Old Mars

Swords of Zar-tu-Kan S. M. STIRLING

“WELCOME TO ZHO’DA,” SALLY YAMASHITA SAID.

“I’ve been on Mars over a month now!”

“Kennedy Base is on Mars, but it isn’t really on Zho’da,” she said.

The Demotic word meant something like The Real World.

She swept her mask over her face with a practiced gesture as she walked out of the street-level stage of the airship landing tower, against air as dry and acrid as the Taklamakan Desert and nearly as thin as Tibet’s.

A second later, Tom Beckworth followed suit. The living, quasi fabric writhed, then settled down, turning her face into a smooth black oval below the tilted brown eyes. You didn’t absolutely have to think about the fact that you were plastering a synthetic amoeboid parasite over your mouth and nose. His matched his medium ebony skin much more closely.

Sally always enjoyed getting back to Zar-tu-Kan, the main contact-city for the US-Commonwealth Alliance of explorers and scientists on Mars. It was honestly alien. While Kennedy Base was … sort of like a major airport that had somehow landed in Antarctica with everyone stuck in a second-rate hotel by bad weather. She was probably going to live out the rest of her life on Mars, and with antiagathics cheap at the source, that could be a long time.

Beckworth was gawking, though with restraint; this was the real thing, not training. Slim tulip-shaped spires reared hundreds of feet into the air between warrens of lower-slung, thick-walled compounds, their time-faded colors still blazing against a sky of faded blue tinged pink with the dust of the Deep Beyond. The towers varied in pointillist shadings like the memory of rainbows seen in dreams. Lacy crystalline bridges joined them, and transparent domes glittered below over lineage apartment houses or the homes of the rich and powerful, full of an astonishing flowering lushness. The narrow serpentine streets below wound among blank-faced buildings of hard, glossy, rose-red stone whose ornamental carvings were often worn to faintest tracery …

Zar-tu-Kan had been an independent city-state and ancient when the Tollamune emperors of Dvor-il-Adazar united Mars. It had outlived the Eternal Peace of a planetary empire that lasted thirty thousand years, and was a city-state again. The elongated forms of its native citizens moved past one another and the draught-beasts and riding-birds in an intricate, nearly silent dance, with the loudest sound the scuff of leather and pads on stone. Occasionally a voice; now and then a tinkle of music, like bells having a mathematical argument.

“Mars isn’t older than Earth. It just feels older,” Tom Beckworth said, as they walked, renewing a discussion they’d been having off and on all the way from Kennedy Base on the icebound shores of the Arctic sea.

Shipping people between planets was expensive, even in this year of grace 1998, and only the very best got to make the trip. Unfortunately, sometimes smart, highly educated people invested a lot of their mental capital in defending preconceptions rather than challenging them.

“Martian civilization is a lot older than ours,” Beckworth went on. “But there have to be commonalities. And frankly, they’ve done less with their time than we have with ours.”

She smiled to herself. This wasn’t Venus and you couldn’t play Mighty Whitey Sahib in a pith helmet here. He would learn. Or not.

She stopped and made a sweeping gesture with her arm. “This is it,” Sally said. “Home sweet residence.”

The building was a smooth three-story octagon, featureless on the outside save for low-relief patterns like feathery reeds, with a glassine dome showing above its central portion, typical of the Orchid Consort style in the Late Imperial period. Maintainer bugs the size of cats and shaped like flattened beetles crawled slowly over the crystal in an eternal circuit.

“Helloooobosssss,” a thin, rasping, hissing voice said, in thickly accented English.

The man started violently as a skeletal shape uncoiled itself from beside the doors. In outline it was more or less like a dog covered in dusty russet fur—a fuzzy greyhound on the verge of starvation, with a long whip tail, teeth like a shark, and lambent green eyes under a disturbingly high forehead and long, prehensile toes.

“Hi, Satemcan,” Sally said. “Anything to report?”

“Quietttt,” the animal said, dropping back into Demotic; the greeting had exhausted its English. “Possibblytoooquiettt.”

It bent forward and sniffed at Beckworth’s feet. “Smelllsss unusual. Like you, but … more.”

She reached into one of the loose sleeves of her robe and tossed a package of rooz meat. The not-quite-animal snapped it out of the air and swallowed flesh and edible preservative packaging and all, licking his chops with satisfaction. Then she stripped the glove from her right hand and slipped it into a groove beside the door. A faint touch, dry and rough, and the portal of time-dulled tkem wood slid aside.

“You’ll need to give the house system a taste,” she said, as they passed into the vestibule and tucked their masks back into pockets in their robes. “There.”

Beckworth put his hand in the slot in a gingerly fashion.

“It bit me!” he exclaimed.

“Needs the DNA sample,” she said.

The inner door with its glossy surface slid aside to reveal an arched passageway in the foamed stone. That gave onto an inner courtyard about a hundred yards across. The air was blissfully damp—about like Palm Springs or Bakersfield—and smelled faintly of rock, growth, and things like marjoram and heather and others that had no names on Earth. The pavement was ornamental, a hard, fossil-rich, pale limestone that was replaced every few centuries. Little of it could be seen beneath the vegetation that covered the planters, rose up the slender fretwork pillars that supported the arcaded balconies that overlooked the court, and hung in colored sheets from the carved-stone screens. It wasn’t quite a closed system like a spaceship, but fairly close.

“I extend formal and impersonally polite greetings to the lineage and residents,” she said quietly in fluent Demotic. “This is my professional associate, denominated Thomas, casual/intimate form Tom, lineage designation Beckworth. He will be residing with me for some time as is contractually permitted by my lease.”

