Pickover struggled to keep the locking wheel from being turned any further, but, damn it, whoever was on the other side managed a massive jerk of the wheel, knocking Rory off the ladder. He was now dangling from the wheel by both arms, with a two-story drop below. The twisting of the wheel had put the ladder behind him, and he seemed to be having trouble re-engaging with it. The wheel jerked once more, and—
Holy crap!
—Pickover was dislodged or let go, but either way, he came falling down the shaft in Martian slow motion.
I thought about reaching out to grab him, but there didn’t seem to be much point; it’d probably just bring me tumbling down on top of him. He hit the floor, bending at the knees as he did so, but he still collapsed into a heap.
“Rory!” I called, and I slid down the ladder. When I reached the bottom—my first time on the lower level—I helped him to his feet.
Newcomers to Mars often did themselves injuries because they felt superhuman but were still flesh and blood. But Pickover was superhuman. Still, it was a nasty height to fall from, even here. Pickover’s plastic face winced in pain as he rolled up his pant leg to expose his right ankle. Biological injuries were easy to spot: blood, bruising, swelling. There was no sign of any of that as Pickover probed the ankle with his fingers. “It’s bent,” he said, at last. “I can barely flex it.”
I thought of Juan’s Mars buggy up on the surface. Even if we could get out of here, if whoever had sealed us in had stolen or wrecked the buggy, there was no way Pickover could run me all the way back to New Klondike this time. I looked at my wrist air gauge; Rory could stay in here indefinitely, but I couldn’t. We’d been sealed in by somebody stronger than Pickover, meaning it was either a transfer or a biological who’d had something to help him turn the wheel. Even if we could undo the seal, anyone on the outside with a gun could easily pick me off as I tried to haul myself up out of the hatch.
“Is it Lakshmi again?” asked Pickover, as he rolled his pant leg down. “Or do you suppose someone else followed us this time?”
I’d been alert while we were leaving the dome, and hadn’t had my visor polarized on this trip. “No one could have,” I said. “I’m sure of that.”
He looked up at the hatch. “Could they have tracked Juan’s buggy?”
“I don’t see how. He said he’d swept it for bugs before we picked it up. And it’s a lot harder to track vehicles here than people think; there’s no GPS equivalent, and…”
“Yes?”
I blew out air—a luxury I might not have much longer. “And I’m an idiot,” I said. I reached into my equipment pouch and pulled out the switchblade I’d gotten from Dirk. I pushed the button that caused the blade to spring out. Rory looked alarmed as I turned the knife around so that the blade was aiming toward my chest.
“Hang on, old boy!” Pickover said. “We’re not done for yet.”
But I was just maneuvering the knife to hand it to him. “You’ve got super strength,” I said. “Can you break the haft open?”
He took the knife from me, looked at it for a moment, and indicated that he was going to snap the wine-colored handle by flexing it with his hands, as if to give me a chance to stop him. But I nodded for him to go ahead, and he did so.
The handle broke in two, and Rory split the pieces open. There was the channel for the blade, the spring mechanism—and the tracking device. I reached over, prized the little chip out, let it drop in slow motion to the deck, and ground the heel of my boot into it until it was crushed. Dirk, or whoever had hired him, had known it would be impossible to plant a tracking device on me—but having one in a knife I’d be bound to seize was another matter.
“Lakshmi Chatterjee must have hired the punk I got the knife from,” I said. “That’s how she managed to follow us out here in the dark, but…” I frowned.
“What?” said Pickover.
“Well, I—hmmm. How’d she know that I would be heading out to the Alpha? Did you tell anyone you were hiring me, Rory?”
“No, of course not.”
“Still, you could have been seen coming to my office. Back when half your face was missing, you’d have been quite conspicuous.”
“I—I hadn’t thought about that,” Rory said. “I’m not used to being clandestine.”
“Well, what’s done is done,” I said.
Pickover was trying hard to be unflappable, but, despite his reserved face, his voice had become higher, and he was darting his eyes about nervously. “So, what now?” he asked. “We seem to be prisoners.”
I looked around the lower level. It had a smaller interior diameter than the upper one, implying there was a donut of equipment or tanks surrounding us. “What about blowing the hatch?” I said. “Aren’t spaceship hatches supposed to have explosive bolts?”
“I’ll check,” said Pickover. He headed up the ladder, hauling himself up with his arms and letting the foot with the damaged ankle dangle freely. Once he was at the top of the shaft, he looked around. “I don’t see any controls for that,” he called down. He tried the wheel again, but it didn’t budge.
I moved off the ship’s centerline into one of the four compartments on the lower floor, found a bucket seat, and dropped myself into it. I looked down at the deck plating, pissed at myself for having been so easily duped with the switchblade. Pickover was banging around up at the top of the shaft, trying various things to get the wheel moving again.
After a time, I looked up. The chair I was in was facing the curving bulkhead in front of me, but it was on a swivel base, and I slowly rotated it toward the central shaft; my instincts wouldn’t let me keep my back to people, even though there was no one here but dead-as-a-doornail Denny and stainless-steel Rory. I looked more or less in the middle distance, at where the ladder began, but after a time my attention fell on the opposite bulkhead—which had a red door with a locking wheel in its center. Of course: the other exit—the one that would have led outside had the lander been sitting on the surface. But, damn it all, it wasn’t sitting on the surface. It was buried in the Martian permafrost.
What goes down must come up.
“Rory!” I said into my fishbowl’s headset.
“Yes?”
“Come down here.”
It didn’t take him long. “What?” he said, when he was standing between me and the red door.
“This is the descent stage, right?”
“Yes.”
“So beneath our feet,” I said, tapping the hull plating with my boot, “there are fuel tanks.”
“They’re actually in a torus around this level.”
“Ah, okay. But below us, there’s the descent engine, right? A big engine cone; a big landing rocket?”
“Yes.”
“So, assuming there’s any fuel left, what happens if we fire that engine?”
Pickover looked at me like I was insane. I get that a lot. “The engine cone is probably totally plugged with soil,” he said.
“Would we blow up, then?”
He frowned in a subdued transfer way. “I… I don’t know.”
“Well, let’s find out. There’s got to be a control center.”
“It’s here,” said Pickover, pointing to his right. I came over to the room he was standing next to. It had a curving control console, following the contour of the outer bulkhead. There was a bucket seat in front of it identical to the one I’d just vacated. I looked at Pickover.
“I don’t know how to fly a spaceship,” he said.
“Neither do I. And I bet Weingarten and O’Reilly didn’t really, either. But the ship should know.” I waved my arm vaguely at the ceiling lights. “The electrical system is working; maybe the ship’s computer is, too.” I lowered myself into the seat, and Pickover took up a position behind me. I scanned the instruments, but Pickover spotted what I was looking for first and reached over my shoulder to press a switch.