The Long Mars

39

Thor burst out of the hole in the Martian ground and into the light of midday.

Mars, more than half as far again as Earth was from the sun, had always struck Sally as a murky kind of world, swathed in twilight colours. After emerging from the pit, though, it seemed dazzlingly bright, the opened-out landscape huge, and it took her a few seconds to get her bearings.

Then she saw chunks of wrecked glider scattered all around the rim of the pit, bone-white fragments chopped and chewed as if by some huge jaw.

As soon as he had gained some altitude from the thermal uplift that he got from the pit, Willis immediately turned the glider’s nose westward, towards their overnight camp. He dipped low for speed; the glider whipped across the rock-strewn ground. There were tracks, Sally saw, like ski marks, cutting across the thin lines of Neil Armstrong spacesuit-boot footprints the crew had made yesterday between their camp and the pit rim.

Then she was distracted by something moving, out in the distance. It raced over the rocky ground, drawn by a mud-brown sail, riding on some kind of ivory-white runners, raising a big rooster-tail of dust. Just as she’d seen a million worlds back: it was a sand-whaler.

Back at what was left of the camp, they circled over the wreckage. The glider was so comprehensively trashed that Sally could barely make out its narrow-winged cruciform layout. Their bubble-dome shelters were still standing, amid scattered bundles of gear, food, water, blankets, clothing, bits of comms and science gear.

And, in the camp, there was Frank Wood, she saw to her relief, standing and waving at them, apparently uninjured, his pressure suit intact.

Sally called down, “Frank? You OK?”

“See for yourself.”

Willis called, “I’m putting her down.”

Frank turned, scanning the horizon. The racing form, the dust cloud, was a good distance away. “Yes. Do it. He’s far enough away for now. We need to salvage as much of our stuff as we can. But, Willis, keep the launch booster primed for takeoff. We can’t afford to lose our last glider.”

“Noted.” Willis dipped the nose and brought the glider down in a hasty, bumpy landing.

Sally immediately unbuckled and opened the canopy. “In fact, Dad, why don’t you stay on board? Stay ready to take her up and out of the way of danger.”

Again Willis hesitated, thinking it over. “That makes sense.”

Sally strode over towards Frank, who called back, “Now do you see why I insisted on fall-backs?”

“Not the right moment for a lecture, Frank,” Sally snapped.

“So how was the pit?”

“Nor for a travelogue. Frank, I get the feeling we haven’t got a lot of time here.”

“You’re right.” He glanced over at the dust plume again. “I was looking east—the way you two had gone. He came in out of nowhere, from the west. He just drove his sand-yacht straight into the glider, severed a wing in the first pass. I was near the bubble domes. I grabbed a strut from the wreck—nearest I had to a weapon—I stood by the bubbles and the rest of the gear while he tore into the glider again. Well, he smashed up the bird, and then he took chunks of it off to the pit. I saw him throwing the gear in.

He’s smart, you know; he’s modified the survival bags to give him self a lot of flexibility.”

“He?” Willis called. “Who the hell is this?”

Frank looked across at the glider, bleakly. “You should know, Willis. Remember the whalers, a million worlds back? You traded them Steppers, for access to those monoliths. Do you remember how it went? One of those ten-armed characters got hold of your boxes and survival bubbles, and started lording it over another of them—”

“You called him the prince,” Sally said.

“Yeah. That was one pissed-off crustacean. Well, my guess is he got hold of one of those Steppers and all the survival bubbles he could steal, and he took off stepwise, chasing us.”

Willis grunted. “Why would he do that?”

“Dishonour,” Sally said. “Revenge. Just as Frank has been saying. Maybe you destroyed his social standing in front of his peers, Dad. Shit. I thought I saw something following us. A light in the dark. I didn’t figure it out, never put it together.”

“And you, Willis,” Frank said, “this is all your fault. You inflicted a Step Day on those guys, just like you did to humanity. It was just a means to an end to you, a way of getting to the next stage in your grand plan. You never thought of the impact it might have on them, did you? And it’s already been a pretty savage one judging by this guy’s obsessive, murderous rage.”

Sally watched the dust plume. Was it coming closer? “I think Frank’s right, Dad. And now he’s coming back for more.”

