Red Planet Blues

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.

Still, Pickover could probably manage a decent volume, so I suggested he shout. He called Mudge’s name a few times, but there was no response—although, even if the computer heard, it was also unlikely that there was a loudspeaker on the outside of the ship.

The cylindrical hull was partially buried in the mud, and the mud was congealing fast. The engine cone and a portion of the lower hull—but not enough to reveal the airlock door—was overhanging the original hole in the ground. The top hatch, now facing outward, was a couple of meters up; somewhat more than half of the ship’s diameter was still above the surface. We moved close, and I boosted Pickover onto my shoulders so he could look at the locking wheel. He was having a hard time perching himself on me since he couldn’t really flex his right ankle.

“It’s been jammed with a crowbar,” he said—or transmitted; I picked it up over my suit radio rather than the external mike. I felt Pickover’s weight shifting on my shoulders as he struggled with the crowbar, but at last he got it free. He tossed it aside, then struggled a bit more and soon had the hatch open. “Mudge!” he called out.

My suit mike picked up the faint voice. “Can I be of assistance?”

“Can you get this ship airborne from its current posture?” Pickover asked.

“Most likely,” Mudge replied.

“How much fuel do you have in reserve?”

“The sensor isn’t designed to operate on its side,” said Mudge, “but I estimate that the tank is about one-fifth full. Not nearly enough to make orbit, let alone escape velocity, I’m afraid.”

“Can you fly to New Klondike?”

“Where is New Klondike?”

Right. The damn computer had spent the last four decades asleep.

“About 300 kilometers east of here,” said Pickover.

“I would require a navigator,” replied Mudge, “but the ship is capable of covering that distance.”

“You fly it back, Rory,” I said, craning my neck upward. “I’ll get Juan’s buggy and use it to tow the two wrecked ones away.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Pickover, and he scrambled up into the access hatch; I was glad to have his weight off my shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “I’m inside and—Jesus!”

“What?”

“Scared me half to death!”

“What?” I said again.

“Old Denny’s corpse got dislodged when the lander toppled. I backed down the access tube right onto it.”

“Yuck,” I said, because he expected me to say something. I headed back toward Juan’s buggy, following the footprints Pickover and I had left earlier. The buggy was intact, thank God. I’d faced murderous transfers before—but I didn’t want to face an angry Juan Santos ever again. I didn’t pressurize the cabin, though. “Rory?” I said into my headset.

“Here, Alex.”

“Buggy’s in good shape. You can take off whenever you’re ready. I want to watch the launch, though. Give me a couple of minutes to get in position.”

“Copy,” said Pickover, in good astronaut fashion. I tooled around the rim of the crater and headed toward the dark bulk of Syrtis Major Planum. We weren’t far north of the equator, and the sun was now nearly overhead. I did an S-shaped maneuver in the buggy and stopped short before I got to the part of the surface that had been melted; I didn’t know how the springy tires would do on a kind of muck they’d never been designed for. I could now see the descent stage from a three-quarters view, favoring the top. “Okay,” I said into the radio.

“Roger,” replied Pickover, clearly still enjoying the notion of piloting a spaceship. But then he had to turn the reins over to the real pilot. “Mudge? We’re all set.”

I couldn’t hear Mudge’s reply, but after a moment, Pickover said, “Oh, right. Go ahead.”

I saw a small hatch open on the side of the ship, and a thruster quad emerged—a cluster of four attitude-control jets. Another cluster emerged ninety degrees farther around the ship’s circumference; I imagined there were two more at the other cardinal points.

On the quad close to me, the jet that was pointing down came to life, and the corresponding one on the other visible unit, near the top, did so, too. The cylindrical stage vibrated for a bit, and then, slowly at first and then more rapidly, it started to roll. I didn’t want to think about Pickover—let alone the corpse—being rotated around like they were on the spin cycle.

The upper level of the descent stage was still partially hanging out over the pit, but by pumping the attitude-control jets off and on, and supplementing the rotational force with a little backward oomph from the jets that were facing forward, Mudge managed to at last dislodge the ship and half push and half roll it completely onto muddy ground, so that no part of it was jutting over the pit. After a few more adjustments, the ACS quads stopped firing. I heard Pickover talking again to Mudge. “Yes, I’m holding on. Whenever you’re ready.”

