For one final time she felt the pull of gravity as the Salyut dove into the Martian atmosphere, the thin air screaming against the lander’s heat shield.
She listened as the long, high note climbed the scale and held at a perfect B above high C.
Kane felt the impact in his ribs and the muscles of his neck, no more, really, than a burst of light and a second of galvanic shock. He rolled onto his hands and knees and let the blood flow into his brain.
The noise of the alarms was so great that Kane could no longer hear the high harmony of his voices. For the first time since they’d touched down on Mars—had it been only a day and a half ago?—he had his mind to himself.
It made little difference. Even without the compulsion from the implant, his course was obvious: kill Curtis, steal the panel, return to Earth, and bring justice to his uncle.
The sirens faltered for a second, and Kane saw a vision of depthless crystal seas fouled with blood, of butchered flesh in the wake of the ship. He saw the dusty yard of a monastery and a filthy, bearded monk on his knees, praying for the waters to be released.
The sirens stopped, and the compulsion seized him again with fierce inevitability. He burrowed through the sheets of black plastic, searching for his gun, hearing only the voices in his head and not the ones across the cave from him, muted indistinct noises with no semantic content.
The implant worked on his adrenal gland as well, renewing the effect of Lena’s adrenogen. He felt the chill of norepinephrins constricting his blood vessels; his kidneys ached from the tension of the surrounding musculature.
He saw the gun.
His hand closed around it and he stood up, dizzy, edgy, barely in control. He saw Curtis by the airlock, putting on a helmet, and he raised the Colt until the sight covered Curtis’s neck. Before he could fire, Curtis had moved, turning and jackknifing into the lock.
He remembered the storm, though the image in his mind was muddled, confused with gray waves and clashing rocks. But he knew he needed the infrared helmet, could remember having thrown it somewhere near where he stood.
By the time he found the helmet, Molly had gone through after Curtis. Kane ran for the hatch, pushing Hanai to one side.A voice behind him said,“He’s got a gun!” as he slammed the helmet in place and dived into the airlock.
The inside of the lock was smeared with the heat of the bodies that had just passed through it. He tapped the butt of the gun against the curved metal floor of the cylinder, his right leg shaking to the rhythm.
The hatch opened. He slid out and stared toward Frontera, at the blinding column of white light that overloaded the contrast sensors of his helmet, reducing the rest of the planet to deep green.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, only realizing he’d vocalized it when he saw the droplets of spittle on the inside of his helmet.
He turned his head downward, blocking the worst of the light with his hands, and made out Curtis as a dull yellow blotch moving down the slope.A few yards away Molly lay with her knees drawn up almost to her chin, as close to a fetal position as the clumsy rigid suit would allow.
Kane moved down the side of the volcano, his feet turned sideways for better traction, each leap jolting his ribcage and firing off telegrams of pain.The laser had vanished, and the ruins of the dome glittered in oily white heat, bringing the foreground back into focus, the cold lumps of rock, the molten patch where the Russian ship had been, the warm orange of Kane’s own ship, the dull red of Curtis’s suit and the brighter red of the panel under Curtis’s arm.
He could hear Curtis’s heavy breathing through the speakers in his helmet. It would be bad for Curtis, in the darkness and chaos of the storm, and Kane knew it was his one advantage. If he failed to catch Curtis before they got to the ruins of the dome...
No, he realized. It wasn’t the dome Curtis wanted. It was the ship.
He forced himself into longer, more reckless leaps, and he forgot the strength of the wind. It unbalanced him as his legs reached for an open square of ground and threw him too far forward, sent him falling endlessly toward the rocks, so slowly that he had time to wrap his arms around his chest before he hit.The rigid suit bounced and rolled, rattling him inside it like dice in a cup.
The lights on his chest pack still glowed, but his infrared scanner could not distinguish between red and green.The suit was all right, he
told himself. If it were compromised, he would already know.
Get up, he told himself.
He got up.
Curtis was nearly to the ascent stage of the ship, but Kane had picked up a few yards on him. He could see the articulation of Curtis’s suit in shades of red, see the man’s arms stretched blindly in front of him.
And behind him came new shapes, a dozen or more suited refugees from the dome, stumbling toward Curtis, toward the ship, toward the mouth of Kane’s gun.
“Curtis!” Kane shouted.
Curtis stopped, turned halfway back toward the cave.
Kane ran at him, holding the gun in front of him. He was a hundred feet away, eighty, sixty. He slowed himself, feet skidding in the dust, almost falling again and sighted down the barrel of the Colt.
Now, he thought, now, quickly, before there are too many others underfoot, now while you have a clean shot.
Something was making his helmet vibrate.
He looked to his right, to the south and east, and saw a tiny ball of flame rip through the sky. It vanished into the horizon near the Syria Planum and a moment later a perfect hemisphere of molten white rose like a new sun.
An asteroid? Kane wondered. If so, it had been enormous, and the impact must have been devastating.
He whirled back to face Curtis and saw him climbing the side of the lander.
“Curtis!” he shouted again, and he fired the Colt, missing Curtis and leaving a white hot streak where the bullet had grazed the spacecraft. Before he could fire again, Curtis dropped to the ground behind the ship and disappeared.
The radio band hissed and rattled with the frightened voices of the refugees; Kane switched his receiver off and ran after Curtis. He dodged between the stumbling automatons who’d been left night-blind and disoriented by the storm, following the retreating image of Curtis’s suit. The heat of the ruins was closer now; the analytical circuitry of the helmet dropped Curtis to a dull yellow in comparison. Kane yearned for another shot, but had no chance in the milling crowd.
Curtis had broken for the eastern side of the dome, dodging through a gaping, melted wound in the wall. Kane slowed to walk, his lungs burning, his concentration breaking down.
The dome was ravaged, mangled beyond repair. Superheated gasses had blown globs and droplets of molten plastic for hundreds of yards in all directions, leaving only a few hundred square feet of limp, opaque plastic over the burned and frozen fields.
Something moved in a gap in the wall and Kane almost fired, then saw that it was a child in a low-pressure shuttle suit. From the obvious pain in her motion Kane could see that the four psi oxygen in the suit had left her with the bends, excruciating bubbles of nitrogen in the joints of her arms and legs.
There was nothing Kane could do for her; if she got to the cave in time, the pain would eventually go away.
There would only be worse inside the ruined dome.
The first thing he saw as he stepped through the wall was a corpse, embolized, nearly as cold as the ground beneath Kane’s feet.A few yards away lay a hand, with no sign of the body it belonged to.
Kane was sweating heavily. He had no idea where Curtis was; at any moment the man could circle back and blend in with the others heading uphill toward the cave. Kane turned constantly to check his back, and at least once every minute he stumbled back outside to make sure the ship was still there.
When the rumbling started under his feet he thought it was a hallucination.Then he saw that the brown, spongy walls of the shattered living modules were quaking and that bits of congealed plastic were falling from overhead.