Kaylee needed a painstaking, technical, exacting installation, alignment, or calibration to keep her mind too busy to worry what Ned and his thugs had done to Alan last night—and what they might have in store next. A day with an engrossing task could pass in the blink of an eye. She desperately needed that today.
Instead, of course, Kaylee was assigned a micro-scrubber and sent off to clean oxidized deposits from the intake manifolds of the Site-2 atmospheric purifier. It was drone work—or would have been on Earth. Mars was short both the drones and drone programmers needed to be using them on minor, one-off tasks like site prep. The majority of the colony’s drones would be working on unloading the transorbital’s payload and dragging ice chunks ranging in side from a thumbnail to a skyro out into the melting fields. It was all automated. None of the drones would question where James98 had gone or why he hadn’t been back. His own crew mates probably hadn’t even noticed. Robots mining that far out were notoriously antisocial. They’d let the drones do their job and head right back out to the belt for more.
Bloody Earthlings and their monopoly on drone production, she caught herself thinking. If only Mars had a Kanto-style factory. Even on a vastly smaller scale, it could help them automate manual labor across the colonies.
Listen to yourself. Already siding with the enemy.
Whatever Ned and his Chain Breaker cronies’ political views were, they crossed the line into zealotry the minute they devolved into violence. Robots used the nice, sterile term “self-termination” for suicide, but murder was still murder whether it was James98 or a human victim.
Bundled against the outdoor chill and wearing goggles and oxygen supplies, she and her coworkers looked like walking parkas with data-screen eyes. They could have been robots beneath all that layered cloth, except that an actual robot wouldn’t have minded the cold or needed breathing assistance.
There wasn’t even a clock in view as Kaylee worked.
All the other supervisors and managers were out there as well, toiling away with their practiced and highly skilled hands at work best suited to burly day-laborers, if not robots. Kaylee wasn’t the only one whose talents were being wasted; she had no right to complain. If nothing else, the isolation as everyone huddled in their own personal refuge of warm clothing prevented just the sort of awkward interaction she’d so desperately wished to avoid today.
As she scrubbed, she watched them.
It was hard to pick out one coworker from the next. Their mass-fabbed parkas were identical. Their protective environmental gear was all from the same design, manufactured over at the Discovery colony a few hundred kilometers to the east. At best, she could judge by mannerisms. A distinctive walk, a limp, a rounded shoulder were her clues.
Ned she picked out early and kept close track of.
Alan, I hope your day is going better than mine, she pleaded silently.
Kaylee kept her portable handy in her pocket. If one of the workers looked ready to sabotage the manifold or any other part of the terraforming equipment, she’d be ready to capture it on video.
But none of them were so sloppy as to get caught on her watch.
When she’d first worried about saboteurs, she’d dismissed the idea as fanciful and paranoid. Ned wanted Mars to breathe Martian air instead of recycled. He wanted to stick it to Earth worse than anyone she’d ever known. Hurting that goal would be the last thing on his mind.
Until she thought deeper on the subject.
Yes, Ned might delay the work on a single site by having someone sabotage it. But if he could connect the damage back to Earth sympathizers, or better—from his viewpoint—a robot, then he could use that persecution to strong-arm his way past committee roadblocks with sympathy as his bludgeon. Anyone who stood in his way then would be complicit with the saboteurs.
Knowing what she now knew thanks to Alan’s predicament, Kaylee was convinced that Ned had the deviousness to think that far ahead and delay his own immediate gratification for a longer-term win.
Alan… poor Alan. He meant so well, but he stumbled right into that trap. If she’d been awake enough to talk sense into him, he might not be lined up in the crosshairs of a frame job. Kaylee prayed that James98 had been the depressive sort so that no one would look too deeply into his apparent self-termination. Knowing that Ned could plunk Alan into the witness chair at a committee inquest on a whim was going to cost her many a sleepless night, she knew.
“Kaylee, c’mon in,” Ned’s voice grated in her earpiece. “Lunch break.”
Kaylee felt the knot of hunger in her stomach, exacerbated by skipping breakfast in her haste to make up for a slapdash morning. “I’m good,” she radioed back. She watched as her coworkers filed into the break room airlock. “Had a big breakfast, knowing we had real work to do for a change.”
“Suit yourself,” came the gruff reply.
As soon as the last of the terraforming team was inside, Kaylee pulled out her portable. With a glove off her right hand to operate the touch screen, she felt the crisp bite of the thin atmosphere. She and Alan had spent a week in Mexico City to acclimate to the low pressure, but it still hadn’t compared to being on the Martian surface.
She tapped out a message with a hand shaking from the cold.
“What did you get him into?” Kaylee sent the message off to Andy. It was nice and generic. No names. No specific events. She wondered what he could feel safe replying.
NO NEWS. COME BACK AFTER WORK.
Kaylee seethed a frustrated breath that made her next breath humid inside the mask. Alan hadn’t reported in. Andy was blind to what was going on. One of them had to get him a briefing.
She resolved to head over to the theater after work, but in the meantime, she tapped out another message.
