Scarface was very gentle, as if she knew what pain was all about and treated Sasha like fragile china. The kid’s dressings were due for a change, and smelled horrible, but the twins gave no sign of it. They loaded Sasha into her stretcher and did their best to make her comfortable. That’s the funny thing about goodness: it can bubble up when you least expect it, and disappear just as quickly.
The kid was only half conscious and regarded me through bleary eyes. I patted her hand, promised everything would be all right, and hoped it was true.
Everything went fairly smoothly after that. The twins carried Sasha aboard the shuttle, and I followed. The gravity created by the barge extended to Quint’s ship. Like most of the craft used out among the ‘roids, it was heavily armored, highly maneuverable, and equipped for everything under the sun. The stretcher slid into one of four recesses provided for that purpose and was clamped in place. I took a nearby seat. My duffel went underneath. Others plopped down all around me. It was then that I remembered our pressure suits and realized that I’d left them behind. I spent five seconds wondering if I should go back and decided to let it slide. It would take forever to get Sasha into a suit, so to hell with it.
The lock closed, the children were strapped in place, and the shuttle broke contact with the barge. The transition to weightlessness was almost instantaneous. I checked to make sure that Sasha was secure, saw that she was, and tightened my harness. The pilot increased power and we were on our way.
The ensuing trip lasted about eight hours, which was at least seven more than I was psychologically prepared for, and eight more than was good for the kid. Doc fought to keep her temperature down, but she continued to run a fever and her wound smelled worse than ever. Every minute was like torture, knowing her condition was deteriorating, and unable to do anything about it.
Joy escaped from my pocket and, much to the children’s delight, put on a demonstration of zero-gee gymnastics. But when Quint threatened to charge me five hundred bucks for bringing an “unauthorized passenger” aboard, I ordered the little robot into my pocket. She complained but did as she was told.
After what seemed like an eternity, Quint announced that we were closing with asteroid DXA-1411, better known as “Deep Port.” There were no windows, but I imagined a rocky planetoid, covered with impact craters, tumbling along the path it had followed for millions of years.
Most of the living quarters would be deep underground, as on Earth’s moon, so there wouldn’t be much to see except for docking facilities, zero-gee cargo storage, antenna farms, and the half-salvaged skeleton of the linear accelerator that Riler had told me about. He said it looked like a ramp and had once been used to shoot ore at waiting ships.
Minutes passed, the shuttle bumped something solid, and gravity reasserted itself. Not Earth gravity, or Mars gravity, but something in between.
I figured everyone would take off and leave me to move the kid by myself, but such was not the case. Doc stayed, as did the twins, and I had plenty of help taking Sasha in through the habitat’s lock: a lock that was labeled “For Emergency Use Only,” and clearly off the beaten track. And that was a good thing, considering the reception we got on Mars. A motorized cart and driver were waiting. I watched as the twins strapped the stretcher into place.
“Climb aboard. The driver will take you to the hospital.”
I turned to find Quint standing next to my shoulder. The ever-present cigar rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. “Thanks for the transportation.”
He shrugged. “It’s all part of the service. She looks like a nice kid. I hope she makes it.”
I looked around, hoping to enlist Doc’s help, or at least thank him, but he had disappeared. I threw my duffel in the back, took the seat next to the driver, gave Quint an optimistic thumbs-up, and held on as the cart jerked into motion. Beacons had been mounted front and back. They flashed on and off as we whirred down the corridor. The walls were made of machine-cut rock and were plugged where core samples had been taken.
We came to an intersection, paused, and took a right-hand turn. This corridor was five lanes wide. The centermost space was reserved for a monorail. The train approached from the opposite direction, roared by, and blasted us with displaced air. I had the impression of windows and hundreds of helmeted heads.
Our driver waited for a break in traffic, pulled into the fast lane, and activated his siren. It made a bleating sound, and he grinned as vehicles pulled out of the way. The driver didn’t get many opportunities to drive full out and put his boot to the floor. Rubber screeched, and I felt G forces push me against the back of my seat. Convinced that we were in at least semicompetent hands, I studied my surroundings in the hopes of learning more about our temporary home.
The first thing I noticed was the orderliness of our surroundings. There were signs of it in the lighting, the well-maintained pavement, and the graffiti-free walls. And it wasn’t that people didn’t have spray paint, because you could see where they’d used it-only to have their efforts masked by neatly applied squares of rock-gray paint.
No, the unrelenting neatness gave the impression of centralized control, of rules that couldn’t be broken, of punishments waiting to be imposed. Which, though not especially surprising in what amounted to a company town, gave the place a repressive feel, and went against my somewhat rebellious grain.
But if I missed the free-for-all atmosphere of home, I didn’t miss the trash-filled corridors, neon-lit dives, and the two-legged scum that frequented them. And speaking of scum, what about our poppers? Had they killed us, rather than the other way around, they’d be reporting in about now, and clamoring for their pay. So what would happen when the call didn’t come? When the corpies discovered that their goons had disappeared? People would come looking for us, that’s what. People with guns.
A person with a full set of brain cells might have come up with a plan, might have hatched some sort of scheme, but not me. All I could do was feel frustrated, get medical help, and hope for the best.
The cart negotiated a corner, wove between a scattering of parked vehicles, and screeched to a halt. A pair of almost identical androids hurried over. Both wore red crosses painted across their otherwise bare chests and had names stenciled on their foreheads. Fric had blood splattered on one shoulder and Frac had a faulty wrist seal. A steady stream of green fluid dribbled down his plastiflesh fingers and dripped to the pavement. He smiled reassuringly. “May we help?”
I gestured towards the stretcher. “Yes, you can. The lady is ill. Would you take her inside?”
The robots could and would. I thanked the kid, grabbed my duffel, and gave him a tip. He nodded and got some rubber as he left. Joy tried to escape from my pocket and I shoved her back in. The last thing I needed right then was a naked robot running around.
The emergency room looked like they all do. Bright lights, stainless steel, and lots of signs. The place was packed with miners. All wore loose-fitting pressure suits under filthy orange overalls. Most had bandages wrapped around their heads, splints on their legs, or other signs of injury. A few had other less obvious problems. They had a tendency to stare through the walls, their eyes slightly out of focus, as if their minds had gone someplace else. I knew how they felt.
A nurse with bushy eyebrows and hairy arms ran a scanner over Sasha’s body, peeked at her wound, and wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Hey, Doc! We’ve got a ripe one over here!”
The doc broke away from a miner and came our way. She was middle-aged, slightly plump, and more than a little crotchety. She fired questions like grenades from a launcher.