That took all of ten words and a couple of modifiers, in Martian. Half a dozen people looked up from chores or narrow books that hinged at the top or games of atanj, gave a brief inclination of the head, then ignored her, which was reasonably courteous; none of them were wearing their robes, or much of anything else.

“We’re on the second floor,” she said, leading the way.

“Nobody seems particularly interested in us,” Beckworth said.

“They’ve seen Terrans before,” Sally said, with a shrug.

“There are only a couple of hundred of us on Mars. I’d have thought we’d attract more attention. A Martian sure as shit would in Oakland!”

“They’re not like us, Tom. That’s the point.”

The door to her suite opened its eye and looked at her, the S-shaped pupil swelling. She met the gaze, letting it scan her and her companion. It blinked acknowledgment and there was a dull click as the muscle retracted the ceramic dead bolt.

They racked their sword belts and he looked at her pictures with interest. There was one of her parents, one of the winery they ran in Napa, and a couple of her siblings and nieces and nephews and one of a cat she’d owned, or vice versa, in university.

The apartment was large, several thousand square feet, paradisical after you got used to spaceships or space habitats or that habitat-on-Mars called Kennedy Base. The furniture was mostly built into the substance of the walls and floor, with silky or furry native blankets and rugs folded on top, some stirring a little as they sensed the Terrans’ body warmth. The extra two degrees tended to confuse them.

Homelike, in a sort of chilly detached alien way, she thought, and went on aloud:

“There’s a bed niche over there, let’s sling your duffle.”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“That way. Wait until you make the acquaintance of the Zar-tu-Kan style of bidet,” she added, and grinned at his wince.

“When do we eat?”

“I’ll whip us up a stir-fry,” she said.

“Martians make stir-fries?” Beckworth said, surprised.

“No, I just like stir-fries.”

“Want me to lend a hand?”

“You’re not going anywhere near my cooking gear,” she said. “It took years to get everything just right.”

As they stowed his modest baggage, Beckworth said quietly: “What’s with the canid?”

“Satemcan? He’s … ah, he’s a very helpful gofer. Especially out in the field. His food doesn’t cost much.”

He raised an ironic eyebrow, and she went on reluctantly, in a lower tone: “And yeah, a bit of a rescue thing. He’s got … problems. He was lucky not to get needled and stuffed in the digester long ago.”

“So much for the cold-blooded, ruthless puppy-rescuing Old Mars Hand,” he said, grinning wide and white.

Sally raised one arm, made a fist, and elevated her middle finger as she went back to the kitchen nook.

“Rooz, the meat vegans can eat,” she called as she sliced and stirred, and Beckworth joined in the laugh as he set out two flat-bottomed globes of essence on the table and pushed in the straws.

Martians regarded the idea of killing a domestic animal to get meat from it as hopelessly inefficient. The tembst-modified bird-dinosaur-whatevers the rooz came from grew flaps of boneless meat where their remote ancestors’ wings or forelimbs had been, and they regrew when sliced off.

“And it does taste like chicken,” Beckworth said.

She put the fry-up aside for a moment in an insulated bowl and poured batter into the wok, swirling it and then peeling out a half dozen tough but fluffy pancakelike rounds of vaguely breadlike stuff in succession.

“More like veal, this variety, and there’s this spice that tastes a bit like lemon and chilies—” she began.

Satemcan whined, his ears coming up and nose pointing toward the door.

It opened without the chime. A green paralysis grenade came rolling through, but Satemcan was already getting to his feet; he made a desperate scrambling leap and struck, batting the barrel-shaped handful of ceramic back out through the open portal.

It sailed out on an arc that would—unfortunately—take it right over the balustrade and into the courtyard. There were shouts of Fright! Alarm! from below, abruptly cut off as it shattered on the stone and everything nearby with a spinal cord went unconscious the instant one of the nanoparticles touched skin.

Three masked figures in robes with the hoods up came through her door on the heels of the projectile, swords and bulbous, thin-barreled dart pistols in their hands. They checked very slightly; she realized it was surprise at finding the Terrans still in their robes indoors, and the fabric was good armor against the light needles.

Sally pivoted on one heel and threw the bowl of sizzling-hot oiled meat and vegetables into the face of the first Martian through the door. He toppled backward, tangling his companions for an instant as she dove forward in a ten-foot leap from a standing start, one arm up in front of her face. A dart gun hissed in a stink of burnt methane tinged with sulfur, and something struck her elbow painfully through the fabric.

That was one pistol out of commission for twenty seconds while it recharged. She hit the ground rolling, stripping her sword out of the belt hanging beside the door; no time for the Colt .45.

Everything felt dreamlike, swift but smooth and stretched somehow; partly the adrenaline buzzing in her blood, partly the gravity. Jumping around on Mars was dreamlike, and so was the softer way you hit the ground.

Satemcan leapt out the door; there was a round of scuffling and thudding and savage growling and a Martian voice screaming:

“Pain!​Sudden​extremepain!” in a tone that told of sincerity. “Emphatic mode!”

And Tom Beckworth fell to the ground with a limp boneless thump, a red spot on his throat showing where a soluble crystal dart had hit as he charged forward like an enraged bull. The third Martian came in at her with a running flèche and all thought vanished as pointed steel lunged for her left eye, blurring-fast and driven by a longer arm than hers.

