She closed the hatch behind her and turned on her helmet lamp. She saw the interior exactly as the Soviet and American explorers had left it–or at least as the monument’s administrators wanted visitors to believe they had left it.
The garbage had been cleared away. A couple of stained coffee bulbs were prudently wired to the table. Checkpads were fastened to a desktop by eternally effective Velcro tabs, their ballpoint-ink entries still legible. A big plastic-covered map of Mars was bolted to the wall.
But here was the prize: a radio in pristine condition, mounted above the bench. A check of its power meter indicated that, after half a century, hordes of electrons still swarmed through its superconducting capacitors. Sparta had been prepared to sacrifice suit power if she had to, but it seemed that wouldn’t be necessary.
The tool kit from the
Mars Cricket
yielded up what she needed to improvise connectors so she could plug her suitcomm into the antique amplifier. She hesitated a moment before sending her message. Once she started broadcasting, she would be as visible to
Doradus
as
Doradus
had been visible to her–more so, for her message would be picked up by communication satellites and rebroadcast, and to hear her
Doradus
wouldn’t even have to be in line of sight.
Still, the cumbersome freighter would take its time crawling around the moon toward her. Even its SADs would take precious seconds to arrive on target. Sparta could call for help and still make her escape.
“Mars Station Board of Space Control, this is a Code Red emergency. Officer in trouble at Phobos Base. Requiring immediate assistance. Repeat, officer in trouble at Phobos Base. Require any available units to render immediate assistance. Mars Station Board of Space Control, this is a Code Red . . .”
She keyed off abruptly and left the radio hut, slamming the hatch behind her. She skimmed like a gliding bird down the smooth black inner walls of Stickney, alighting on the rim of a smaller, younger crater deep inside. She hooked herself into the makeshift foxhole with gloved hands, turned, and fixed her macrozoom eye on the shining structure she had just vacated.
Perhaps
Doradus
really was fleeing, maintaining communications silence. She could not see it from her position. Perhaps the Board of Space Control really was coming to the rescue, in the person of this Lieutenant Fisher. But Sparta knew the roster of the Mars Station unit. Yes, there was a Fisher based at Mars Station, but she was a clerk.
Blake had been spinning helplessly for four minutes when the
Kestrel
’s hatch opened and a spacesuited figure emerged. The orange man was wearing a high-pressure suit with a full maneuvering unit. He was carrying something Blake didn’t recognize, but it looked like a gun. He aimed himself toward the limb of Phobos and jetted away. The hatch closed automatically behind him.
The sun was behind the spacesuited figure as it swept over the edge of Stickney under full maneuvering jets and homed on the radio shed at Phobos Base. Sparta watched as “Fisher” landed expertly outside the shed, opened its hatch, and disappeared inside. A few seconds later the hatch opened and he reemerged.
He was half a kilometer away, but to her eye he might be standing half a meter away. She could not see his face through his reflective visor, but she knew he was no member of the Space Board. He was holding a laser rifle.
How long can you wait, Linda? My oxygen tanks are full. You’ve been up here for hours. I’ll find you eventually–when you’re dead–so why not give up now and save Blake? The poor fellow is adrift in space without a maneuvering unit, without a friend in sight, with no pressure in his tanks.
Oh, I understand–you think perhaps this is just a clever fiction. But remember? You yourself demanded that the No ble Water Works put its executive spaceplane at the disposal of Mr. Redfield. You should have inquired who the pilot was–not that the name would have meant anything to you– and of course, I was happy to oblige you. You can see the Kestrel just about now, I think, if you are more or less where I suspect you are. It should be rising in the east.
With deadly precision Sparta had directed the plaque’s reflection straight into his eyes. She saw him flinch and spin away. While the filtered sun was not bright enough to blind him through his visor–not for more than a moment or two–his vision must be full of dancing corruscations.
She hated what she did next, for Sparta would risk her own life rather than kill another person–but she had no right to sacrifice Blake to her desperate ideals. She raised the shotgun at her side and sited it with inhuman accuracy at the confused man above her. The explosion drove her back against the crater wall. The shot pattern sped toward its target with no drag and insignificant deflection.
