Another Girl, Another Planet Page 13

  “Can you clean this up, replace the NYPD contact information with ours, and make maybe 500 copies?”

  He took it with a chubby hand and looked it over. “I’m sure I can.”

  He looked at it intently “Do we have a better photo of the lady?”

  “Spoken like a true graphic artist. No, but that’s okay, this is a law enforcement poster. Do the best you can. We don’t want it to look too snazzy, or it will look like we are wasting the taxpayers’ money.”

  “Why are we doing this instead of Coltingham?”

  “It’s my idea, I have a personal interest in the case.”

  He looked at the photo, tapped his fingers and raised his eyebrows. “All right. When you say change the contact information, do you want to use Coltingham’s or ours?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Not using Coltingham’s would have looked strange.

  “Put both, and when you’re done, run it by me for final approval,” I said. “How long will it take?”

  He looked around. “I can drop what I’m doing and rush this to the head of the line, in which case I’m sure I can have it ready by the end of the day.”

  He nodded his head. “Yes, I’m sure I can get it done in a few hours.”

  I stood up and extended my hand. “Thanks, I knew I could count on you. Make it look simple and authoritative, but professional.”

  We shook hands. “I’ll get you something that pops from the page.”

  “Excellent, do that, and I’ll look at it again later.”

  He walked out purposefully and went straight to his office, walking past Sherry’s desk.

  Sherry followed him with her gaze, then looked back toward me and raised an eyebrow..

  Chapter Nine

  Later that night, while lying in bed, I laid out all my thinking and unburdened myself to Laura. It may not have been the smartest idea, but there were very few people I could speak freely with.

  “I think you are obsessed with this girl, and you’re seeing things,” she replied rather bluntly. “It must be caused by the distance and guilt. Plus, you said yourself that you were spooked when you saw her just before you left Earth.”

  I realized I had probably exposed myself too much.

  “But there was the robbery and she was taken hostage and never released,” I said.

  “I’ll concede, that is unnerving,” she said, rolling over and staring me in the face. She frowned. “Call it my feminine intuition, but my gut tells me there’s a crime involved, but not the one you think.”

  She slid out of bed and stood looking out her window. Unlike yours truly, she had enough seniority with her government to have one. She was naked, but it’s not like there was anyone outside who could see her, unless there were some Martian peeping Toms hidden under the orange rocks.

  I was paying attention to the view I had when something made her gasp.

  I jumped out of bed. “What is it?”

  She’d had her arms crossed her naked chest, but now she threw her hands out.

  “The stars are blotted out on the horizon!”

  She turned back around to face the window, and made a small sound of alarm.

  Now, I hadn’t been on Mars long, but I knew what that meant. With its thin atmosphere, the stars in the Mars sky were especially profuse and brilliant at night—except when a storm blew in.

  “Shit!” Almost simultaneously, my pager went off. I rushed over to where my pants sat in a chair.

  It was Sherry. I called her back from Laura’s phone on the night table.

  “Hey, boss, better get back to Dome One immediately. There’s a really bad storm blowing in.”

  “How far away is it?”

  Martian dust storms, like Earthside thunderstorms, generate static, and the line was already crackling.

  “An hour, but it’s very dense,” Sherry said.

  “I’m leaving right now,” I said, as I dropped the receiver in the cradle.

  “I gotta go,” I said to Laura.

  She was already tugging on some pantyhose. “Of course, I have to check in with my office, also,” she said.

  I yanked on my pants, shirt, and shoes. “I’ll pick up the odds and ends later,” I said.

  She nodded. Her phone rang, and she started talking speaking in Italian, so I knew it was time to go.

  Unlike the MarsTran transports inside the dome, the “tubes” between them were standard subway car design, except for being airtight. They can’t run during a storm because the glassy Mars sand crunches under the wheels and destroys traction.

  I caught the last train inbound to Dome One before the system shut down for the storm. As we approached, I could see from the red lights that all external airlocks were secured. The protection panels were pivoting around to cover the Plexiglas windows in the dome, and shutters were closing on all the other windows in the walls. I could hear the clunks and feel the thunks as they all fell into place.

  By the time the train entered the tube into the dome, it was completely dark on the outside. Rather than take the transport, I hiked up several flights of stairs and cut straight across the level where my office was.

  The door was open and the lights were on. Sherry’s voice rose amidst the general chatter.

  I walked in, panting hard. Sherry was at her desk. There was a small crowd of four people in front of her, and there were two civil defense guys at another desk.

  Sherry looked at me, then cast a glance downward, and her eyes grew wide.

  She made a gesture to pause the men speaking to her at her desk and got up quickly to walk over to me.

  “Dave,” she hissed. “Look at your shoes!”

  I looked down to see I was wearing one loafer and one of Laura’s flats.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I muttered, and kicked them both off under a nearby desk.

  Sherry gave me a look of exasperation. I just shrugged.

  “It will look better if people think I was in such a rush that I ran out barefoot,” I said. “How bad is this?”

  “This is a pretty big storm,” she said. “Look at the CCTV.”

