Mel emerged from the bathroom and picked up the small bag with the one set of spare clothes she had borrowed and the few provisions that Pedro had been able to find.
Pedro stood in front of her, fully dressed and ready to work.
It was difficult to say goodbye to the warmth and safety she had rediscovered in his friendship, but it was time.
“All ready?” he asked.
“I would be lying if I said I was,” said Mel. “But staying isn’t going to change that.”
“Are you sure you want to go back to Deimos City?”
“It’s where my lab is, it’s where my experiment was stolen from. It’s the only place I can find the answers.”
As she spoke, his WristTab bleeped.
He ignored it. “It’s going to be harder now that the public has been alerted that you’re a wanted person.”
“I’ll be careful,” she assured him. The WristTab was becoming annoying. “Are you going to answer that?”
He lifted his arm and frowned at the device. “It’s Gadd, saying it’s urgent. I better get it.”
Gadd’s voice barked out of the WristTab the moment Pedro answered.
“Do you want to explain why there’s a man called Inspector Deverau from the MSS at the airlock wanting to talk to you?”
The name sent a shiver of dread through Mel. She had stayed too long. She should have left the moment she was publicly named as a wanted person.
“Oh really?” said Pedro, adopting a surprised tone.
Mel and Pedro exchanged worried looks over the top of his WristTab.
“He says he’s trying to find Doctor Melanie Erdan,” came Gadd’s voice. “He sent across an image of her. Perhaps you would also like to explain why she looks very much like your visiting friend.”
“I’ll tell you everything, Vince. Just don’t let him in.”
“He’s MSS! Of course I’m letting him in! He’s already negotiating the airlock.”
With every turn of the conversation, Mel felt the paths of escape closing around her.
“Send him to my lab, I’ll meet him there,” said Pedro. “Please don’t say anything.”
“Fine,” said Gadd, begrudgingly. “But we’ll discuss this when he’s gone.”
The call ended without pleasantries and a moment of silence filled the room.
“I’ll keep him busy,” said Pedro. “Can you get yourself to a rover?”
“Yes.” Mel was already thinking about driving herself to Deimos City and how she was going to get past security when she didn’t have Pedro’s unwanted face to do it for her.
With the moment to leave suddenly upon her, she realized there were many things she wanted to say to him. Not about science, but about how she had been rash to break ties with him after university and what might have been. But she had run out of time.
“Thank you,” was all she could say.
He nodded. Whether it was acknowledging her unspoken thoughts or whether it was merely an acceptance of her gratitude, she couldn’t tell.
“Good luck,” he said.
Mel walked past him without turning back. Entering the corridor outside his rooms, she was already working out a route to reach the rovers without bumping into Inspector Deverau on the way.
•••
After being kept waiting for a suspiciously long time, Deverau was disappointed to discover that the lab he was escorted to at Squyres Research Outpost was much the same as a lab anywhere else. The man he and Jones had come to see, Doctor Pedro Serrano, was oddly welcoming to a pair of MSS officers who had turned up out of the blue.
Even so, all the time he was being polite, he clasped his two hands in front of him with the tension of someone trying to keep their nervousness in check. Deverau had interviewed a lot of people since becoming a police officer and he could tell when someone was lying to him. With Doctor Pedro Serrano, he knew he was going to lie before he even opened his mouth.
“Doctor Serrano,” Deverau began.
“Call me, Pedro, please. Everyone does.”
“Pedro, you knew Doctor Mel Erdan when you studied together at university, is that right?”
Pedro returned a puzzled look and Deverau had that sinking feeling that he was going to have to put up with a lot of pretense before he actually got anywhere.
Jones reached over with his tablet and showed Pedro a picture of the wanted suspect.
“That’s Mel Walker, not Erdan,” said Pedro, pointing at the image. “Did she get married or something? Unusual for someone like her to change her name, but then people were always associating her with her father, so I suppose it makes sense.”
Deverau maintained his unimpressed expression. Some people became incredibly chatty when they were nervous. He hated the chatty ones. Almost as much as he hated the silent ones. “Have you been in contact with her recently?”
“Should I have?” said Pedro evasively.
“We have reason to believe she stowed away on a truck heading for the mining operation at Ceraunius Tholus.”
“Yes, I know it. It’s not far from here.”
“Which makes me think she might have been heading for this research outpost to look up an old friend.”
“Which would be you,” said Jones, just to underline the point.
Pedro went silent and his smile became fixed, like he was thinking of a response which wouldn’t land him in trouble. Whatever that response was going to be, it was interrupted by his WristTab bleeping loudly. Pedro’s smile became apologetic. “Excuse me.”
Deverau exchanged irritated glances with Jones while Pedro answered the call. Arranging to be interrupted was a classic tactic to buy time.
“Pedro,” said the voice on the other end of the call. Deverau recognized it as belonging to Doctor Gadd, who had greeted them at the airlock. “Now that the MSS have gone, I think we should have a quiet word, don’t you?”
Deverau and Jones exchanged more looks.
“Gone?” said Pedro into the WristTab, looking up at the two officers, who were very much still there.
“Yes,” said Gadd. “Their rover’s just left the airlock.”
