Martians Abroad

Then I walked away.

* * *

Six weeks in. My skin itched. I was tired of second-guessing every word that came out of my mouth. The longer I stayed, the thicker and weirder my Martian accent sounded. I had to get out of here. I had to do something. Back on Mars, I’d take out a scooter. I wouldn’t even go very far, just run it around the colony a couple of times. That was all. I wanted to do that here. I had to do it, or I’d go crazy.

I asked around to find out about those cycles in the garage, what class I would have to take or club I would have to sign up for to learn how to ride one. Nobody knew. Nobody would admit they were there. I even did the responsible thing and went up to Stanton herself one morning at breakfast and asked.

“Ms. Stanton?” I said, as politely and demurely as I could. “You know those cycles in the garage? What are they for?”

I had noticed by now that when she was annoyed, she got even more polite. “They belong to the groundskeeping staff, for inspecting the perimeter of the grounds.”

“So there’s no way I could take a lesson on one, or check one out?”

Her smile grew even more stiff. “Of course not.”

“There’s no class I could take, or request for PE—”

“Not at all,” she enunciated, and I took the hint.

That didn’t mean I thought she was right.

Doing some research online during study hour, I found the manuals for the motorcycles. When the library-monitor program that kept tabs on us asked what I wanted them for, I gave some excuse about working on a physics problem, and it authorized my looking at them.

I had a couple of problems from the start: I’d need a keycard to activate the cycles, and I’d have to dodge the surveillance cameras.

I wasn’t the best hacker in the universe. If I had to guess who was, I’d say Charles. At least, he’d gotten himself into most of Colony One’s computer systems by the time we’d both started school. He didn’t mess around with anything important. He just wanted to see if he could, “Just in case,” he always said. He and Mom kept up a polite fiction about it—she knew he could do it, and therefore all the department heads and officials at Colony One knew he could do it, but they all pretended that they didn’t know, just as long as Charles left everything the way he found it, which he did, because he knew they knew and were letting him alone.

But I wasn’t going to ask him for help. Not in a million years. Any hacking I did, I had to use my own know-how and hope it was enough. Which meant not poking too hard. Which meant not trying to do anything crazy like actually shut down the security cameras in the garage. I did, however, find a maintenance program that would temporarily shut off the cameras in that part of the dorm while it tested the electrical system. That would give me about half an hour without anyone tracking me.

All I had to do then was figure out how to steal a keycard, fake a keycard, or learn how to bypass the security lock on a motorcycle.

At PE the next day, Angelyn and I spotted each other on weights. I’d bench-press while she made sure I didn’t crush myself with the measely ten kilos I’d loaded, and then I’d do the same for her—thirty-five kilos. I felt like a pity case—she could lift three times as much as I could. But she didn’t seem to mind. I even asked her about it,

why she would want to lift weights with me when she could help someone who was more at her level. She blushed and confessed that she wanted an easy day of it, and spotting for me seemed the way to do it. “But I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t actually want to hang out with you,” she added quickly.

Hey, at least she was honest. And that gave me a chance to talk to her when it was her turn to lie back and lift.

“So, do you ride motorbikes?” I hoped that wasn’t too suspicious.

She wrinkled her nose, easily hefting the weights in a set of repetitions. “Not really. Once on vacation on St. Thomas we rode aqua jets, but it’s not really the same thing. Going that fast seems a little bit scary to me.”

“Oh, but it’s not, I had a scooter back on Mars, and it’s amazing, the way the whole world just whips on past … anyway. Have you seen the cycles in the garage?”

“The garage? No, I haven’t been in there since we got here.”

“Well, they’ve got these electric cycles. Stanton says they’re for the groundskeepers—”

Her eyes widened. “You didn’t actually talk to Stanton about it, did you?”

“Well, yeah, I wanted to know, I figured I ought to ask.”

“You just keep pushing, don’t you?”

I frowned. “I never know I’m doing it until I’ve already done it.” There were all these rules that no one had bothered to write down, like that you weren’t supposed to ask questions because it made you look weak.

Angelyn frowned back. “You’re trying to figure out how you can take one of those bikes out, aren’t you?”

“What makes you say that?” I said, but I wasn’t at all convincing.