  The colony’s internal closed circuit television was showing the radar image of what looked like a dark, swirling mass about to strike the colony. The lights over the consoles were dimmed for better visibility.

  “I’ve never seen one of these,” I said to Sherry. “Does this look especially bad?”

  “Normally there are light swirls in the image because of varying density,” she said. “This is solid. It’s real BS.”

  I looked at her in puzzlement.

  “I’m sorry, that’s local jargon. It stands for Barsoom Simoom; a real old-fashioned Edgar Rice Burroughs sand storm.”

  “What do we need to do?”

  “Stay on duty. Everything is shut down—ports closed, filters covered.” She nodded. “Civil defense is activated. It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.”

  We began hearing the low growling of the storm. It sounded like some giant animal outside.

  “That’s creepy,” I said with a slight involuntary shudder.

  In a moment, we could hear a dull rhythmic throbbing and a deep-seated shaking. I looked up and around.

  “The winds are shaking the dome,” Sherry said. She listened carefully. “I’ve heard worse.”

  It was obvious the civil defense guys were monitoring wind speeds and air pressure, while watching the video feeds carefully.

  Sherry smiled a little bit. “Things seem to be holding together.”

  Someplace not terribly far away, there was a very loud explosion. My ears popped.

  “Shit! There’s a breach!” Sherry shouted as she turned. We both ran to the wall and grabbed breathing kits as sirens sounded.

  I went over to the CCTV monitor. A readout read: “Dome 1, Upper Sector B.”

  I turned to one of the civil defense guys. “Where’s that?”

  He pulled his breathing mask away. “That’s where the Executive Hilton is,” he said. “One of their pictur
e windows must have blown out.”

  “In a second, the back-up inside gates should close,” said the other, leaning forward. “The air pressure will begin to stabilize.”

  “That’s just around the corner and up a flight,” I said. “I’m going up there.”

  “You don’t need to,” said Sherry.

  “I want to. This is part of my responsibility. Besides, I want people to know I’m not hiding behind a desk.” I made a dash for the door. “And, if they need extra manpower, I can lend them a hand.”

  I went up two steps at a time on the stairs and exited to see the level swirling with dust and debris as any loose material was being sucked toward the hotel lobby.

  The sirens and lights kept going off. Why haven’t the gates closed? I wondered.

  All windows in the dome had shutters, but in case of emergencies they also had internal gates that were supposed to slide shut if there was a decompression.

  I had been so close to the hotel that I got there before any of the emergency personnel. I ran into the lobby, where a lone desk clerk braced herself against the counter as the air was rushing outside. She looked at me, eyes wide in fear, as the air howled past her.

  If anyone was in the lobby before the window broke, they were long gone by now. And there was no letup in the wind rushing outside.

  The clerk looked at me, terrified. Her hair was undone and her lapels flapped. I knew she must have seen people sucked outside.

  I saw a large piece of smashed metal sitting in the middle of the lobby’s tiled floor. The storm had picked up some piece of scrap from outside and hurled it hard enough at the dome that it that it broken through a protective shutter.

  The desk clerk, who was much smaller than me, hung on for dear life. Because of my size, I was able to scramble my way to her across the lobby.

  “Why isn’t the gate closing?” I shouted above the howling.

  She nodded with her head. “Look!”

  A large sofa, with a sturdy metal frame, had been sucked toward the window and was jammed between the internal gate, which was trying to deploy, and a pillar. The gate was bouncing back and forth like a jammed elevator door, each time making a dull metallic crunching sound.

  “Dammit, we need to knock that loose,” I shouted.

  I realized it was lucky I had gotten there so quickly. There was no way the clerk could get near the window to do anything; she was too light.

  I shouted at her. “Is there something I can hit it with?”

  She nodded behind her. “The fire ax.”

  I broke the glass of the emergency box by hitting it with my watch on the back of my wrist, and yanked the ax out. I said to her, “I’m going to knock that sofa loose.”

  The rush of air going outside was starting to slow down, but that was a bad thing. We heard a loud thud as an isolation gate in the outside corridor dropped.

  The air pressure was dropping too much. If we didn’t get the gate closed, all the air would be lost in the hotel, and we’d all suffocate. Nobody from the emergency response crew made it in before the gate dropped.

  I looked the clerk in the eye. “Fuck it, I’m gonna do this myself.”

  She nodded, tears streaming down her face, which was contorted in a frown.

  I stepped out from behind the counter and let the escaping air help push me forward. I aimed for a pillar as I skidded across the floor. Slamming up against the pillar, I looked around it to see where the sofa was lodged. I realized if I struck it hard enough with the ax, it would begin to shift as the gate kept banging it. All I needed was for it to get out of the way.

  Despite having the oxygen mask on, I was breathing very heavily. I raised the ax, and glanced back toward the clerk. I turned and, with one large swing, struck the edge of the sofa. The gate slammed into it again. Pieces of wood and upholstery flew off and into the Martian darkness, but the frame held firm.

  Smash! Crunch! Smash! Crunch! It was beginning to shift.

