Rainbow Mars (14 page)

“They fought for the last of the water. Bet on it. Hanny, let's be careful. People who fight like this might set traps too.”

“We should be on the roof.”

“No, we just don't use the door.” Miya fired at a transparent wall and stepped through the hole.

Svetz backed after her. No ten-legged tigers followed them.

Here was another pool of silver lava. Miya took its temperature: 190°C. “Same as the other one. I was right, it's for cooking. Up the stairs, those little staggered platforms are where they ate.”

“Let's stay here. The beasts won't come into a house.”

“Hanny, is that your expert opinion?”

Would he stand behind that? He would. “Anything that thinks like a ten-legged tiger won't trap itself in this maze of rooms. Furthermore, it's my expert opinion that I need rest. I don't know where you're getting your strength, Miya. I've run out.”

He didn't wait for an answer. The sleeping rooms must be in one of the opaque towers. He borrowed the blaster and shot a hole in a wall. Up the spiral stair were two matched cubicles bigger than closets, and a glass wall with a faded obscene frieze on the glass.

The touch point in one room got him nothing.

The other deployed gray smoke that half-congealed to a springy bed. He heard Miya behind him, and he said, “Mine.”

“One of us should stay on guard,” she said. “Me?”

“My mind's foggy. Do it. Wake me up when you can't stand it anymore.” He started to strip off his pressure suit. Just opening zips was enough to tell him that the air was martian-cold. He kept it on. The gray foam accepted him and he slept.

*   *   *

He woke.

Miya was on the stair with her back to him.

He rolled out of the foam. He touched her shoulder and she jumped. “Four hours,” she said. “It's still dark out. Nothing threatening. The moons—well, look for yourself. How's the bed?”

“You're going to love it,” he said.

She nodded. She crawled into the foam.

Feeling the need to stretch, he went downstairs. He felt elated. Maybe that was only the bouncy feel of Mars gravity. There were no windows upstairs or down. The only light came from the forever bulbs. He armed himself before he stepped out.

Behind the sharp, close horizon was a silver flower, the Hangtree with solar sails deployed. That would be west, then. The Hangtree in its higher, slower orbit must be near setting.

Above the Hangtree, one of the hurtling moons was a glowing disk smaller than Luna but still too large. He watched it for an hour or so while he stretched against yesterday's kinks and injuries. The moon rose up the western sky. It was pale and featureless … but it was changing phase, from full to a fat crescent.

Maybe Miya had guessed right: that was moonlight on stratospheric ice crystals.

The corner of his eye caught motion.

He jumped straight backward through the doorway. The dark shape resolved, all teeth and too many legs, and slammed into the jamb while Svetz completed a backward somersault and jumped again, straight up three meters of stairwell. The beast roared like a high-pitched jackhammer and pushed through into the house. It was as big as the door.

Still in flight, Svetz screamed back, “Miya!” in case the beast's roar hadn't wakened her. The curve of the stairwell caught him. Now that his feet had some purchase, Svetz reached for the needle gun on his back.

Too slow! The beast flowed up the stairs and Svetz had to jump again. Its roar froze him and he landed badly. Miya must have heard the roar—

Miya was in the bedroom doorway with the blaster in her hands.

He stumbled past her, snatched at the doorway, turned with needle gun in hand. Too late. Miya fired downward. Her backhand slapped his chest, sending him into the other bedroom as the blast roared back up at them.

He waited until he couldn't hear anything before he crawled out.

The beast was gone. Below the upper landing, both lower landings and half the stair were gone. Shrapnel had spattered the living space below.

Miya said, “What a rush!”

“My hero,” he said. He craned his neck to see if the flight stick had survived. It looked untouched.

Miya said, “There, there, my pretty one, no danger shall harm you.”

Svetz said, “We're doing this all wrong.”

“It's dead. We're alive. Sorry about the stair.”

“No, hear me out. We can't walk a quarter of the way around the planet! We've got one flight stick. I stay here. You take the flight stick to Mons Olympus. Debrief Zeera and vice versa, then come back here with Zeera's flight stick and we'll fly back.”

Miya thought it over. Presently she nodded. She said, “You're the boss.”

“I don't know how to give orders. I was alone on every mission.”

“There has to be a boss.” She looked over the landing's fractured edge. “Long way down.”

“Nah.” Mars gravity. He jumped.

She caught him by his backpack frame and lifted him. “You'd just have to come back up,” she said.

“That's right, you've only had an hour's sleep.”

“Never mind that. Take off your skintight.”

“Why?… oh. Miya, I'm getting whiplash here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought you'd made yourself pretty clear, so I gave you up. I'm not sure how often I can do that.”

