Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Pickover’s voice was harsh. “Get him, Alex.”

  I appreciated his faith in me, but I didn’t have any idea just then how to get him—or the woman who was also closing rapidly. There was another blast—visual, not aural—from the shotgun, and this time I was hit in the shoulder. The impact knocked me sideways, and I sent up a dust cloud when I fell. Beneath the dust, there were loose rocks. I grabbed one about the size of a grapefruit, scrambled to my feet, and continued running. My shoulder hurt, but the suit seemed intact, and—

  And, no, damn it, there was a chip out of my helmet. It hadn’t broken all the way through, but the structure had doubtless weakened; another hit, and I’d be sucking in nothing but thin carbon dioxide.

  The man was slightly outpacing the woman, and that was working to my advantage—she seemed reluctant to shoot again with him in front of her; perhaps she was worried about going wide enough of her mark to hit him instead of me.

  I had no such compunctions. The man was now close enough that I could throw my rock at him. All that bench-pressing at Gully’s paid off, and I had plenty of experience throwing things under Martian gravity—as Buttrick at The Bent Chisel could testify. I hit the man right in the faceplate, and it cracked in a spider-web pattern that probably obscured his vision but I didn’t think was going to result in him gasping for breath, unfortunately.

  Still, it slowed him down enough that the woman was now in front again, and she brought the shotgun up to her red-suited shoulder. She was clearly about to fire when Pickover’s voice burst into my helmet, and hers, too, presumably. “Look out, Alex!”

  I swung my head to the right and saw our Mars buggy rushing toward us, a great cloud going up behind it. As I leapt to one side, I was touched that Pickover was willing to drive over his precious fossil beds to rescue me. He slammed the brakes in a way that would have made a screeching sound in a real atmosphere, and popped the clear habitat roof open. I leapt in, and he put his metal to the pedal. I thought he was going to take us through a wide one-eighty, but instead he aimed directly for the woman in red. I struggled to pull the lid down over the habitat as he continued to roar toward her, clearly aiming to mow her down. But she was aiming, too—right at us.

  That the woman was reasonably new to Mars was now obvious. The best way to stop a car on Earth was to shoot out the pneumatic tires, but we favored springy wiry things. The angle between the spokes changed constantly under computer control, and each spoke led not to a continuous rim but to a separate pad. A camera up front watched for obstacles, and the spokes configured themselves to make it possible to go over most rocks without even touching them. Trying to shoot such wheels out was useless, but she nonetheless fired at our left front tire—and it didn’t slow us down at all.

  The man in the blue suit started running back toward their yellow Mars buggy. He wasn’t going as fast as he’d been before; I suspect he’d slowed down not so much out of fatigue—having a guy hurtling toward you in a motorized vehicle tended to get the old adrenaline going—but because he was having trouble seeing through the cracks in his faceplate.

  Pickover had to make a choice: go after the woman with the gun or after the apparently unarmed man who had a chance of getting back to his buggy. I could think of arguments for either selection, and didn’t gainsay the one Rory made: he decided to pursue the woman, who was running like the wind.

  There was no way she could outrace us on a flat surface, but even a planitia has some craters on it, like God had peppered it with his own shotgun. She was heading straight for the one I’d noticed before; it was maybe thirty meters across. The crater wall rose in front of us. To get up it, she had to drop the shotgun, and it skittered with Martian indolence down the crater face. She scrambled up, gloves clawing for purchase. Damn, but I wished I had my gun! It would have been easy to take her out while her back was to us. Our springy wheels did their best, but when the slope exceeded forty-five degrees, they weren’t able to get enough traction, and we started backsliding.

  I unlatched the habitat lid, and it fell open, letting me hop out. The buggy managed to reverse its slide and climb back up a bit farther after the weight of me and my surface suit was no longer in it. But soon the slope proved too much again, and Pickover abandoned the buggy, too; the vehicle came to rest half-on and half-off the sloping, crumbling crater wall. I flipped open the trunk, exposing the land mines. The activation knob was on the underside of the mine, dead center, behind a little spring-loaded safety door. I reactivated both mines, and saw that the flags on their upper surfaces turned red. I then picked up one of the mines, supporting it underhanded by its rim.

