Drifter

by William C. Dietz

  Lando saw that a rotary missile launcher had been built into the vehicle's front fairing. He bumped helmets with the team leader and pointed towards the launcher.

  "Does that thing work?"

  The team leader laughed. "Who the hell knows? You'd better hope so."

  One of the men did something to the scooter's controls and it lifted itself off the ground. The small instrument panel glowed green and the vehicle swayed slightly as the man got aboard.

  A new source of static rattled in Wendy's ears. She imagined riding the scooter and felt something hard and cold in the pit of her stomach. They'd be like targets in a video game as they threaded their way through the broken streets.

  One of the men touched Wendy's arm and motioned her forward. The woman moved up the corridor, with the scooter right behind, and left the rest of them to bring up the rear.

  The strange assemblage had traveled only a short distance when the woman signaled for them to stop.

  Lando saw a large bank of old-fashioned elevators and wondered what the woman was up to. He watched as she produced a small tool, unscrewed a metal plate, and did something to the wires inside. An UP sign appeared, nearly invisible through layers of dust, and a pair of doors slid open.

  Amazing! Lucky Lou had restored power to at least one of the elevators. Just one of hundreds or maybe even thousands of contingency plans the old man had put in place during his extra long lifetime.

  The scooter took up a lot of room, but all six of them managed to crowd aboard nonetheless, and waited while the ancient elevator carried them slowly upwards.

  The letter G lit up and one of the doors slid open.

  One of the men put his shoulder against the second door and forced it open.

  Now they were in some sort of lobby, a one-time bank lobby from the look of the old-fashioned teller machines and the huge chrome-plated vault that stood open along one wall.

  Lando noticed the bullet-riddled wall, the section of counter that had been melted by blaster fire, and the dust-covered mounds. Vacuum-preserved bodies, still clad in their punctured armor, awaited a burial that would never come.

  A bank robbery? No, the dust wasn't thick enough for that. The bank had been deserted for hundreds of years. This was something more recent, a dispute over money, or a blood feud of some kind.

  Dust sprayed sideways as the scooter's antigrav units counteracted what little gravity Mars had to offer, and a set of swivel-mounted thrusters propelled the vehicle forward. The driver stopped just short of the door and got off. The woman pressed her helmet against Lando's.

  "This is where we part company. I attached a mapper to the console, and no matter which way you go, it will always show the shortest route to the spaceport."

  The woman smiled cynically. "Of course that assumes that the mutes haven't barricaded any more streets during the last twenty-four hours."

  Lando forced a smile. "Does the local Chamber of Commerce know about you?"

  The woman shrugged and was large enough to make the armor shrug with her. "It's my job. Good luck."

  Lando nodded and swung a leg over the scooter's seat. He felt the vehicle bob slightly as Wendy did the same. Something bumped into the back of his helmet and he heard Wendy's voice. "What now?"

  Lando rearranged the sling on his blast rifle so that the barrel of the weapon was pointed to the right. "We go like hell and hope for the best. Sling your blast rifle so that the barrel points left. We'll cover both flanks that way."

  "I don't know if I can shoot someone again."

  Lando knew better than to insist. "Okay… but you could fire for effect. Just to keep their heads down."

  Wendy said, "Okay," but knew it was a cop-out. Random death is death just the same.

  Lando took one last look around. The security team had vanished back into the tunnels whence they'd come. He tilted his helmet back to make contact with Wendy's. "Hang on… here we go!"

  Lando twisted the throttle. The scooter's thrusters fired and pushed him out into the light of day.

  Tawson tripped over a dirt-covered pipe and swore under his breath.

  The sound was picked up by his mike, transmitted over his suit radio, and received by all those around him.

  The shuttle pilots grinned and looked at each other through darkened visors. They worked for Orlow. The Mega-Metals exec might pull some heavy G's back on Terra but he didn't know diddly out here. An open mike was real stupid. Fortunately the gaffe wouldn't make any difference. The targets weren't close enough to hear.