Frank punched a fist into a gloved palm. “And we’ve been standing here yakking and haven’t loaded a damn thing. We can’t let him get at the second glider, Willis—”

Willis hesitated no longer. He fired up the launch rocket and the glider leapt into the air, wheeling over the two of them on the ground. “Listen,” he called down. “I’ll draw him off with the glider. You get the stuff packed up. When he’s out of range I’ll come back—the glider is a hell of a lot faster than that damn sand-yacht—and we’ll load up and step away.”

“Come on.” Frank led the way, collapsing the bubble-dome shelters, bundling up pallets of food and water. Sally followed his lead, making for the wreck of the Woden to see what she could salvage.

Willis dipped the glider over the sand-yacht, and Sally saw that, yes, the yacht was turning, following the bird in the sky. Willis called, “He’ll follow us when we step. But he’s not going to be able to get any closer to us while we keep moving stepwise.”

“Dad,” Sally said urgently. “Why not just kill him?”

“I got nothing to kill him with.”

“Come on. I can’t believe you didn’t pack any weapons. Some kind of handgun adapted for Martian air.”

“Believe me. I didn’t.”

She hesitated. “OK. Well, I did. In the back of the food lockers, on both the gliders. I stowed away crossbows. To work them, you just have to—”

“Found them. Took them out. Dumped them. Sorry, kid.”

She felt unreasonably enraged. “Why the hell? Listen to me, Dad. Weapons like that have helped keep me alive a long time in the Long Earth—”

“Don’t hold with weapons. Wouldn’t expect that from a guy from Wyoming, would you, Frank? Weapons kill people, in the hands of idiots. And since most of the human race are idiots—”

Sally yelled, “Including me, you pompous old tyrant? Including Frank, for God’s sake?”

“Anyhow we don’t need weapons to get rid of this guy. He’ll destroy himself soon enough. He can’t do me any harm up here. And then, the ride home. It won’t be comfortable but we’ll make it. Look, he’s a long way out, and heading away now. I’ll come back in and—”

Sally saw a blinding light coming from the plain, from the sand-yacht dust plume, directly under the glider’s elegant form. And a spark, bright as the sun of Earth, lifted up into the sky, trailing black smoke.

A spark arcing straight up at Thor.

Though Willis banked with impressive reflexes he only had a second or two to react. Sally saw the spark rip through the fabric of the glider.

When Willis came back on line, Sally heard alarms sounding in the background, patient artificial voices explaining the nature of the damage. “Shit, shit…”

“Dad, what the hell was that? Some kind of rocket?”

“I think it was natural. Like the dragon-beasts, like those fire-breathing columns we saw. It’s like a methane-burning worm, flying through the air, using that burning breath as a rocket exhaust. A living missile. Maybe the whalers cultivate them, as weapons. Saved that up for a surprise when he needed it, didn’t he? These guys are pretty smart.”

Frank said, “Yes, they are. And you thought the prince couldn’t touch you.” Despite the peril of the situation for them all, angry as he was, Frank sounded like he was almost gloating. “You were wrong again, Linsay.”

“We’ll discuss my personal flaws later. Listen, the wings are intact, but my controls are mostly shot, and I’m losing pressure… I’m coming down. Let’s stick to the plan. We’ll load up what we have, launch again, get out of here. There should be time before he reaches us. When we’ve outrun him stepwise we can land, make proper repairs—”

“Just get that bird down here,” Frank snapped.

And Sally was watching the dust plume. “He’s closing. I think you keep underestimating this guy, Dad. He is a hunter, from a culture of hunters.”

“Yeah, yeah. Later. Coming in.”

The landing was heavy, but, as Frank remarked, in these circumstances any landing that left the fuselage intact was acceptable.

To Frank’s curt orders, Willis stayed in the cockpit, at the controls, ready to get the bird back in the air at short notice. Frank and Sally, meanwhile, began to bundle their goods into the glider’s slim fuselage. They had to work around the scorched, gaping hole in the rear where the rocket-worm had passed straight through.

Frank muttered and growled. “Hell, I hate the idea of launching again without taking care of that damage.”

“We have to. And we can’t leave the gear behind.”

“I tried stepping, you know,” Frank said. “When he came in for his first passes. Sally, he stepped straight after me. Even with the anti-nausea drugs, stepping slows me down, just a little. Not him, not the prince—”

“Don’t talk,” Sally said. “Just load.”