  The man had succeeded in his retreat; I could see him in the distance clambering into their buggy. I’d thought he was going to hightail it away from here, but he came charging toward us again. I chinned my radio: “One warning only: get out of the buggy!”

  It was possible that the damage to his helmet had wrecked his microphone in addition to impairing his vision. Or maybe he just didn’t feel inclined to take orders from me. Either way, he kept racing my way at a clip I couldn’t outrun. I took a bead on the approaching vehicle, and flung the land mine the way you’d toss a discus. It spun through the air and—

  Ka-blam!

  —hit the flat front of the buggy’s habitat, exploding on impact. The canopy was reduced to crystalline shards that went flying. I saw the man in the blue suit throw up his arms, trying to cover his face—

  His exposed face: the glass visor of his helmet was gone. He gasped for breath—and I imagine he felt the linings of his lungs seizing up in the wicked cold of an equatorial Martian day.

  His vehicle was still moving, though—the habitat was wrecked, but the chassis was intact and those big wheels kept on rolling, propelling it at high speed along the wall of the crater and—God damn it!—straight toward me and our Mars buggy.

  I ran as fast as I could, but the incoming vehicle plowed into our buggy, and the other land mine I’d activated in preparation for throwing it went off, and I watched as the axles snapped on the incoming yellow buggy and our buggy burst into flames that almost immediately were snuffed out by the carbon dioxide atmosphere.

  We were all marooned in the middle of nowhere.

  NINETEEN

  Irushed over to the man in the blue surface suit. He’d tumbled out of the wreckage and was still desperately trying to cover his face. I looked around for anything that could help him do that: tarpaulin, plastic sheeting, even paper. But there was nothing.

  I doubted he could still hear me, given that the air was out of his helmet, but I said, “Hold on!” anyway. I used my gloved hands in addition to his own to try to make a new front for his helmet. For a moment, I thought it was working, but even though clouds of air were still coming out of the tubes attached to his tank, his fingers went slack and his arms dropped down, and there were now huge gaps that I couldn’t cover.

  And so at last I got a good look at his face. His nose had bled—low air pressure or the impact—but the blood had now frozen onto his face, a narrow face that was Asian, perhaps sixty years old, with thick gray hair. I didn’t recognize him. His mouth worked for a few moments—gasping for air, or hurtling invective at me, I couldn’t say which. And then it just stopped moving, about half open. I took no pleasure in watching this man expire, even though he’d tried to kill me—but I didn’t waste any tears over it, either.

  I’d lost track of Pickover during all this, and, swinging my head in the fishbowl, I saw no sign of him—which meant he must be inside the crater, along with the lady in red. I looked around for the discarded shotgun and found it. Damn thing had gone barrel-down into the dust and probably had a bunch of it in the bore now. Still, I grabbed it and scrambled up the crater’s rim, which was about three meters high, and peered over the edge.

  I’d expected to see Pickover having captured her at this point. After all, she was now unarmed and he was much more nimble as a transfer than she—whoever she was—could possibly be in a surface
suit. But Pickover was—well, I couldn’t exactly say he was a lover not a fighter . . . but he definitely wasn’t a fighter. Although it was true she no longer had a gun, she did apparently have a lasso: a loop of what, judging by its dark color, were fibers made of carbon nanotubes, meaning it would be almost impossible to break even with a transfer’s strength. And she’d managed to get it around his ankles and had pulled it tight. While I watched, she gave the lasso a yank, pulling Pickover’s legs out from under him. He tumbled backward—a body slam, not a slo-mo fall—landing flat on his back and sending up a cloud of dust.

  As it happened, Pickover was facing my way; she had her back to me. I could make it two for two, pumping shot into her from behind, but her suit might protect her. And, besides, I had questions I wanted to ask. I hauled myself up over the crater rim and clambered down the crumbly incline. The two of them were just shy of the crater’s central bulge.