But he’d been quick. As he’d jerked himself away from the painful brightness of the mirror he’d dived for the ground. Sparta’s blast tore a ragged hole through the venerable aluminum of the Phobos Base radio hut behind where his helmet had been. By the time she’d recovered her balance and jacked a second shell into the gun, he was out of sight.
Black spots were dancing in front of Blake’s eyes. The aching pressure to open his mouth and gasp for air was becoming unbearable. He knew that if he did so, there would be no air to breathe. He also knew– although it took extreme effort to persuade himself of this truth–that the blood’s dissolved oxygen lasts many minutes beyond the brain’s conviction that one is suffocating.
The modern spacesuit is the product of over a century of development, and one of the earliest improvements was the perfection of the interchangeable life-support unit. Unlike the spacesuits of the 1980s and ’90s, the tanks on pressure suits and deep-space suits could readily be traded in vacuum.
He held his breath while he spun slowly in space. He let himself spin once, then again, counting as precisely as he could: “One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand . . .” If anoxia overcame him the counting would amount to nothing, but at the moment he still trusted his reason. He was feeling anything but euphoric.
When his back was to the spaceplane, he hurled the pack away from him as hard as he could. It massed a fraction of what he and the rest of the suit massed together, and it tumbled away fast. He moved backward more slowly–but just as inevitably.
By the time he reached the
Kestrel
he was turned half toward it. There were no handholds on the streamlined surface of the spaceplane, but he caught the leading edge of its swing wing and held on for his life. The recessed handle of the airlock was just beyond his grasp, but by now this was all starting to seem like fun. Blake giggled. He wished he didn’t feel so damn good. That meant he was going to die real soon. What a gas . . . !
Calling the pilot of the
Kestrel.
This is Blake Redfield calling the pilot of the Noble spaceplane. This is going out over all channels, Red. I’m talking to you, but every ship in Mars space is hearing what I’m telling you. Everybody in that freighter is hearing what I’m telling you. Everybody in Mars Station Traffic Control is hearing what I’m telling you. I’m sitting in the lefthand seat of your plane, Red, and you’d better hope somebody comes to take you off that rock, be cause I’m not letting you back inside.
She saw the rockets of the spaceplane burst into blue flame. He’d understood enough to act on her warning. She waited in agony as the
Kestrel
wheeled in the sky . . . waiting for the incoming torpedo from
Doradus
.
A burst of scrambled communication came over her commlink. And at that moment she saw the orange man rise from his hiding place and begin to
run
–run along the north rim of Stickney in astonishing strides, one, two, three–a hundred meters, two hundred at a leap–then stretch like a longjumper and soar right off the surface of the moon. The gas jets of his maneuvering unit puffed and augmented his takeoff. His white-suited figure dwindled in the direction of
Doradus
.
She held him in her sights. The shotgun blast, unhindered by atmosphere, undeflected by strong gravity, would have intercepted him at any point on his trajectory. The pattern would have spread and spread; perhaps only one massive pellet would have impacted his helmet. That would have been enough.
Almost before the
Doradus
’s airlock hatch had closed behind him, there was a sudden blast of steering jets and the pirate ship’s main drive burst forth in the fury and splendor of fusion exhaust. In seconds
Doradus
was shrinking sunward, free of Phobos at last. Sparta wondered if the ship’s commander were thankful to leave, even in defeat, this miserable lump of rock that had so annoyingly balked him of what should have been easy prey.
A female voice broke into the suitcomm channel.
Inspector Troy. Inspector Troy. This is Inspector Sharansky, Board of Space Control. We are responding to your request for assistance. Please advise. Inspector Troy . . .
The channels in the metal were different from each other but all the same height and width and depth. They ran in straight lines. There were three dozen different kinds of them, but they repeated themselves in various sequences until the total number of them, etched in the metal, was a thousand and more. . . .