Our savior comes back leading the Korean general. Tak follows. Our eyes meet. He shakes his head as he walks up the ridge.
“Sorry,” the female says. She sounds young. “Coudna get t’em in time. We should get a my buggy and te hell out. Ot’ers sure come soon.”
Her voice is high and a little hard on consonants and s’s. I had read about thinspeak… pronunciation adapted for high altitude or thinner air. Now I’m hearing it. Plus a true Muskie accent. She’s the real thing. Through her faceplate I see a wisp of white-blond hair and large, blue-green eyes. She’s very tall. Have I said that already?
“Are we the last?” Gamecock asks. “I mean, our company…”
“Havena seen else a-one. Sommat set off transponder an hour ago. I tracked a way off course and found you.”
DJ must have activated the fountain’s beacon. He may have inadvertently saved our lives. But likely he also announced our presence to anything that gives a damn within a hundred klicks.
We march to the buggy’s airlock, helping each other along. DJ and Michelin tend to Major General Kwak.
“Second gen?” DJ asks the ranch wife as she returns to assist. We’re all on radio comm now.
“Don’t be rude,” Tak says.
“Born a Mars,” she confirms. “All guys? No fem?”
“No women,” Gamecock says.
“Damn. Be good, now.” She gives us each, one by one, a foot up into the lock. “Carry us all, buggy’s got just juice enow make te eastern Drifter.”
Great. Whatever that is.
Her eyes meet mine as she hands me up, right after the general. She’s strong, despite being slender. “Welcome on’t, Master Sergeant Venn.” She sounds out my name precisely. It’s on my chest strap.
I smile. “Thank you.”
“Get te hell in,” she says.
I am the last. She climbs up and seals the door. In the cramped lock, she hands out brushes unlike any we’ve seen—labeled “Dyson.” Like magic, we’re clean in a few minutes, with nary a speck kicked loose. She dumps the brushes down a little chute. “Gecko tech,” she announces with that amazing smile as the lock finishes its cycle and she pushes open the inner hatch.
We tumble into the relatively spacious cabin, about two meters wide and four long. Forward, through the wedge-shaped windshield, I can see the ridge, the unmoving vane of the useless Chinese fountain…
The distant horizon.
The young woman—she can’t be more than twenty-three, twenty-four Earth years, half that Martian—sits in the forward seat and takes the pilot’s two-grip wheel. The bus responds with a whine, a deep groan, and a whir of electric motors, and we back away from the ridge, turn north, roll a short distance, then turn southeast.
We take seats on cushions or slings spaced along the bus’s interior. Unmarked bins and plastic crates fill most of the cabin, leaving us with little space to call our own. We do not complain.
“Rough go soon,” she says. “Strap in if you can, otherwise hang a tie-downs.”
Vee-Def assumes a husky feminine voice. The husky part comes easy. “Buckle your seat belts, gentlemen, it’s going to be a bumpy ride,” he says. He’s quoting someone, I don’t know who, probably a movie star, but that’s okay. Everything’s okay.
Tak and Michelin and I try to treat the general’s wounds, which have purple edges, not good; we don’t know if he’ll last more than a few hours. He slips in and out of consciousness, murmuring in Korean.
The young woman focuses on the drive. The bus does not appear to be equipped with other than the most rudimentary guidance. I can make out a kind of sighting telescope in the roof just behind the driver’s seat, probably for taking star fixes. Grid lines on the lower half of the windshield. No side windows, no way for us in the back to look out at the passing spectacle that is Mars.
A bottle of tasteless water is passed around. Even the general takes a long drink.
I feel almost human.
“Remove t’ose skintights,” our driver says.
“Yes, ma’am!” DJ says, grinning like a bandit.
“Scrub t’em out while t’ey charge a buggy taps,” she continues. On Mars, among the Muskies, there are now several kinds of accents and dialects and even some newly birthing languages, we were briefly informed in basic. But we weren’t instructed in any of them.
“Pull your pouches and toss t’em a recycle chute. I t’ink we have filters a fit, back a rear bulkhead, top right drawer. T’en, scrubbed and clean, climb in your suits again. We’re going outside onced we get t’ere.”
Those of us who can, follow her directions. We don’t mind being bossed by a tall blond ranch wife. That’s what our DI at Hawthorne called Muskie women, when he mentioned them at all. “Don’t think you’re going to save all those ranch wives… They are off-limits. They do not fidging care. To you, they matter less than Suzy Rottencrotch.” That sort of shit. I am deliriously grateful. I feel the way a pound mutt must feel, rescued just before they seal the hatch on the death chamber.
We’re all War Dogs, adopted by a very tall, strong ranch wife.
WE’VE STRIPPED TO Under Armour when the first big jolt hits. She wasn’t kidding. We’re off the plateau, off the hardpan, onto real washboard. And heading toward the eastern Drifter. Whatever that is.
“As Raisuli said, It is good to know where one is going,” I quote. Skyrines headed for the Red dote on desert war movies, even flatties. Oddly, Vee-Def does not get the reference, which makes him sullen.
Tak and Kazak finish their chores first, scrubbing and repacking filters, despite the lurching and jolting, and suit up again, then move to the front. Michelin is next. I’m slower, luxuriating in the simplicity of being alive.
Glancing at the ranch wife, I feel the vague pressure of crotch interest. I’m reviving enough to ask what life is like for her, up here, and how I may be of assistance, that sort of hormonal shit. Feels good. But of course, Michelin has moved in first. Michelin imagines himself our Tango Foxtrot Romeo. Not even the obvious competition of Tak sidelines his self-assurance.
He’s trying to strike up a conversation.
The ranch wife shakes her head, twice.
Michelin doesn’t get that she’s fully focused on the job at hand until she shoots out her long right arm and claps a spidery hand over his mouth. “ShutTup, please,” she says. “You want a roll t’is t’ing?”
The long arm’s reverse elbow swivel impresses us all. We goggle in admiration.
“No, ma’am,” Michelin says. He grins like a sap back at us, then squats down behind the control cab—and promptly goes to sleep.
Major General Kwak is in severe pain. He doesn’t complain, but we can’t pull off his skintight, not around that splinted arm. I rummage in the rear bulkhead and find the medical kit in a drawer just below the filters, marked with a red cross, and with Tak’s help administer some morphine. Nothing more modern in the way of painkillers, apparently, but this will do for now. The general regards us with tight eyes, nods his gratitude. Muzzes out. I start looking for a transfer bag or rolls of tape to repair his suit. Either we patch the skintight’s arm, which is showing too much fray, or we bag him entire, or he’s going to have to stay in the bus. Will the ranch wife mind us using her safety gear, depleting her reserves, air and water?
That leads me to ask myself, what is she doing out here all alone—and how do we possibly fit into those plans? She could just as easily dump us in a hole. We’ve never been of much use to Muskies. Maybe their neutrality has taken a more practical turn and they’ve gone over to the Antags. It’s all about survival. I might do the same. How is it bad thoughts return so quick when you know you’re not going to die, not right away?