Red Planet Blues

TWENTY-FOUR

Iscrambled for the ladder—as much as one could scramble in a surface suit—but Dr. Pickover, unencumbered by such a thing, beat me to it. Probably just as well; he was stronger than me.

Pickover struggled to keep the locking wheel from being turned any further, but, damn it, whoever was on the other side managed a massive jerk of the wheel, knocking Rory off the ladder. He was now dangling from the wheel by both arms, with a two-story drop below. The twisting of the wheel had put the ladder behind him, and he seemed to be having trouble re-engaging with it. The wheel jerked once more, and—

Holy crap!

—Pickover was dislodged or let go, but either way, he came falling down the shaft in Martian slow motion.

I thought about reaching out to grab him, but there didn’t seem to be much point; it’d probably just bring me tumbling down on top of him. He hit the floor, bending at the knees as he did so, but he still collapsed into a heap.

“Rory!” I called, and I slid down the ladder. When I reached the bottom—my first time on the lower level—I helped him to his feet.

Newcomers to Mars often did themselves injuries because they felt superhuman but were still flesh and blood. But Pickover was superhuman. Still, it was a nasty height to fall from, even here. Pickover’s plastic face winced in pain as he rolled up his pant leg to expose his right ankle. Biological injuries were easy to spot: blood, bruising, swelling. There was no sign of any of that as Pickover probed the ankle with his fingers. “It’s bent,” he said, at last. “I can barely flex it.”

I thought of Juan’s Mars buggy up on the surface. Even if we could get out of here, if whoever had sealed us in had stolen or wrecked the buggy, there was no way Pickover could run me all the way back to New Klondike this time. I looked at my wrist air gauge; Rory could stay in here indefinitely, but I couldn’t. We’d been sealed in by somebody stronger than Pickover, meaning it was either a transfer or a biological who’d had something to help him turn the wheel. Even if we could undo the seal, anyone on the outside with a gun could easily pick me off as I tried to haul myself up out of the hatch.

“Is it Lakshmi again?” asked Pickover, as he rolled his pant leg down. “Or do you suppose someone else followed us this time?”

I’d been alert while we were leaving the dome, and hadn’t had my visor polarized on this trip. “No one could have,” I said. “I’m sure of that.”

He looked up at the hatch. “Could they have tracked Juan’s buggy?”

“I don’t see how. He said he’d swept it for bugs before we picked it up. And it’s a lot harder to track vehicles here than people think; there’s no GPS equivalent, and…”

“Yes?”

I blew out air—a luxury I might not have much longer. “And I’m an idiot,” I said. I reached into my equipment pouch and pulled out the switchblade I’d gotten from Dirk. I pushed the button that caused the blade to spring out. Rory looked alarmed as I turned the knife around so that the blade was aiming toward my chest.

“Hang on, old boy!” Pickover said. “We’re not done for yet.”

But I was just maneuvering the knife to hand it to him. “You’ve got super strength,” I said. “Can you break the haft open?”

He took the knife from me, looked at it for a moment, and indicated that he was going to snap the wine-colored handle by flexing it with his hands, as if to give me a chance to stop him. But I nodded for him to go ahead, and he did so.

The handle broke in two, and Rory split the pieces open. There was the channel for the blade, the spring mechanism—and the tracking device. I reached over, prized the little chip out, let it drop in slow motion to the deck, and ground the heel of my boot into it until it was crushed. Dirk, or whoever had hired him, had known it would be impossible to plant a tracking device on me—but having one in a knife I’d be bound to seize was another matter.

“Lakshmi Chatterjee must have hired the punk I got the knife from,” I said. “That’s how she managed to follow us out here in the dark, but…” I frowned.

“What?” said Pickover.

“Well, I—hmmm. How’d she know that I would be heading out to the Alpha? Did you tell anyone you were hiring me, Rory?”

“No, of course not.”

“Still, you could have been seen coming to my office. Back when half your face was missing, you’d have been quite conspicuous.”

“I—I hadn’t thought about that,” Rory said. “I’m not used to being clandestine.”

“Well, what’s done is done,” I said.

Pickover was trying hard to be unflappable, but, despite his reserved face, his voice had become higher, and he was darting his eyes about nervously. “So, what now?” he asked. “We seem to be prisoners.”

I looked around the lower level. It had a smaller interior diameter than the upper one, implying there was a donut of equipment or tanks surrounding us. “What about blowing the hatch?” I said. “Aren’t spaceship hatches supposed to have explosive bolts?”

“I’ll check,” said Pickover. He headed up the ladder, hauling himself up with his arms and letting the foot with the damaged ankle dangle freely. Once he was at the top of the shaft, he looked around. “I don’t see any controls for that,” he called down. He tried the wheel again, but it didn’t budge.