Apparently Mudge was raring to go, because as soon as Pickover said that, the big engine cone at the rear ignited, shooting out a plume of flame. The massive cylinder pushed forward, sliding at least twice the ship’s length along the ground, digging a furrow as it did so, before it started to angle up toward the butterscotch sky. I watched it lift higher and higher and then streak toward the eastern horizon.

Once it was gone from view, I spun the Mars buggy around and headed back to that small crater with the two other wrecked buggies. And, of course, Dirk’s excimer jackhammer was waiting for me there. I had no idea which fossils were the most valuable, but I wandered around and used the hammer to remove four choice-looking slabs, which I put in the trunk of Juan’s buggy, along with the jackhammer. If I understood what Pickover had said correctly, it was best to keep the slabs frozen; I’d drop them off at a secret locale of my own on the way back.

Before removing each slab, I’d used my tab to take photographs of the specimens in the ground, and wider shots that established their precise locations and orientations; I’d placed my phone in the shots, so that dimensions could be worked out, too.

I couldn’t literally cover our tracks—or the buggy’s—but the ever-shifting Martian dust would do that soon enough. Still, I did make an effort to hide the wounds I’d just made in the soil.

Juan’s buggy, like most models, had a trailer hitch, and I hooked up a line so that I could drag both wrecks, one behind the other. I wouldn’t take them back to New Klondike because people would ask awkward questions about how they’d come to be destroyed, and because hauling that much weight all the way would make the journey take forever. But I did drag them thirty kilometers—not back east, in the direction we’d come, but south. They’d doubtless be stumbled upon at some point, but they would be nowhere near the Alpha.

I then finally got to give Juan’s buggy a workout. This part of Isidis Planitia wasn’t quite as good as the Bonneville Salt Flats, but it still let me pull some great skids, and I spun the buggy through a couple of three-sixties, just for fun. And then, at last, I headed home. I had no really good map of how to get there—and I wouldn’t have been able to retrace the course to return here—but I knew the dome was to the east, and so I just started driving that way, confident I’d eventually pick up the New Klondike homing beacon. And, indeed, after about ninety minutes, I did.

The sun had reached the western horizon behind me by the time I was approaching New Klondike. When I was back in phone range, I checked in with Pickover; he was safe in his apartment and happier than I’d ever heard him. He’d found the map aboard the descent stage—it had been rolled up for storage, he said, but was as big as a kitchen tabletop, a fact he knew because he now had it covering his own and was poring over it excitedly.

As I got closer to the dome, I saw that Mudge and Pickover had put the descent stage down vertically on one of the circular fused-regolith landing pads; it was resting on articulated tripodal legs that must have been previously stored within the hull. The pads were numbered with giant yellow painted numerals at three places on their rims; this one was number seven.

There’d be some paperwork to take care of before the descent stage could be brought inside to the shipyard. I drove on to the garage building near the south airlock and returned Juan’s buggy, pleased to see that although it was mud-splashed, it was otherwise no worse for wear.

I then entered the dome, returned my rented surface suit—getting the damage deposit back this time—and headed to my little windowless apartment. On the way, I listened to the voice mail that had accumulated while I was out, including a message from Diana that said Lakshmi Chatterjee had had a cancellation and could see her to talk about her poetry tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. It was less necessary now, I suspected, to bug Shopatsky House; Dirk had almost certainly been her accomplice. But it was still probably worth finding out if Lakshmi had revealed the location of the Alpha to anyone else or was planning another trip out to it.

Despite all I’d been through today, I was totally clean—the surface suit had kept all the dust and mud out. But I definitely needed a shower. Once I got home, I stripped and headed into the stall, opting to treat myself to a water rinse. (The irony was that it was water showers that were noisy; sonic showers were ultrasonic and didn’t interfere with your hearing—not a lot of people sang while taking sonic showers.)

But while other sounds were being drowned out by the jets of H₂O, someone must have jimmied the lock on my apartment door. Or maybe they’d broken in earlier, and had simply been hiding until now. Either way, when I turned off the nozzles, what I heard was not the drip-drip-drip that I really needed to get fixed, but rather a low, unpleasant voice that said, “Freeze.”