Hide and Seek

by Paul Preuss

  With a brief glow of its steering jets, the SAD moved on. Sparta switched on her suit pumps and allowed herself to breathe again.

  The incident confirmed her suspicion that the Doradus was interested in more than simply recovering the plaque; it also needed to eliminate her as a witness. There are more men on the chessboard now, Sparta thought, and the game is a little deadlier. But the initiative is still mine.

  The SAD kept going until its silhouette vanished in the night sky to the southeast; since the missile was traveling an almost straight course in the low gravitational field, it would soon be leaving Phobos behind, unless. . . . Sparta waited for what she knew would happen next. In a few moments she saw it, the brief stab of steering jets: the projectile was swinging slowly back on its course.

  At almost the same moment she saw another faint flare far away in the southwest corner of the sky. She wondered just how many of the infernal machines were in action.

  She considered what she knew of Doradus–there were not so many freighters in space that an officer in her job could not remember the basic facts about them all, even without an enhanced memory. Doradus had been built ten years ago at the New Clyde Shipyards, one of the oldest and most respected of the private shipyards orbiting Earth. It was an average-sized vessel for a freighter, unusual at the time only in that it had a somewhat higher ratio of fuel-to-payload mass than was customary. The crew complement was ten, also unusually large–the minimum and customary crew being three–but because Doradus was intended specifically to serve the burgeoning settlements of the Mainbelt, it was not illogical that it should sacrifice a bit of carrying capacity for speed, or that it should have a crew large enough to be self-sufficient where docking and cargo-handling facilities were primitive.

  The ship’s history since then had been uneventful, although Sparta recalled that its maiden voyage had kept it away from Earth for three full years. Sparta wondered just where it had gone during that cruise and how it had spent its time. She had no doubt that some considerable period had been spent secretly converting Doradus into a pirate ship.

  Even with an extra-large crew it seemed unlikely that Doradus had more than one fire-control officer, whose computer would have difficulty simultaneously keeping track of more than half a dozen SADs in a small area–for the greatest challenge of working with SADs was to prevent them from blowing one another up.

  Sparta herself could keep track of that many SADs if she could find them. With a bit of luck, that would be no problem–and at the same time, she would find Doradus. Somewhere not far away the Doradus was pumping out radio power, at frequencies from a kilohertz on up. She switched on her suit’s broadband comm unit again and began cautiously to explore the spectrum.

  She quickly found what she was looking for–the raucous whine of a pulse transmitter not far away. She was picking up a subharmonic, but that was good enough: the Doradus had betrayed itself. As long as the ship kept a data channel open to its missiles, Sparta would know exactly where it was.

  She moved cautiously toward the south, listening to the transmitter whine with superhuman sensitivity, analyzing what she heard at lightning speed. With an oscillation imperceptible to ordinary ears the signal alternately faded and increased sharply; the pulsed signal was interfering with itself as Sparta moved with respect to the ship, and the width of the diffraction zones gave her the relative velocity. From the increasing signal strength she knew she was getting closer to Doradus. She should see it–

  –there. The Doradus was hanging just above the southern horizon, perhaps five kilometers above the surface, rimlit in marslight.

  Sparta guessed that Doradus had made contact with the penetrator rocket and was station-keeping above it, at a sufficient distance that its optical and other sensors could sweep most of the southern hemisphere of Phobos. The scheme gave her an advantage–any landing party would have a long way to go to get to the surface.

  Sparta had another advantage, due not to the tactics of Doradus but to plain honest luck. It was “winter” on the southern hemisphere of Phobos; Sparta no longer had to worry about the rapidly revolving sun, which had sunk below the northern horizon. It would be dark in this neighborhood for a long time.

  Sparta settled down comfortably where she could just see the freighter above the horizon. When the landing party left the ship, the patrolling SADs–most of them, anyway–would have to be inactivated. Then she could move in.

  She didn’t have long to wait.

  The sound of the missile-control transmitter suddenly died. A moment later a bright circle opened in the ochre-shadowed sphere of Doradus’s crew module.

  With her macrozoom eye zeroed in on the airlock, Sparta could see as clearly as if she were floating only a dozen meters away. The round hatch swung fully open and four space-suited figures emerged, one coming quickly after the other. Sparta noted with interest that their spacesuits were black–and that they were carrying weapons. These people took their piracy seriously.

  Gas jets puffed, and the four began their descent.

  Taking advantage of every crater and hillock, Sparta moved forward, skimming Phobos like a low-flying grasshopper. She tuned her suitcomm back to standard communication channels and was rewarded with a terse vocal hiss: Right ten degrees.

  A woman’s voice. The suited figures above her, black cutouts against the stars, spiraled down like slow-motion skydivers.

  When they hit the dusty surface Sparta was already in position, belly down behind a massive block of rock which glistened like coal. She was not a hundred meters from the landing site. She watched as three of the party fanned out, taking up positions in a rough circle around the fourth, who disappeared over the lip of one of the moon’s big radiating grooves.

  Another burst on the commlink, a man’s voice: We have located the objective.

