Patang climbed down out of her suit. She stretched out her arms as far as they would go, luxuriating in the room’s openness. All that space! It was twenty feet across and windowless. There was the one table, and six iron chairs to go with it. Half a dozen cots folded up against the walls. A line of shelves offered Company goods that neither of them could afford. There were also a pay toilet and a pay shower. There was a free medical unit, but if you tried to con it out of something recreational, the Company found out and fined you accordingly.
Patang’s skin prickled and itched from a month’s accumulation of dried sweat. “I’m going to scratch,” she said. “Don’t look.”
But of course MacArthur did, the pig.
Ignoring him, Patang slowly and sensuously scratched under her blouse and across her back. She took her time, digging in with her nails hard enough almost to make the skin bleed. It felt glorious.
MacArthur stared at her all the while, a starving wolf faced with a plump rabbit.
“You could have done that in your suit,” he said when she was done.
“It’s not the same.”
“You didn’t have to do that in front of—”
“Hey! How’s about a little conversation?” Patang said loudly. So it cost a few bucks. So what?
With a click, the innkeeper came on. “Wasn’t expecting any more visitors so close to the noon season,” it said in a folksy synthetic voice. “What are you two prospecting for?”
“Gold, tin, lead, just about anything that’ll gush up a test-hole.” Patang closed her eyes, pretending she was back on Lakshmi Planum in a bar in Port Ishtar, talking with a real, live human being. “We figured most people will be working tracts in the morning and late afternoon. This way our databases are up-to-date—we won’t be stepping on somebody’s month-old claim.”
“Very wise. The Company pays well for a strike.”
“I hate those fucking things.” MacArthur turned his back on the speaker and Patang both, noisily scraping his chair against the floor. She knew how badly he’d like to hurt her.
She knew that it wasn’t going to happen.
The Company had three rules. The first was No Violence. The second was Protect Company Equipment. The third was Protect Yourself. They all three were enforced by neural implant.
From long experience with its prospectors, the Company had prioritized these rules, so that the first overruled the second, the second overruled the third, and the third could only be obeyed insofar as it didn’t conflict with the first two. That was so a prospector couldn’t decide—as had happened—that his survival depended on the death of his partner. Or, more subtly, that the other wasn’t taking proper care of Company equipment, and should be eliminated.
It had taken time and experience, but the Company had finally come up with a foolproof set of algorithms. The outback was a functioning anarchy. Nobody could hurt anybody else there.
No matter how badly they needed to.
The ’plants had sounded like a good idea when Patang and MacArthur first went under contract. They’d signed up for a full sidereal day—two hundred fifty-five Earth days. Slightly longer than a Venusian year. Now, with fifty-nine days still to go, she was no longer certain that two people who hated each other as much as they did should be kept from each other’s throats. Sooner or later, one of them would have to crack.
Every day she prayed that it would be MacArthur who finally yanked the escape cord, calling down upon himself the charges for a rescue ship to pull them out ahead of contract. MacArthur who went bust while she took her partial creds and skipped.
Every day he didn’t. It was inhuman how much abuse he could absorb without giving in.
Only hatred could keep a man going like that.
Patang drank her water down slowly, with little slurps and sighs and lip-smackings. Knowing MacArthur loathed that, but unable to keep herself from doing it anyway. She was almost done when he slammed his hands down on the tabletop, to either side of hers, and said, “Patang, there are some things I want to get straight between us.”
“Please. Don’t.”
“Goddamnit, you know how I feel about that shit.”
“I don’t like it when you talk like that. Stop.”
MacArthur ground his teeth. “No. We are going to have this out right here and now. I want you to—what was that?”
Patang stared blankly at her partner. Then she felt it—an uneasy vertiginous queasiness, a sense of imbalance just at the edge of perception, as if all of Venus were with infinitesimal gentleness shifting underfoot.
Then the planet roared and the floor came up to smash her in the face.
When Patang came to, everything was a jumble. The floor was canted. The shelves had collapsed, dumping silk shirts, lemon cookies, and bars of beauty soap everywhere. Their muscle suits had tumbled together, the metal arm of one caught between the legs of the other. The life support systems were still operational, thank God. The Company built them strong.
In the middle of it all, MacArthur stood motionless, grinning. A trickle of blood ran down his neck. He slowly rubbed the side of his face.
“MacArthur? Are you okay?”
A strange look was in his eyes. “By God,” he said softly. “By damn.”
“Innkeeper! What happened here?”
The device didn’t respond. “I busted it up,” MacArthur said. “It was easy.”
“What?”
MacArthur walked clumsily across the floor toward her, like a sailor on an uncertain deck. “There was a cliff slump.” He had a Ph.D. in extraterrestrial geology. He knew things like that. “A vein of soft basalt weakened and gave way. The inn caught a glancing blow. We’re lucky to be alive.”
He knelt beside her and made the OK sign with thumb and forefinger. Then he flicked the side of her nose with the forefinger.
“Ouch!” she said. Then, shocked, “Hey, you can’t…!”
“Like hell I can’t.” He slapped her in the face. Hard. “Chip don’t seem to work anymore.”
Rage filled her. “You son of a bitch!” Patang drew back her arm to slug him.
Blankness.
She came to seconds later. But it was like opening a book in the middle or stepping into an interactive an hour after it began. She had no idea what had happened or how it affected her.
MacArthur was strapping her into her muscle suit.
“Is everything okay?” she murmured. “Is something wrong?”
“I was going to kill you, Patang. But killing you isn’t enough. You have to suffer first.”
“What are you talking about?”
Then she remembered.
MacArthur had hit her. His chip had malfunctioned. There were no controls on him now. And he hated her. Bad enough to kill her? Oh, yes. Easily.
MacArthur snapped something off her helmet. Then he slapped the power button and the suit began to close around her. He chuckled and said, “I’ll meet you outside.”
Patang cycled out of the lock and then didn’t know what to do. She fearfully went a distance up the road, and then hovered anxiously. She didn’t exactly wait and she didn’t exactly go away. She had to know what MacArthur was up to.
The lock opened, and MacArthur went around to the side of the tavern, where the drilling rig lay under its tarp. He bent down to separate the laser drill from the support struts, data boxes, and alignment devices. Then he delicately tugged the gold foil blanket back over the equipment.
He straightened, and turned toward Patang, the drill in his arms. He pointed it at her.
The words LASER HAZARD flashed on her visor.
She looked down and saw the rock at her feet blacken and smoke. “You know what would happen if I punched a hole in your shielding,” MacArthur said.