The Empress of Mars (Company) Read online

  The Empress of Mars

  BOOKS BY KAGE BAKER

  The Anvil of the World

  Dark Mondays

  Mother Aegypt and Other Stories

  The House of Stag

  The Empress of Mars

  The Company Series

  In the Garden of Iden

  Sky Coyote

  Mendoza in Hollywood

  The Graveyard Game

  Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

  The Life of the World to Come

  The Children of the Company

  The Machine’s Child

  Gods and Pawns

  The Sons of Heaven

  The Empress

  of Mars

  _____________

  KAGE BAKER

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE EMPRESS OF MARS

  Copyright © 2009 by Kage Baker

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baker, Kage.

  The Empress of Mars / Kage Baker.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1890-9

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1890-3

  1. Mars (Planet)—Fiction. 2. Space colonies—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A4313E47 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008050606

  First Edition: May 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Kate, of course,

  But also for Kelly Rettinhouse,

  Who understands about the Great House . . .

  And for Uncle Dougie, a true Brick

  The Empress of Mars

  PROLOGUE

  There were three Empresses of Mars.

  The first one was a bar at the Settlement. The second was the lady who ran the bar; though her title was strictly informal, having been bestowed on her by the regular customers, and her domain extended no farther than the pleasantly gloomy walls of the only place you could get beer on the Tharsis Bulge.

  The third one was the queen of England.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Big Red Balloon

  What were the British doing on Mars?

  For one thing, they had no difficulty calculating with metric figures. For another, their space exploration effort had not been fueled primarily by a military-industrial complex. This meant that it had never received infusions of taxpayers’ money on the huge scale of certain other nations, but also meant that its continued existence had been unaffected by bungled wars or inconvenient peace treaties. Without the prospect of offworld missile bases, the major powers’ interest in colonizing space had quite melted away. This left plenty of room for the private sector.

  There was only one question, then: was there money on Mars?

  There had definitely been money on Luna. The British Lunar Company had done quite well by its stockholders, with the proceeds from its mining and tourism divisions. Luna had been a great place to channel societal malcontents as well, guaranteeing a workforce of rugged individualists and others who couldn’t fit in Down Home without medication.

  But Luna was pretty thoroughly old news now and no longer anywhere near as profitable as it had been, thanks to the miners’ strikes and the litigation with the Ephesian Church over the Diana of Luna incident. Nor was it romantic anymore: its sterile silver valleys were becoming domesticated, domed over with tract housing for all the clerks the BLC needed. Bureaucrats and missionaries had done for Luna as a frontier.

  The psychiatric Hospitals were filling up with unemployed rugged individualists again. Profit margins were down. The BLC turned its thoughtful eyes to Mars.

  Harder to get to than Luna, but nominally easier to colonize. Bigger, but on the other hand no easy gravity well with which to ship ore down to Earth. This ruled out mining for export as a means of profit. And as for low-gravity experiments, they were cheaper and easier to do on Luna. What, really, had Mars to offer to the hopeful capitalist?

  Only the prospect of terraforming. And terraforming would cost a lot of money and a lot of effort, with the successful result being a place slightly less hospitable than Outer Mongolia in the dead of winter.

  But what are spin doctors for?

  So the British Arean Company had been formed, with suitably orchestrated media fanfare. Historical clichés were dusted off and repackaged to look shiny-new. Games and films were produced to create a public appetite for adventure in rocky red landscapes. Clever advertising did its best to convince people they’d missed a golden opportunity by not buying lots on Luna when the land up there was dirt cheap, but intimated that they needn’t kick themselves any longer: a second chance was coming for an even better deal! And so forth and so on.

  It all had the desired effect. A lot of people gave the British Arean Company a great deal of money in return for shares of stock that, technically speaking, weren’t worth the pixels with which they were impressively depicted in old-engraving style. The big red balloon was launched. Missions to Mars were launched, a domed base was built, and actual scientists were sent out to the new colony along with the better-socially-adapted inhabitants of two or three Hospitals. So were the members of an incorporated clan, as a goodwill gesture in honor of the most recent treaty with the Celtic Federation. They brought certain institutions the British Arean Company officially forbade, like polluting industries and beast slavery, but conceded were necessary to survival on a frontier.

  So all began together the vast and difficult work of setting up the infrastructure for terraforming, preparing the way for wholesale human colonization.

  Then there was a change of government. It coincided with the British Arean Company discovering that the fusion generators they had shipped to Mars wouldn’t work unless they were in a very strong electromagnetic field, and Mars, it seemed, didn’t have much of one. This meant that powering life support alone would cost very much more than anyone had thought it would.

