“You wouldn’t torture me. I know it. Not me.”
“Maybe. Circumstances change, Mac. Times change.”
“Very true. But you don’t. I don’t. We’re Martians. You’re more Martian than I am. You don’t have anyone they can get at you through. Same with me. We have identical reasons for keeping free of ties.”
“We’re different, Mac. Fundamentally. I’m a hunter. You’re a thief. Sometimes hunters are commissioned to find thieves.”
“So who gave you the job? Who wants you to bring me in?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Delph. And he has most of the money in the universe. But not enough to pay for me.”
“Maybe so much money that I got curious. I wanted to know what he wanted that is worth such a lot. A bag I’m not supposed to look in. And which you don’t have. I know you don’t or you’d have used it as a decoy by now. I’ve hunted you for nearly a week, Mac. I’ve almost killed you half a dozen times. I’ve given you a chance to try all the angles. And you’ve tried them.”
“What? You were testing me?”
“I guess.”
She stepped out into the open, into the beam of light, a quick, boyish figure. Not at all what he’d imagined. She held her helmet in her left hand, one of her guns loose in the other. Her brown curly hair framed an impossibly beautiful triangular face with heavily slanted golden eyes. Her brows were thin and sloping, her lips red and bright as fresh blood. Few of those she hunted ever saw that face. Her clients rarely saw Yily Chen at all. She just delivered her “commissions,” like packages. She’d been his sister. He’d played with her every day as a young child. For all he remembered her as smart and pretty, Mac could hardly believe how truly beautiful she had become.
“Hello, Yily. What are you really after?” He lifted his visor.
“Hi, Mac.” She smiled and holstered her pistol. “You’re a hard guy to fool. And hard not to kill, too. I guess I wanted to know what Delph needs so bad from you that he’d let me name my price.”
Now he had a good idea what this was all about. He holstered his own Banning. She slipped her gun into its sheath and went back to drag something from the shadows. A bulky pack. She knelt to check the harness.
“And did you find out?”
Mac wondered why he remained so wary of her. The answer was probably simple. The strongest man, usually able to keep control of his emotions and stay cool, would find it hard to resist that beauty.
“Sure I did.” She straightened her back. She moved toward him, half-smiling, looking up from under heavy lids, her voice husky. “But I couldn’t trust him to pay.”
Stone caught himself laughing. “I last saw you twenty years ago, stealing water from the tanks.”
She grinned. He remembered that grin from when he had chased her through the bazaars of the Low-Canal and she had mocked him for his clumsiness. She boasted then that she had true Martian blood from a time when the great Broreern triremes had dominated the green seas swelling under a golden sun in the autumn of the planet’s long history. Stone could easily believe her. Cynics said Yily’s mother was a Terran whore and her father a Martian prison guard. But, with that glorious light brown skin, her beautifully muscled, boyish frame, that curly hair, her long legs, those firm, small breasts, her sardonic golden eyes, no one who saw her ever believed she was anything but a Mars woman reincarnated.
There were very few career possibilities on Mars for a girl of Yily’s background and looks. She had chosen the least likely: first as Tex Merrihew’s sidekick, learning the bounty hunter’s trade, then as a fixer on her own account. Mac wondered if Yily Chen had other reasons for helping him. She was known to be clever and devious. Was her word as good as they said? “So what are you proposing, Yily?”
“A partnership, maybe.”
“I didn’t know you liked me that much.”
“I don’t like Delph at all. I don’t like what he’s done to Mars or what he will do if he gets what he wants. What does he want, Mac?”
“He believes I have a bunch of indigo flame sapphires.”
“A bunch?”
“A bunch.”
She was silent. He could almost hear her thinking.
“What was that about a bomb?” she said.
He saw no reason not to. So he told her all he knew.
When he had finished she said, “Then, I guess I’d better help you.”
He asked why.
She grinned. “Because I’m a Martian, too.” She bent and picked up her heavy pack. “And I’m not tone-deaf.”
5 Whistling “Dixie”
THEY CAME TO THE FALLS, INCREASINGLY COMMUNICATING through their filtered helmet radios. The sound was deafening. An eerie pink light glared up from the chasm’s depths.
“Some say that’s Mars’s core down there.” She didn’t elaborate.
“Have you been here before?”
“Once. Guy jumped bail on Terra. Thought he had immunity here. He did, but they framed him anyway because the judge in Ram owed the judge in Old London a favor. So I was in for double reward. A share of the bail money if I brought him in alive. Well, it turned out he had friends here. Archaeologists. Academics. They crack easily. They told me how they’d found evidence for what they called the lost canal. You know the story?”
He nodded. “Guy’s out in the desert. He beds down for the night. Wakes up suddenly. He hears water. He listens more carefully. Running water. It’s the ghost canal. A kind of mirage, leading travelers astray so they die of thirst convinced there’s water all around them.”
“They told him about a cave system. Legends said it was a way into another world. Some argued it came out on Terra, in Arizona somewhere. Some thought ancient Mars. Others linked it to the discoveries of the so-called hidden universe obscured from our astronomers by drifting clouds of cosmic fog.” She shrugged. “You don’t have to break many fingers before they put two and two together. I found the cave, found this place, found him, hauled him up, took him in, and took the money.”
“Why didn’t I ever hear of that entrance?”
“Because I destroyed it. Didn’t want those archaeologists to be embarrassed again. My guy had two reasons not to talk. He might escape and hide out down here. And he knew what I’d do to him if news of the falls ever reached the surface. They sent him to Ceres. You don’t live long there. As far as I know, he died with the secret.”
The falls mesmerized them. They both found themselves walking too close to the edge, drawn by the vast, rearing walls of water spraying blue and gold, emerald and ruby, in that strange light. Old light, thought Mac without knowing why. Light that appeared to be pressed down by the cavern’s impenetrable blackness. Mac saw all kinds of shapes in there. Faces from his past. People he had hated. Nobody he had loved. Men with weapons. Women wanting his money or contempt or both. Cruelty ran through interplanetary society like a fuel. Not his drug of choice. Peace. Why was he thinking like this as the pink flume blew into a million shapes and offered to hold him like a baby, safely, safely …?
“Stone!”
Her strong hand grabbed his arm and yanked him back from the edge. “Damn! I thought you could look after yourself.” Her anger was like a slap across his face. He swore. Those eyes, those glaring eyes! What had they held in that moment when she raged at him?
He shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
She was frowning now, peering through her distance glasses out across the raging falls and pointing. “What’s that?”
A flash of electric lime green. An obviously unnatural color. Nothing like anything surrounding it. He switched over to the helmet’s optics and brought it in sharply as instruments reported distance and size. She adjusted her own glasses to check it out.