A missile slammed into the ground about ten meters to the crawlers right. Rocks and chunks of sulfur rained down. The only thing that saved the crawler from worse damage was that Io’s atmosphere was too thin to transmit the blast from the explosion.
Fear knotting her guts, Renée fed emergency power to the electric motors in each wheel hub. She slewed the crawler leftwards, dashing for the shelter of a ridge of rock. She got there just in time; the missile from the pursuer, which had been homing on her, blew itself up against the suddenly interposed barrier.
“Cochons!” she cried, shaking her fist at the Japanese. Then reaction set in. Sweat oozed over her skin, the clammy, clinging sensation made worse by its lazy flow in Io’s .18g. If they’d been in the open when that second missile struck-With an almost physical effort, she forced herself to optimism. “We’ve gained some time, at any rate,” he said. “They’ll have to suit up and EVA to reload their missile racks.”
“You’re right.” Alec came forward to strap himself in again. He rubbed at his hip through the space armor; Rente’s desperate maneuver must have thrown him head over heels. But he still sounded as calm and practical as if the discussion were about the best place to dig a sample trench. “The eclipse will slow them, too.”
“Eclipse?” Renée echoed foolishly; she hadn’t consciously noticed how narrow Jupiter’s crescent had become. The planet, of course, hung unmoving in the sky; from Loki, it stood about forty degrees above the horizon, slightly south of west. But the sun was within a few degrees of it, and would soon vanish behind its bulk.
Elation filled Renée for a moment, but gloom quickly replaced it. “Eclipse matters less to them than it would to us. We have light from the sun, Jupiter, or both for all but a couple of hours out of every forty-two, but on Luna Farside they’re in dark phase two weeks of four.”
Alec frowned. “Unfair for men from a different world to be better prepared for this one than we are after we’ve spent so much time on it.”
“If ever two worlds were similar, they’re Luna and Io,” Renée said with a sigh. “Io’s radius is only about eighty kilometers greater, and they they have about the same density, too-like as two peas in a pod, as far as worlds go.”
“That’s superficial,” Alec said. “Luna is dead, but Io still has a molten core. And our sulfur-based geology is different from anything else in the solar system.”
“That’s nice,” Renée said politely, “but it doesn’t help us, and the Japanese will take advantage of the similarities.”
She drove on in gloomy silence. The sun slipped behind Jupiter’s disk. Even in eclipse, Jupiter did not vanish altogether. Coldly gleaming aurorae and crackles of lightning from titanic storms still showed its place in the heaven. A sudden bright streak marked the incineration of a meteor.
None of that, however, was enough to drive by, nor was the pale light from the outer satellites. Before she switched on her headlamps, Renée turned the crawler around to see if she could spot the Japanese. She did not expect to be able to; the halt to put on fresh missiles should have made them fall below the horizon.
She gasped in dismay. She needed no TV pickup to spot them; their driving lights glowed in the darkness like fireflies. “They didn’t reload!” she said indignantly, as if some rule had required them to. “They’ll just catch up with us and do us in with gunfire, the dirty salauds.”
Alec seized her arm hard enough to hurt, even through the metal and fabric of her suit. “Maybe not, if we have just a little luck,” he said. “Listen-”
She listened. When he was done, she said, “If it fails, we’re dead-but then, we’re dead anyway, right? Let’s try; what do we have to lose?”
Following the crawler track, Sublieutenant Mitsuo Onishi was more bored than anything else. He wished the missiles had taken out the United European vehicle. Then he could have gone back to base. Instead, every minute took him almost a kilometer farther away.
Well, it wouldn’t be long. He’d been gaining since the eclipse began. The United European wasn’t much of a night driver, he thought with faint contempt. Radar showed the other crawler only seven kilometers ahead now. Because it was on higher ground, Onishi could see the pools of light its headlamps cast before it.
He jammed a fresh thirty-round magazine into his rifle and hung several more on the belt of his spacesuit. This time, no misses.
His driver gave a surprised grunt. At the same time, Ensign Mochifumi Nango’s voice, high-pitched with excitement, came over the crawler-to-crawler circuit: “We must have damaged them after all, sir! Their steering’s failing!”
“Hai!” Onishi said, grinning. The United European vehicle was making small, helpless circles dead ahead. “Let’s go do our job. Nothing to it now.”
Both Japanese machines sped forward. Onishi imagined the consternation of whoever was inside the crawler. He smiled.
“Sir,” the driver said, “ground temperature is rising ahead. Up to ten degrees Celsius, now twenty, now twenty-five-”
“What of it?” Onishi snorted. “Lunar day is over 100 Celsius, and we’re rated safe past 150. Move, damn you; I want this over with.”
“Aye, sir.”
The radio crackled to life again. Nango asked, “Why does the trail stop short up there, sir?”
Onishi clapped a hand to his forehead in exasperation; was he the only person on this mission capable of rational thought? “The dust peters out, bakatare. There has to be one clear, flat patch on this miserable moon, neh? What do we care about the trail now? There’s the enemy waiting for us. Do you want him to wait longer while you have the vapors?”
Nango could say only one thing, and he said it: “No, sir.”
“All right, then.” Onishi broke the circuit. He watched with satisfaction as the other crawler came abreast of his. Nango was all right. No one could call him a shirker.
They sped past the place where the tire tracks of the United European crawler stopped short. Onishi admitted to himself that they did end rather abruptly, but he was damned if he’d say so out loud. It was of no consequence, anyway.
He gave Nango credit. The ensign was even trying to get ahead now; sulfur powder flew from his wheels as he accelerated.
Onishi watched for several seconds before that registered. If there was still dust here, then the crawler they were after hadn’t come this way-and probably had a reason for it.
“Reverse!” the sublieutenant said urgently. “It’s a-”
Before he could finish, the ground buckled beneath his crawler. It happened with eerie slowness, as most things do on a low-gravity world, but no less inevitably on account of that. Slabs of yellow sulfur gave way like thin ice.
The crawler tipped with that same sense of nightmare leisure. Through the window, Onishi, who was cursing and praying in the same breath, saw Ensign Nango’s crawler go down nose first.
One after another, alarm bells began to ring.
From their hiding place behind a boulder close by the circling crawler, Renée and Alec watched fearfully as the lights from the Japanese vehicles stabbed toward it. When those lights suddenly slewed wildly, Renée let out a whoop that almost deafened her inside her helmet.
She hugged Alec. It wasn’t much of an embrace; the thick suit material saw to that. The crawler pilot did not care.
Alec pressed his helmet to hers. “We did it! We did it!” he shouted over and over. He was yelling in English, but Renée did not care about that, either. She knew what he had to be saying.
They danced round and round in glee, holding each other’s hands. At last, panting, Renée thumbed her portable transmitter. The crawler obediently broke off its circuit and came over to the boulder. With a deep bow, Renée waved Alec into the airlock ahead of her.