“And we’re below capacity too. We’re going to have to leave stuff behind if—”

“Shut up.” At the foot of that racing dust plume, Sally saw another spark of light, this time racing over the ground. Racing towards her, she realized. “He’s firing at us, this time. Dad, incoming. Get her up again, now.”

“Roger that—”

The glider scraped into the air with a flare of booster rockets.

And Frank Wood was standing there, staring at the approaching rocket-worm.

Sally leapt forward. She endured an age of low-gravity slow-motion falling towards Frank. At last she slammed into him, her arms around his waist, pushing him to the ground.

Not a heartbeat later the rocket-worm hammered into the ground. Sally felt the pressure wave, feeble in the thin air, a stronger blast of heat.

When it was over she was on top of Frank, who was on the ground, on his back, gasping. She rolled off him, clumsy in her pressure suit.

Frank said, sitting up, “What the hell—would he have hit?”

“He was damn close.”

“If it is some kind of living being, this weapon—internal methane and air sacs—I wonder how close you can aim it?”

Willis called down from the spiralling glider, “If it’s alive, maybe it aims itself. Meanwhile he’s coming back for more, on that damn sand sled of his.”

Sally saw the looming dust plume. There was a figure on the deck, beneath the big sail: that body like a huge upright centipede, incongruously wrapped in the plastic sac of a survival bag, wielding some kind of spear.

Frank stood, breathing hard. “By Christ, I’m getting old. Look at that bastard. He’s relentless.”

Sally glanced up. “Keep on climbing, Dad. Just stay out of the range of the rocket-worms.”

“Roger. But what about you two?”

Frank faced the plume of dust. “We split up.” Without hesitating he turned and began to run, clumsy in his suit, across the dirt. He looked back once, still running. “Move out, Sally. Thataway.”

She stood frozen for a heartbeat.

Then she began to run in the opposite direction. She ran with her head down, her body tilted forward, her boots thrusting back at the crusty ground. She had practised running on Mars. This moment was why.

“He can only come for one of us at a time,” Frank called. “He can strike at us from a distance, but this way at least one of us has a better chance. And if we keep on moving, maybe we’ll wear him down.”

“Maybe. We could have just stood and fought.”

“With what? This is the better way, Sally. Weaken him, finish him later.”

“Dad? What can you see from up there? What’s he doing?”

“Hesitating. He’s by the campsite, what’s left of it. Making another couple of passes through the wreck of the Woden, just for fun, I guess. Listen, I’ve a better idea. I’ll come down, pick one of you up.”

Frank seized on that immediately. “Do it.”

Sally said, “Leaving one at his mercy?”

“We’ll deal with that when we get to it,” Frank said. “Come on, Willis, do it.”

Sally stopped running, breathing hard, and looked up at the circling glider. Willis hadn’t yet made his move to land, she saw. Looking back she could see the sand-yacht, the trail its runners made in the dirt, the bulky form of the whaler swathed in the survival bag. And beyond that, the smaller figure of Frank, still running awkwardly. From the point of view of her father, up there, the situation must look perfectly symmetrical, she thought. The hunter at the centre, his two prey to either side, more or less equidistant. Whoever of them Willis chose to pick up first was going to have a markedly better chance of survival than the other; she knew that, and so would Willis. So who would he choose?

She was Willis’s daughter. She imagined that for most people that would swing it. But Willis was no ordinary father.

Still Willis hesitated. He was actually thinking it over. Choosing between her and Frank Wood, who to save, as she waited.

At last, with a dip of its wings, the glider came out of its banking circle, like sliding off an invisible summit in the air, and swept down towards the ground.

Heading straight at Sally.

In the glider, Sally and Willis watched from the air as the whaler’s yacht closed on Frank Wood, trailing plumes of red Mars dust. Frank made his last stand, lashing out with his gloved fists as the yacht made pass after pass. There was nothing they could do to help.

Finally the crustacean jumped off his yacht, hitting the ground running, though he was obviously impeded by the layers of survival bags he wore. He leapt straight at Frank, driving his spear forward even as he completed the low-gravity stride. Frank tried stepping even now, but the crustacean went straight after him, so that the two of them strobed between the worlds, fighting in the dirt.

Then the spear slammed into Frank’s faceplate, shattering it.

The noise of Frank’s ragged breathing cut out of the comms link immediately, and he shuddered and toppled back.

And Willis shifted them stepwise, over another crimson Martian plain, under an identical buttery sky. The scene of devastation and death below was gone, whisked away as if it had never happened.