Once they were both inside the crawler, they shed spacesuits with cries of relief. No one would be shooting at them now. And neither of them seemed surprised when the shedding did not stop there; tunics and shorts quickly followed. The latter were not made for modesty in any case, having openings here and there for the suits’ sanitary arrangements.
The crawler’s bunk was narrow, and covered only by a thin foam pad. In .18g, that didn’t matter.
“Very glad to see the two of you. To be honest, I didn’t think I would,” said Jacques Guizot, commandant of Lola Station. The office in which he received the newcomers was small and cramped, like all the chambers in the station’s tunnel system. The domes above were abandoned, though thus far the batteries around them had knocked down all incoming missiles.
“To be honest, we didn’t expect to get here,” Renée said.
Beside her, Alec nodded. “We were very lucky.”
“No,” Renée said, giving him credit. “It was your cleverness. If you hadn’t thought of how the Japanese were unfamiliar with Io, we’d have been done for.”
“It never would have occurred to me without you,” he insisted, “and I’m not a good enough driver to have brought it off by myself.”
Guizot raised a bushy gray eyebrow at this mutual admiration society. “What exactly did you do?” he asked at last.
“We lured them into a hot patch,” they said together.
The commandant’s other eyebrow shot up. His thundered laughter was positively Jovian. “Magnificent! How did you manage that?”
“I drove up to the very edge of the patch,” Renée answered, “Then I reversed, backing up in my own tracks till I could turn and skirt the patch. Once I was on the other side, I set the crawler to circle, as if it were disabled.”
Alec took up the story: “Then we both EVA’d and hurried back to sweep away the tracks that showed where we’d turned. Luckily, we were in eclipse-we just had to get rid of a few meters of the trail, what the Japanese headlights would pick up. After that, it was hide and wait and hope.”
“And they fell into the trap,” Renée said. “Literally.”
“Why not?” Alec said. “They were used to driving on Luna, which has been dead for billions of years. But hot patches are places where molten black sulfur reaches the surface. Once it gets up there, it starts to freeze again, and gets covered over by yellow sulfur dust, but underneath-”
“Underneath, it’s still black sulfur,” Messier interrupted with a savage grin, “and a lot like hot black tar. Only the thin crust on top keeps it from showing its true temperature-”
“-which is around 200 Celsius,” Alec finished. “And the crust is very thin. When a crawler tries to cross it“
“Magnificent!” Guizot said again. “Using the enemy’s ignorance against him is a first principle of warfare.”
“My own ignorance, too,” Renée confessed. “I said Luna and Io were much alike. You can imagine, sir, how glad I was to be proved wrong. And, as is more often said in another context”-she looked fondly at Alec-“vive la différence!”