“What?” said Deverau. He stepped forward, grabbed Pedro’s wrist and yelled at the WristTab. “This is Inspector Deverau – what do you mean my rover’s just left the airlock?”
“I… well, I assumed you were on it.”
“Didn’t you think to check?”
“Well… no.”
Deverau let go of Pedro’s arm in disgust.
“She’s stolen our ride!” said Jones, stating the obvious.
“Looks like it,” Deverau said. He glared at Pedro.
The scientist looked uncomfortable but maintained his air of ignorance. “Come to mention it, we did have a botanist visit recently who looked a bit like Mel, but she used a different name.”
Furious, Deverau wanted to smash his fist right into the lying man’s face. But that was unethical, would risk getting him fired and would do nothing to stop their fugitive getting away.
Jones was already heading for the door. “Dev, if we want to catch her, we need to get a move on.”
Deverau pointed an accusatory finger at Pedro. “Don’t think I won’t come back to deal with you.”
It was an empty threat, but if it caused Mel’s accomplice a few sleepless nights, then it was worth it. Deverau waited the second needed for his words to have their desired effect, then followed Jones out of the lab.
•••
The rover Deverau had commandeered from Squyres Research Outpost bounced over the uneven terrain following the tracker on his stolen vehicle. Despite wearing his seatbelt, he held on tight to the internal frame of the vehicle with one hand and onto the dashboard with the other to stop himself being thrown around. Beside him, Jones’s driving had reached new levels of recklessness.
“Isn’t there a proper road we can take, Jonesy?”
“You want to catch her, don’t you?”
“I was thinking I would arrest her, but now I think I’ll just throw up over her.”
Jones chuckled, but didn’t alter his driving one bit.
Deverau tried to focus on the horizon because he’d heard that it could help steady the systems in his brain that were making him feel travel sick. But it didn’t help. Not least because his view was obscured by the lorries and machinery of a construction crew not far ahead.
“Oh no,” said Jones, staring at the tracker readout on the dashboard.
“Oh no, what?”
“We’re closing in on her fast.”
“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?”
“Too fast,” said Jones. “I think she’s stopped.”
“Again, not seeing the problem.”
“In my experience, people on the run keep running.”
Jones, much to the relief of Deverau’s stomach, slowed as they approached the construction crew. Close up, he could see they were approaching the parking spot for all their vehicles. He recognized two people transporters, a fleet of five supply lorries and, tucked in on the end, a trio of rovers. Beyond them, a crane reached high up into the Martian sky with a long piece of metal – which was likely a strut or girder of some kind – dangling from a cable at the top. In the distance, it was just possible to see the occasional white figure of a construction worker in a rad-suit.
“It’s here,” said Jones. He glanced up from the tracking data and drove down the line of vehicles to the rovers at the end. There, between two construction vehicles, was the recognizable shape of their rover with its MSS designation written in distinctive dark blue lettering on the rear and its unique serial number, 621.
Deverau opened the general comms channel and leaned into the microphone to make sure his voice was picked up loud and clear. “This is Inspector Deverau of the MSS, to MSS rover 621, please respond.”
“I should be able to connect to the internal systems,” said Jones, and began doing something on the dashboard.
Deverau leaned into the microphone again. “Doctor Mel Erdan, this is the MSS. You have nowhere else to go. Respond and we can come to some arrangement.”
“Even if she’s in there, what makes you think she’ll talk to you?” said Jones.
“My charm and my good looks,” Deverau retorted.
In truth, he didn’t expect her to respond at all. He stood up and took a few paces to the rear of the rover where the scientists kept their rad-suits. If he needed to go out and chase her down, he wanted to be ready.
He had just opened a cabinet to find four fully replenished rad-suits when Jones exclaimed, “I’m in!”
Deverau returned to stand over his sergeant’s shoulder. He peered at the data which filled one of the screens on the dashboard, under the heading of MSS Rover 621.
“She’s gone,” said Jones, drawing his finger down the data. “Internal environment shows conditions similar to the surface of Mars and it says the hatch was opened ten minutes ago. I think it’s safe to assume she stopped here, suited up and got out.”
Deverau closed his eyes against the reality of the data and tried to stop his frustration turning to anger. He needed to think clearly.
“Jones,” he said, his police officer’s brain firing into action. “Get onto the construction crew, ask if they’ve seen her and tell them to keep a look out for her. But don’t take their word for it – get an MSS team down here to do a thorough search. If they give you any kickback about being busy on crowd control duty, tell them this is a priority. Then I want you to find out the details of every vehicle which has passed through here in the last hour and track its movements. It’s possible she figured an MSS rover was too hot and dumped it here to swap it for something else.”
“Yes, Dev. What are you going to do?”
“Get suited up and make sure she’s not throwing us a double bluff and still hiding in the rover.”
“You realize she’s got a good half hour head start on us?” said Jones, as Deverau pulled a rad-suit from the cabinet. “She could have gone anywhere.”
“Then we haven’t got time to sit about stating the obvious.”
“Yes, Dev. On it, Dev.”
But, as he heard Jones make contact with the construction crew over the comms, he knew his sergeant was right. The scientist had made a fool of him and Mel was, once again, in the wind.