Parry in tierce, a desperation move, her blade whipping up and to the side and wrist pronated, jarring impact through her fingers. Smooth ting-shring of steel on steel, and she stepped in with a quick shuffling advance and punched with the guard as the elongated figure began an agile backing recovery. That was a bully-swordsman’s trick that would get you disqualified in any salon on Earth, but she wasn’t on Earth and there weren’t any second prizes here.

The Martian made a hissing sound as the Terran’s heavier bone and muscle ripped the hilt of his or her gloved fingers, probably breaking something in the process. Sally Yamashita had just enough time to begin a savage cut from the wrist toward the other’s neck before she felt the slight sting on the back of hers. There had been three Martians to start with.

Oh sh—

Blackness.

The unconsciousness didn’t last long, and the anesthetic dart didn’t leave a hangover. Something rough and wet was touching her cheek. She blinked her eyes open and saw Satemcan’s bloodied muzzle.

“Bossss …”

The canid’s paw-hand dropped the applicator from her belt pouch that had administered the antidote. Blood leaked away from the dagger wounds in his throat and torso, slowing as she watched. Volition returned and she rolled upright, trying to staunch the wounds with her hands.

“Good dog,” she said. “Optimal canid.”

Satemcan whined. A face looked around the doorjamb, one of the lineage.

“Medical care, imperative tense!” Sally barked. That brought someone in with a clamshell-shaped platform running at their heels on many small, unpleasantly human feet. It opened to display a bed of writhing wormlike appendages that divided and subdivided until pink filaments too fine to actually see glittered and weaved. Sally grunted as she levered Satemcan inside and the chitin top closed with a clumping sticky sound like two raw steaks being slapped together. A few moments later a voice came from behind a pierced grille in the shell, unstrained through consciousness as the organic machine spoke:

“Hybrid canid, standard format. Extensive exsanguination, moderate tissue trauma, minor damage to motor nerves. Stabilizing … prognosis excellent but requiring additional proteins and feedstocks.”

“I authorize the expenditure,” she snapped, holding herself from slumping with relief; Mars didn’t run to national health plans. “Maximum accelerated healing.”

For a moment she touched the shell of the trauma unit.

Come on, boy, you can make it!

She came to her feet; the robe had shed the blood, and scuttling things were coming out of tiny holes in the walls to clean up the rest before they returned to feed it and the spilled food to the house digesters. The platform trotted off pad-pad-pad-pad to plug itself into the … more or less … veins of the building.

“How much were you paid to let them in?” she asked.

The lineage head—his name was Zhay—was gray-haired and wrinkled, which meant he’d probably been born when Andrew Jackson was president of the United States and Japan was a hermit kingdom run by knife-fanciers with weird haircuts who spent all their spare time oppressing her peasant ancestors.

“One thousand monetary units, and in addition a conditional threat to kill or excruciate several of us if we declined,” he said. “The perpetrators were independently contracting Coercives, persons self-evidently given to short-term perspectives.”

Which is a devastating insult, locally.

He went on: “I would estimate that they were highly paid, however.”

Sally made herself count to five before replying in an even tone: By local standards she simply didn’t have any grounds for being angry, and she had to conform if she wanted to be taken seriously. Nobody here would expect the residents to risk their relatives or their own lives to protect someone like her. And if they were going to rat her out, why shouldn’t they make a profit on it? A thousand monetary units was a lot of money.

Somebody was willing to pay high for a Terran, or for Tom specifically. Or maybe they wanted both of us, but they were too banged-up to take us both.

The apartment’s lineage had had the medical platform standing by, which actually showed goodwill. She really couldn’t afford to unload on them.

“But it would feel so good to go completely ripshit,” she said to herself through gritted teeth, in English.

“Take this to my consulate and you will receive reasonable recompense,” she went on, when the throbbing in her temples had subsided, typing quickly on her personal computer and loading it onto the data stick.

She hadn’t known Tom Beckworth long enough to care about him really deeply.

Not as much as I do about Satemcan, if we’re being completely honest, she thought.

But he was a Terran where those were damned few, and a fellow American where they were even thinner on the ground, and more important, looking after him while he was still green here was her job.

“Please note that if there is any repetition, my associates at the consulate will invoke an arbitration council and propose a heavy fine for implicit violation of the mutual-protection provisions of my lease.”

Zhay looked as if he were going to protest—it was an arguable point, since that clause really only applied to random street crime and burglary. Instead he simply gestured acknowledgment again and accepted the little plastic rectangle.

She didn’t bother to threaten him with the consulate’s influence with the local government. Robert Holmegard was a good man, but she’d learned right down in her gut what the Alliance consul still had trouble accepting over there in the palace district: government just didn’t matter nearly as much here as it did back on Earth, where variations on social democracy were pretty well universal outside the EastBloc.

And I am better informed about this side of Martian life than a diplomat. Much, much better.

“I will be out for a considerable period,” Sally concluded. “I need to find a Coercive of my own. Please leave on the porch light; I’ll be back after midnight.”

It didn’t rhyme in the monosyllabic tonalities of Demotic, but the puzzled frown was worth it. They really didn’t get folk rock here.

A Martian staggered out of the Blue-Tinted Time Considered as a Regressing Series, cheap inert fabric mask dangling and a smile—a slack grin, by local standards—on his face. He hummed a tune, then called out:

“Eu … Eu … euphoriaaa! Is there anyone within heeeearringggg intent on parareproductive coitus?”

Sally stiff-armed him as he stumbled toward her. The lightly built Martian gave an ooof and bounced back into the wall, still giggling.

