Old Mars

Now he knew that they didn’t really want him dead. It had to be Chen. They had just been pretending up there before the croc got him. They had wanted him to think he was as good as dead. Or maybe they’d wanted to get him down here where they could take their time with him?

“If that’s you, Yily, why are you after me? You’re on Terra. I’m on Mars. We were never at odds.”

Her voice hadn’t changed as much as he’d expected. A sweet, light, lilting brogue came back out of the darkness. “Maybe the price was never high enough, Mac.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“OK. Then you tell me why somebody wants you alive and doesn’t want me to talk it over with you.”

“You wouldn’t torture me. I know it. Not me.”

“Maybe. Circumstances change, Mac. Times change.”

“Very true. But you don’t. I don’t. We’re Martians. You’re more Martian than I am. You don’t have anyone they can get at you through. Same with me. We have identical reasons for keeping free of ties.”

“We’re different, Mac. Fundamentally. I’m a hunter. You’re a thief. Sometimes hunters are commissioned to find thieves.”

“So who gave you the job? Who wants you to bring me in?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“Delph. And he has most of the money in the universe. But not enough to pay for me.”

“Maybe so much money that I got curious. I wanted to know what he wanted that is worth such a lot. A bag I’m not supposed to look in. And which you don’t have. I know you don’t or you’d have used it as a decoy by now. I’ve hunted you for nearly a week, Mac. I’ve almost killed you half a dozen times. I’ve given you a chance to try all the angles. And you’ve tried them.”

“What? You were testing me?”

“I guess.”

She stepped out into the open, into the beam of light, a quick, boyish figure. Not at all what he’d imagined. She held her helmet in her left hand, one of her guns loose in the other. Her brown curly hair framed an impossibly beautiful triangular face with heavily slanted golden eyes. Her brows were thin and sloping, her lips red and bright as fresh blood. Few of those she hunted ever saw that face. Her clients rarely saw Yily Chen at all. She just delivered her “commissions,” like packages. She’d been his sister. He’d played with her every day as a young child. For all he remembered her as smart and pretty, Mac could hardly believe how truly beautiful she had become.

“Hello, Yily. What are you really after?” He lifted his visor.

“Hi, Mac.” She smiled and holstered her pistol. “You’re a hard guy to fool. And hard not to kill, too. I guess I wanted to know what Delph needs so bad from you that he’d let me name my price.”

Now he had a good idea what this was all about. He holstered his own Banning. She slipped her gun into its sheath and went back to drag something from the shadows. A bulky pack. She knelt to check the harness.

“And did you find out?”

Mac wondered why he remained so wary of her. The answer was probably simple. The strongest man, usually able to keep control of his emotions and stay cool, would find it hard to resist that beauty.

“Sure I did.” She straightened her back. She moved toward him, half-smiling, looking up from under heavy lids, her voice husky. “But I couldn’t trust him to pay.”

Stone caught himself laughing. “I last saw you twenty years ago, stealing water from the tanks.”

She grinned. He remembered that grin from when he had chased her through the bazaars of the Low-Canal and she had mocked him for his clumsiness. She boasted then that she had true Martian blood from a time when the great Broreern triremes had dominated the green seas swelling under a golden sun in the autumn of the planet’s long history. Stone could easily believe her. Cynics said Yily’s mother was a Terran whore and her father a Martian prison guard. But, with that glorious light brown skin, her beautifully muscled, boyish frame, that curly hair, her long legs, those firm, small breasts, her sardonic golden eyes, no one who saw her ever believed she was anything but a Mars woman reincarnated.

There were very few career possibilities on Mars for a girl of Yily’s background and looks. She had chosen the least likely: first as Tex Merrihew’s sidekick, learning the bounty hunter’s trade, then as a fixer on her own account. Mac wondered if Yily Chen had other reasons for helping him. She was known to be clever and devious. Was her word as good as they said? “So what are you proposing, Yily?”

“A partnership, maybe.”

“I didn’t know you liked me that much.”

“I don’t like Delph at all. I don’t like what he’s done to Mars or what he will do if he gets what he wants. What does he want, Mac?”

“He believes I have a bunch of indigo flame sapphires.”

“A bunch?”

“A bunch.”

She was silent. He could almost hear her thinking.

“What was that about a bomb?” she said.

He saw no reason not to. So he told her all he knew.

When he had finished she said, “Then, I guess I’d better help you.”

He asked why.

She grinned. “Because I’m a Martian, too.” She bent and picked up her heavy pack. “And I’m not tone-deaf.”

5 Whistling “Dixie”