on the floor. ‘It’s going to take time for me to get to wherever the antimatter is. If you don’t tell me soon, there won’t be time to stop it. You’ll die of indecision.’

Bell-Hewlett remained silent, but he was tense. Fox had to admit, he was holding up better than she thought he would. Maybe he had worked out that she was not going to kill him before finding out where the antimatter was. Maybe he was just unwilling to give up his dream of having Mars all to himself. Maybe he was just stubborn. But she thought he was cracking.

‘Do you know what extreme radiation exposure does to you, Albus?’ Fox asked. She did not wait for a reply. ‘I mean you get nausea, vomiting, and headaches from fairly mild exposure. The onset is faster for higher doses. The bigger the dose, the more chance of cancer developing later in life, but once you get to the really big levels, you needn’t bother about cancer. You see, the radiation kills off the cells in your body that replace the fast-turnover cells. Like your stomach lining. After a while, the lining of your stomach falls apart. You’ll be able to tell because there’ll be blood when you take a shit. That’s when all the bacteria in your gut gets into your bloodstream. That’s when you get blood poisoning. By then, your immune system will be shutting down because your white blood cells die and get replaced fairly fast. Except they won’t get replaced. Then your red blood cells die off, so if you haven’t already died of sepsis, you’ll suffocate.’

She smiled, even if he was not looking at her. ‘Oh, did I mention that all your hair will fall out. That happens fairly quickly. And the radiation affects your nervous system, so you can expect physical tremors, pain, and cognitive impairment. If you live more than a couple of days, you’ll feel better as the nerve damage appears to recover, but it’s not a real recovery. They call it the “walking ghost” phase. You’re dead, but your body just hasn’t quite worked it out yet. It’s a truly horrible way to die. I always said I’d eat a bullet rather than go through it. Of course, now all I have to worry about is metal fatigue.’

‘Fusion bunker,’ Bell-Hewlett mumbled.

‘Sorry, Albus? Didn’t quite hear you.’

‘It’s in the fusion bunker!’ he snapped. ‘There are two of the Martian robots with it. They’ll deactivate the containment field when the time limit is up, no matter what.’

‘Kit,’ Fox said silently. She was heading for the door before she got a reply.

‘Justin and squad A are on their way there.’