“Three inhabited planets in this fucked-up zoo of a solar system, and you can’t get away from irritating drunks on any of them.”

He sank against the wall and slid down it, tittering, then started to hum the same tune as he sat splay-legged. Several adolescents eyed him, waiting to see if it was safe to lift his possessions, but blinking and backing a little when she glared at them.

It was that sort of neighborhood. She pushed through the doors. Teyudza-Zhalt was usually to be found here when she wasn’t working a contract. It was a canal-side dive where the crews of the long-distance canal boats and the landships that sailed the desert plains and caravan traders down from the highlands hung out … and where the little sign with the glyphs reading Professional Practitioner of Coercive Violence on her table wasn’t at all out of place.

Silence fell as Sally entered the inner door, and heads moved to consider her.

“Vas-Terranan,” someone murmured—which was insulting, but at least subtly so.

There was a slight clatter as weapons were laid back on tables or holstered. The light had an unpleasant greenish cast; someone was underfeeding the glow-globes. The murals on the walls looked dusty and faded, outlining a big circular room on the ground floor of a tower more than half-abandoned. The adamantine stone of the floor was worn deep enough to show ruts in places, and it was set with circular tables cut in slabs from the perfectly circular trunks of tkem timber. They were nicked and battered, which took some doing with a wood that contained natural silica monofilaments.

The air was dry and cool, of course, but it somehow smelled of ancient ghosts and lost hopes and all the labyrinthine history of Zho’da, the Real World.

Teyud sat with a tiny incense-burning brazier empty and swept clean beside her, but leaving a faint musky fragrance in the air when you got close. She was playing atanj, left hand against right, and occasionally taking a sip from a globe of essence as she considered the moves of her pieces or threw the dice.

Beside the folding game-set her table held a bowl of sweet dipping sauce and a platter of black-streaked crimson flowers. She crunched one, swallowed, sipped, and inclined her head in Sally’s direction.

“I express amiable greetings, Sally Yamashita,” she said, in a voice that had an undertone like soft trumpets. “This match will be completed shortly.”

The Coercive was on the tallish side of average height, around seven feet, but the color of her huge eyes was distinctly odd, a lambent amber-gold. Her robe was of a reddish khaki, excellent blending colors nearly anywhere on the planet, but the hood was thrown back to show hair caught back in a fine metallic net. Hair and metal both had a sheen like polished bronze. She was slender, but not with the impression of birdlike frailty common among Martians. Unless the bird was a golden eagle, the type Mongols had used to hunt wolves with back in the old days.

Thoughtful Grace, the emperors of the Crimson Dynasty had called the tembst-modified warrior caste that had enforced their will and kept their peace. They were rare now that the Tollamunes controlled nothing except the old capital of Dvor-il-Adazar and its environs, but it wasn’t only Martian manners that ensured a ring of empty tables around Teyud.

Sally didn’t intrude on the game; they took their atanj seriously here. The Coercive threw the dice one more time, moved a Transport piece to the square of the left-side Despot, nodded very slightly, and began to pack the set away. When the pieces were in their holders she folded it shut and tucked it into a pocket in the sleeve of her robe.

“I profess amiable greetings in return, Teyudza-Zhalt,” Sally said.

She took one of the flowers and dipped it in the sauce. Amiable greetings included an invitation to share. The texture was slightly chewy and the flavor sort of like frangipani-scented sweet-and-sour pork; her stomach growled.

Murder and sudden death, but you still get hungry if you don’t eat … and I literally threw away dinner.

“Contractual discussion?” she went on to the Martian.

“You have recently been engaged in lethal or near-lethal conflict,” Teyud said thoughtfully. “You were struck by an anesthetic dart there—” She tapped the back of her neck. “You are not accompanied by the … unconventional canid. I request details; then we may discuss contract terms in accordance with degrees of uncertainty, calculable risk, and difficulty.”

They did, and in a marked concession to Terran custom, the mercenary shook hands to seal the deal; hers was firm and dry and extremely strong. It wasn’t the first time she’d worked for Sally or other members of the Alliance mission here.

“This will be an interesting task,” she said.

“I need to get my colleague back,” Sally said grimly.

“That is the point of interest,” Teyud said, finishing her globe of essence. “That he was removed indicates that immediate lethality was not the object of the attackers. They were—metaphorical mode—operating as if intent on armed robbery, even though they stole nothing else. They wished to steal a vas-Terranan. Surely even the most eccentric of collectors would not do that simply to have one on hand? I am pleasantly at a loss for an explanation.”

The clock on the wall began to sing in the poetic-aesthetic mode, with a tone like the grief of diamonds:

Hours like sandOn the shores of a bitter seaFlow on waves of time;Twelve hours have passedSince last the SunRose in blind majesty;It shall yield heedless to nightIn one more—“Bit him, emphatic mode! Bit, bit, bit him!” Satemcan said viciously, snarling … literally. “I bit the intruder on the territory of my social reference group!”

“Yes, you did,” Sally said patiently, patting the canid on the head.

“I will—future-conditional intentional case—bite him again, emphatic mode!”

You couldn’t just say you absolutely would do something in the future in Demotic; the assumptions built into the structure of its grammar forbade certainty about uncontrollable events. Satemcan was coming as close to that as possible.

The canid wasn’t looking at his slightly scruffy best; the areas over his wounds were naked and glistening with the pseudoskin that covered them. He was moving well enough, though, and the medical tembst used organic glues to hold things together internally. They’d be absorbed as the accelerated natural healing took place.

