1
Chryse was like any other Martian city, old and alien.
Mars was one of the first worlds to be colonized, even before the development of the Boson Apertures. Unlike the towers on Venus with their almost-desperate attempts to establish an identity, Chryse had layers of culture built on the decaying ruins of what came before. It was like walking through an alternate reality. An Earth that never was but could have been.
Just a few months earlier, I was with the rest of my team in a different Martian city, where we were shooting our way to safety as a nascent revolution flared behind us. We lost one of our own in that mission, and there but for the grace of God go I, as they say. I had hoped to never come back to that city or this planet, but fate has a sense of humor. I was once again on Mars to find Geoffrey Rosenstein, a mid-level Chryse gangster with information that could help Section 9 write the final chapter of that story.
I found him as he left a tailor, and I slipped into the foot traffic behind his bodyguards. As we wound through the market district, I caught the scents of the city—the restaurants serving spicy-sweet noodles, the honey tea shops, the pungent incense from the Buddhist temples—and drank it in despite myself. No hints of choking smoke, or metallic blood, or rotting bodies. It was an improvement over East Hellas. Over Tower 7. Over most of my life, if I’m being honest.
Seeing but unseen, I slipped through the afternoon crowd as Rosenstein made his way back toward his power base in midtown. I planned to take him once when he left the busy market district and was in an area with fewer witnesses. Section 9 does tend to be a bit loud sometimes, so for this solo job I was going to do it my way and minimize collateral damage.
Up ahead of me, Rosenstein ran into someone he must have felt was important enough to talk to. They stopped and chattered in the street for a few minutes while his three guards stood like blind statues and failed to see me. I was in front of a rug shop pretending to admire the merchandise, angled so that my body was mostly hidden by an air purifier. When they started moving again, I gave it a minute and then followed them. Whoever he had been talking to was already gone.
They wandered through the busy streets, not hurrying at all, letting Mr. Rosenstein be seen. It’s important for minor royalty to do that sometimes; you can’t claim to be a king if you don’t maintain a presence. Then they turned down Tharsis Street and made their way toward Lowerback, the warren of narrow streets he called his own. It would be better to take him before he reached that neighborhood, though not impossible to take him after.
The job would be harder at that point. I could follow them on Tharsis Street, but there was a lot less foot traffic and an increased risk they would make me. I slipped across Tharsis instead and found a smaller street that ran parallel to it. If I attacked them from behind, the guards would be able to engage me while Rosenstein escaped in another direction. If I attacked them from the front—blocking the way back home—my odds of actually talking to Rosenstein would be a bit better.
When I reached a cross street, I returned to Tharsis and spotted them behind me by about a block and a half. We had left the downtown area, but we were not yet in Lowerback. There were fewer witnesses to spot me or what I was doing, and fewer allies to come to Rosenstein’s aid unexpectedly. It was time to pick a spot.
The area was mostly empty, the security shutters of long-vacant storefronts lining the street. Red dust hung heavy in the air. I walked rapidly, like I had somewhere important I needed to be. I knew they could see me now, a lone figure on the otherwise clear street, but they had no reason to suspect anything. Once they were just beyond arm’s reach, I spoke.
“Hello, Geoffrey.” My voice was quiet, but he stopped dead in his tracks. “We need to talk.”
He looked at me for a second like he didn’t quite know what I was supposed to be. I didn’t blame him. People do say I have a baby face. “Do I know you?” he managed at last.
That struck me as kind of funny because I knew everything there was to know about him: his age, his weight, where he was born, his brothers and sisters. How he got that little scar above his left eyebrow. Where he got his beard trimmed so nicely.
“No.” I said, and he gestured to the three hulking bodyguards. He didn’t try to run, which in retrospect seemed like a stupid decision. But from his perspective, why would he? I was just one guy with an innocent face. They were three hard killers with submachine guns.
Two of the bodyguards flanked me, one to the right and one to the left. The third one came straight in at me but didn’t raise his submachine gun. He probably thought this would just be a simple beating.
I didn’t move on him. Instead I took the one on the left. Anytime you’re being flanked like that, they’ll expect you to go after the guy in the middle, at which point you will inevitably get sucker punched by the guy on either side. As a right-handed fighter, it made the most sense to me to move them all to my right. So I shuffled sideways, jammed my thumbs into the eyes of the man on the left, swept his feet out from under him, and guided his skull into the pavement.
That definitely surprised the others.
The man in the middle—probably their lead—had to jump out of the way to avoid the man falling in front of him. When he jumped back the other man had to also, so both of them were already off their rhythm before the first was out.
From that point on it was a straight-up fight of two against one. I drove my left fist into the face of the man in the middle, and to his credit he ate the punch and came back swinging. I dropped my right elbow to block the counterpunch, then pivoted and kicked the man on the right. He blocked it successfully but staggered back from the blow.
The man in the middle kept punching, either forgetting all about his weapon or thinking he had something to prove now. I caught a punch and wrapped my arm around his, locked the joint with upward pressure, then spun him around to block the other guy’s line of fire. That one hadn’t forgotten he had a gun, and I wanted to make him think twice about using it.
My faith was proven misplaced with a rattle of submachine gun fire. The man in my grip went slack as he became an unintended human shield. I shoved his dying body away, and he stumbled a few feet before falling onto the shooter. I came in behind the dead man as the shooter shoved the body out of his way and leveled his weapon again. I caught his wrist and stripped the weapon out of his hands in the same movement.
To my surprise, he rallied. I saw something flash and realized that he had drawn a knife. I threw my head back and dodged his first slash, then caught his arm. He probably thought I meant to wrestle him for the weapon, but I only wanted to stop it from moving. I kicked the man’s heel out from under him and dropped him hard on the street. He tried to twist out from under me, but a single blow to the back of his head knocked him out as well.
One dead, two concussions. Not bad, considering the situation at the start of the fight.
I turned and saw that Geoffrey Rosenstein was finally giving an appropriate level of thought to the possibility of just running away. I drew a pistol from under my shirt and advised him of the realities of his situation. “I wouldn’t do that, Geoffrey. I shoot better than I box.”
He had already half-turned, but these words did seem to give him pause. He looked down at his bodyguards. “You didn’t have to do that to them.”