‘Good. Lock this asshole in here when I leave.’

~~~

Justin, Fred, and the rest of Fred’s squad were standing outside the bunker when Fox got to it. The reactor was housed in a surface facility accessed via a tunnel which gave it a little distance from the other buildings up there. The reactor itself – according to the plans Kit had found – was in the middle of a fairly large space surrounded by a number of containment measures, including the three-metre-thick concrete walls of the bunker itself.

‘We have a problem,’ Justin said as Fox approached.

‘And that is?’

‘With the reactor operational, anyone who goes in there is looking at a possibly lethal dose of fast-neutron radiation.’

Fox frowned and jammed her helmet on. ‘If they get past me, you flatten them. But be careful of the damn containment vessel.’

‘You can’t–’

‘I can’t stay out here and wait for them to blow us up. I’m not organic, Justin. Even if this frame shuts down, I can just start up in the other one. Now, get out of my way.’

There was an airlock with very thick doors on it which allowed you into the bunker itself. Inside, Fox found herself looking at… well, not at a fusion reactor. Instead, there were huge iron tanks filling space around the machine in the centre which was currently invisible. There was a maze of walkways that allowed you to get into the middle, but even with protective suits, workers were only supposed to go there when the reactor was shut down.

‘The outer tanks contain water,’ Kit said as Fox skirted the perimeter, hoping that the Martians were sticking to the outside of the room. ‘They are the, um, backstop against the radiation produced. The inner tanks are for liquid lithium, which is used both to supply tritium to the reactor and to provide heat to drive the turbines.’

‘That’s great,’ Fox replied.

‘It is, because without them, you would be getting hit in the face with enough neutron energy to shut down your frame in a second.’

‘Yeah, but what I really want to know is where the damn Martians are.’

‘I would suggest that they are near the walls of the chamber. Otherwise, radiation damage is likely to have shut down their electronics. We should not spend much longer than ten minutes in here. Well, we may start having problems after that long. We could probably survive for longer.’

Fox checked the time. ‘In ten minutes, the last thing we’re going to have to worry about is the reactor.’

‘That is a very valid point. There!’

Fox had circled around one of the tanks and was now at the chokepoint between tank and bunker wall. It was not that much of a chokepoint really: there was a good metre between the wall and the tank. Still, it stopped you seeing past until you got there, and that meant Fox did not see the two Martians until she was right at the narrowest point. Twenty metres away, the two androids were crouched beside a black case. They were right in the corner of the room, directly under a security camera; they were both armed with laser carbines, and, at least briefly, they were unaware of Fox. It was not going to last.

Picking a target, Fox lifted her pistol, braced it with her left hand, and took aim. One of the two robots went for the container before she could fire, the other lifting its rifle and firing. Green light blazed in the air but did not get close to hitting Fox. She fired back, putting three rounds in its chest, and it was slammed back into the concrete. It fell, lying unmoving on the concrete floor as Fox shifted her aim.

An alert of some kind began to issue from the antimatter container. That could mean only one thing. Forgoing the time to aim, Fox lined up and fired. Only one of the three rounds hit, the impact bouncing the robot off the wall and away from the container. It stayed on its feet, however, and turned, heading back for its goal. Fox put her last round in the thing’s chest, slamming it back again, but it was still moving, and she was out of bullets.

The alarm was still sounding on the container as Fox dropped her magazine and pulled a fresh one from her belt. At the same time, the Martian staggered two steps to the container. It bent down as Fox slammed the new magazine home and the tone of the alarm changed to something more urgent. Cold, blue eyes looked up at Fox as she fired, blasting it back against the wall. This time it bounced and fell, lying unmoving on the concrete.

Fox bolted forward, dropping to her knees beside the black case. A panel was open on the top of it, and beneath that there was a counter clicking down from twenty-six at one-second intervals, a big red switch, and a thumbprint scanner. A biometric lock? How was she going to get past that? In simple desperation, Fox flicked the red switch over. The counter clicked from twenty-four to twenty-three. ‘Shit! I have to get–’ The alarm cut off as a light turned on behind the switch and the counter blanked.

‘According to the information I have,’ Kit said, ‘you can turn it on without the biometrics.’ She sounded far too calm. ‘But it does take a second or two to fully charge the safety capacitor when power is re-established.’

Fox closed the panel and picked up the case. ‘You might have mentioned that a little earlier.’

‘But you seemed like you were having so much fun.’

Part Six: The Tentacle Monsters Are Coming!

Isis City, Isidis Planitia, Mars, Sol 96, Year 3.

‘You know, I’d never have figured this out without you,’ M. J. said. She was pacing, clearly annoyed. The man she was pacing in front of was Harlan Barnes, and she had just proved that he was a murderer. ‘If you hadn’t kept hiring me to find out how close I was getting, I doubt I’d have got near you.’

Barnes struggled, apparently trying to get to her, but the two men in Palladium uniforms were holding him too tightly. M. J. turned away from him, toward the detective standing behind her. ‘Take him away, Detective Hermanson,’ she said. ‘I hope there’s a hole in Rikers deep enough for him.’ Then she strutted away, her Sisters of Corruption uniform skirt flicking with the swing of her hips.

And then the credits rolled.

‘I hate mid-season cliffhangers,’ Fox commented, ‘but not a bad resolution.’

‘You’re going to be back on Earth tomorrow,’ Justin pointed out. ‘You’ll be able to see the reruns, or on-demand.’

Fox turned a little, angling herself toward him. They were sitting on his bed because there was not much to his apartment. Like Nick Low’s, it was more of a bedsit, and Justin had never bothered with a sofa. ‘Oh, Marie will probably have a special recording ready, just for me. She hates it when I miss an episode.’

Justin shifted his position slightly to make talking easier, angling toward Fox. On screen, an announcer had begun chattering in Chinese. ‘I still can’t believe you know her.’

Fox grinned. ‘Current housemate, ex-lover. She’s actually a pretty ordinary girl. Stardom hasn’t really affected her yet. Maybe it never will.’

‘She’s not ordinary. She’s beautiful.’

‘Not arguing.’

‘Uh, I mean, you are too. Uh, I mean–’

Reaching out, Fox put a finger to his lips. ‘Stop digging. My last night here. I’m heading out at two a.m. There is one thing I really need to know before I go.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’

‘Whether you can actually use that big log you keep in your pants.’ She reached down to the fastening on the jeans he was wearing.

Justin grinned. ‘I feel quietly confident.’

New York Metro, Earth, 10th March 2062.

Kit, the Kit with the cyberframe, was standing in front of Fox and holding a bodysuit when Fox opened her eyes. ‘Welcome home,’ Kit said. ‘We’re all updated on what happened on Mars, so you won’t be getting questions from me.’

‘That’s something,’ Fox said. She undid the locking clamps and reached behind her neck for the data cable as she stepped free. ‘Thank you for being here to greet me.’

‘My pleasure. You’re not getting questions from me, but Sam and Marie are just getting up. They’ll be having breakfast shortly.’ Kit held out the purple teddy she was holding with a grin.

Fox took it. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say no to a coffee.’