And there was a crazed look in his reddish eyes. Not a happy camper, Sally thought. Well, neither am I.

“Canid,” Teyud said. “Can you track these individuals?”

“Yessss,” Satemcan said, all business for a moment.

He began to walk away from the apartment building, nose working as his deep red tongue came out to lap over it. After a moment he sniggered, which was something to see:

“He-he-he-he! Here they triggered an antiscent aerosol. I express derision! Utter futility! My exceptional sensitivity and practiced skill easily uncover the scents of blood and fear pheromones.”

He trotted on. Teyud was keeping her eyes up, watching for movement on the low rooftops without seeming to strain.

“Intriguing,” she said softly. “This resembles minor-unit confrontation tactics more than most private commissions.”

Martians weren’t any braver than Terrans, on average; they were just more straightforward. Teyud was, though. They’d worked together before, and it could get stressful. But right now, Sally didn’t give a damn.

“I express regret at the risk you must undergo,” Sally said.

The Coercive didn’t look around, but there was slight surprise in her voice:

“I chose to be involved.” Thoughtfully: “You vas-Terranan are the first new thing to come into the Real World in a very long time. Working with you is less demoralizing than sitting and contemplating the time when the Deep Beyond spreads over the final cities and the last atmosphere plants wither.”

“It will be a long time before that happens, too,” Sally said; it didn’t bother most Martians much.

She was checking their six; it would be difficult to detect a tail, but not impossible.

“Not so long as the time that has passed since the date when the First Emperor reigned,” Teyud said. “Ah, your canid halts.”

“Here,” Satemcan said, casting around under the feet of irritated pedestrians. “Multiple trails, but the freshest leads into this structure.”

“Oh, shit,” Sally added, as the canid looked up with tail waving, expecting praise. “Ah … good job, Satemcan.”

The glyphs on the building read:

Cooperative Agency for Aggrandizement, Zar-tu-Kan Franchise.

“What are we going to do?” she said. In English: “Here at Yakuza Central?”

“I recommend following the exhortation on the wall: Enquire Within,” Teyud said.

The waiting room was a large arched space; it had a rack for scrolls, which was the equivalent of a stack of magazines, and a vending device for essences. And there were advertising posters on the walls:

Have you lost the desire for self-preservation but lack the fortitude for conventional suicide? Then consider tokmar addiction, the most subjectively pleasant form of slow dissolution for individuals with your psychological malfunction! Initial samples available gratis!

Or:

Few satisfactions equal the excruciation of those who have antagonized or superseded you. Indulge spite and envy! Our specialists …

“It’s not the differences that are really disturbing, it’s the goddamned similarities,” she muttered, avoiding the helpful illustrations. “Or maybe it’s both. We do the same stuff, but they’re so fucking up front about it.”

Satemcan had his ears laid back as they entered; he must be getting a snoutful of unpleasant scents far too faint for human or Martian nostrils.

“Apprehension,” he whined. “Fear.”

“Did they come through here?”

“That way,” he said, pointing with his nose.

That way was effectively the receptionist’s desk, the one with a helpful sign:

Past This Point Those without Authorization Will Be Killed without Warning.

“You wish?” the receptionist said.

Then he took in Teyud, and Sally could see his pupils expand. He brought his hands out of his sleeves and laid them carefully flat on the table.

“You wish, most refined of genome?” he repeated—this time using the honorific mode.

Three Coercives in black robes stood behind the slab of gray smooth stone, and she thought there were probably more in the offing. This was thug central. It was some consolation that their eyes were traveling between her and Teyud with a certain nervousness; she’d been here long enough to read Martian body language well. It gave her an advantage, since the locals she dealt with didn’t have nearly as much experience with Terrans.

It’s bullshit that they don’t have emotions, whatever those Far Frontiers episodes say. They’re just less self-reflective about them.

Sally took a deep breath; she wasn’t entirely confident of getting out of here alive, but the odds would be much worse without Teyud.

“My residence was attacked …” she began.

When she had finished, the receptionist blinked at her and bent to whisper into a grille. Teyud’s ears pricked forward; so did Satemcan’s. A tendril extended and the receptionist plugged it into his ear. The conversation that followed went entirely silent; he nodded several times, then extracted the intercom thing (or possibly data-retrieval thing) with a plop and spoke:

“Three independent Coercives contracted with a third party for the operation you mention four days ago, through our employment placement service, with the usual finder’s fee. They also purchased tactical information on your habitual schedule. Early this morning they returned here with a vas-Terranan prisoner, whom they turned over to the third party. They then purchased fairly extensive medical care for bone fractures, burns, and canid bites and departed Zar-tu-Kan bound for Dvor-il-Adazar. We will not sell you their identities because their affiliation contracts contain a nondisclosure clause.”

International Union of Thugs, Local 141, she thought bitterly. They’ve had a long time to come up with rules to cover every contingency.

The receptionist blinked; evidently Sally’s expression was showing more than she wanted. Earth-human body language wasn’t exactly the same as Martian, but it wasn’t impossibly different either for basics like humor or anger. The problem was that each species found the reasons for the other’s emotions weirdly opaque. Add in that Martians had only one language and one set of social rules and hence were unaccustomed to dealing with different reactions, and crossed wires were more common than not.

There was more cultural variation in San Francisco than on this entire planet. She made the muscles of her face relax one by one.

“The nondisclosure policy is not negotiable, by permanent directive,” the receptionist said cautiously. “Killing or excruciating myself or any of our other associates here will not alter this; the policy is set at higher levels, to whom we are of little consequence.”