  Almost five minutes passed without further communication. The three crewmembers standing guard bounced nervously, rising a meter or two above the black dirt with each step. Below the edge of the groove, out of sight, the fourth was presumably digging.

  The next move was up to Sparta. The timing was tricky.

  She had the laser welder from the tool kit out and ready, cradled in her arms. The welder was not an ideal rifle. While it had a power-pack as massive as any rifle’s, it had no provision for aim at a distance; Sparta’s right eye was her telescopic sight. And though a laser beam spreads very little in the vacuum of space, the welder’s optics were designed for optimum focus a few centimeters in front of its barrel.

  The power reserves wouldn’t allow keeping a beam on three distant spacesuits, one after the other, long enough to burn a significant hole in each, but Sparta had no desire to kill anyone in the landing party. She only needed to disable them.

  The objective is in my possession. Returning to the ship.

  Before the man who had been busy excavating the buried head of the penetrator could reappear above the rim of the trench, Sparta shot the nearest guard. She heard the woman’s scream over the suitcomm channel.

  Sparta’s laser had illuminated the woman for the briefest fraction of a second, not her torso but through the glass of her visor; before the visor glass could react to the light, the brightness of a dozen suns had exploded inside the unfortunate woman’s eyes.

  The others on guard instinctively tried to wheel; it was a mistake which sent both of them spinning out of control. Sparta got one of them before she had completed even a single rotation; she heard the woman’s scream over the suitcomm.

  The second guard, a man, compounded his mistake by firing his shotgun. Paradoxically, the illconsidered act almost saved him, for he was propelled starward by the gun’s recoil. Sparta held her aim for an agonizing two seconds as he tumbled away, before his visor came around to face her; evidently he had not yet figured out his companions’ mistake, for he had failed to darken the glass manually.

  He too wailed when the light burst in his head.

  Landing party, come in. . . .

 
; We are under attack. Send in SADS.

  Sparta smiled grimly. She could take out the eyes of a SAD as efficiently as she’d blinded the guards. There were an estimated half a dozen SADs out there on the perimeter. She checked her power pack. Well, as long as she didn’t miss even once . . .

  The man who now clutched the Martian plaque rocketed straight up out of the rill where he’d been hiding. Whether by luck or good sense, his back was to Sparta; he could not be blinded. Nevertheless Sparta aimed the laser welder and fired a sustained burst.

  Five seconds passed. Her target rose farther and farther above the surface. Ten . . . her laser power ran out, and at the same moment the gas reservoir in the man’s maneuvering pack overheated and exploded.

  The force of the explosion sent him hurtling back toward Phobos. Sparta had already tossed the useless bulky laser behind her and launched herself on an intercepting trajectory.

  They closed on each other with slow precision. The man was alive, and would stay alive if Doradus rescued him while there was still air in his suit. Sparta was satisfied that she had not murdered a man; she was otherwise uninterested in his fate. She was interested only in the precious object he gripped in his right glove.

  He saw her coming, but he could do nothing except writhe helplessly, out of control.

  SADs target on me! Danger of capture!

  At the last second he threw the gleaming mirror as hard as he could, away from him. In his panic he threw it almost at her, down toward the surface of the moon. Sparta clutched at the plaque and missed. She swung her booted feet around and kicked the man’s helmet, launching herself off him in the direction of the speeding plaque, nimbly evading the clutch of his gloves. She boosted herself at maximum power with her gas jets.

  The seconds passed with interminable slowness. Sparta overtook the plaque shortly after it struck the surface, throwing up a cloud of coal-black dust that hung suspended in vacuum. She launched herself from the surface with one arm, like a diver moving along the bottom of the sea, and snatched the tumbling mirror before it bounced farther. With a burst of her jets she drove herself on toward the nearest crater.

  The helplessly struggling crewman hit dirt a few seconds later and rebounded into space. If Doradus had any interest in rescuing the landing party, that interest was subordinate to the desire to destroy Sparta–and apparently the plaque with her, if necessary. Sparta had distanced herself from the crewman by almost a hundred meters when the first SAD came in. The missile found him, not her, and exploded in fury.

  By then she was in a foxhole-sized crater. Shrapnel peppered the landscape around her. She heard long screams on her suitcomm radio as the other exposed members of the landing party were hit by the fragments of the warhead, their suits torn open, their life’s blood and breath spilling into space.

  Sparta felt the old anger rise, the rage she felt against the people who had tried to kill her, the people who had murdered her parents. She would have let those crew people live. Not even their blindness would have been permanent. Their own commander had slaughtered them.

  With effort she suppressed her adrenalin surge. She switched her suitcomm channel back to the SAD command frequency. It was child’s play to evade the missiles; she had only to stay silent and still when they were within range, move cautiously when they were distant. How long could Doradus afford to cause havoc in near-Mars space? Sooner or later, Mars Station would be alerted.

  Meanwhile, let Doradus think it had killed her, too. Let anyone aboard dare come to confirm it.

  Before she left the scene of the carnage she added a shotgun to her kit.