I moved off the ship’s centerline into one of the four compartments on the lower floor, found a bucket seat, and dropped myself into it. I looked down at the deck plating, pissed at myself for having been so easily duped with the switchblade. Pickover was banging around up at the top of the shaft, trying various things to get the wheel moving again.

After a time, I looked up. The chair I was in was facing the curving bulkhead in front of me, but it was on a swivel base, and I slowly rotated it toward the central shaft; my instincts wouldn’t let me keep my back to people, even though there was no one here but dead-as-a-doornail Denny and stainless-steel Rory. I looked more or less in the middle distance, at where the ladder began, but after a time my attention fell on the opposite bulkhead—which had a red door with a locking wheel in its center. Of course: the other exit—the one that would have led outside had the lander been sitting on the surface. But, damn it all, it wasn’t sitting on the surface. It was buried in the Martian permafrost.

What goes down must come up.

“Rory!” I said into my fishbowl’s headset.

“Yes?”

“Come down here.”

It didn’t take him long. “What?” he said, when he was standing between me and the red door.

“This is the descent stage, right?”

“Yes.”

“So beneath our feet,” I said, tapping the hull plating with my boot, “there are fuel tanks.”

“They’re actually in a torus around this level.”

“Ah, okay. But below us, there’s the descent engine, right? A big engine cone; a big landing rocket?”

“Yes.”

“So, assuming there’s any fuel left, what happens if we fire that engine?”

Pickover looked at me like I was insane. I get that a lot. “The engine cone is probably totally plugged with soil,” he said.

“Would we blow up, then?”

He frowned in a subdued transfer way. “I… I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s find out. There’s got to be a control center.”

“It’s here,” said Pickover, pointing to his right. I came over to the room he was standing next to. It had a curving control console, following the contour of the outer bulkhead. There was a bucket seat in front of it identical to the one I’d just vacated. I looked at Pickover.

“I don’t know how to fly a spaceship,” he said.

“Neither do I. And I bet Weingarten and O’Reilly didn’t really, either. But the ship should know.” I waved my arm vaguely at the ceiling lights. “The electrical system is working; maybe the ship’s computer is, too.” I lowered myself into the seat, and Pickover took up a position behind me. I scanned the instruments, but Pickover spotted what I was looking for first and reached over my shoulder to press a switch.

There was a big square red light on the console that flashed in what looked like a random pattern—but I knew it wasn’t; it was one of those lights that robots in old sci-fi flicks used to have that flashed in time with spoken words, once per syllable. Such lights didn’t really serve any purpose on robots, but they were handy to indicate that a computer was talking in a spaceship cabin that might or might not be pressurized. There wasn’t much air in the lander, and all of it was unbreathable, but it was sufficient to convey faint sound. I cranked up the volume on my suit’s external microphones. “Repeat,” I said.

“I said, can I be of assistance?” replied a male voice; in the thin air, I couldn’t say much more about it than that, although I thought it sounded rather smug.

“Yes, please,” I said. “Can you open the hatch?”

“No,” the computer replied. “Both egress portals are manually operated.”

“Can you blow the top hatch?”

“That functionality is not available.”

“All right,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “We’d like to take off.”

“Ten. Nine. Eight.”

“Wait!” I said, and “Hold!” shouted Pickover.

“Holding,” said the voice.

“Just like that?” I said. “We can just take off? You know we’re buried in Martian permafrost.”

“Of course. I engineered the burial.”

“Um, is it safe to take off?” asked Pickover.

“Well, safe-ish,” said the computer.

“What kind of answer is that?” I asked.

“An approximate one,” replied the prim voice.

“I’ll say,” I said. And then it occurred to me to ask another question. “Do you know how long you’ve been turned off?”

“Thirty-six years.”

“Right,” I said. “Do you know why Simon Weingarten marooned Denny O’Reilly here?”

“Yes.”

“Spill it.”

“Voiceprint authorization required.”

“Whose?”

“Mr. Weingarten’s or Mr. O’Reilly’s.”

“They’re both dead,” I said.

“I have no information about that.”

“I can show you O’Reilly’s body. It’s upstairs.”

“Be that as it may,” said the computer.

I frowned. “What other information has been locked?”

“All navigational and cartographic records.”

I nodded. If the lander ever was moved, no one but Simon or Denny could ask the computer how to get back to the Alpha. “All right,” I said. “We need to get out of here. That door”—I pointed to the other side of the ship—“is it an airlock?” I couldn’t see the computer’s camera, but I was sure it had one, and so it should have known what I was indicating.

“Yes.”

“The outer door is sealed?”

“Yes.”

“Does it swing in or out?”

“Out.”

I motioned to Pickover. He walked over and worked the wheel that opened the inner door, which swung in toward him. There was a chamber with curving walls between the inside and outside hulls of the ship, big enough for one person. “Is there a safety interlock that will prevent us from opening the outer door while the inner one is open?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the computer.