  Not only that, the lowland canyons where principal settlement had been planned turned out to channel winds with devastating velocity. Only in the Tharsis highlands, where the air was thinner and colder, was it possible to erect a structure that wouldn’t be scoured away by sandstorms within a week. The British Arean Company discovered this after several extremely costly mistakes.

  The balloon burst.

  Not with a bang and shreds flying everywhere, exactly; more like a very fast leak, so it sort of dwindled down to an ignominious little lopsided thing without much air in it. Just like the dome of the Settlement Base.

  So a lot of people were stuck up there without the money to
come home, and they had to make the best of things. Under the circumstances, it seemed best to continue on with the job.

  CHAPTER 2

  Twenty Acres

  Mary Griffith woke alone that morning, though she did not always do so. She lay for a while in the dark, listening to the quiet, which was not the same thing as silence: low hum of the jenny and a few snores drifting from the other lofts tucked in under the curve of the dome like so many swallows’ nests. No coughing. No quarreling. No fretful clunking to tell her that Three Tank needed its valves unblocked yet again.

  Smiling to herself, she rolled out of her bedclothes and tossed the ladder over the side, so descending nimbly to meet the day. She was a compactly built and muscular little woman of a certain age. Her ancestors, most of them coal miners, had passed along with other hardy genetic characteristics a barrel chest, which gave her considerable bosom a certain massive foundation, and Martian gravity contributed in its own way to make Mother Griffith’s Knockers famous throughout the Settlement.

  Having sent the ladder back up on its reel and tied off the line neat as any sailor, she set the stove to heating and pumped a kettle of water. The water came up reluctantly, as it always did, rust-colored, strangling and spitting slush from the pipe, but it boiled clear; and as she sat and sipped her tea Mary watched the steam rise like a ghost in the dry cold air.

  The visible phantom ascended and dissipated, reaching the lofts and sending its message to the other sleepers, who were pulled awake by its moistness as irresistibly as though it were the smell of eggs and bacon, were they back on Earth. Soon she heard them tossing in their blankets, heard a racking cough or a whispered exchange. She sighed, bidding good-bye to the last bit of early-morning calm. Another day begun.

  She got up and rolled back the shade on the big window, and the sullen purple dawn flared in and lit her house.

  “Oh, my, that’s bright,” said someone plaintively, high up in the shadows, and a moment later Mr. Morton came down on his line, in his long black thermals looking uncommonly like a hesitant spider.

  “Good morning, Mr. Morton,” said Mary, in English because his PanCelt was still halting, and “Good morning, ma’am,” said he, and winced as his bare feet hit the cold sanded floor. Half-hopping, he picked his way to the stove and poured his tea, inhaling the steam gratefully; brought it back to the long stone table and seated himself, wincing again as his knees knocked into the table supports. He stirred a good lump of butter into the tea and regarded Mary through the steam, looking anxious.

  “Er . . . what would you like me to do today?” he inquired.

  Mary sighed and summoned patience.

  He was nominally her employee, and had been so since that fateful afternoon when he, like so many others, had realized that his redundancy pay did not amount to half the fare back to Earth.

  “Well, you didn’t finish the scouring on Five Tank yesterday, did you?” she said.

  “No,” he agreed sadly.

  “Then I think perhaps you had better do that, Mr. Morton.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  It was not his fault that he had to be told what to do. He had spent most of his adult life in Hospital and a good bit of his childhood, too, ever since (having at the age of ten been caught reading a story by Edgar Allan Poe) he had been diagnosed as Eccentric.

  Mind you, it wasn’t all jam and tea in Hospital. Even the incurably twisted had to be of some use to society, and Mr. Morton had been brilliant at the chemistry, design, and fabrication of cast-stone structures for industrial use. That was why he had been recruited by the British Arean Company, arriving on Mars with a single black duffel containing all he owned and a heart full of dreams of romantic adventure.

  Having designed and fabricated all the structures the British Arean Company needed, however, he had been summarily fired. He had gone wandering away through the Tubes and wound up at the Empress, his white thin face whiter still for shock, and sat at a dark table drinking batch for eight hours before Mary had asked him if he was ever going home, and then he had burst into tears.

  So she had given him a job. Mary had been fired herself. Not for redundancy, though, really; for being too Ethnic.

  “Five Tank, yes, and in the afternoon we can brew another pale ale,” she decided, “or maybe a good oatmeal stout, what do you think?” and Mr. Morton brightened at that.

  “Tch! In your dreams,” said someone in a voice dripping with contempt, high up near the ceiling. Both Mary and Mr. Morton craned their heads back to look, but the remark had not been addressed to them. “I must be out of my mind, wasting time on a loser like you!”