  XIX

  Blake sat under the eye of the orange man’s pistol for half an hour. Toward the end of the flight there was a brief moment of vertigo while the spaceplane spun on its axis. Shortly afterward the sensation of weight was restored as the Kestrel began to decelerate.

  The natty little red-haired man was undisturbed by any of this. He perched comfortably on the edge of the flight-deck door when the plane stood on its tail, trusting the plane’s computers to handle the details, never wavering in his aim. He’d answered none of Blake’s questions, had made no move to come closer to Blake or to turn away, had hardly registered more than a slight smile when Blake complained that his bladder was full and he desperately needed to make a trip to the head. He had given Blake not the slightest chance to escape the pistol’s bleak stare.

  Then a signal chimed in the cabin of the small spaceplane.

  “Time to put on your spacesuit,” the orange man said cheerily. “You’ll find it in the locker beside the airlock.”

  “Why should I put on a spacesuit?” Blake snapped.

  “Because I’ll shoot you if you don’t.”

  Blake believed him. Still he tried. “Why do you want me in a spacesuit?”

  “You’ll learn that soon enough, if you choose to get into it by yourself. Although I admit that you would be almost as useful to me dead–should you require me to kill you now and stuff you into the thing myself.”

  Blake expelled his breath. “Why save you the trouble, if you’re going to kill me anyway?”

  “My dear Mr. Redfield! Your death is by no means inevitable–else I would not have bored myself to tedium, sitting here watching you all this time!” The man’s grin was almost charming. “Have I motivated you sufficiently?”

  Blake said nothing, but cautiously unloosed his harness. While the orange man watched from his overhead perch, Blake climbed down to the suit locker, opened it, and began struggling into the soft fabric suit that hung there.

  “Do I have time for the prebreathe?” Blake asked. The suit was equipped for oxygen only, not built for the full air pressure which had been standard on Mars. Unless Blake purged his bloodstream of dissolved nitrogen–a process that required hours–the gas would bubble out of his blood under the suit’s low oxygen pressure, giving him a painful case of the bends.

  “You’re being silly again, but it doesn’t matter,” the orange man remarked. “You won’t have time to get the bends. A few minutes after you’re through the lock we’ll both know whether you are going to live or die.”

  “That’s a comforting thought,” Blake muttered.

  “I regret to confess that your comfort, while it concerns me in the abstract, as a consideration pales by comparison to the larger aims to which it must be sacrificed.”

  Without a weapon of his own Blake couldn’t think of a worthy reply to that baroque expression of sentiment, so he climbed into the spacesuit. Shortly after he was done, a second chime sounded.

  “Hang on,” the orange man said. “We’re about to go weightless again.”

  The rumble of the Kestrel’s engines cut out a few seconds later. Blake and his captor were both adrift again. As before, the gun hardly wavered.

  “Seal your helmet,” said the orange man. “Now into the airlock. Right now–and close the hatch behind you.”

  Blake complied. If he’d had any thought of jamming the hatches, the orange man was too quick for him, flying down the short aisle and slamming the door behind him.

  Before Blake could even grab the safety rail, the outer hatch, triggered from inside, slammed open. The air in the lock rushed out and he was propelled spinning into space, gasping for air. He stared desperately around him, trying to orient himself.

  He saw the enormous crescent of Mars, filling much of the sky. He saw a huge black rock, crumpled and striated and cratered, which he knew must be Phobos. Behind him he saw the slim dart of the Noble Water Works executive spaceplane he had just exited so precipitously, its silvery skin reflecting the bright yellow sun and the red planet Mars.

  And he saw a long white ship, a freighter, some five kilometers distant but moving slowly in his direction under maneuvering rockets.

  He wished he had maneuvering rockets. Without them, he was probably going to die, and soon: the pressure gauge of his suit was already on emergency reserve. He calculated that he had at most five minutes to live under the p
artial pressure of oxygen remaining in his depleted tanks.

  The outer hatch of the Kestrel closed firmly behind him.

  Sparta had made her way cautiously northward, keeping a close eye on the heavens and a sensitive ear to the data channels that Doradus used to keep track of its hunting SADs. Once she noted a flare of light on the western horizon, its spectrum that of an exploding SAD, and she guessed that the exasperated fire-control officer had seen a humanlike shadow–or, more likely, that an overruled computer had allowed two SADs to home on each other’s exhaust.

  Only once did she see a missile drifting inquisitively overhead. Keeping perfectly still, with her spacesuit’s systems in stasis, she was confident that she was undetectable. And once only, Doradus itself hove into view. Sparta froze between two rocks until it had sunk beneath the horizon again; its radio signals broke up and grew faint. Sparta thought the commander must be getting desperate, to be searching the landscape of the dark moon so randomly. But the position of the ship was no longer her primary concern–

  –for she had reached her goal. On the sunlit rim of Stickney stood the bright aluminum domes of Phobos Base, untouched in half a century. Untouched and uncorroded.

  Sparta needed to send a message farther than the comm unit in her space suit could transmit. What she needed was an amplifier and a big antenna.