The phone rang four times, and I thought perhaps everyone had gone home for the day. But then a woman’s voice said, “InnerSystem. How can I help you?”
“I’m Detective Dougal McCrae of the New Klondike Police Department, and this is an emergency. I’m standing outside the Kathryn Denning, and need access to the interior.”
“Just a second,” said the woman, then: “I’m told I need an authorization code word from you.”
“The code word is ‘jasper,’” said Mac.
“Yes, right, okay,” said the woman. “Well, to get in, you just need to punch in the master skeleton-key combination code on the keypad next to the airlock; it’ll open any door on the ship, including the airlock one. Let me know when you’re in position, and I’ll recite it to you.”
The keypad was behind a hatch helpfully labeled “Keypad” in English; there was also some Chinese, which doubtless said the same thing. Mac opened the little hatch and said, “Go.”
“Five zero four,” said the woman, then, “three two nine, three one seven, five one zero.”
Mac pressed keys and the door slid about fifteen centimeters to the left; presumably it had been spring-loaded but held in place by the lock. The slight displacement revealed a recessed handle. Mac put his gloved fingers into it and pulled the outer door the rest of the way, revealing a chamber no bigger than an old-fashioned phone booth—something I’d seen in plenty of movies but never in real life.
Mac was still carrying the disruptor as he entered the tiny chamber. I pushed myself inside. It belatedly occurred to me that the surface suit Mac was wearing was probably bulletproof. I wondered if the plain one I’d chosen was similarly equipped.
Mac turned around and pulled the outer door shut. He then pressed the one large button on the airlock’s left wall; it was labeled “Cycle” in English, and again presumably the same thing in Chinese. I couldn’t hear air being pumped into the chamber, but I felt the growing pressure of it on my suit. When the pressure reached that of the ship’s interior, a green light went on above the inner door, and, for good measure, it popped aside fifteen centimeters, revealing a recessed handle just like the one on the outer door.
Mac shimmied around—it really was meant to be a one-person airlock—and pulled on the handle, sliding the door all the way aside.
He still had the tracking device, but it was hard for him to operate it and hold the disruptor, so he handed the tracker to me. I tried to use finger gestures on the display to zoom in, but it wasn’t responding to the touch of my glove. Since we were now at normal air pressure, I pulled off my right glove and tried again. The dot indicated that Rory was about thirty meters toward the stern, and I gestured to Mac that we should start walking in that direction.
The interior of the ship was well lit—in fact, too well lit. We tended to keep things a bit dimmer on Mars, since we only got about one-quarter of the sunlight Earth did. I found myself squinting. But I also peered around, trying to picture the horrors that had occurred aboard this ship all those years ago, and my mind started playing tricks. I was still breathing the same bottled air I had been out on the surface, but it now had an iron tang to it, as though it smelled of blood.
I assumed the meese hadn’t counted on being tracked here and so wouldn’t be expecting us. Still, the broadband disruptor wasn’t easily aimed. If they’d kept Reiko rather than Rory, Mac could have fired the disruptor blindly into a room. But we couldn’t risk taking out Rory, too.
Mac and I walked stealthily down the corridor, me in true gumshoe fashion and him in flatfoot mode. We soon heard voices up ahead and made an effort to be even quieter. The voices were muffled not because they were coming from behind a closed door—they weren’t—but rather because Mac and I were still wearing our fishbowls. I undogged the fasteners, lifted mine off, and tucked it under my arm.
In reality, the air inside the ship did smell different: it was musty and stale. Without the helmet, I could hear the voices more clearly. It must have been the two meese: they had the same thick-and-slow speech Trace had had. They occasionally interrupted each other, which was strange and hard to parse: two identical voices overlapping.
Rory, if he was still with them, wasn’t saying anything. I consulted the scanner and tried to judge the location the voices were coming from. It looked like the meese and Rory were now in separate rooms: the two thugs sounded like they were ahead but to the left and Rory was showing as ahead and to the right. I indicated that Mac should head off to immobilize the meese, and that I’d rescue Dr. Pickover; my phone had recorded the lock-override code that had been dictated to Mac and could play it back to me if I needed it for another door.
Sure enough, the little corridor we were in had come to its end, and there were two doors in front of us. The one on the left had its door open, and I could actually see the broad back of one of the meese through it; he was wearing the same clothes as before. The door on the right was closed. It had a sign on it, and although I couldn’t make out the writing the symbol above it was clear: a caduceus; this was the sickbay.
I put my glove back on and looked at Mac. This was almost too easy. If Rory was safe behind the closed door on the right, Mac could take out the meese on the left, then we could spring the professor and be on our way. Except for one thing: Mac probably thought the kidnappers deserved due process, blah, blah, blah. Fine; he could use the disruptor to hold them at bay until the cavalry finally finished with the riot and showed up.
We didn’t have a lot of time to think. The meese hadn’t yet detected us, but if either of them happened to look out the open door of the room they were in, they’d see us. And so, while we still had the element of surprise, Mac shifted the disruptor so that he was holding it like a shield, and he surged forward, shouting through his surface suit’s speaker, “NKPD! Freeze!”
THIRTY-TWO
The visible moose turned to face us, looking startled. I ran toward the door on the right and hit the keypad, and pounded out the skeleton-key numbers as fast as my phone read them back to me. I had my gun out, just in case Rory wasn’t alone, and—
And he wasn’t. The paleontologist was lying on his back on the one and only examination bed in the sickbay. He’d been strapped down, doubtless with the aid of the meese, and his work shirt removed—small consolation, I’m sure, that this time he wasn’t going to lose another favorite garment. Looming over him was a scrawny, pale man with shoe-polish-brown hair in his mid-thirties—younger than me, but a toothpick; there was no question which of us would win in a fight. Still, the man was holding a cutting laser, which he’d been in the middle of using to make a vertical incision in Rory’s chest, not unlike the one I’d seen Horatio Fernandez carve in Trace’s corpse. A deepscan was displayed on the wall; it took me a second to realize that it was showing the interior of Rory’s torso.
I gestured with my gun at the pale man. “Drop the laser and put your hands up.”
“Alex!” said Rory, lifting his head to look at me.
“Hands up!” I said again to the scrawny man, who had ignored me. Meanwhile, next door, Mac shouted, “I said, freeze!” I was torn; if he needed backup, I should perhaps go help him. But a moment later, I heard Mac say, “That’s better. This is a broadband disruptor. It’s already taken down one of you today. Don’t make me use it again. Keep your hands above your heads.”