Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,37

you listened for such things—as the Martian atmosphere was pumped from the tube and oxygen-rich nitrogen took its place. Then the attendant was punching in a code to the keypad by the door. With a barely audible hiss of equalizing pressure, the hatch swung open.

An announcement came over the Net: “Welcome to Pallah. You may now begin the off-boarding process. Remember, gravity on Mars is only forty percent of Earth standard. Please bear that in mind as you move about the domes.”

I held back a derisive snort and saw a similar expression on most of the faces around me. There were probably still more people who lived on Earth than there were scattered throughout the system, but those people tended to stay on Earth, with a few rare exceptions. People who spent most of their lives on free-floating habs, or cities bored into asteroids or built on the surfaces of moons had little need for a reminder about changing gravitic conditions. The crowd moved forward, gliding through the door and down the docking tunnel, heading into the dome.

I moved more slowly, savoring the view the clear docking tube provided of vast expanses of red dirt and rolling hills. Pallah was one of the more remote of the Martian domes and from my vantage, it was the only one in sight. Somehow, even with the people moving around me, even with the vastness of Pallah’s dome looming over me, it was easy to imagine being alone in that crimson wasteland, being among the first of the human race to set foot on Mars. It was both similar to, and distinctly different from, the sense that I got when boarding a derelict vessel or abandoned station in search of salvage.

“Come on, Langston,” Chan said at my side. “Let’s move it.” She, too, was looking at that vast wasteland, but a faint sheen of sweat glistened on her forehead, and her breathing was coming a little fast and shallow.

“You okay?” I asked, as I reluctantly turned my eyes away from the Martian landscape and back toward the far end of the tube.

“I don’t like wide open spaces,” she admitted. “They make me nervous.”

I nodded in understanding and picked up the pace. Life in the close quarters of a ship or hab made some people long for open vistas. Others took comfort from the layers of steel and composite that kept them safe—relatively speaking—from the dangers of a universe that seemed to go out of its way to prove its inhospitable nature to the human race. When those layers were removed, agoraphobia took hold. It wasn’t something that bothered me—the vast deserts of Mars still paled in comparison to hanging in the emptiness of space—but I understood it, nonetheless.

We crossed into the terminal, entering the domed city. The passenger waiting area boasted rows of plastic chairs and a series of airlocks that, I assumed, each came equipped with their own docking tube. I counted eight gates within my line of sight, and the long walkways suggested that there were plenty more. We were not the only arrivals, and the people disgorging from our gate joined an ever-expanding flood of humanity as it funneled down the walkways toward a Net object that read, “Customs.”

A flicker of nerves twisted my stomach as I approached the customs station. Prospect and the other deep-space habs were all their own legal polities as were most of the domed cities on the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The cities of Mars were unified under their own government and the same held true for the cities of Luna. Earth was a hodgepodge of nations, alliances, and governments as it always had been, and damned if I could keep any of them straight. The governments of the various domes and habitats weren’t exactly generous in the sharing of information among themselves, but it was entirely possible that the death of the would-be assassin on Prospect and my sudden disappearance had been significant enough to draw notice. Nothing had reached Daedalus—but Daedalus was notorious for its autonomy. If it didn’t happen there, they didn’t care… and as far as I knew, we’d gotten away from the Black Diamond clean. The domes of Mars were a different beast, though, and my mouth went dry as the steadily moving line of people drew us nearer to the uniformed customs agents.

“Net ID, sir,” the bored official said as I stepped before him.

I initiated the transmission, sending the algorithm that served as my identity. When