~~~

‘How was Mars?’ Sam asked. He was lounging, shirtless, on one of the dining chairs. It was vaguely possible that the shirt he was not wearing was on Marie, who was busy pouring Fox a coffee and wearing just an oversized shirt. Well, Fox was wearing just a teddy.

‘Red,’ Fox replied. ‘Mostly. There was some black. Dusty. There was a lot of dust.’

‘Red dust?’ Marie suggested.

‘Mostly.’

‘You missed M.J. I got a copy–’

‘I did not miss it. I watched it last night. With Chinese subtitles.’

Marie blinked. ‘Huh?’

‘It gets shown on RPE about a week after it airs here. RPE is a Chinese channel run out of Red Beijing, so it has Chinese subtitles.’

‘Wow. I knew it was syndicated, but I didn’t expect it to show on Mars.’

‘Well, it does. You’re even famous on the Red Planet.’ Marie blushed at that. ‘Anything exciting happen while I was away?’

‘Nothing special,’ Sam replied. ‘We’ve had news reports indicating that the Martian vid was a hoax. We assumed you’d cracked the case.’

‘Uh-huh. Would you believe that the whole thing was cooked up by an eccentric recluse who wanted the planet to himself?’

Sam appeared to consider the question for a second. ‘Considering the perversity of human nature, I think I probably would. Is he going to plead some form of insanity?’

‘He’s clearly nuts,’ Marie commented.

Fox sipped her coffee and allowed it to soak into her brain before answering. Even if the coffee did nothing more than supply fluid to her skin, it still felt like it was doing more. ‘They might try. He is nuts, but legally he’s sane. He knew what he was doing was wrong, and he went ahead and did it anyway. I won’t go into all the charges, but he’s going to be locked away for a very long time.’

~~~

‘Best of all,’ Fox said to the people assembled for the teleconference, ‘the UNTPP is handling the paperwork. Most of it. His home isn’t on American soil and a lot of his crimes weren’t in Isis City, so we decided that Shriver could handle it. She has all the evidence.’

Mariel, sitting at one end of the virtual conference table, nodded. ‘NAPA questioned the decision, but they’re happy if he’s charged with the things they’re concerned about.’

‘Oh, Shriver was considering inventing a few new crimes to charge him with. Given we’ve definitely got him on a couple of cases of murder and one of attempting to blow up a city, all the other things are just going to be icing. They’ll put him in a cell in Cold Harbour and throw the key away.’

‘I’m not sure why Carter went along with this,’ Jackson said. He was across the table from Fox; never the one to play head of the company, he had left the two end seats to Mariel and Garth Eaves. ‘He did not seem the type to fake evidence he was sure he would find.’

‘It was the proposed terraforming,’ Fox replied. ‘He wanted human activity cut back, not expanded, and he was sure the terraforming activities would destroy his precious evidence. It seems like he got cold feet too, since he was the first to be actually killed.’

‘I see. And the remaining Martian androids?’

‘Once we had Bell-Hewlett’s computers and communications systems, tracking them down wasn’t that hard. Shriver’s people ran them down. Well, most of them. Four were traced to Red Beijing, so they notified the Chinese about them. Most of the rest were destroyed along with the shuttle they were using to get about. He had twenty of them, all told. He’d written the AI himself. Guy’s clever. Twisted, but clever.’

‘Twisted seems right,’ Helen said. She was sitting beside Jackson and opposite Ryan Jarvis. The only Palladium board member missing was Alice Vaughn. Well, Kit was not there in body, but she was in spirit. ‘NAPA arrested Simeon Roberts two days ago. Bell-Hewlett wasn’t the only source of funds for the guy and they wanted to make sure they had as many listed in the charges as possible.’ Helen glanced across the table at Ryan. ‘I think they’ll be sending details through to Mars concerning a few people they’d like arrested up there. They hit the Earthside targets at the same time as Roberts.’

Ryan nodded. ‘Came through yesterday. We’ll be passing it on to Lieutenant Holt today. Some of the arrests are going to be contentious, but we’ll get it done. And we’ll get a new computer tech to slot in up there as soon as we can. Have to say, Ayers didn’t seem the type.’

‘It’s not an excuse,’ Fox said, ‘but Bell-Hewlett got to him because of a sick mother. That’s not the kind of thing that comes up in interviews. Justin had no reason to suspect Bast because no one knew a nutjob who really likes his solitude was tossing money around like water. Uh, what happened with the memetic campaign?’

‘The government suggested that since we found it,’ Mariel said, ‘we should fix it. We suggested a fee. They’re doing it themselves.’

‘It’s already started,’ Eaves said. ‘A couple of basic debunking campaigns and some general interference. The news reports on the original vid are part of that. Camille hasn’t done a proper analysis, but she says they should get a good result from the countermemes. Oh, and we thought you’d like to thank Naomi personally for the information she gave us.’ He was trying to keep the smirk off his face, but not succeeding especially well.

‘I will,’ Fox replied. ‘Just as soon as I get the chance.’

