She did. All the air in her suit would explode outward, while the enormous atmospheric pressure simultaneously imploded the metal casing inward. The mechanical cooling systems would fail instantly. She would be suffocated, broiled, and crushed, all in an instant.
“Turn around. Or I’ll lase you a new asshole.”
She obeyed.
“Here are the rules. You get a half-hour head start. Then I come for you. If you turn north or south, I’ll drill you. Head west. Noonward.”
“Noonward?” She booted up the geodetics. There was nothing in that direction but a couple more wrinkle ridges and, beyond them, tesserae. The tesserae were marked orange on her maps. Orange for unpromising. Prospectors had passed through them before and found nothing. “Why there?”
“Because I told you to. Because we’re going to have a little fun. Because you have no choice. Understand?”
She nodded miserably.
“Go.”
She walked, he followed. It was a nightmare that had somehow found its way into waking life. When Patang looked back, she could see MacArthur striding after her, small in the distance. But never small enough that she had any kind of chance to get away.
He saw her looking and stooped to pick up a boulder. He windmilled his arm and threw.
Even though MacArthur was halfway to the horizon, the boulder smashed to the ground a hundred yards ahead of her and to one side. It didn’t come close to striking her, of course. That wasn’t his intent.
The rock shattered when it hit. It was terrifying how strong that suit was. It filled her with rage to see MacArthur yielding all that power, and her completely helpless. “You goddamned sadist!”
No answer.
He was nuts. There had to be a clause in the contract covering that. Well, then… She set her suit on auto-walk, pulled up the indenture papers, and went looking for it. Options. Hold harmless clauses. Responsibilities of the Subcontractor—there were hundreds of those. Physical care of the Contractor’s equipment.
And there it was. There it was! In the event of medical emergency, as ultimately upheld in a court of physicians… She scrolled up the submenu of qualifying conditions. The list of mental illnesses was long enough and inclusive enough that she was certain MacArthur belonged on it somewhere.
She’d lose all the equity she’d built up, of course. But, if she interpreted the contract correctly, she’d be entitled to a refund of her initial investment.
That, and her life, were good enough for her.
She slid an arm out of harness and reached up into a difficult-to-reach space behind her head. There was a safety there. She unlatched it. Then she called up a virtual keyboard, and typed out the SOS.
So simple. So easy.
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO SEND THIS MESSAGE? YES NO
She hit YES.
For an instant, nothing happened.
MESSAGE NOT SENT
“Shit!” She tried it again. MESSAGE NOT SENT A third time. MESSAGE NOT SENT A fourth. MESSAGE NOT SENT She ran a trouble-shooting program, and then sent the message again. MESSAGE NOT SENT
And again. And again. And again.
MESSAGE NOT SENT
MESSAGE NOT SENT
MESSAGE NOT SENT
Until the suspicion was so strong she had to check.
There was an inspection camera on the back of her suit’s left hand. She held it up so she could examine the side of her helmet.
MacArthur had broken off the uplink antenna.
“You jerk!” She was really angry now. “You shithead! You cretin! You retard! You’re nuts, you know that? Crazy. Totally whack.”
No answer.
The bastard was ignoring her. He probably had his suit on auto-follow. He was probably leaning back in his harness, reading a book or watching an old movie on his visor. MacArthur did that a lot. You’d ask him a question and he wouldn’t answer because he wasn’t there; he was sitting front row center in the theater of his cerebellum. He probably had a tracking algorithm in the navigation system to warn him if she turned to the north or south, or started to get too far ahead of him.
Let’s test that hypothesis.
She’d used the tracking algorithm often enough that she knew its specs by heart. One step sidewards in five would register immediately. One in six would not. All right, then… Let’s see if we can get this rig turned around slowly, subtly, toward the road. She took seven strides forward, and then a half-step to the side.
LASER HAZARD
Patang hastily switched on auto-walk. So that settled that. He was watching her every step. A tracking algorithm would have written that off as a stumble. But then why didn’t he speak? To make her suffer, obviously. He must be bubbling over with things to say. He must hate her almost as much as she did him.
“You son of a bitch! I’m going to get you, MacArthur! I’m going to turn the goddamned tables on you, and when I do—!”
It wasn’t as if she were totally helpless. She had explosives. Hell, her muscle suit could throw a rock with enough energy to smash a hole right through his suit. She could—
Blankness.
She came to with the suit auto-walking down the far slope of the first wrinkle ridge. There was a buzzing in her ear. Somebody talking. MacArthur, over the short-range radio. “What?” she asked blurrily. “Were you saying something, MacArthur? I didn’t quite catch that.”
“You had a bad thought, didn’t you?” MacArthur said gleefully. “Naughty girl! Papa spank.”
LASER HAZARD
LASER HAZARD
Arrows pointed to either side. She’d been walking straight Noonward, and he’d fired on her anyway.
“Damn it, that’s not fair!”
“Fair! Was it fair, the things you said to me? Talking. All the time talking.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You did! Those things… the things you said… unforgivable!”
“I was only deviling you, MacArthur,” she said placatingly. It was a word from her childhood; it meant teasing, the kind of teasing a sister inflicted on a brother. “I wouldn’t do it if we weren’t friends.”
MacArthur made a noise he might have thought was laughter. “Believe me, Patang, you and I are not friends.”
The deviling had been innocent enough at the start. She’d only done it to pass the time. At what point had it passed over the edge? She hadn’t always hated MacArthur. Back in Port Ishtar, he’d seemed like a pleasant companion. She’d even thought he was cute.
It hurt to think about Port Ishtar, but she couldn’t help herself. It was like trying not to think about Heaven when you were roasting in Hell.
Okay, so Port Ishtar wasn’t perfect. You ate flavored algae and you slept on a shelf. During the day you wore silk, because it was cheap, and you went everywhere barefoot because shoes cost money. But there were fountains that sprayed water into the air. There was live music in the restaurants, string quartets playing to the big winners, prospectors who had made a strike and were leaking wealth on the way out. If you weren’t too obvious about it, you could stand nearby and listen. Gravity was light, then, and everybody was young, and the future was going to be full of money.
That was then. She was a million years older now.
LASER HAZARD
“Hey!”
“Keep walking, bitch. Keep walking or die.”
This couldn’t be happening.
Hours passed, and more hours, until she completely lost track of the time. They walked. Up out of the valley. Over the mountain. Down into the next valley. Because of the heat, and because the rocks were generally weak, the mountains all had gentle slopes. It was like walking up and then down a very long hill.