  Tawson shifted the unfamiliar weight of the blast rifle from one shoulder to the other. Sol help him if anything went wrong. He'd never fired a weapon in his entire life.

  It was a mistake to be here. Tawson knew that. But circumstances had left him with very little choice. He was committed now, so deeply committed that success was a must, even if that meant his personal involvement.

  Damn Orlow anyway. This was her fault for allowing the fugitives to escape. To hell with asking them questions. Shoot on sight. That was the way to handle it.

  Tawson shifted his weight from one foot to the other and used his binoculars to look around. The view from the top of his makeshift command post was excellent. Not the highest point around, but high enough to spot anything that approached the spaceport and nail it if need be.

  Not that it would be necessary to dirty his hands. No, the somewhat repulsive group who referred to themselves as the Air Heads would see to that.

  Tawson, and the five pilots who'd agreed to come with him, were nothing more than backups. A last line of defense in case Lando and the Wendeen bitch managed to slip past the oxy vamps.

  Yes, money could work absolute miracles, raising entire armies when necessary and solving all manner of problems.

  That's why Tawson was so fond of it.

  Tawson felt a trickle of sweat run down his temple and wished that he could wipe it away. He turned his heater down instead. The sun was high in the sky and beating down through the thin Martian atmosphere.

  The executive took a sip of water and looked out over the ruins. Wisps of dust, thin as smoke, rose like spirits from their graves.

  When Tawson spoke he was unaware that the pilots could hear every word he said. "Hurry up, damn it. Hurry up and come."

  Lando turned the handlebars to the right, realized that he'd turned them too far, and overcorrected in the other direction. The scooter bobbed, tilted dangerously, and straightened out. There was a pile of rubble in the middle of the street and he guided the scooter around it.

  The smuggler glanced down at the mapper and saw that there was a turn coming up. He triggered the reverse thrusters in a series of short bursts, felt the scooter start to slow, and accelerated into the turn.

  Lando felt better now, connected to the machine, and somewhat more confident of his ability to control it.

  He saw a short stretch of open street up ahead. He twisted the throttle and felt the little vehicle leap forward.

  Deeber fingered his talisman and prayed. "Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, let the holy Oh-Two flow."

  Deeber hoped that the prayer would bring today's quarry in his direction. The first one to see and attack the norms would get half their oxygen. That, plus his share of the tribe's fee, would make this a profitable day. He squinted into the unaccustomed light.

  "Night, night, that's the way, hunt at night not the day. Thus it is, thus it was, thus it shall always be, amen."

  Deeber turned and his reflection turned with him. It was distorted by flaws in the ancient chrome but was better than nothing. He preened for a moment.

  Though deformed from birth, Deeber's body was closer to norm than most, and he was proud of it. Unrestrained by gravity, and lacking in sufficient calcium, bones grew in strange ways. Deeber had a reasonably normal skull, narrow shoulders, a long twisted spine, and short stumpy legs.

  His armor had been custom-made to fit his deformed body. His mother had assembled it from bits and pieces that she'd salvaged herself
or purchased from the metal scavs. Deeber had decorated the pressure suit with more than a thousand pieces of plastic. They made the sunlight hop, skip, and jump as he moved.

  He jerked around as a series of tones sounded inside his helmet. The oxy vamps used their children as scouts. This was Skizy, or maybe Pullo, slipping him the jump. His prayer had been answered.

  Deeber's short stumpy legs carried him out the door of the one-time cafe and into the street. Two norms came straight at him. Wait a minute! They weren't supposed to have a scooter. What the…?

  Okay, ignore the scooter and concentrate. Raise the kill tube, aim carefully, take a deep breath, and fire. "Missile, missile, white and red, find the norm and kill him dead."

  Lando swerved as the weirdly shaped alien thing aimed some sort of tube at him.

  The tiny, heat-seeking missile identified two different heat sources, and true to its programming, chose the stronger of the two. It soared towards the sun.

  The mute cursed. This sort of thing didn't happen at night. Deeber tried to turn, tried to run, but his short little legs weren't fast enough.