Sally schooled her face and glanced aside at Teyud. The Thoughtful Grace made a very small gesture with two fingers of the hand resting on her sword hilt: Don’t push it.

“I’m more interested in the person who employed the three … associates of your cooperative,” Sally said grimly.

“We will inform you of the identity of the third party for a fee of 2,750 monetary units, with financing available on the following terms at an interest rate of …”

“No nondisclosure clause?”

“No, none was purchased. This was an imprudent excess of thrift that increases the probability of suboptimal results from the client’s perspective! Note that we will include a nondisclosure agreement with you for a modest additional fee of—”

Ten minutes later they were back on the street, and Sally was looking at the name and address written on a scrap of paper-equivalent.

“What do we do now?” she said.

Teyud smiled. “As to our course of action, we engage in reconnaissance, then attack.”

Here I am, invading Harvard with fell intent. Or maybe Oxford.

Even by the standards of Zar-tu-Kan, the Scholarium was old. Old enough that it hadn’t originally been under a dome, or laid out whole in one of the fractal-pattern mazes Martians had gone in for under the Crimson Dynasty. They’d improvised during the Imperial era as it grew; now the reduced students and staff rattled around in buildings that ranged from the size of her apartment block to things bigger than the Solar Dome in Houston or the Great House of People’s Culture in Beijing; the bigger ones were mostly garden now, and they were all linked together by tunnels below and translucent walkways etched in patterns like magnified snowflakes above.

Sally suppressed a start as she saw herself in a reflective patch of one of them. She and Teyud wore student robes—slightly threadbare and gaudy—and Scholarium-style masks. Hers was a Spinner-Grub, modeled on the pupal stage of an insect used for textile production—a freshman style, and something of a dry joke in local terms. Teyud’s was a jest of her own, a delicate golden mask representing the face of a Thoughtful Grace sword-adept … which she actually was. Here it could mark someone studying the martial arts, or military history. The fact that most people wore masks and clothing that covered everything to the fingertips made sneaking around in disguise much easier.

And Teyud had a rather ironic sense of humor. When Sally mentioned the fact, she nodded slightly.

“More. In their origins, the Thoughtful Grace were Coercives concerned with maintenance of rule and regulation deference … what is that Terran word …”

“Police,” Sally said quietly.

“Yes. And now I am pursuing a similar function, particularly for you.”

She chuckled slightly. Sally didn’t feel like laughing; it was a bit too personal.

“And so I still serve Sh’uMaz, in—metaphorical mode—a way,” Teyud said, and touched the Imperial glyph in the forehead of her mask that represented that concept. “Even though I am not in the service of the Kings Beneath the Mountain.”

Sh’uMaz meant Sustained Harmony, the program and motto of the Tollamune emperors. The Eternal Peace of the Crimson Dynasty was a nostalgic memory on Mars now, but there was some undertone in Teyud’s voice stronger than that.

A section of the walkway curled downward in a spiral like a corkscrew. They slid down it in a way practicable only because the gravity was a third of Earth’s, then walked out into the space under a dome. The buildings around the edge were wildly varied, but most of the identifying glyphs bore variations on the beaded spiral that signified tembst. This was the science faculty, more or less.

Pathways of textured, colored rock wound through the open space, interspersed with low shrubs and banks of flowers. Colorful avians flew or scurried about. One of the birds stopped and hovered before her face.

“Food?” it said hopefully.

“Buzz off,” she replied, and it did.

Students sat or sprawled along the pathways and planters and benches, arguing or reading or occasionally singing. Apart from the eternal atanj a few played games that involved throwing small things with bundles of tentacles that tried to snag your hand. You won by catching the tip of a tentacle and whirling the … thing … at the next player. If it missed, it scuttled back to the one who had the next turn.

She couldn’t understand why anyone here would abduct a Terran biologist for his knowledge; Martians were simply better at it, and Tom had come to this planet to learn himself. That left something on the order of I need a lab rat with a particular genetic pattern as motivation. Which meant that anything could be happening to him.

Anything at all.

“Information,” Teyud said smoothly to a passerby. “Knowledgeable Instructor Meltamsa-Forin?”

The student had a mask whose surface mimicked something that had a swelling boss of bone on its forehead.

“Ah, Meltam the Neurologically Malfunctioning,” he said.

Or Meltam the Eccentric or Meltam the Mad, she translated mentally.

“Identity, function?”

The student pointed to one of the buildings. “Be prepared to listen to exquisitely reasoned arguments from faulty premises.”

“Specialty?”

“Agri-tembst, with a more recent subsidiary field in Wet World biotics,” the student said. Grudgingly: “In the latter, he has considerable data. Though the subject is arcane and of little immediate utility, it has some interest.”

He tilted his head and left, having comprehensively dissed a professor. Under other circumstances, Sally would have found it humiliating: the glyph on the building he’d pointed out was roughly translatable as Veterinary Science. Of course, it also meant Engineering Malfunctions and Their Remedies.

“Tom was kidnapped by veterinarians?”

The building itself was old enough that it had high, arched windows, filled with foam-rock aeons ago. Most of it was included in the later dome, but a tower reared high above, a smooth stone cylinder that flared outward at the top like a gigantic tulip.

“Ah,” Teyud said. “Yes. A straightforward entry has limited possibilities. But there are alternatives available.”

“What alternatives?”

“There are advantages to being of the Thoughtful Grace genome, which compensate for the increased caloric intake necessary.” She frowned in thought and ate another flower. “In your terms … I am owed favors and have serious mojo with the local Coercives in the service of the Despot.”

