It’s my turn for a smile — a bluff, of course. “Sometimes one wants to keep a low profile.”

Her returning smile is coy. “Of course.”

UP THE AVENUE of shadows I march, coattails sweeping the moonlit gravel. Each pebble is carved in minute detail. The memento mori hollows of an open-visored helmet repeat a thousand times across the arms’ breadth span between crumbling walls of Martian sandstone. Behind me, the sexton dines heavily on my would-be assassins; already their reedy screams grow shorter, though the crunching, slurping sounds continue.

To my left, a row of empty stone sarcophagi are set back in alcoves within the wall. Each is surmounted by a statue of the dead Creator who formerly slumbered within, their pose at once noble and heroic, as befits the graveyard of those who would dare to reach for the stars. For some reason, those who died of starvation, or gnawed on the bodies of their fallen comrades, are gowned in the formal robes of the Indonesian Islamic Republic’s judiciary; those who walked out into the Martian desert and opened their faceplates, to leave food and air for their companions, are pictured in “space suits,” those claustrophobic contrivances of fabric and metal that the Creators depended on when they ventured outside the environment for which they were designed.

Between the sarcophagi, guardian angels stand at attention, wings outstretched and flaps extended. Their eyes are fierce as they grip their assault rifles of holy office, ready to see off any who would disturb the slumber of their charges.

Now, if my information is correct, the second angel on the left — yes, I see it. Its gun is suspiciously smooth for a work of sculpture. I walk over to it and reach inside my coat to retrieve the grisly token I paid so much for. Then I touch fingertip to gun muzzle.

“Pass, friend,” the guardian angel electrospeaks me, and I pull back my hand. The severed digit of the deliverator I slip back in my pocket, authentication tokens and all. Sometimes identity-based authentication is a good way of securing your perimeter… but not always. Even the sextons need to buy supplies. And the sextons are so paranoid about intruders that they don’t want smart guards? That’s their problem, I tell myself as I slip past the guards, open the gate, and enter the rock garden that surrounds the mausoleum.

The mausoleum stands on its own within a walled garden of immaculately carved memorial stones. Sitting atop a circle of twenty Doric columns, the roof takes the shape of a squat conical landing craft, legs extended in the moment that precedes touchdown. I walk toward the entrance, barely visible in the shifting shadows of Phobos’s passage. Permafrost crackles beneath my feet. In the distance, impaled wretches moan as a distant bell tolls the hour of the night. I step inside.

Here are stacked the treasure tubes of Mars, rescued from their graves and brought hither by the sextons when the spate of robberies became intolerable. (It’s easier to guard a single mausoleum at the center of a defended installation than a scattering of graves across an open landscape.) They lie in twenty thin aluminum canisters, stacked in a raft at the center of the floor. The bell tolls, but their ears do not hear. My skin crawls, chromatophores tensing into black spiky cones as I approach the pile, something akin to superstitious dread gnawing at the edge of my mind; these are our Creators, and this may be as close to meeting my Dead Love as I shall ever come, unless the plans of — of who? — come to fruition. Dead, and yet containing the seeds of undeath; there are pink goo replicators in here, desiccated and chilled, but nevertheless intact, their monstrously profligate duplication technology present (how strange!) in every cell.

She wants the samples, of course. She’ll happily destroy the rest, to deny them to Her competitors — but first, She wants the vital undamaged proteome, hydrogen bonds and disulphide bridges intact and unbroken by heat: the chromosomes, DNA tidily supercoiled and held in place, methylation groups signaling their activation status. She wants to scrutinize the cells for tiny scraps of RNA, subtle modulators and trigger sequences to make the machinery spring into life. And when Her artificers are done, they will build Her a cell, clocks and sequencers reset to zero, primed with enzymes and painstakingly reconstructed organelles… and She will throw the switch and put her vile scheme into action.

We can’t be having that, can we?

I tiptoe over to the stack of tubes and bend over the topmost layer. The tubes are thin-walled and light, as befits a coffin shipped all the way from Earth; there is a dusty label bonded to the nearest one. I read its English translation with some difficulty; ABDUL AZIZ IBRAHIM, it says. XENOBIOLOGIST. Below the label, a series of latches, dull and corroded.

I am reaching into my inner pocket for the sampler when I sense a vibration through the soles of my feet. I look round in a hurry for somewhere to hide. Is it near and quiet, or far away and loud? I make a hasty decision, and jam the sampler up against the gasket of the coffin. It coughs as it stabs its steel beak through the membrane and into the mummified remains within. I yank it out hastily, cap the point, and head for the entrance as fast as I can.

But I’m too late.

IT’S NOT UNTIL the Lyrae twins are halfway into their third course and the fifth back-and-forth of the debate that the venerable Granita Ford puts away her small talk and gets to the point. “You haven’t so much as hinted at what brings you to Mars,” she says. “That interests me. Keeping oneself private is not unusual. But such total restraint, after so long — you’ll forgive me for finding that curious, I hope.”

Save me from the attentions of bored dowagers! I silently curse Jeeves, but I have a confabulation ready. Like all such, it functions best by blending truth and falsehood. “I’m performing a favor for a friend,” I say, trying to put just the right arch emphasis on the word to imply that they are nothing of the kind. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

Ford’s carnivorous smile widens. “Come, my dear. D’you think I haven’t noticed the size of your court? Or how lightly you travel? I understand completely; your little problem is safe with me.” Which is to say, she’s swallowed the cover story — that the Honorable Katherine Sorico has fallen upon hard times and is reduced to providing very expensive services for very discreet, rich clients — and is prepared to use it against me. “I sympathize completely, and I can be the soul of discretion. But I’m still curious. What is it that takes you from Mercury to Mars with such haste?”

“Why, the availability of transport, nothing more and nothing less.” I raise my crystal drinking bulb and ingest a sip of sweet liqueur, using the motion to distract as I compose my features. “My friend wants a pair of trustworthy eyes to look over some interests of his that are giving him reason for concern.” Trustworthy meaning independent and unindentured. Unlikely to be suborned by a conspiracy to throw off the shackles of proxy ownership, in other words. “About which I can say no more.” And that should slam the air lock down before her probing, because if there is a single issue that all aristos hold in confidence, it is the whispered threat of an indentured arbeiter conspiracy against the moneyed elite.

Granita’s smile evaporates. For a moment I think I’ve gone too far. Then she reaches across the table and grasps my arm. I feel the hum of powerful motors concealed within the satin sheath of her formal glove. “One trusts that you will remember your friends, should times become difficult.” She stares at me, eyes glittering as coldly and brilliantly as rhinestones.