“Maybe he’ll take you.”
“He says he has work for me in Mars.”
Paula studied her a moment, wondering what the work might be. Cam’s cigarette made its arc upward toward her mouth. She breathed out smoke and said, “You might be right about Newrose and Hanse. I think the Martians know about this battle.”
“Oh?”
“It accounts for something one of them said. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“Not in a million years.”
“What’s the matter, baby?” Cam said. “Can’t stand the competition?” Paula went into her suite and shut the door.
Midway through the artificial night Newrose woke her, pounding on her door. “Hurry,” the Martian said. “We haven’t much time.” He hustled her off along the trunk corridor. She glanced behind them down the empty hallway into the darkness. Their steps sounded hollow here. Newrose took her arm and led her into a vertical car.
The car was supposed to be dead. The panel beside the door was missing and the instrument plate showed bare, its surface etched with circuits. Newrose took a key from his pocket and pressed it to the plate. The car climbed toward the surface, past the thirteenth floor where the Styths lived, up through layers of uninhabited space where the environment was supposed to be turned off. She wondered how many miles of tunnels there were under Luna’s surface. Hundreds. She looked at Newrose, smiling all over his face.
“Good news,” he said. “There’s been another battle. Hanse has won again. We’re beating the hell out of the Styths.”
“We. Do you like Hanse?”
“I can reason with him,” Newrose said. “Unlike the Sunlight League. Or the Styths.”
The car stopped at the sixth floor. They went out onto the vertical apron. Several corridors fanned away from them. One was lit by spots of light running off into the distance and Newrose took her off along it. Every few yards a power torch was stapled to the wall at shoulder-level. They passed a pile of rubble that smelled of char.
“The Styths never took all of Luna,” Newrose said, hurrying along. “Just the surface and the nerve center on the thirteenth floor. The life support systems. Then they turned off the oxygen everywhere else.”
“Tanuojin,” she said. “He’s an economical man. Then what are we breathing?”
“Local emergency supply.”
Ahead a box torch glowed on a crossbeam. She knew about the battle for Luna. Kasuk had died here. The broken wall bulged into the corridor and Newrose went ahead of her through the narrow gap. Paula glanced behind her. She thought she saw something moving in the dark.
The air turned cold. Under her feet the floor was buckled and she had to watch to keep from tripping on the plastic waves. They went through a door, down a hall, through another door. She had lost her way. They crossed a stretch of darkness where her ears told her the walls left off and vast space stretched away around her. Newrose took her up a short flight of stairs and into a small room.
“We can’t promise to get you off the Planet right away, but the Styths will never find you here.”
She looked around the tiny L-shaped room. Another Martian sat at a table under the ceiling lamp, playing cards scattered before him. In the foot of the L was a box with a screen like a videone: a photo-relay. On the panel above the screen a green light was burning.
“The signal is through,” said the man playing cards. “That book she gave us is authentic.”
Newrose smiled at her. Paula shook her head at him, exasperated. “You should have checked that before you brought me here.”
“I trust you,” he said.
“Then you’re naive.” She opened the door to the corridor again. From the darkness Ymma came past her into the room.
Newrose’s man gave a muffled cry and stood up. The Styth loomed over them all. In the taut silence, another Styth walked in from the corridor and went straight to the photo-relay.
His hands on his hips, Ymma said to Paula, “Are they signaling Hanse?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Mars.” She was watching Newrose’s face harden into an expression of outrage. The other Martian sat down with a thump. She said to Newrose, “Who are you calling?”
On his domed forehead a film of sweat appeared. He said, “I should have listened to the people who told me you were treacherous.”
She turned to Ymma again. “He didn’t even check the book. He isn’t very good at this. And he says there’s been another battle.”
“The word came just before I left. We lost another eight ships.”
The Styth by the photo-relay said, “Akellar, the transmission beam focuses in Mars.”
“You were right about that, too,” Ymma said to her.
She faced Newrose again. “You call me treacherous, Newrose. We let you come here in good faith. Even after Lore Smythe, we acted in good faith. When are you coming up to my level?”
Newrose took a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his tunic, opened it out, and patted his forehead dry. He folded the handkerchief again. “It’s your move, Mendoza.” With two fingers he stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket.
“Show me how to get back to the verticals.”
They went back through the ruins of Luna. Newrose clasped his hands behind his back. Until they had crossed the stretch of darkness they walked in silence. In the lighted hallway, she said, “You can’t cheat, Newrose. You have to do this the hard way.”
The lights shone on his face. She smelled char. They were going along between walls swollen and cracked from fires. She was ready to remind him of Tanuojin, who had done all this, but Newrose took out his handkerchief again, mopped his face again, and said, “I’ll try to do my job.”
“I want an unconditional surrender.”
“The Martian Army is winning the war.”
“The Styths will win.” She slowed to keep her footing on the uneven floor. “Tanuojin will want something impossible, and Saba will do it. If you and I haven’t arranged something by then, they’ll go straight for Mars, and you and I will have missed our chance.”
“What did you have in mind?”
Ahead the corridor led off, banded around with alternate yellow light and dark from the torches. At the end she saw the double doors of the verticals and quickened her steps. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. But it’s very simple. You and I are going to rule the Middle Planets.”
When she came up the ladder to the surface, Newrose was already in the ancient room. She opened her notebook and put it down on the table. “Sign that.”
“I want to know a little more about—”
She slid onto the chair facing him and folded her arms on the tabletop. “Sign it.”
“I warn you that if necessary I shall repudiate this agreement.”
“Sign it.”
He signed the surrender. She turned the notebook around and folded that leaf over. “Good. Now, we have a lot of work to do.”
“What exactly are you planning?”
She looked out through the clear window, across the barren floor of the crater to its steepled wall. The sun was still setting; the slow rocking of the Planet on its axis had kicked it up higher than the day before above the rough horizon. “I don’t know. Whatever is possible. How much work does the Council do?”
He shrugged. “All the relations between the member governments.” His hands were clasped together before him on the table. They opened enough to gesture at her and folded together again in their two-handed fist. “Actually, in practice, the Committee’s liaison with us—Miss Jefferson—went between the parties involved and settled everything outside the official meetings. Otherwise there’d be just too much detail.”