  “Come on, your son-of-a-bitch,” I muttered. I went to take a deep breath, and gasped. My tank was running out, because of all my exertion.

  “Not today!” I shouted and took the hardest swipe I could.

  The ax head broke off the handle and flew out the broken window. The sofa was still jammed. I kicked at it in frustration with my foot, falling down in the process. My other foot was propped up against the pillar. I braced myself, and then realized I wasn’t being sucked out. I heard a grating metallic sound and looked up to see the gate sliding past me, pushing the sofa aside.

  The gate shut with a thunk and the rushing stopped. There was an incredible stillness.

  Still lying on the floor, I looked across the lobby to see the clerk had been pulled away from the counter and had slid up against the piece of junk that had caused the whole mess.

  I could hardly breathe yet, but I crawled over to her. “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she said weakly. “We almost died.”

  “Yes, we will die,” I said, “but not today.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me. “You saved us.”

  We both heard the sound of the air pumps kicking in to equalize pressure. I took a deep breath and cringed. “Damn, that was close!”

  “That was something!” she said, looking at me.

  We looked at each other; we were both sweaty and panting hard. She smiled and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Was it good for you?”

  I was still laughing as the emergency crew raised the isolation gate and entered the lobby.

  * * *

  After being checked out by an emergency medical tech, I stumbled back to the office, my bare feet squeaking across the tiles.

  Sherry stared at me as I lumbered in. “I don’t know if you’re brave or stupid,” she said.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “There’s a camera in the lobby of the hotel. We thought we were going to watch you die on the CCTV,” she said. “Everyone already knows what you did. Christ, you charged into a decompressed room!”

  “How many people were sucked out of the lobby when the window busted?”

  She looked down at a piece of paper. “Eight.”

  “How many people would have died in the hotel if the window wasn’t sealed?”

  She thought for a moment and frowned. “Counting guests and staff this time of day, thirty. Counting you, thirty-one.”

  Mickey Cardinale came in the office. “Dave, you’re the man!” He was followed by an AP reporter, as well as a reporter from Mars Today.

  “The press pool has arrived,” Sherry said.

  “You’re certainly a hands-on administrator,” said the Mars Today guy.

  “There was no use just standing around,” I said.

  Sherry came up behind me. “I had nothing to do with this.”

  “What did you see when you rushed inside?” asked Mickey.

  I explained why the back-up gate hadn’t closed. “I thought it was pretty straight-forward, what needed to be done.”

  “Shit, man, you could have been sucked out,” said a reporter.

  “You know, there is no way I could let over two dozen people suffocate in their rooms.”

  “I need to start on some paperwork,” Sherry said, giving me a little wink as she left.

  A television crew walked in and their lights went on. The cameraman squinted through the lens. “The man of the hour,” he announced.

  * * *

  The newspaper headlines were head-expanding.

  YOUNG U.S. ADMIN TO THE RESCUE!

  THE BAREFOOT BOY WONDER

  NEWCOMER TAKES QUICK ACTION DURING DECOMPRESSION EMERGENCY

  Even the Mars Edition of Izvestia was generous.

  FEARLESS YOUNG AMERICAN MAKES LIKE ABE LINCOLN!

  Or something to that effect; it was roughly translated for me. They obviously were referring to how I wielded the ax.

  Sherry stood in my door the next morning with a crooked smile. “Enjoying your press?”


  “Yes, and no,” I said. “I didn’t go out seeking glory. Obviously, the good press massages my ego. On the other hand, this place is like a small town. And I deal with a bunch of bureaucrats with their petty egos.”

  She sat down. “For a new guy, you seem to have a realistic sense of office politics. Which is good.” She peered over her bifocal lenses at me. “The biggest thing that surprised people is that you showed up at all. Anyone else would have let the emergency response team take care of it.”

  “Has anything this serious happened before?”

  “No, we’ve had punctures and blown windows before, but never anything like that,” she said. “That’s the first time in the colony’s history an isolation gate dropped. That is pretty serious.”

  A chill slid across my shoulders. “It sounded like the lid closing on my coffin,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “It’s a cliché, but you really did save the day.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart. This isn’t my first job, just my first one with the government,” I said. “You should deal with the New York City bureaucracy as a member of the public.”

  I stood up and put and on my coat. “Well, I have to investigate where that surface junk came from.”

  “Yes, that’s never happened before,” she said. “I mean, a storm churning up a piece of debris so large it busted a window.”

  “You sound like there’s been stuff tossed around in a storm before.”

  “Just things left outside when people head for cover,” she said. “But nothing like last night. That was the worst howler I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m going to see Andy Coltingham to talk about this,” I said. “I also want to talk to him about that missing persons bulletin.”

  “I’ll watch the shop,” she said. “By the way, the Hilton is planning an event to honor and thank you for what you did last night.”

  “Eight people still died. Have they recovered the bodies?”

  She gave me a small strange look. “Yes, they’re in the morgue … all six of them.”

  I stopped. “I thought eight people were killed.”

  “Eight persons went flying out the breach, but six were people. Two were androids.”