“Alan was accosted by the Chain Breakers last night. If I’m not around to deliver this message, it’s because one of them got to me. James98 was murdered by Ned Lund and his associates. They cut Alan’s hand on the chassis in order to frame him. Don’t let them sweep this under the rug.”
She set the delivery to tomorrow afternoon, then buried the outgoing message in an archival directory. A real data wrangler would find it with no trouble, sent or not, but a casual inspection from the likes of Ned and his gang wouldn’t find anything.
Slipping her glove back on, Kaylee returned to her task.
Post lunch, the terraforming crew resumed reconditioning machinery left idle and unattended for months longer than expected. Kaylee finished up on her section of the intake manifold and moved on to the waste pumps. Despite the layer of rust, they were still cleaner than they’d ever be once operation got under way.
By the end of the shift, Kaylee felt like she’d been at the job site for a year, not a mere ten hours.
The crew rode back to Airlock 4 in a convoy of rovers and parted ways once they were back inside the dome.
Mask dangling around her neck, Kaylee headed straight for Arthur Miller Theater.
“There you are!” Andy said accusingly. He towed her from the common area where several other Unity Keepers were idling after work and down an adjacent hall lined with dressing rooms. An old-fashioned swinging door slammed shut behind them. “What the blazes is going on? Back channel, I heard the Breakers took Alan out for some kind of initiation last night.”
“You tell me,” Kaylee said. “This is your secret agent act that got his cover blown. They know he was a plant.”
“Oh, God!” Andy said, covering his mouth. He dove for his portable. “I need to—”
Kaylee caught him by the wrist. “He’s fine. Alan went to class this morning, same as usual.”
Andy had a haunted look in his eyes. “We haven’t had anyone outed before. This is bad.”
“No kidding,” Kaylee said. “We need a plan.”
“I need the details. Are you sure Alan is OK?”
“I checked with the school on the way over. He’s busy with after-school tutoring. Safest place in the colony, if you ask me. Nobody wants to be the one to endanger kids.”
At Andy’s urging, Kaylee recounted Alan’s tale as best she could remember it. Andy listened attentively without interruption.
“Who else have you told?” Andy asked.
“No one,” Kaylee replied. “You’re the first besides Alan, and I don’t think he was inclined to spread the word.”
“No… no, that wouldn’t make sense,” Andy said as he began to pace, not even looking in Kaylee’s direction. “Not in such a precarious predicament. One wrong word in the wrong ear…”
“I did compose a message to go out tomorrow in case I didn’t make it here,” Kaylee said, taking out her portable and waggling it.
“To whom?” Andy asked.
“You, mainly.”
“And…?” he prompted.
Kaylee was horrible at lies and secrets. She couldn’t have left it at just Andy. “Possibly my mom, a couple aunts, Dr. Toby, my mother-in-law, and maybe my great-grandmother.”
“You were going to alert half of Earth’s most prominent humans and an original thirty-three robot about a suspicious murder that implicates your husband?”
Kaylee sighed. “And Charlie7.”
Andy looked aghast.
“He’s an old family friend. I trust him.”
Kaylee wondered if this was what it was like for the people in those old Mafia movies, totally innocent of the greater family business but still aware that certain problems could go away by dropping the right word of complaint at Thanksgiving dinner.
“Delete it,” Andy ordered sternly, the first thing he’d seemed certain of since her arrival.
“We need to put a stop to whatever they’re doing to Alan,” Kaylee said. “Even if that means covering up the death of James98 until we can prove it was them.”
The door to the dressing room burst open, splinters flew where the doorjamb gave way under the force of a booted foot. Wil from the terraforming team backed out of the doorway to allow Ned Lund inside.
“About time we found out where you rats were hiding,” Ned said to Andy. He looked the theater director up and down. “Never imagined it would be a wet noodle like you playing rebel.”
“Just like I said,” Gregor Zimmerman said calmly. “Let her go. She’ll lead us right to them. Who needs the teacher?”
“What’s this about, Ned?” Kaylee demanded. “You just go barging into a dressing room. What if I’d been—”
“Cut the crap,” Ned barked. His cronies filed in, greater in numbers than Kaylee had imagined. “We know who you people are and what you’ve been trying to do. You’ve been enemies of Mars for too long. It’s about time we put you to work on our side.”
Kaylee and Andy were hauled out of the dressing room, feet not even touching the floor. In the main backstage area, the rest of the Unity Keepers who’d been present had already been rounded up and penned in by armed Chain Breakers.
“What are those collars for?” Andy asked.
Kaylee saw what he was referring to. The others had all been fitted with makeshift collars fashioned from piping meant for use as electrical conduit. Each had a small indicator panel with a glowing red light at the center.
She struggled as two of Ned’s goons forced one around her own neck with an ominous click. Ned held up a remote. “Those are insurance. They’ll blow your head right off if you get more than a few meters away or I press this button.
“Now sit down, shut up, and don’t cause any trouble. I’ve got a broadcast to make.”
Before forcing Kaylee to the floor, the Chain Breakers confiscated Kaylee’s portable. Even with an exploding collar freshly locked at her throat, all she could think about was the emergency message contained on it. What would they do to her if they discovered she was sending distress calls to the primary villains of their conspiracy theories?