Red Planet Blues

FORTY-ONE

It was hard to tell while looking at Lakshmi from behind, but I think she’d pulled her gun out of Reiko’s side and was now aiming it at the gorgeous apparition, who was sailing ten meters closer with each stride. I was all set to jump Lakshmi from the rear when the blonde transfer leapt, flying through the almost nonexistent air. She slammed into the writer, knocking her on her back. Reiko danced out of the way just in time to avoid being bowled over, too.

Lakshmi swore; it doubtless hurt to be knocked over, especially when wearing a backpack with oxygen tanks. She was flat on her back but still had her little gun. I kicked the hand that held it. The weapon went up, up, and up some more. Lakshmi was trying her best to throw the blonde bombshell off her, but the transfer had grabbed her wrists.

Blondie looked at Ernie even as she was struggling with Lakshmi, and she made some beckoning motions with her lovely head. Gargalian seemed baffled for a second, but then got it. It took some doing, but Blondie managed to get up, and Ernie managed to get down without Lakshmi escaping. He took the simple expedient of sitting on her chest. Lakshmi beat at him with gloved fists, but her suit didn’t allow her arms to move fast enough for the blows to really hurt, I imagined.

Blondie smiled at me, but then her perfect mouth dropped open in surprise, showing the porcelain pearly whites within. It took me a second to realize she was now looking past me. I turned, and—

Damn. I really did need to do something about my eyes. Once again, there was something off in the distance. I squinted, and—yes: it was someone else running this way, this time coming in from the north.

Blondie’s baby blues were wide. She probably had that bionic-vision thing going on; I wondered if there was a reticle over her retina. Reading a transfer’s expression was hard, but I don’t think she recognized whoever it was.

I didn’t know if this interloper was friend or foe, but it pays to prepare for the worst. Since Blondie, at least, seemed to be an ally, I grabbed her hand—my glove in her naked plastiflesh—and led her perpendicular to the newcomer’s travel, running west toward the Alpha, meaning he’d have to choose whether to come toward me and Blondie, or toward Lakshmi and Ernie. It was soon apparent that the newcomer had altered his trajectory to come after the two of us.

Blondie fell in next to me, matching my stride, and we continued on for a few hundred meters. Although the dust covering Isidis Planitia shifts over time, I could still make out two divots in the surface, and I maneuvered us between them. Then I scanned around for the automobile-shaped rock I’d dubbed Plymouth and the more jagged one I’d nicknamed Hudson. And so I figured stopping here was just right, with Plymouth at about ten o’clock and Hudson standing guard at 3:30.

The intruder was now just a hundred meters away. He was either wearing a beige surface suit, or was a transfer in beige clothes, or—less likely—a naked transfer with beige skin.

I was suddenly distracted by Ernie shouting into his helmet microphone. “Alex! Alex!”

I turned. Somehow, Lakshmi had managed to push Ernie off, or—no, no, that wasn’t it. Reiko had a gun pointed at Ernie. Damn it! While I’d been busy maneuvering Blondie and me to just the right spot, and Ernie had been busy trying to flatten out all the appealing bumps on Lakshmi, Reiko must have gone off to retrieve the piece I’d sent flying earlier. Back on Earth, when people get surges of adrenaline, they sometimes manage to lift cars off trapped pedestrians; the sight of Reiko again packing heat must have been enough to give Lakshmi the jolt she needed to heave Ernie off herself, and she now had hold of his rifle.

Blondie flexed her fingers, disengaging her hand from mine, and in a blur of motion she scooped up a rock about the size of a softball, hauled back, and let loose a pitch worthy of the major leagues. The rock tore through the thin air and made it a good fraction of the distance, but it fell short, and I couldn’t tell which of the three people she’d been aiming at. Ernie was on his feet, and the two women were facing off against each other, perhaps a dozen meters between them, Reiko aiming her pistol at Lakshmi, and Lakshmi pointing Ernie’s rifle at Reiko.

If this had been the Old West, I would have heard the shot ring out, but the air was too thin for that, and instead all I heard was a feminine “Oomph!” over the radio as one of the women was hit, and I waited breathlessly to see which of them would crumple to the ground.

And, after about three seconds, one of them did, with graceful Martian indolence: the shorter of the two, the lady in dark green, the heiress who seemed to have inherited nothing but her grandfather’s obsession with wealth.

Blondie suddenly sprang into action, running toward them. She’d yet to say a word, and I had no reason to think she was listening to the same frequency I was using, but I shouted anyway: “No! Stop! Go back the way we came!”

And either she was tuned into that channel, or else she had bionic ears in addition to bionic eyes, because she skidded to a halt, changed direction, and followed the precise path out that we’d taken in.

Meanwhile, the beige intruder was still coming straight for me. If I moved, he’d alter his course—and so I stood my ground.

Blondie was damn near flying, yellow hair a cloud around her head as she hurried toward Reiko and Lakshmi. Lakshmi aimed the rifle at Blondie, and I guess Blondie and I were thinking the same thing—that perhaps a gun that big would do real damage to a transfer; the blonde goddess started bobbing and weaving as she continued to race in. Lakshmi’s first shot was a clean miss. The second got Blondie somewhere in the torso—hard to tell exactly where when watching from the rear—but it didn’t slow her down.

I turned back to the intruder. It was a male transfer in khaki slacks and a khaki long-sleeved shirt, and he was still coming straight at me. As his shoulders worked up and down, I glimpsed that he had on a backpack—surely not air tanks, but rather a rucksack with equipment. Ah, and at last he was close enough that I could make out his face, and—

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.

I needed another helmet and fast. Ernie was clearly conscious of my plight: he was trying to undog Lakshmi’s fishbowl. I was having trouble seeing now—I think my eyeballs were freezing in place, and—

And everything went dark and I went plowing face first into the ground. I managed to lift my chin and spit out the oxygen tube just in time to keep it from bashing my front teeth out. And then I felt the weight of someone on my back, and strong hands grabbed the sides of my neck and squeezed, strangling the life out of me.