God, no!
I shouted, even though he almost certainly couldn’t hear me through my helmet in this thin atmosphere. “Rory, stop!”
I hadn’t seen the bootleg Pickover since shortly after I’d rescued him from the torture room aboard the Skookum Jim, but I had no doubt that this was him; the face was the one the bootleg had adopted to take on the identity of Joshua Wilkins. He was now just thirty meters from the line of land mines—and closing.
Even in a surface suit, I should be able to do at least as good a long jump as I could have back on Earth. I started running straight for him—meaning I was also running straight for the buried mines. When I got close to the line, I kicked off with all my strength and went sailing horizontally toward him, arms outstretched. He had the most astonished expression I’d ever seen on a transfer’s face as I sailed closer, and—
—and, damn!, my Smith & Wesson flew out of my holster and dropped behind me. It must have hit one of the mines, because I was suddenly propelled forward by more than just the strength of my initial kick. The explosion was deafening even in the thin air. Something tore into my right leg as I collided with the bootleg Pickover and knocked him on his stainless-steel butt.
It took me a second to recover from the impact, but then I pushed myself to my feet and reached down to give Pickover a hand. As I pulled him up, I felt a stabbing in my calf. Land-mine shrapnel had sliced through my suit and the jeans beneath. A piece of skin about as long and wide as a banana was exposed to the subzero air, and blood was flowing down the suit’s leg, although it would soon either freeze or boil off. I opened the suit-repair kit on my belt, pulled out the largest adhesive patch, and positioned it over the cut. Pickover and I were so close now that I could hear him speak. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Someone’s booby-trapped the Alpha!”
I nodded as much to myself as to him; the legit Pickover had discovered that only after this bootleg had been spun off. I changed my radio’s channel. “Channel twenty-two,” I shouted. The transfer nodded, but didn’t do anything visibly to indicate he’d selected that radio frequency. I went on at a normal volume. “What are you doing here?”
The bootleg’s voice—which didn’t sound anything like that of the real Rory—came through my helmet speakers. “I’ve been working a bed twenty kilometers north of here,” he said. “I saw an airplane fly by, and it looked like the damn thing was coming down near the Alpha. I thought I should investigate—and then I caught sight of you.”
“Good to see you, Rory. Some of those people over there want to steal fossils from here. Are you up for a fight?”
His eyes narrowed. “Hells yes.”
Lakshmi, Reiko, Blondie, and Ernie were fifty meters east of us. Blondie was now kneeling next to the fallen Reiko. “The woman on the ground is the granddaughter of Denny O’Reilly.”
“Oh, really?” he said, just as the other Pickover had when I’d first told him.
I wasn’t in the mood for the “No, O’Reilly” schtick, although it is rare that you get to use a joke twice on more or less the same person. “Yes,” I said. “The woman in red is Lakshmi Chatterjee. She’s a writer, and has tried to kill me more than once. As for the transfer babe in turquoise, I have no idea who she is, but she seems to be on our side, or at least not actively against us. And the big guy is—”
“Ernie Gargalian.” Sneering is more effective with a British accent, but even without it, Rory’s contempt was plain.
“Yes,” I said, looking out at the tableau. I suppose it was debatable which of us was the Good and which the Bad, but there was no way Reiko, Lakshmi, or Blondie could qualify as the Ugly—which left Ernie, Rory, and me to vie for that title. “But that’s Ernie’s airplane. He brought me here. The real threat to the Alpha, at least right now, is Lakshmi.”
“I—I don’t want to kill to protect the secret,” Pickover said.
“I don’t see another way,” I replied. “Lakshmi is certainly willing to kill us.” As soon as I said it, I realized that Ms. Chatterjee really wasn’t much of a threat to Rory. Indeed, he could just run off—he could move faster than Lakshmi; for all I knew, he could even outrun her in the buggy, if she ever got it going again. But I’d saved him from that torture room, and I’d saved him again when I hid his identity from the legitimate Pickover, who, had he known of this one’s continued existence, would have demanded he be terminated. I doubted he was going to take off on me. And, after a moment, he confirmed that. “All right. What now?”
“See those two pits, there? That’s where your, ah, brother and I removed two of the land mines. You can safely move in and out if you go between those pits.” The bootleg nodded, and I went on. “So, let’s go. Our first order of business: disarm Lakshmi.”
“Okay,” said Pickover. “But how?”
“Improvise,” I replied as I started running toward the others: sailing forward, kicking off, sailing forward again. Pickover must have hesitated for a moment, but he soon fell in beside me.
It didn’t take long for Lakshmi to react. She assumed a marksman’s spread-legged stance and aimed her gun at me, which was precisely what I was hoping for, because it meant she could no longer cover Ernie. As soon as she swung the gun away from the big man, Ernie did the best leap he could manage. He might have weighed only a third as much here as he would have on Earth—a fact that let him clear the ground by half a meter and come forward a meter and a half—but he massed exactly the same, and he slammed into Lakshmi from behind with a lot of inertia. While Pickover and I continued to close the distance, Lakshmi pitched forward, legs still splayed. Ernie landed on her suit’s backpack, and although my view was bouncing as I ran, it looked like he was trying to disengage her air tanks.
Pickover suddenly surged in front of me, his artificial legs pistoning in a way mine never could. Despite doubtless having the wind knocked out of her, Lakshmi was struggling to lift her head and get the gun up again, and she squeezed off a shot at Pickover. I thought the paleontologist was hit—he did a headfirst roll into the ground—but then I realized it was a deliberate evasion tactic, and he somersaulted perfectly, Lakshmi’s bullet flying above him while he rolled. He sprang back into a running posture and continued in.
I was now close enough to make out more detail. Blondie was still kneeling, and—no, no. That wasn’t it. She wasn’t kneeling; she was sitting cross-legged on the sand, and Reiko Takahashi’s helmeted head was cradled in her lap.
Ernie was still doing things on Lakshmi’s back, and—yes!—he managed to disengage her tanks and toss them aside. Doubtless there was still some air in her helmet, but the writer couldn’t have more than a couple of minutes left to live.
Suddenly my own helmet exploded around me. Lakshmi had shifted her aim from Pickover to me and had squeezed off another shot. I couldn’t see for a moment—the atmosphere that had been in my fishbowl turned into a white cloud of condensation—but as I continued running forward, I left the cloud behind. The tanks on my back were still working, though, and oxygen was being pumped though the tube from them. I stopped running for a moment, hoping that Lakshmi had shot her last, and yanked on the tube, pulling it farther up; they were designed to have some play for just such emergencies.
I felt the skin on my face freezing, my eyes hurt from the cold and the exposure to near vacuum, and my sinuses were seizing up. But there was warm air coming through the tube, which I’d now stuck in my mouth and was clamping onto with my teeth. I continued to run because I didn’t know what else to do. I think I was bleeding from my scalp; shards from the fishbowl must have sliced into it.