“Can it be defeated?” I assumed there must be a way to turn it off, since it’d be a pain in the ass to have to cycle through the airlock during testing back on Earth.

“Yes.”

“Do so.”

“Done.”

“Okay. I propose that you fire the engine to lift the ship up out of the ground so that the airlock is just above the surface. Can do?”

“Can do,” said the computer.

“All right,” I said. “Rory, are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

I got out of the chair and moved over to stand behind him. “Nothing personal,” I said, “but if whoever is outside opens fire, you’ve got a better chance of surviving than I do.”

The paleontologist nodded.

“Computer,” I said.

“My name is Mudge,” the machine replied.

I heard Pickover snort; the name must have meant something to him. “Fine, Mudge,” I said. “We’re ready.”

“Ten,” said Mudge, and he continued in the predictable sequence.

There was a wheel set into the outer door, which was also red. Pickover moved over and grabbed it with both hands, ready to start rotating it as soon as it was above the ground. I grabbed onto a handle conveniently set into the wall of the airlock, in case it turned out to be a rough ride.

“Two,” said Mudge. “One. Zero.”

The whole ship began to shake, and I heard the roar of the engine beneath my feet and felt it transmitted through the deck plates and the soles of my boots. We did not explode, for which I was grateful. But we didn’t seem to be going anywhere, either.

“Mudge?” I called.

The computer divined my question. “The permafrost is melting beneath us and, by conduction, at our sides, as well. Give it a moment.”

I did just that, and soon did feel us jerking upward. I tried to imagine what the scene looked like outside: perhaps like a cork working its way slowly out of a wine bottle.

There was a rectangle in front of Pickover, above the wheel, that I’d stupidly taken as decorative, but it was a window in the outer airlock door. Light was now streaming in from the top of it, and the strip of illumination was growing thicker centimeter by centimeter as the ship rose out of its muddy tomb. I couldn’t make out any details through the window, though: it was streaked with reddish brown muck.

If whoever had locked us in had been standing guard, I hoped—old softy that I am—that he or she realized what was going on, since I imagined the superheated rocket exhaust would spray out in all directions once the cylindrical hull was fully above ground.

Soon the entire height of the window was admitting light. Our ascent was still slow, though. Pickover was craning to look out the port, presumably to see when the bottom of the door was above ground—

—which must have been now, because he gave a final twist to the locking wheel and hauled back and kicked the door outward with the leg that had the uninjured ankle.

Suddenly we popped higher into the air—free now from the sucking wet melted permafrost. Pickover threw himself out the airlock with a cry of “Geronimo!”

I scrambled to follow suit, but by the time I got to the precipice, we were already dozens of meters above the ground; even in Martian gravity, the jump would surely break my legs and probably my neck, too.

“Abort!” I yelled over my shoulder. “Mudge, lower us back down!”

The vibration of the hull plating changed at once, presumably as the computer throttled back the engine. We hung in the air for a moment, like a cartoon character after going off a cliff, and then started to descend.

Pickover had ended up spread-eagled in the mud, but was now getting to his feet and trying to run, despite his bad ankle. The cylindrical habitat had reduced its altitude by half. Pickover was having a terrible time gaining traction in the mud; I didn’t want to singe him. “Cut the engine!” I called to Mudge. The hull suddenly stopped vibrating, and we began dropping like a rock. I was afraid the ship would fall right back down into the hole it had previously occupied, especially since it was probably widened now by the rocket exhaust. When I figured my chances were at least halfway decent for surviving, I leapt out of the airlock, trying for as much horizontal distance as I could manage.

When I landed, my legs went like driven piles into the muck. No sooner had they done so than a shock wave went through the melted permafrost as the massive lander impacted the surface behind me. I twisted my neck to see. The lander had hit half-on and half-off the hole, and now was teetering toward me; it looked like it was going to topple over any second. I tried to pull myself up and out of the mess, but it was going to take some doing—and the chances of the ship falling precisely so that I ended up poking safely through the open airlock doors instead of being crushed seemed slim. It was too bad we hadn’t brought along the lasso that Lakshmi had used on Pickover earlier; he could have employed it to haul me out of the quagmire.

That is, if he himself could get solid footing. Behind me, the tottering ship was making a groaning sound, conveyed through the attenuated atmosphere and picked up by my still-open external helmet microphones.

I was pushing myself up out of the mess as fast as I could, but a surface suit really wasn’t designed for those sorts of gymnastics. For his part, Pickover was staggering away from me like Karloff fleeing the villagers, the mud still sucking at his every step.

Suddenly—it was always suddenly, wasn’t it?—a shot rang out, audible because my external mikes were still cranked way up. The bullet whizzed past me and impacted the mud. I swung my head within the fishbowl, trying to make out the assailant. There: about ten o’clock, and maybe thirty meters away—a figure, probably a man, in an Earth-sky-blue surface suit, holding a rifle aimed at me.