The man in the blue suit started running back toward their yellow Mars buggy. He wasn’t going as fast as he’d been before; I suspect he’d slowed down not so much out of fatigue—having a guy hurtling toward you in a motorized vehicle tended to get the old adrenaline going—but because he was having trouble seeing through the cracks in his faceplate.
Pickover had to make a choice: go after the woman with the gun or after the apparently unarmed man who had a chance of getting back to his buggy. I could think of arguments for either selection, and didn’t gainsay the one Rory made: he decided to pursue the woman, who was running like the wind.
There was no way she could outrace us on a flat surface, but even a planitia has some craters on it, like God had peppered it with his own shotgun. She was heading straight for the one I’d noticed before; it was maybe thirty meters across. The crater wall rose in front of us. To get up it, she had to drop the shotgun, and it skittered with Martian indolence down the crater face. She scrambled up, gloves clawing for purchase. Damn, but I wished I had my gun! It would have been easy to take her out while her back was to us. Our springy wheels did their best, but when the slope exceeded forty-five degrees, they weren’t able to get enough traction, and we started backsliding.
I unlatched the habitat lid, and it fell open, letting me hop out. The buggy managed to reverse its slide and climb back up a bit farther after the weight of me and my surface suit was no longer in it. But soon the slope proved too much again, and Pickover abandoned the buggy, too; the vehicle came to rest half-on and half-off the sloping, crumbling crater wall. I flipped open the trunk, exposing the land mines. The activation knob was on the underside of the mine, dead center, behind a little spring-loaded safety door. I reactivated both mines, and saw that the flags on their upper surfaces turned red. I then picked up one of the mines, supporting it underhanded by its rim.
The man had succeeded in his retreat; I could see him in the distance clambering into their buggy. I’d thought he was going to hightail it away from here, but he came charging toward us again. I chinned my radio: “One warning only: get out of the buggy!”
It was possible that the damage to his helmet had wrecked his microphone in addition to impairing his vision. Or maybe he just didn’t feel inclined to take orders from me. Either way, he kept racing my way at a clip I couldn’t outrun. I took a bead on the approaching vehicle, and flung the land mine the way you’d toss a discus. It spun through the air and—
Ka-blam!
—hit the flat front of the buggy’s habitat, exploding on impact. The canopy was reduced to crystalline shards that went flying. I saw the man in the blue suit throw up his arms, trying to cover his face—
His exposed face: the glass visor of his helmet was gone. He gasped for breath—and I imagine he felt the linings of his lungs seizing up in the wicked cold of an equatorial Martian day.
His vehicle was still moving, though—the habitat was wrecked, but the chassis was intact and those big wheels kept on rolling, propelling it at high speed along the wall of the crater and—God damn it!—straight toward me and our Mars buggy.
I ran as fast as I could, but the incoming vehicle plowed into our buggy, and the other land mine I’d activated in preparation for throwing it went off, and I watched as the axles snapped on the incoming yellow buggy and our buggy burst into flames that almost immediately were snuffed out by the carbon dioxide atmosphere.
We were all marooned in the middle of nowhere.
NINETEEN
Irushed over to the man in the blue surface suit. He’d tumbled out of the wreckage and was still desperately trying to cover his face. I looked around for anything that could help him do that: tarpaulin, plastic sheeting, even paper. But there was nothing.
I doubted he could still hear me, given that the air was out of his helmet, but I said, “Hold on!” anyway. I used my gloved hands in addition to his own to try to make a new front for his helmet. For a moment, I thought it was working, but even though clouds of air were still coming out of the tubes attached to his tank, his fingers went slack and his arms dropped down, and there were now huge gaps that I couldn’t cover.
And so at last I got a good look at his face. His nose had bled—low air pressure or the impact—but the blood had now frozen onto his face, a narrow face that was Asian, perhaps sixty years old, with thick gray hair. I didn’t recognize him. His mouth worked for a few moments—gasping for air, or hurtling invective at me, I couldn’t say which. And then it just stopped moving, about half open. I took no pleasure in watching this man expire, even though he’d tried to kill me—but I didn’t waste any tears over it, either.
I’d lost track of Pickover during all this, and, swinging my head in the fishbowl, I saw no sign of him—which meant he must be inside the crater, along with the lady in red. I looked around for the discarded shotgun and found it. Damn thing had gone barrel-down into the dust and probably had a bunch of it in the bore now. Still, I grabbed it and scrambled up the crater’s rim, which was about three meters high, and peered over the edge.
I’d expected to see Pickover having captured her at this point. After all, she was now unarmed and he was much more nimble as a transfer than she—whoever she was—could possibly be in a surface suit. But Pickover was—well, I couldn’t exactly say he was a lover not a fighter… but he definitely wasn’t a fighter. Although it was true she no longer had a gun, she did apparently have a lasso: a loop of what, judging by its dark color, were fibers made of carbon nanotubes, meaning it would be almost impossible to break even with a transfer’s strength. And she’d managed to get it around his ankles and had pulled it tight. While I watched, she gave the lasso a yank, pulling Pickover’s legs out from under him. He tumbled backward—a body slam, not a slo-mo fall—landing flat on his back and sending up a cloud of dust.
As it happened, Pickover was facing my way; she had her back to me. I could make it two for two, pumping shot into her from behind, but her suit might protect her. And, besides, I had questions I wanted to ask. I hauled myself up over the crater rim and clambered down the crumbly incline. The two of them were just shy of the crater’s central bulge.
Pickover tried to get to his feet. The woman yanked the lasso again, and he tumbled backward once more. I think she’d have preferred to hog-tie him, but she didn’t have enough rope for that—I imagine she’d improvised the lasso out of line she’d brought along to help with climbing; she must have thought the Alpha might have been deep in some crevasse, and—
Yes, that was it. She didn’t have another real gun, true—but she had a piton gun attached to her suit’s belt, and she bent over now and positioned it against the center of Pickover’s artificial chest. She presumably hoped that firing a metal spike into his innards would damage something that would incapacitate him. She pulled the trigger.
Pickover screamed and his torso convulsed. It was like watching a biological getting defibrillated, but the intent was the opposite. I had made it down to the reasonably flat bottom of the crater. There was hoarfrost along this part of the wall, since it hadn’t yet been touched by the rising sun.
The woman, who was straddling Pickover, moved the piton gun farther down his chest and fired again. Once more, Rory convulsed from the impact. I brought the shotgun to my shoulder and Pickover seemed to be tucking his knees up toward his torso, maybe to protect his nuts and bolt.
I fired, the recoil pushing me backward a bit—and Pickover got his knees through the woman’s spread legs and kicked her in the chest with his bound feet. She went flying up a good two meters, and the bulk of my shot flew through the gap that had appeared between her and Pickover before she came down again.