~~~

It was Friday night and Sheela Na Gig was humming. The main lounge and bar were full of people wearing clothes which contravened a number of ordinances concerning public decency, but it was private property and that was just the sort of place it was. Fox tended to push the bounds a little herself and Kit’s cyberframe was dressed in a latex sheath which left just enough to the imagination. Marie and even Helen were edging toward the minimal clothing choices these days. Sam could somehow manage to look like he was naked and gorgeous, even when wearing a black silk shirt and leather trousers. And then there was Naomi who, dressed in a corset and floor-length skirt, looked like the most dangerously erotic woman alive.

‘To the return of Fox’s mind,’ Naomi said, raising her glass of deep-red wine. ‘Even if her body hasn’t been away, it’s nice to have her back in it.’

There was a round of agreement and drinking. Fox felt her cheeks heating a little and tamped down on that. ‘Thanks. Well, technically, this body was away for a little while.’ She reached up and tugged on her fringe. ‘New hair.’

‘New hair and skin,’ Kit said. ‘They took the opportunity to apply a slightly improved version of the skin. And since they had it down to the framework, they swapped out the computer system for an updated version. Terri mentioned that I should get my own done at some point. It’s no more powerful, but they say they’ve improved the reliability.’ Terri was not there because she was on the Moon, though Helen seemed to be more or less over the loss of her girlfriend for another indeterminate period.

Fox frowned at her. ‘It is unwise to mention any reliability issues that I may or may not have had previously.’

Kit just beamed her best smile across the table. ‘All in the past and therefore nothing to worry about. The architecture is stable now. The issue with making this generation available for general use is actually one of production.’

‘That’s you told,’ Marie said.

‘Kit has a habit of winning arguments with me,’ Fox replied. ‘Anyway, “The Hellas Find” goes on the pile of archaeological frauds with the Piltdown Man.’

‘Paleoanthropological frauds,’ Kit corrected.

‘That’s way harder to say.’

‘That’s… one argument you’ve won then.’

‘Shame really,’ Marie said. ‘It would be kind of cool to finally find definitive proof of life on another planet. You’re sure there’s nothing up there?’

Fox shook her head. ‘This was a fake, but they still might find something. I doubt it’ll be alive, and I really doubt it’ll have more than one cell. There’re still a few other places to look. The Astraeus Project is back on track to send a ship to Titan and there could be something there.’

‘At least I have some time before I need to worry about alien members,’ Naomi said, smiling. ‘I mean, the costume redesigns are likely to be drastic.’

‘All the tentacles,’ Helen said, nodding sagely.

‘Oh, tentacles we can cope with. I’m rather looking forward to the tentacles.’

11th March.

Fox had been expecting Naomi to bring up the subject all night, but it was after midnight and they were back at Fox’s apartment before Naomi asked. ‘Did you come to a conclusion about my proposal while you were hunting Martians?’

‘I was expecting you to ask that back at the club,’ Fox replied. She continued walking down to the lounge, turning in and heading for the sofa. As she did so, she took the box with the collar in it from her bag, dumping the bag.

‘I decided that it was a private matter. Until it isn’t.’

‘Okay.’ Fox took a seat and waited for Naomi to sit down beside her. ‘And I accept. I’ll wear it and accept whatever else goes with it.’