  Leaving his right hand on the handlebars, Lando used his left to pull the blast rifle's trigger. A shaft of blue light shot out at right angles to the scooter and burned a black groove along the front of the buildings on that side. It cut through Deeber's homemade armor like a knife through warm butter. The oxy vamp exploded inside his suit.

  A horrible series of screams filled Wendy's helmet. They were part sorrow and part anger as the rest of the oxy vamps rushed to avenge Deeber's death.

  Unthinking, Wendy let go of the passenger bar and put both her hands to her helmeted ears, at the very moment Lando swerved sharply. Toppling sideways, she grabbed desperately for the bar, and just barely managed to seize it and right herself.

  The screaming filled Lando's helmet. He wanted to turn his radio off but resisted the impulse to do so. No radio meant no Wendy.

  Five pressure-suited somethings scurried, limped, and crawled out into the street. Each of them was armed and leveled some sort of weapon in his direction. The smuggler flipped a protective cover up, pressed the red button, and watched the missiles surge away. They had no guidance systems whatsoever and exploded on impact.

  The oxy vamps became pillars of flame. Lando drove between them and out the other side.

  A heat-seeking missile came from somewhere behind him, zeroed in on some red-hot oxy vamp armor, and blew up. Fragments of metal and plastic were thrown fifty feet into the air where they cartwheeled and fell slowly towards the ground.

  Lando braked for a pile of debris, took a turn down a side street, and accelerated away.

  The pilot finished her report. Tawson forced himself to remain calm as he looked at the twisted image of himself reflected in her visor. All right. The fugitives had unearthed a scooter somewhere and broken through the oxy vamp cordon. Bad, but not disastrous. That's what backup plans were for.

  Tawson turned towards the rest of the pilots. He was proud of how calm he sounded. "Okay… round one goes to the rimmers. But scooter or no scooter, they will still have to come here. Let's get down to street level and provide them with a warm reception."

  Lando's heart beat like a triphammer. They were close, very close, and would encounter the corpos any minute now.

  There! In the doorway up ahead, a space-suited figure with a blast rifle aimed in his direction.

  Lando fired a missile just as a beam of pure energy sliced past his head. The world grew darker as his visor polarized.

  The corpos disappeared in a flash of white light. More figures appeared farther down the street. Lando pushed the red button again and swore when nothing happened. A red light blinked on and off on the control panel.

  "Damn!" Out of missiles.

  A matrix of crisscrossing energy beams converged around him and started to close in. There were five corpos, and their lack of infantry training showed in the way that they grouped together, all firing in Lando's direction.

  The smuggler gritted his teeth and headed straight for them. Blue light slashed by his side, scorched his armor, and cut a groove along Wendy's left thigh.

  Lando fired the reverse thrusters, saw it was too late, and closed his eyes.

  The scooter hit the wall about fifty feet in front of the corpos but didn't crash.

  The planet's light gravity, combined with the vehicle's antigrav units and forward momentum, sent it skittering up along a vertical wall. Lando looked, felt the scooter start to fall, and fired the forward thrusters in response. The scooter angled down towards the street.

  Wendy saw a corpo fall, saw one of them bring a hand blaster up, and saw it burp blue light. The beam hit the side of the scooter an inch away from her left knee and burned its way out the other side.

  Her response was unplanned, but lethal nonetheless. She squeezed the trigger.

  Tawson saw his beam hit the scooter, saw it pass all the way through, and was busy congratulating himself when the sudden vacuum turned his body inside out.

  Lando felt the controls go dead in his hands as Tawson's energy beam sliced through the fuel lines. The scooter's nose hit duracrete, bounced off, and was pushed upwards by the still-functioning antigrav units. The vehicle wobbled left and right and found its equilibrium. Momentum carried it forward.

  Lando fired the reverse thrusters. Nothing. There was a pile of junk up ahead. "Wendy! Jump! I can't control it."

