That is, if he himself could get solid footing. Behind me, the tottering ship was making a groaning sound, conveyed through the attenuated atmosphere and picked up by my still-open external helmet microphones.
I was pushing myself up out of the mess as fast as I could, but a surface suit really wasn’t designed for those sorts of gymnastics. For his part, Pickover was staggering away from me like Karloff fleeing the villagers, the mud still sucking at his every step.
Suddenly—it was always suddenly, wasn’t it?—a shot rang out, audible because my external mikes were still cranked way up. The bullet whizzed past me and impacted the mud. I swung my head within the fishbowl, trying to make out the assailant. There: about ten o’clock, and maybe thirty meters away—a figure, probably a man, in an Earth-sky-blue surface suit, holding a rifle aimed at me.
TWENTY-FIVE
Pickover finally reached solid ground, it seemed, but as soon as he did, he threw himself down, presumably to make a harder target for whoever was shooting at us. As proof that he was back on marsa firma, the belly flop sent up not a splash of mud but a cloud of dust.
I pulled myself a little farther out of the muck, removed the Smith & Wesson from my shoulder holster, then took a bead on Mr. Blue Sky. There was no way to call “Freeze!” to him, so I just squeezed the trigger, setting off the oxygenated gunpowder, and watched with satisfaction as he slumped over.
But speaking of freezing, I think the mud was starting to do that again. I didn’t want to end up as one of Pickover’s fossils, and so, with a final Herculean effort—as in the Greek hero, not the Agatha Christie detective—I hauled myself out of the thickening sludge.
And just in time, too! With a dinosaurian groan, the ship came tumbling down. I spun around in time to see it hit, and it splashed me from helmet to boot with filth. I used my gloved hands to wipe the front of my fishbowl clean, although it was still streaked with mud, and looked at the fallen lander. The sealed circular hatchway stared out at me like a cyclopean eye.
There was no way anyone could enter through the airlock again; it was face down and buried. I hadn’t seen it happen, but I suspected that the outward-opening door had been slammed shut when the curving hull had hit the muck. If we were going to get back inside, we’d have to find a way to unseal the top hatch. But that was a problem for later; for now, I made my way over to Pickover. “It’s safe to get up,” I said once I’d reached him. His bum ankle was making it hard for him to do so, so I gave him a hand. While walking over, I’d scanned around for anyone else—but Mr. Blue Sky seemed to be alone. We headed over to see him.
“You okay?” I said to Pickover, as we closed the distance.
“Yeah, but that jump didn’t do my ankle any favors; it’s worse than before.”
The sun was high, and there were a few thin clouds overhead. We got those naturally sometimes, although I wondered if they were actually our rocket exhaust or water vapor from the melted permafrost. Phobos is hard to see during the day, and catching sight of Deimos is a good sign that you don’t need your eyes fixed; I managed the former, but not the latter, although who knew if the little terror was up, anyway.
I still had my gun out. Blue Sky looked like he was slumped over unconscious, but he could just be playing possum, waiting until we were near enough that he couldn’t miss. But as we got closer, he really did seem out of it, and when I knelt next to him, I could see why. “Ooops,” I said.
Pickover sounded aghast. “You just killed a man, and the best you can manage is ‘Ooops’?”
“Well, he did try to kill us,” I said. My bullet had gone a little higher than I’d intended and had shattered his helmet, exposing him to the subzero cold and the razor-thin atmosphere. It was an odd sight: the youthful face was clearly dead, the eyes were locked open and staring straight ahead, and a trickle of blood, already frozen, extended down from a corner of his mouth. But the snake tattoo on his left cheek was still animated, the rattle on the tail moving back and forth. It was Dirk.
“I know him,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Dumb punk, recently arrived from Earth.” I shrugged a little.
“Ah,” said Rory, I guess because he needed to say something. But, then, after a moment, he went on. “Hello, what’s this?”
Lying on the ground nearby was an excimer-powered jackhammer, like the one Joshua Wilkins had used to fake the suicide in the basement of NewYou.
“He must have used it to push the locking wheel against your strength, Rory.”
“Ah, right. But what should we do with this poor devil? We can’t just leave him here.”
“No,” I said softly. “We can’t.”
For once, Rory was being more mercenary than me. “It’s the color of his surface suit,” he said. “Anyone coming this way is bound to spot him. We don’t want people stopping near the Alpha for any reason.”
I pointed back the way we’d come. “But even if we bury him, that giant lander lying on its side is bound to attract some attention.”
“Then we’ve got to move it.”
“How? Juan’s buggy can’t haul that.”
“There’s no reason to assume the ship is no longer flightworthy,” Pickover said. “Let’s get Mudge to fly it back to New Klondike.”
Normally, I’d have had Pickover carry the corpse, since it would have been no hardship for him, but he was still limping. I put Dirk in a fireman’s carry, and we took him back toward the pit left by the lander. We could have used the jackhammer to dig a grave through the permafrost, but the pit, and the area for a bunch of meters around it, was still mushy enough to make it possible, though difficult, to inter him by hand, so we did that instead. When it was done, I stood over the spot for a few minutes, trying to think of something appropriate to say. But, for once, I was at a loss for words.
I assume it was Dirk who had rescued Lakshmi when we’d abandoned her here. She hadn’t seemed like she expected the cavalry to come charging over the hill—so my guess was that while she and Darren Cheung had followed us, via the tracking chip in the switchblade, he had tailed them, hoping for his own crack at Alpha riches. And, to his credit, when he came upon Darren dead and Lakshmi getting that way, he’d rescued her rather than left her to die. Maybe there was some honor among thieves after all.
It wouldn’t do to leave Dirk’s buggy here. I knew from the old movies I liked that the terms “manual” and “automatic” used to refer to types of automobile transmissions, but the switch on the buggy’s dashboard labeled with those two words simply selected whether the vehicle drove itself or not. I had Rory help me rotate the buggy so that it was facing northeast—vaguely toward Elysium—and then set it on its way; the buggy’s excimer battery showed a three-quarters charge still, so the damn thing should go thousands of klicks before running out of power.
We then turned our attention back to the lander—and discovered we had another difficulty. If there was a way to talk to Mudge from the outside, we had no idea what it was. I doubted there was an external microphone; that sort of thing got burned off on entering an atmosphere, even one as thin as Mars’s.