I cocked my pistol and aimed it at the thin man’s face. “Make like your goons,” I said. “Reach for the sky.”
The man set down the laser and did so. His arms were skeletal.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“Take a hike,” he replied in a reedy, weak voice.
I turned my phone, attached to the suit’s left wrist, so that it could see his face. “Identify this person.”
“Error twenty-three,” replied the device, which I had programmed to use Peter Lorre’s voice. “No probable match.”
I shook the damn thing off and looked back out into the corridor. Mac was now marching the meese toward the airlock. I turned back to the emaciated man. “What the hell are you doing opening up Dr. Pickover?”
Rory answered that: “I told the goons the diary is sealed inside my torso.”
I made an impressed face. “And is it?”
“Yes. I had Fernandez put it in there for safekeeping.” I looked at the deepscan. There was indeed the ghostly outline of an object the right size next to one of the ballast cylinders. “The goons threatened to kill Reiko if I didn’t give them the diary. I had to tell them where it was.”
There were two chairs in the room, padded enough to be comfortable even under Earth gravity. I set my fishbowl on one of them, then pointed to the other one; the scrawny man sat on it and lowered his hands. I moved back to Pickover. The restraints were built into the medical bed, but although a patient couldn’t undo them once strapped in, the release mechanisms were plainly labeled. I lifted the latch for each of the four restraints, and Rory sat up, the incision on his chest opening a bit as he did so. A biological would be rubbing his wrists and ankles now to restore circulation, but Rory just sat there, looking daggers at his captor.
“Let me have the diary,” I said.
Rory hesitated for a moment then did what the skinny man had been about to do before I’d interrupted him: he stuck a hand through the plastiskin and foam rubber just below his metal sternum, rummaged around, and pulled out the diary—still missing its back cover, but sealed now in a plastic bag. He handed it to me.
The bag was slick with clear lubricant. I didn’t want the damn thing slipping around, so I removed the little bound volume from the bag and shoved it into my surface suit’s hip pocket.
“What’s become of Miss Takahashi?” I asked.
Rory’s face lit up. “She escaped, Alex—with my help; I created a diversion. Those big blokes wanted to get rid of her; they want to get rid of everyone they think knows where the Alpha is, and they figured she must know, because she’s read the diary.” Rory was now putting his work shirt back on. “I kept telling them the diary doesn’t disclose the location, and Reiko told them the same thing, but they didn’t believe us.”
I spoke to my phone while keeping my gun aimed at Rory’s captor. “Call Reiko Takahashi.”
“Shunted to voice mail,” said Peter Lorre.
“Call Horatio Fernandez at NewYou.”
Three rings, then: “Hello, Alex.”
“Horatio, has Miss Takahashi returned?”
“No.”
“She escaped”—I looked at Rory—“how long ago?”
“Forty minutes, I’d say.”
“She escaped forty minutes ago. And I’m with Dr. Pickover.”
“I’ll let you know when she arrives here.”
I shook the phone off. “Who are you?” I said again to the seated man.
“Get stuffed.”
“My phone would know you if you were a longtime Mars resident—so you aren’t. I’ll assume you came here on this ship, and you’re too chicken to go out into the dome. That’s probably wise: New Klondike is a rough place, and it wouldn’t be long before someone there decided to snap you in two.” I took a step closer. “I might even decide to do it myself, and—”
I hadn’t paid any attention to his clothing until now, but the shirt he was wearing was burnt orange with a circular patch over the left breast, a patch bearing the “ISL” logo of InnerSystem Lines; it was a uniform top. “Christ, you’re part of the crew.” I spoke to my phone again. “How many crew on the Kathryn Denning?”
“Two,” wheezed Peter Lorre. “A primary bowman and a backup bowman. The former normally travels awake, while the latter makes the voyage in hibernation and is only thawed out in emergencies.”
“So which are you?” I demanded.
“Go climb a tree,” said the man.
“There aren’t any for a hundred million kilometers,” I replied. I looked at the phone again. “Get the names of the two bowmen from the InnerSystem office here.”
“A moment.” Then: “The primary bowman is Beverly Kowalchuk. The backup is Jeffrey Albertson.”
“So you’re Albertson,” I said. I gestured with my gun for him to get to his feet.
He hesitated for a moment then did get up. It was the exact opposite of the effect one normally observed with someone newly arrived from Earth. Usually, the freshly thawed stand with way too much energy and actually lift themselves off the ground a bit; I’m tall enough that I’d bumped my head on ceilings a few times shortly after my own arrival here. But Albertson got slowly to his feet, wincing as he did so; if he was weak here, movement back on the mother world must have been excruciating for him.
“Those thugs of yours,” I said. “One of them has already been fried—by the broadband disruptor you just heard that police officer talking about. We haven’t identified him yet, but we will—same with whoever it is inside the other two.”
The thin man shrugged. “Uno and Dos are the only names they’ve got.”
Pickover brightened. “Oh, I get it! Alex, the third one wasn’t called Trace; rather it was Tres—Spanish for three; sounds the same, but spelt different. Uno, Dos, Tres.”
“Huh,” I said. “How high do the numbers go, Jeff?”
“Jump off a cliff.”
“So what the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?” I asked, not expecting an answer.
Rory was now standing beside me. “My grandfather looked the same way,” he said. “It takes a lot out of you.”
“What does?”
“Well, I suppose it could be anything, but…”
I waved the gun. “On the examining bed.”
Albertson glared at me, but then did as I’d commanded. He simply sat on the bed’s edge, but it was enough. The ship’s computer obviously recognized him, even if my phone hadn’t, and his medical records came up on a monitor in the room. I scanned them quickly. “‘Stage-four lymphatic cancer.’ And those numbers don’t go any higher.” I looked at him. “Tough luck. I wouldn’t want to die in jail.”
Albertson crossed his arms defiantly in front of his chest. I idly wondered if I could bring myself to rough up somebody in such bad shape, and—
“Oh, my,” said Pickover. He’d been looking at Albertson’s medical record in more detail; I imagine the scientific gobbledygook meant more to him than it would have to me. “Alex, look at this.”
He was pointing at some text on the screen. I squinted to make it out, and—
And I guess this wasn’t Albertson after all. Not only was the date of birth given, but the computer had also helpfully calculated his age and placed it in brackets after the date: “78 years.”
I turned back to him, and—
And—
God.
And he was the backup bowman. He—Christ, yes. I’d never heard of anything like this, but…
He looked like he was in his thirties. Biologically, he probably was in his thirties.
“You’ve been doing this forever,” I said. “For decades. You keep making trips back and forth between Earth and Mars—spending eight months or more each way in hibernation. I didn’t know it was possible to do that many stints in deep freeze, but—”