  Pickover tried to get to his feet. The woman yanked the lasso again, and he tumbled backward once more. I think she’d have preferred to hog-tie him, but she didn’t have enough rope for that—I imagine she’d improvised the lasso out of line she’d brought along to help with climbing; she must have thought the Alpha might have been deep in some crevasse, and—

  Yes, that was it. She didn’t have another real gun, true—but she had a piton gun attached to her suit’s belt, and she bent over now and positioned it against the center of Pickover’s artificial chest. She presumably hoped that firing a metal spike into his innards would damage something that would incapacitate him. She pulled the trigger.

  Pickover screamed and his torso convulsed. It was like watching a biological getting defibrillated, but the intent was the opposite. I had made it down to the reasonably flat bottom of the crater. There was hoarfrost along this part of the wall, since it hadn’t yet been touched by the rising sun.

  The woman, who was straddling Pickover, moved the piton gun farther down his chest and fired again. Once more, Rory convulsed from the impact. I brought the shotgun to my shoulder and Pickover seemed to be tucking his knees up toward his torso, maybe to protect his nuts and bolt.

  I fired, the recoil pushing me backward a bit—and Pickover got his knees through the woman’s spread legs and kicked her in the chest with his bound feet. She went flying up a good two meters, and the bulk of my shot flew through the gap that had appeared between her and Pickover before she came down again.

  Rory rolled onto his side so she wouldn’t fall on top of him, and I hurried in. She hit the ground before I’d closed all the distance and was in a push-up posture, trying to get to her feet, by the time I got there. I grabbed her shoulder and flipped her onto her back, then loomed over her with the shotgun aimed right at her helmet.

  “Can you hear me?” I said into my suit radio.

  I gave her time to weigh whether she wanted to reply—and, after a moment, she did, although the connection was staticky and hard to make out. “Yes.”

  “I want to see your face. There are two ways that can happen. One is I blast open your helmet. The other is you depolarize it. Your choice.”

  She just lay there. Maybe she was hoping blue boy would come to her rescue, jumping me from behind. I wanted to see her face when I broke the news—not out of any sick desire to watch her feel hurt, but because her reaction would be a useful clue to the nature of their relationship.

  “Five seconds, lady,” I said. “One. Two. Three.”

  She moved her right hand to the bank of buttons on her left forearm, and the bowl went from reflecting a distorted image of me to being transparent.

  And that face I did know, a gorgeous symphony in chocolate shades: brown skin, brown hair, brown eyes. Lakshmi Chatterjee, New Klondike’s writer-in-residence.

  “Sweetheart,” I said, “I thought we had something special.”

  “We still could,” she replied. She indicated Pickover, who was lying on his side. “With him out of the picture, you, me, and Darren split it three ways.”

  “Just two ways, honey. Darren is dead.”

  Her brown eyes went wide, but she didn’t seem too broken up by it, and, after a moment, she said, “Even better.”

  I looked over at Pickover, and, yeah, I thought about it for half a second. Now, you could say that all things being equal, it made more sense to share the wealth with Rory, who’d never tried to kill me, than with Lakshmi, who’d happily shoot pitons into my chest, too, if given the chance. But old Dr. Pickover wasn’t going to let these fossils be sold, so there was no sharing to do with him.

  Still, I liked the guy.

  “No dice,” I said. I reached down and wrenched the piton gun from her and sent it flying—it was easy enough to toss it clear over the crater’s rim. “Roll over,” I said. “Face down.”

  Lakshmi hesitated, so I pushed the shotgun muzzle right up against her fishbowl. She nodded within and turned onto her stomach. “Don’t move,” I said.

  I went over to Pickover. If he’d been knifed, the standard advice would be to leave the blades in, lest removing them exposed gaping wounds through which he’d bleed to death. But I thought in this case the metal spikes might be causing electrical shorts inside him, and so I grabbed them—my suit’s gloves insulating me—and pulled them free. One came out clean; the other was covered with black machine oil. I tossed them aside.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He looked no worse for wear—although the workings of his face were still exposed. “I think so.”

