I settled cross-legged onto cushions at a table that was secured to the blimp’s hull on a metal arm and thus did not touch the gantry at all. The gantry itself was cordoned with the faint haze of a power screen that kept the temperature decent and the gusting wind to a pleasant breeze. Around me the hexagonal grating floor allowed me an almost uninterrupted view past the edge of the cushions to the sea a kilometre below. I shifted uneasily. Heights had never been my strong point.
“Used to use it for tracking whales and stuff,” said Ortega, gesturing sideways at the hull. “Back before places like this could afford the satellite time. ‘Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.”
She paused. “I was born on Understanding Day,” she added inconsequentially.
“Really?”
“Yep. January 9th. They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.”
“Nice.”
Who she was really talking to caught up with her. She shrugged, abruptly dismissive. “When you’re a kid you don’t see it that way. I wanted to be called Maria.”
“You come here often?”
“Not often. But I figured anyone out of Harlan’s World would like it.”
“Good guess.”
A waiter arrived and carved the menu into the air between us with a holotorch. I glanced briefly down the list and selected one of the ramen bowls at random. Something vegetarian.
“Good choice,” said Ortega. She nodded at the waiter. “I’ll have the same. And juice. You want anything to drink?”
“Water.”
Our selections flared briefly in pink and the menu disappeared. The waiter pocketed the holotorch at his breast with a snappy gesture and withdrew. Ortega looked around her, seeking neutral conversation.
“So, uh—you got places like this in Millsport?”
“On the ground, yes. We’re not big on aerial stuff.”
“No?” She raised her customary eyebrow. “Millsport’s an archipelago, isn’t it? I would have thought airships were—”
“An obvious solution to the real estate shortage? Right as far as that goes, but I think you’re forgetting something.” I flicked my eyes skywards. “We Are Not Alone.”
It clicked. “The orbitals? They’re hostile?”
“Mmm. Let’s say capricious. They tend to shoot down anything airborne that masses more than a helicopter. And since no one’s ever been able to get close enough to decommission one of them, or even get aboard, come to that, we have no way of knowing what their exact programming parameters are. So we just play it safe, and don’t go up in the air much.”
“Must make IP traffic tough.”
I nodded. “Well, yeah. ‘Course, there isn’t much traffic anyway. No other habitable planets in the system, and we’re still too busy exploiting the World to bother about terraforming. Few exploration probes, and maintenance shuttles to the Platforms. Bit of exotic element mining, that’s about it. And there are a couple of launch windows down around the equator towards evening and one crack of dawn slot up on the pole. It looks like a couple of orbitals must have crashed and burned, way back when, left holes in the net.” I paused. “Or maybe someone shot them down.”
“Someone? You mean someone, not the Martians?”
I spread my hands. “Why not? Everything they’ve ever found on Mars was razed or buried. Or so well disguised we spent decades looking right at it before we even realised it was there. It’s the same on most of the Settled worlds. All the evidence points to some kind of conflict out there.”
“But the archaeologues say it was a civil war, a colonial war.”
“Yeah, right.” I folded my arms and sat back. “The archaeologues say what the Protectorate tells them to say, and right now it’s fashionable to deplore the tragedy of the Martian domain tearing itself apart and sinking via barbarism into extinction. Big warning for the inheritors. Don’t rebel against your lawful rulers, for the good of all civilisation.”
Ortega looked nervously around her. Conversation at some of the nearer tables had skittered and jarred to a halt. I gave the spectators a wide smile.
“Do you mind if we talk about something else?” Ortega asked uncomfortably.
“Sure. Tell me about Ryker.”
The discomfort vanished into an icy stillness. Ortega put her hands flat on the table in front of her and looked at them.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said eventually.
“Fair enough.” I watched cloud formations shimmer in the haze of the power screen for a while, and avoided looking down at the sea below me. “But I think you want to, really.”
“How very male of you.”
The food arrived and we ate in silence broken only by the traditional slurping. Despite the Hendrix’s perfectly balanced autochef breakfast, I discovered I was ravenous. The food had triggered a hunger in me deeper than the needs of my stomach. I was draining the dregs of my bowl before Ortega had got halfway through hers.
“Food OK?” she asked ironically as I sat back.
I nodded, trying to wipe away the skeins of memory associated with the ramen, but unwilling to bring the Envoy conditioning online and spoil the sated feeling in my belly. Looking around at the clean metal lines of the dining gantry and the sky beyond, I was as close to totally contented as I had been since Miriam Bancroft left me drained in the Hendrix.
Ortega’s phone shrilled. She unpocketed it and answered, still chewing her last mouthful.
“Yeah? Uhuh. Uhuh, good. No, we’ll go.” Her eyes nickered briefly to mine. “That so? No, leave that one too. It’ll keep. Yeah, thanks Zak. Owe you one.”
She stowed the phone again and resumed eating.
“Good news?”
“Depends on your point of view. They traced the two local calls. One to a fightdrome over in Richmond, place I know. We’ll go down and take a look.”
“And the other call?”
Ortega looked up at me from her bowl, chewed and swallowed. “The other number was a residential discreet. Bancroft residence. Suntouch House. Now what, exactly, do you make of that?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ortega’s fightdrome was an ancient bulk carrier, moored up in the north end of the Bay, alongside acres of abandoned warehouses. The vessel must have been over half a kilometre long with six clearly discernible cargo cells between stem and stern. The one at the rear appeared to be open. From the air, the body of the carrier was a uniform orange that I assumed was rust.
“Don’t let it fool you,” Ortega grunted as we circled. “They’ve polymered the hull a quarter-metre thick all over. Take a shaped charge to sink it now.”
“Expensive.”
She shrugged. “They’ve got the backing.”
We landed on the quay. Ortega killed the motors and leaned across me to peer up at the ship’s superstructure, which at a glance appeared to be deserted. I pushed myself back into the seat a little, discomfited in equal parts by the pressure of the lithe torso in my lap and my slightly overfull stomach. She felt the movement, seemed suddenly to realise what she was doing and pulled herself abruptly upright again.