  The speaker was Mary’s firstborn, Alice, long-necked and irritable as a swan, who now poised on the edge of her loft and fastened the descent line. Leaning out, she flew down, and let the line go with a snap as soon as her feet hit the floor. It went writhing back up as she flounced away to the stove.

  Mary sighed and Mr. Morton, for whom relationships were things that happened to other people, looked fixedly at his feet.

  “Have we got any oats?” he inquired, in as bright and normal a voice as he could manage. Before Mary could reply, a second person leaned out of the love nest Alice had made up above One Tank and, groping for the line, came down. It was Alice’s current young man, who grinned sheepishly at Mary. He was carrying his psuit over one arm, with his boots and mask. She nodded at him, trying to remember his name.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wilson,” she said. “Please help yourself to the water.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Only it’s Johnson.”

  “To be sure, Johnson.” Mary watched as he hurried over to the stove, where Alice stood waiting for him to fix her a cup of tea. Young Johnson obliged. She accepted it with frigid condescension and sat facing away from him as he pulled on his psuit. He fixed himself tea, gulped it down, and hurried off to work after an unsuccessful attempt to kiss her. Mary cleared her throat.

  “Have we got any oats with which to brew, Mr. Morton? No, but perhaps She will provide them,” Mary said, and he nodded sagely. Mr. Morton wasn’t an Ephesian himself, but he was willing to concede that there was Somebody out there responsive to human prayer, and She certainly seemed to hear Mary’s.

  “Something will turn up,” he said, and Mary nodded.

  And when the day had well and truly begun—when the staff had all descended from their alcoves to their varied employments, when Mary’s other two daughters had been roused and set smiling or sullen about the day’s tasks, when the long stone counter had been polished to a dull shine and the heating unit under One Tank was filling the air with a grateful warmth, and Mary herself stood behind the bar drawing the first ale of the day, to be poured into the offering basin in the little shrine with its lumpy image of the Good Mother Herself, dim-lit by Her little flickering votive wire—even in that moment when the rich malty stuff hit the parched stone and foamed extravagantly, for CO2 is never lacking on Mars—even just then the Lock doors swung open and in came the answer to prayer, being Padraig Moylan with a hundred-weight sack of Clan Morrigan oats and two tubs of butter in trade.

  Mr. Moylan was thanked with grace and sincerity, the clan’s bar tab recalculated accordingly. Soon he was settled in a cozy alcove with a shot of red single malt and Mona, the best listener amongst Mary’s children. Mary, having stashed the welcome barter in a locker, set about her slow eternal task of sweeping the red sand from her tables. She could hear Mr. Morton singing as he worked with his scouring pads, his dreamy lyric baritone echoing inside Five Tank, reverberating “Some Enchanted Evening.”

  Mary ticked him off her mental list of Things to Be Seen To, and surveyed the rest of her house as she moved down the length of the table.

  There was Alice, still miffed about something, loading yesterday’s beer mugs into the scouring unit. Rowan, brown and practical, was arranging today’s mugs in neat ranks behind the bar. Worn by scouring, the mugs had a lovely silkiness on them now, shiny as pink marble, dwindling to a thinness
and translucency that meant that soon they’d be too delicate for bar use and more would have to be cast. (Though when that happened, the old ones could be boxed up and sent out to the British Arean Company PX in the landing port, to be sold as “Finest Arean Porcelain” to such guests as came to inspect the BAC public facilities.)

  Over behind Four Tank, the shadows had retreated before a little mine lamp, and by its light Chiring and Manco had a disassembled filtering unit spread out, cleaning away the gudge with careful paddles. The gudge too was a commodity, to be traded as fertilizer, which was a blessing because it accumulated with dreadful speed in the bottom of the fermentation tanks. It was a combination of blown sand, yeast slurry, and the crawly stuff that grew on the ceiling, and it had a haunting and deathless smell, but mixed with manure and liberally spread over thin poor Martian soil, it defied superoxidants and made the barley grow.

  And everyone agreed that getting the barley to grow was of vital importance. It fed people, it was a nitrogen fixer, it expired oxygen, and it made soil out of Martian loess and sand.

  Now Chiring and Manco sang too, somewhat muffled behind kerchiefs tied over their mouths and noses, joining the last bit of “Some Enchanted Evening” in their respective gruff bass and eerie tenor. A tiny handcam whirred away at them from its place on the table, adding footage to Chiring’s ongoing documentary series for the Kathmandu Post. Mary nodded with satisfaction that all was well and glanced ceilingward at the last member of her household, who was only now rappelling down from the lowest of the lofts.