Old Mars

Sally followed suit, and they swooped down into the not-darkness. She hoped the falling-elevator sensation in her stomach was all physical. The tower’s roof was flat or nearly—shedding rain wasn’t much of a problem here, and from the markings there had been Paiteng perches there once. She didn’t try to gauge her own speed; Teyud was the specialist, and she just followed as closely as possible. There was a sudden flexing in the cable; the bundle of sucker-equipped boneless limbs at its end had clamped down on the target. She clamped her legs together and extended them as the roof rushed up at her, then hit the release and tucked and rolled the way she would have from a parachute drop; she’d done that on Earth, of course, but never here.

Whump.

“Oooof!” and a muffled yelp from the canid.

Things thumped and gouged at her and the wind jolted out of her lungs. The boots and padding protected her, a bit. She thought the impact would have broken bones on Earth; it would have broken bones here, for most standard-issue Martians. Teyud was up on one knee, the edges of her blackened sword blade glimmering and the dart pistol in the other.

Sally drew likewise, the steel a comforting weight. The pistol was in her left and much lighter, but she didn’t have the Thoughtful Grace’s advantage of being ambidextrous. Satemcan staggered for a moment, shook his head, and slunk over to her heel.

There were a couple of packages of Semtex in her belt, part of her other-job kit as she thought of it. Hopefully …

They came erect and padded over to the door. It opened its eye—slowly, which was the sign of a system reaching the end of its life span. Teyud leaned forward swiftly and pressed her optic mask to the opening. Things made rather ghastly wet, sticky sounds as the commando optic used one of its functions to take over the other biomachine, and the door swung open.

“Poor security maintenance,” Teyud said very softly.

A spiral staircase led down from the landing stage, curling around a shaft that held—or had held, once—a freight lift. Teyud went down with a rapid scuff-scuff-scuff leaning run not quite like the way a Terran moved and only slightly more like the way a standard Martian did. Sally simply hopped down three or four steps each time, quiet enough in padded-sole boots if you were careful. There were occasional glow-globes, but they were nearly dormant; the optics gave them a sort of twilight view, in which footprints glowed slightly from remnant heat.

Every once in a while, they’d pass a door, one that led to rooms in the thickness of the tower wall. Most were unoccupied. Some—

Phufft.

Teyud fired before the door was fully open. The student toppled backward, a surprised look on his face. One hand held a pancake-tortilla thing wrapped around some filling, the other a top-hinged book. Teyud moved in a blur, getting her pistol arm underneath him before he struck the ground, lowering him gently and leaving the book and the more-or-less burrito on his chest.

Sally covered the stairwell while she worked. Shooting someone here wasn’t really like doing it at home, not if you used anesthetic darts; it was more like paintball, in a way, with the only real risk that of bonking your head when you collapsed. She had played a fair amount of what amounted to paintball with Teyud and her friends now and then. It was fun and excellent training, though she never beat the Coercive. Other Martians yes, but not the Thoughtful Grace, though she came close occasionally.

Of course, out on planet Reality and away from the padded obstacle course you couldn’t tell if someone was using lethals until it was too late. The instant unconsciousness was the same, but with the real thing you had instant brain-death too.

“Here,” Teyud whispered, in a flat, noncarrying tone.

Here was a door with more than its share of faintly glowing footprints. Sally tapped Satemcan on his head, and he sniffed long and carefully, then nodded.

“Ssssame​sssstrange​sssssmelll,” he whispered.

Teyud went through the eye-capture routine again. Then she looked up and nodded to Sally before she pushed gently on the door.

It swung open, and her optic mask stepped down the brighter light. A voice came through:

“… many years of declining fees and contributions by organizations and the Despot. This is suboptimal in the medium to long term! Contact with the Wet World—”

Which was colloquial Demotic for Earth.

“—presents both unprecedented risks and opportunities for maximizing the utility of the faculty of—”

Under the tiger alertness, some distant part of Sally Yamashita’s mind quietly boggled.

Am I really listening to an evil-mastermind academic veterinarian monologing about cutbacks in his fucking budget? that part of her asked.