  I glanced at his bound ankles. “You still have my switchblade?” He’d kept it after using it to disarm the two mines.

  “In the pouch,” he said.

  I opened his equipment pouch and took out the knife. I tried to cut through the material, but my guess had been right: it was carbon nanofiber; the knife didn’t even make a mark on it. Still, that didn’t mean we were out of luck. I went over and kicked Lakshmi none too gently in the thigh. “Up,” I said.

  She got to her feet.

  “You made the lasso,” I said, pointing. “Untie it.”

  She hesitated for a moment then bent over to do so. It took a particularly good figure to look attractive through a surface suit, but, admiring her from behind, it was clear that that was precisely what she had.

  “Come on!” I said. “Hurry up!”

  “I can’t,” she said after trying for a bit. She held up her hands. “The gloves are too thick.”

  “Take them off, then.”

  “It’s fifty below zero!”

  I considered. “All right. Rory, can you manage it?”

  He sat up. A jet of oil squirted from one of the holes in his chest, but he didn’t seem to notice. His fingers were unencumbered, and I imagined he’d opted for a super-high degree of dexterity, since part of his job was preparing minute fossils. I kept the shotgun trained on Lakshmi, while he struggled to loosen the loop—and, at last, he succeeded.

  He surprised me by holding out a hand so I could help him get up—but that might just have been the natural thought of the middle-aged mind within the transfer body; I was counting on him not actually being severely injured. I put my gloved hand in his naked one and pulled him to his feet. He nodded his thanks and stepped out of the lasso. I bent over, picked it up, and slipped it over Lakshmi’s head and shoulders, pulled it down past her breasts, then cinched it tight, binding her arms below the elbow to her waist—which, again, emphasized her remarkable figure.

  I took the other end of the cord, holding it like a leash. I gave her a little shove, and she started walking in front of us. Pickover fell in next to me. I had to let go of the cord to let her, and then me, scramble up the inner crater wall and down the outer one. We’d come out about thirty degrees around the rim from where I’d gone in, and—

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I probably should have mentioned that.”

  Pickover’s artificial jaw had dropped to half-mast. Lakshmi stopped dead in her tracks. “How are we going to get home?” she exclaimed, looking at the two wrec
ked buggies.

  “That’s a very good question,” I replied. Mars had no telephone system outside the dome, no global positioning system, and no string of communications satellites—it was the frontier. And the planet’s weak and wonky ionosphere was no use for bouncing signals, so radio worked only more or less over line of sight—meaning there was no way to call all the way back to New Klondike for help. “Given how long it took to get here,” I continued, “and even allowing for Rory possibly not having taken the most direct route out, I’d guess it’d take days to walk home.” In this gravity, even in the suit, I could easily manage it—and I suspected Lakshmi was in good enough shape to do it, as well. Except for one thing: I looked at the air gauge built into my suit’s inner left sleeve. “I’ve got five hours left.”

  Lakshmi was still bound with the lasso. I rotated her arm in a way that probably wasn’t pleasant and read her gauge. “And she’s got three.” I didn’t add, but I certainly thought, Which means if I take her tanks, I’ve got a total of eight. I looked at Pickover. “We should head out.”

  “You’re not abandoning me here!” Lakshmi exclaimed.

  I turned to her. “Why not? You were prepared to kill me, and you just tried to kill Dr. Pickover.”

  “Not kill him, just disable him—with damage that would be easy to repair.”

  “Well, tell you what, sweetheart: you can start walking; you, at least, should more or less know the way.”

  “I’m new to Mars; you know that. Darren was navigating. I honestly don’t have a clue which way to go.”

  “If you ask him nicely, Rory might point you in the right direction.”

  He was looking down at his chest, probing the holes in it with his fingers, and—

  And, no, actually, he was probing the holes she’d made in his work shirt. I hadn’t paid much attention to it until now, but it was a somewhat tattered flannel number sporting a light and dark gray plaid and pockets over both breasts. Above his left breast was a logo showing what I was pleased with myself for recognizing as a trilobite, and beneath that, some words that were too small for me to read.