Rory rolled onto his side so she wouldn’t fall on top of him, and I hurried in. She hit the ground before I’d closed all the distance and was in a push-up posture, trying to get to her feet, by the time I got there. I grabbed her shoulder and flipped her onto her back, then loomed over her with the shotgun aimed right at her helmet.
“Can you hear me?” I said into my suit radio.
I gave her time to weigh whether she wanted to reply—and, after a moment, she did, although the connection was staticky and hard to make out. “Yes.”
“I want to see your face. There are two ways that can happen. One is I blast open your helmet. The other is you depolarize it. Your choice.”
She just lay there. Maybe she was hoping blue boy would come to her rescue, jumping me from behind. I wanted to see her face when I broke the news—not out of any sick desire to watch her feel hurt, but because her reaction would be a useful clue to the nature of their relationship.
“Five seconds, lady,” I said. “One. Two. Three.”
She moved her right hand to the bank of buttons on her left forearm, and the bowl went from reflecting a distorted image of me to being transparent.
And that face I did know, a gorgeous symphony in chocolate shades: brown skin, brown hair, brown eyes. Lakshmi Chatterjee, New Klondike’s writer-in-residence.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “I thought we had something special.”
“We still could,” she replied. She indicated Pickover, who was lying on his side. “With him out of the picture, you, me, and Darren split it three ways.”
“Just two ways, honey. Darren is dead.”
Her brown eyes went wide, but she didn’t seem too broken up by it, and, after a moment, she said, “Even better.”
I looked over at Pickover, and, yeah, I thought about it for half a second. Now, you could say that all things being equal, it made more sense to share the wealth with Rory, who’d never tried to kill me, than with Lakshmi, who’d happily shoot pitons into my chest, too, if given the chance. But old Dr. Pickover wasn’t going to let these fossils be sold, so there was no sharing to do with him.
Still, I liked the guy.
“No dice,” I said. I reached down and wrenched the piton gun from her and sent it flying—it was easy enough to toss it clear over the crater’s rim. “Roll over,” I said. “Face down.”
Lakshmi hesitated, so I pushed the shotgun muzzle right up against her fishbowl. She nodded within and turned onto her stomach. “Don’t move,” I said.
I went over to Pickover. If he’d been knifed, the standard advice would be to leave the blades in, lest removing them exposed gaping wounds through which he’d bleed to death. But I thought in this case the metal spikes might be causing electrical shorts inside him, and so I grabbed them—my suit’s gloves insulating me—and pulled them free. One came out clean; the other was covered with black machine oil. I tossed them aside.
“You okay?” I asked.
He looked no worse for wear—although the workings of his face were still exposed. “I think so.”
I glanced at his bound ankles. “You still have my switchblade?” He’d kept it after using it to disarm the two mines.
“In the pouch,” he said.
I opened his equipment pouch and took out the knife. I tried to cut through the material, but my guess had been right: it was carbon nanofiber; the knife didn’t even make a mark on it. Still, that didn’t mean we were out of luck. I went over and kicked Lakshmi none too gently in the thigh. “Up,” I said.
She got to her feet.
“You made the lasso,” I said, pointing. “Untie it.”
She hesitated for a moment then bent over to do so. It took a particularly good figure to look attractive through a surface suit, but, admiring her from behind, it was clear that that was precisely what she had.
“Come on!” I said. “Hurry up!”
“I can’t,” she said after trying for a bit. She held up her hands. “The gloves are too thick.”
“Take them off, then.”
“It’s fifty below zero!”
I considered. “All right. Rory, can you manage it?”
He sat up. A jet of oil squirted from one of the holes in his chest, but he didn’t seem to notice. His fingers were unencumbered, and I imagined he’d opted for a super-high degree of dexterity, since part of his job was preparing minute fossils. I kept the shotgun trained on Lakshmi, while he struggled to loosen the loop—and, at last, he succeeded.
He surprised me by holding out a hand so I could help him get up—but that might just have been the natural thought of the middle-aged mind within the transfer body; I was counting on him not actually being severely injured. I put my gloved hand in his naked one and pulled him to his feet. He nodded his thanks and stepped out of the lasso. I bent over, picked it up, and slipped it over Lakshmi’s head and shoulders, pulled it down past her breasts, then cinched it tight, binding her arms below the elbow to her waist—which, again, emphasized her remarkable figure.
I took the other end of the cord, holding it like a leash. I gave her a little shove, and she started walking in front of us. Pickover fell in next to me. I had to let go of the cord to let her, and then me, scramble up the inner crater wall and down the outer one. We’d come out about thirty degrees around the rim from where I’d gone in, and—
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I probably should have mentioned that.”
Pickover’s artificial jaw had dropped to half-mast. Lakshmi stopped dead in her tracks. “How are we going to get home?” she exclaimed, looking at the two wrecked buggies.
“That’s a very good question,” I replied. Mars had no telephone system outside the dome, no global positioning system, and no string of communications satellites—it was the frontier. And the planet’s weak and wonky ionosphere was no use for bouncing signals, so radio worked only more or less over line of sight—meaning there was no way to call all the way back to New Klondike for help. “Given how long it took to get here,” I continued, “and even allowing for Rory possibly not having taken the most direct route out, I’d guess it’d take days to walk home.” In this gravity, even in the suit, I could easily manage it—and I suspected Lakshmi was in good enough shape to do it, as well. Except for one thing: I looked at the air gauge built into my suit’s inner left sleeve. “I’ve got five hours left.”
Lakshmi was still bound with the lasso. I rotated her arm in a way that probably wasn’t pleasant and read her gauge. “And she’s got three.” I didn’t add, but I certainly thought, Which means if I take her tanks, I’ve got a total of eight. I looked at Pickover. “We should head out.”
“You’re not abandoning me here!” Lakshmi exclaimed.
I turned to her. “Why not? You were prepared to kill me, and you just tried to kill Dr. Pickover.”
“Not kill him, just disable him—with damage that would be easy to repair.”
“Well, tell you what, sweetheart: you can start walking; you, at least, should more or less know the way.”
“I’m new to Mars; you know that. Darren was navigating. I honestly don’t have a clue which way to go.”
“If you ask him nicely, Rory might point you in the right direction.”
He was looking down at his chest, probing the holes in it with his fingers, and—
And, no, actually, he was probing the holes she’d made in his work shirt. I hadn’t paid much attention to it until now, but it was a somewhat tattered flannel number sporting a light and dark gray plaid and pockets over both breasts. Above his left breast was a logo showing what I was pleased with myself for recognizing as a trilobite, and beneath that, some words that were too small for me to read.