“They’ll intervene?” Sally said, surprised and pleased.

“Not directly. But … off the books.”

“I would have preferred a high-altitude insertion with directional parachutes,” Teyud said a few hours later. “There is a small but calculable risk of the airship’s being spotted.”

“No,” Sally said; that was less impolite in Demotic.

The blimp was very nearly silent; the engines were panting—literally—because they’d pulled it into a position upwind and were now drifting with the breeze quietly and slowly toward the Scholarium. Zar-tu-Kan passed below the transparent compartment in the belly of the dirigible, less stridently bright than a Terran city from the air, a mystery of soft glow and points of light. It was cold, well below zero, but the robes and undersuit were near-perfect insulation. Only the skin across her eyes was exposed, and that only until …

Teyud extended a case unclipped from her belt. Sally winced slightly but bent forward. The lid snapped open, and tentacles swarmed out and webbed around her face. The optical-beast pulled itself out of the case with a sticky plop and settled firmly; it only weighed a couple of pounds, and it felt like the slightly tacky play-goo kids used. Everything went blank, and there was a slight sting at her temples as the fine tendrils plugged into her veins. Another sting at the corners of her eyes, and a sensation like blurs of static and a very brief headache as even finer filaments integrated into her optic nerves.

Then everything went brighter, like an overcast day. Teyud glowed very slightly; the animal sensed ambient heat as well as magnifying light.

“Functioning,” she said.

If she looked anything like Teyud, she was now giving a fair imitation of a Bug-Eyed Monster from an ancient magazine cover; the optic the Thoughtful Grace wore turned the upper part of her face into a smooth bulging surface like the eyes of an insect … which was more or less what it was. This was Imperial-era military tembst, and Teyud had said there was a very slight possibility it would kill Sally when she tried to use it, despite her providing a blood sample for prior authorization.

Too small a probability for serious consideration, was the way she’d put it.

The intercom whistled, then said: “Coming up on target. Prepare to deploy. I express a desire that random factors eventuate in a favorable pattern.”

Satemcan whimpered slightly as Teyud picked him up, and he clamped on to her harness with both paw-hands. Sally checked her equipment; her sword was across her back, in that cool-looking position that meant you had to be careful to not slice off your ear when you drew. She wore a native dart pistol, after a bit of an argument from Teyud. Her own Colt had a much higher rate of fire—it didn’t depend on a chamber generating methane. On the other hand, shooting someone with a bullet didn’t drop them instantly, and it was much louder.

Cables uncoiled from the roof of the assault transport’s ceiling. Sally clipped one to her harness and gripped it in her gloved hands.

Down below, the dome of the Science Faculty glowed like an opal beneath the moon—Phobos was up here, a third the size of Luna from Earth, and Deimos crawled past it. The airship’s props whirred briefly as it corrected course.

“Deploying … now!”

The transparent doors beneath them opened, and her weight came onto the harness. The cable dropped away, coiling into space, and dangled as they approached the swelling top of the tower. Teyud’s head moved, calculating.

“Now,” she said, and squeezed the release.

Sally followed suit, and they swooped down into the not-darkness. She hoped the falling-elevator sensation in her stomach was all physical. The tower’s roof was flat or nearly—shedding rain wasn’t much of a problem here, and from the markings there had been Paiteng perches there once. She didn’t try to gauge her own speed; Teyud was the specialist, and she just followed as closely as possible. There was a sudden flexing in the cable; the bundle of sucker-equipped boneless limbs at its end had clamped down on the target. She clamped her legs together and extended them as the roof rushed up at her, then hit the release and tucked and rolled the way she would have from a parachute drop; she’d done that on Earth, of course, but never here.

Whump.

“Oooof!” and a muffled yelp from the canid.

Things thumped and gouged at her and the wind jolted out of her lungs. The boots and padding protected her, a bit. She thought the impact would have broken bones on Earth; it would have broken bones here, for most standard-issue Martians. Teyud was up on one knee, the edges of her blackened sword blade glimmering and the dart pistol in the other.

Sally drew likewise, the steel a comforting weight. The pistol was in her left and much lighter, but she didn’t have the Thoughtful Grace’s advantage of being ambidextrous. Satemcan staggered for a moment, shook his head, and slunk over to her heel.

There were a couple of packages of Semtex in her belt, part of her other-job kit as she thought of it. Hopefully …

They came erect and padded over to the door. It opened its eye—slowly, which was the sign of a system reaching the end of its life span. Teyud leaned forward swiftly and pressed her optic mask to the opening. Things made rather ghastly wet, sticky sounds as the commando optic used one of its functions to take over the other biomachine, and the door swung open.

“Poor security maintenance,” Teyud said very softly.

A spiral staircase led down from the landing stage, curling around a shaft that held—or had held, once—a freight lift. Teyud went down with a rapid scuff-scuff-scuff leaning run not quite like the way a Terran moved and only slightly more like the way a standard Martian did. Sally simply hopped down three or four steps each time, quiet enough in padded-sole boots if you were careful. There were occasional glow-globes, but they were nearly dormant; the optics gave them a sort of twilight view, in which footprints glowed slightly from remnant heat.

Every once in a while, they’d pass a door, one that led to rooms in the thickness of the tower wall. Most were unoccupied. Some—

Phufft.

Teyud fired before the door was fully open. The student toppled backward, a surprised look on his face. One hand held a pancake-tortilla thing wrapped around some filling, the other a top-hinged book. Teyud moved in a blur, getting her pistol arm underneath him before he struck the ground, lowering him gently and leaving the book and the more-or-less burrito on his chest.