  Wendy understood immediately. There wasn't enough oxygen for a fire, but fuel was streaming out the holes in the vehicle's side and spraying across her legs. She wasn't tall enough to simply stand up and let the scooter run out from under her, so she did the next best thing. She jumped straight upwards.

  That strategy worked. Wendy jumped higher than expected and fell slowly. She landed standing up.

  Lando did what Wendy couldn't, and stood up, allowing the scooter to run out from under him.

  The vehicle hit the pile of rubble a few feet later, bounced off, and wobbled away.

  Lando spun around, his blast rifle searching for targets, but found none. With Tawson down, and things going badly, the remaining corpos had faded into the rubble. These weren't the easy pickings that they'd been promised, and besides, a bonus doesn't mean a helluva lot when you're sucking vacuum instead of air.

  Lando backed away, and Wendy did likewise, until part of a collapsed building provided them with cover.

  Things went easily after that. They jogged a couple of blocks, arrived in the small red-light district adjacent to the spaceport, and saw the sign "Lucky Lou Enterprises, Ship Storage, Maintenance, and Repair."

  A couple of pressure-suited locals stared as they approached but made no attempt to interfere.

  The lock opened to Lando's touch and he breathed a sigh of relief as the outer door cycled closed.

  They were in space a scant four hours after that, accelerating towards a nav beacon, preparing for a hyperspace jump.

  It was a moment that might've been celebrated, that might've brought them closer together, but it didn't happen. Both sat slumped in their seats, staring at the stars, seeing them in completely different ways.

  15

  Lars Schmidt was extremely tired, so tired that his vision had started to blur, and he had trouble with even the simplest tasks. He'd been driving south for a long time now, probably days, but it felt like weeks.

  It had been fairly easy going at first. Across the pan, down through a series of valleys, and out onto a vast arid plain. Flat, almost featureless country, but easy to drive through.

  Schmidt called his truck "Honey," as in "come on, Honey, you can make it," and she had literally hummed across the plain with only one of her three drive axles engaged, and a huge plume of dust to mark her passing. Those were the good days, when he'd been fresh, and the driving had been easy.

  But that was a long time ago, before the badlands, and before the endless hell that followed. Schmidt peered out through the half arc of dust-free windshield, fightin
g the wheel, gritting his teeth as Honey waddled her way up and out of another gully. The hundredth? The thousandth? The millionth? There was no way to tell.

  Schmidt's mind had a tendency to wander, he knew that, but it seemed strange to take one section of a nearly lifeless planet and call it "the badlands." After all, the rest of the planet was nearly as "bad," and might've been classified as badlands somewhere else.

  As a geologist he knew the truth, that the badlands were nothing more than a region of small hills and deep gullies formed through erosion.

  Every now and then thunderstorms swept over the area and dumped two or three inches of rain onto the land all at once. The rain ran down off the hillsides, collected in the gullies,

  and gushed through the canyons in the form of flash floods. Tons and tons of dirt were washed away in the process. The result was a tortured hell of ups and downs.

  Honey roared, all three drive axles engaged, as she dragged herself up and out of the gully and onto the top of a low hill. Schmidt stepped on the brakes, checked his scanners for danger, and killed both the engines. The temp indicators were bright red. Honey needed a rest and so did he.

  He opened the door and climbed down from the truck. Dust puffed up and away from his boots. Right at that moment the sun came out from behind a cloud and bathed the land in gold.

  The geologist turned and looked out over the equatorial zone. It would be worse, much worse than the badlands, but he felt refreshed nonetheless. He was close now, maybe ten or fifteen miles from the cave, and only hours from some much needed sleep.

  The E-zone was flatter than the badlands, but broken just the same, and covered with thousands upon thousands of overlapping impact craters.

  Some of the craters were relatively new. They had crisp, clean edges, and were nearly untouched by the effects of wind and rain. The ground around them glittered with countless pieces of out-flung metal speckled with rust.

  Other craters were ancient things, depressions left by meteors that had struck hundreds, or even thousands of years in the past. They were little more than dimples now, softened by erosion, and filled with water or soil.