Smiling, Naomi took the box from Fox. ‘Turn around.’ Fox sat forward and turned, bending her neck slightly to give Naomi space to work. She felt the cool leather against her throat, then there was a click from behind her head and the collar settled into place. ‘You’re mine,’ Naomi said softly. Her hands went to Fox’s shoulders, turning her, and then their lips met. The heat of the kiss was intense, and Naomi was gasping when she broke away. ‘Did… Did you end up seducing that young man while you were away?’

Fox smiled. ‘I’ve got two recordings for you. I met Sister Antonia while I was out and about, and I finally got to spend a couple of hours with Justin last night.’

‘Antonia Belmonte? Well, I’ll review her technique later. I think I’d like a sample of your Justin to warm me up now.’

‘You’re not warm enough? That kiss felt like you were burning.’

‘One can never be insufficiently warmed, Fox. Let’s see what I missed.’ Naomi settled back against the sofa and waited while Fox began transferring the data to her implant.

‘I should warn you,’ Fox said, ‘he was worth waiting for.’

‘That needs a warning?’

‘Well, yeah. Kind of. Just… wait and see.’

There was a pause while the transfer completed and Naomi cued it up to play. Naomi’s body relaxed as Fox’s sensory impressions took over from Naomi’s normal ones. She was not inanimate, just letting herself go with the foreign sensations. ‘Well, he’s a handsome young man,’ she commented.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Mm, good muscle development.’

Fox smirked. ‘Uh-huh.’ She was waiting for the punchline.

‘Oh my… goodness, he’s big!’

‘And there it is,’ Fox said, grinning. ‘There really is a tentacle monster on Mars.’

###

About the Author

I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.

Oddly, then, one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.

I got into writing through roleplaying, however, so my early work was related to the kind of roleplaying game I was interested in. I wrote science fiction when I was playing Traveller. I wrote “high fantasy” when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I wrote a lot of superhero fiction when I was playing City of Heroes. I still love the idea of a modern world with magic in it and I’ve been trying to write a novel based on this for a long time. As with any form of expression, practice is the key and I can look back on all the aborted attempts at books, and the more successful short stories, as steps along the path to the Thaumatology Series.

Recently I took the big step of quitting my day job and taking up full-time writing. My favourite authors are Terry Pratchett, Susan Cooper, J.D. Robb, and Kim Harrison. Kim’s Hollows books were what finally spurred me to publish something, even if the trail to here came by way of Susan, back in school, several decades ago.

For More Information

Take a look at the Witches and Ray-guns blog: http://witchesandrayguns.wordpress.com

Links to book vendors and other information can be found there, along with a view on what I’m up to and when it might happen.

Other Books by this Author

The Thaumatology Series

Thaumatology 101

Demon’s Moon

Legacy

Dragon’s Blood

Disturbia

Hammer of Witches

Eagle’s Shadow

Ancient

Dragonfall

The Other Side of Hell

For Whom the Wedding Bells Toll

Vengeance

Anthologies in the Thaumatology Universe

Tales from High Towers’ Study

Tales from the Dubh Linn

The Aneka Jansen Books

Steel Beneath The Skin

The Cold Steel Mind

Steel Heart

The Winter War

The Greatest Heights of Honour

The Lowest Depths of Shame

Hope

The Ultrahuman Books

Ugly

Shadows

Hunting Mink

Frostburn

Guardian

True Dark

Liberty

The Unobtainium Books

Kate on a Hot Tin Roof

The Reality Hack Books

Reality Hack

The Fox Meridian Books

Fox Hunt

Inescapable

DeathWeb

Criminal Minds

Emergence

The Ghost in the Doll

Eden Burning

Dominance

The Hellas Find

Dancing with The Devil – coming February 2019

The Princeps Venator Books

Hunter’s Kiss

Be My Valentine

The Gunwitch Books

Gunwitch: Rebirth

The Children of Zanar Series

The Zanari Inheritance

The Misfits Series

Misfit Magic

Misfit Witchcraft

The Sondra Blake Series

The Vanity Case

The Shil the Huntress Books

The Eyes of the Huntress

The Twilight Empress Trilogy

The Iron Princess

Table of Contents

Part One: Martians

Part Two: Astraeus

Part Three: The Spy Who Came In

Part Four: The Mines of Mars

Part Five: A Solitary Man

Part Six: The Tentacle Monsters Are Coming!