Sally covered the stairwell while she worked. Shooting someone here wasn’t really like doing it at home, not if you used anesthetic darts; it was more like paintball, in a way, with the only real risk that of bonking your head when you collapsed. She had played a fair amount of what amounted to paintball with Teyud and her friends now and then. It was fun and excellent training, though she never beat the Coercive. Other Martians yes, but not the Thoughtful Grace, though she came close occasionally.

Of course, out on planet Reality and away from the padded obstacle course you couldn’t tell if someone was using lethals until it was too late. The instant unconsciousness was the same, but with the real thing you had instant brain-death too.

“Here,” Teyud whispered, in a flat, noncarrying tone.

Here was a door with more than its share of faintly glowing footprints. Sally tapped Satemcan on his head, and he sniffed long and carefully, then nodded.

“Ssssame​sssstrange​sssssmelll,” he whispered.

Teyud went through the eye-capture routine again. Then she looked up and nodded to Sally before she pushed gently on the door.

It swung open, and her optic mask stepped down the brighter light. A voice came through:

“… many years of declining fees and contributions by organizations and the Despot. This is suboptimal in the medium to long term! Contact with the Wet World—”

Which was colloquial Demotic for Earth.

“—presents both unprecedented risks and opportunities for maximizing the utility of the faculty of—”

Under the tiger alertness, some distant part of Sally Yamashita’s mind quietly boggled.

Am I really listening to an evil-mastermind academic veterinarian monologing about cutbacks in his fucking budget? that part of her asked.

The chamber was large and had scattered consoles and lab benches, and what Sally recognized as an isolation tank, a glassine cylinder. Tom Beckworth was in it, naked and glaze-eyed and fastened to a frame with living wormlike bonds. An elderly white-haired Martian was striding up and down in lecture mode, dressed in a dark coverall fitted with dozens of loops to hold instruments, most of them alive.

There were a half dozen younger Martians, probably the equivalent of grad students. She checked a half step at the seventh, a tall, hard-faced man in a gray uniform. He had blond hair cropped to a bristle cut, but his cheekbones were nearly as high as hers and his eyes slanted. One of the grad students was fitting a glassine tube to the side of the isolation chamber and preparing to press a plunger.

Teyud simply walked toward the group. Sally followed, taking deep, slow breaths. Then—

The EastBlocker turned, and his eyes went wide. A hand sped toward the Tokarev at his waist, very fast. Sally leapt—

Pfutt!

The student slumped to the floor before he could press the plunger, and Teyud’s dart pistol was out of action for twenty seconds as the methane chamber recharged.

—and the blond man leapt back, but the tip of her sword scored across his hand and the automatic pistol went flying—

Crack and Teyud’s sword punched through another student’s eye socket and into her brain and out again, as the rest scrambled for their sword belts if they weren’t wearing them. The professor stood glaring with indignation.

Ting, and the EastBlocker had his own blade out, settling into a classic European academic épée stance and beating aside her flèche and riposting with a stop-thrust.

Cling-ting-crash and Teyud was moving through the press of grad students in a whirling blur, with blood misting into the air in arcs as she did. Pfutt, and another dropped bonelessly to the floor. A scream and growl as Satemcan leapt onto the back of one angling to get behind Sally’s back.

Ting-crash-ting, and the point of Sally’s blade slid into the man’s throat, with an ugly sensation of things crunching and popping and yielding.

She froze for a moment, watching him fall slowly to the floor and lie kicking as the astonishing amount of blood a human being contained flowed out.

“Mat’ …” he gasped once: Mother.

“You came a very long way to die,” she murmured, suddenly conscious of a wound along her ribs that she hadn’t even noticed. She swallowed as she felt it; just an inch or two farther in …

The last of the grad students broke and fled for the door. Teyud’s dart pistol came up: Pfutt.

Something crunched as he fell face-first.

Sally wiped her sword on the arm of her robe and sheathed it, throwing back the hood of her robe and keeping her pistol trained on the white-haired professor. She removed her mask and the optic, regretting it as the thing scuttled across the floor and flowed up Teyud’s robe, opening a container and stuffing itself inside. It wasn’t the light, which was adequate; it was the smell. Martians and humans both tended to be very messy when they died.

The robe she was wearing would take care of her wound until she had time to do something more formal. She reached for the ampoule plugged into the side of the isolation chamber.

“Careful!” Tom said.

She looked up; he was gray with either pain or shock or both, but alert.

“Dr. Cagliostro there was about to test that on me, he liked explaining every step. It’s a virus that makes you suggestible. The East-Blockers … or maybe that guy on his own … were paying him to develop it. Then they were going to tell me to forget about it and let you rescue me … so I could spread it.”

“Sounds like them,” Sally said grimly. “There’s a protection?”

“Vaccine,” Beckworth said.

Teyud came back from the door, considering the veterinarian with her head to one side.

“You are elderly and frail,” she said. “Attempting to resist excruciation would be pointless.”

Sally smiled thinly as she worked the controls of the isolation chamber. There were times when she did like the way Martians thought.

Sally Yamashita yawned as she finished her essence, a taste like raspberries and mango with an alcoholic subtang. The glow-globes of her apartment were turned down low; Tom needed all the sleep he could get.

“I am an optimal canid,” Satemcan said sleepily, curling up on his rug.

She yawned again. “Damned straight,” she said. “Best damned dog on Mars.”