She sat down on the edge of the landing and swung her legs, not looking at him. “You work for the ITR. I work for Space Bureau. Most of the time we wouldn't be in the same time
or
place.”

“I hadn't thought that far.” He sat down beside her.

“Had you thought of transferring?”

“We could ask. X-cages don't generally carry two crew. Me, I'm not a cosmonaut. But we could ask.”

She sighed.

He asked, “You want your hero's reward anyway?”

“Sure.” She moved to kiss him through two filter helmets, and caught herself. She began opening zips instead.

Svetz watched her nakedness emerge while he dealt with his own. He didn't know where the zips were on a skintight pressure suit. It slowed him. Miya opened a score of zippers in a few seconds' time, then started helping Svetz with his. Suddenly she yelped, “It's
cold!
”

Svetz grinned. “I wondered!”

“Well, how the futz—” She saw the only answer. She zipped, zipped, and pulled, and Svetz leapt naked into the sleeping room with Miya on his tail.

She was the only warmth in the world. The congealed gray fog wrapped itself partly around them and held some of their heat. “It's still futzy cold,” she said.

“Well, try to remember why you slept in your pressure suit.”

“Oh, was that it? I thought I was too tired to take it off. Or maybe I just hadn't decided, Hanny. But a thought finally plods across my sluggish mind.
Zeera never saw you on a mission.
”

“No, of course not.”

They had to keep the filter helmets. They still couldn't kiss. The gray foam impeded their lovemaking. It tangled them. Svetz finally got enough of his arm free to reach a touch point. The fog softened to mist and seeped into the floor. Miya pulled them together in frantic reaction to the cold, and they connected.

And presently broke free and sprinted for the skintights.

“How the futz did Martians do this?” Miya asked, and went back into the room to look at the frieze. “Hanny—”

“Did it without the bed, didn't they?”

“Right. Kneeling.”

“The bed's only for sleeping, bet on it. If Martians had seen us they'd have laughed themselves sick.”

“Well.” They grinned at each other. Then … skintights weren't good for coitus, but they were fine for cuddling.

“I was furious with you,” she said.

“That's what I thought, but I couldn't see why.”

“For letting me think you were dead.”

“Miya, I couldn't tell the difference myself!”

“How are you feeling now?”

“Beaten. There are places where I don't hurt. Miya, what's your fantasy Hanville Svetz like? Is he taller? Brawnier?”

“Braver than Zeera thinks you are. Agile. Nonlinear thinker. Heals fast.”

“Does he negotiate or give orders?”

“Depends. You talk it out when there's time. Hanny, I'm describing what I see.”

“If you see that when we get home—”

“If Wrona will have me.”

23

…
across the gulf of space … intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes.…

—
The War of the Worlds,
H. G. Wells

 

After she was gone, Svetz tried to guess how long the flight would take. Moving at high altitude through Mars' already thin air, Miya could make a hundred and fifty klicks per hour. Mons Olympus was four thousand and a bit, far around the curve of the planet, but with no chance of getting lost. Mons Olympus would loom like a piece of the sky.

Twenty-five hours. Give them an hour to debrief. Twenty-five coming back.

*   *   *

He stayed in the Martian house, that first day. His injuries had stiffened up.

By noon of the second day he was beginning to starve.

The suit would conserve water—as the filter helmet would not—but it wouldn't feed him. He had to distract himself somehow.

He went exploring. He stayed on the bare rock crest and kept his needle gun in his hands.

They might have been a pack of wild dogs, all hunger and teeth, in the moment he glimpsed them. They flowed up the rock slope in a surge that was like so many maglev trains. He fired carefully into their mouths. The nearest fell at his feet.

They were miniatures of the ten-legged killers, no taller than Wrona but three times as long. They were dead. The anesthetic had shut down their breathing.

He dragged two back to the house.

Svetz dissected one, talking his way through it for the record. He learned little. They had the wet red interiors of mammals. He could identify a single longitudinal lung. A stomach segued smoothly into an intestine that coiled neatly down the abdomen.

He cut up the second adolescent and dropped the legs into hot silver metal. He had read of this: that men and women had killed animals for food. He didn't believe it until he lifted his filter helmet to free his mouth. Then the smell hit him. He did not decide to eat; he found himself tearing meat from the bone with his teeth.

It was good! He nearly broke a tooth, he had to learn to chew around the bone, and the meat was tough, but he was ravenous. He made himself stop, appalled at himself, and waited to see if he'd get sick. A hour later, he gorged.

He deep-fried the rest of the legs and several strips of what he thought was muscle, zipped it all into sample bags and set it outside where the martian cold would keep it.

*   *   *

Night. The Hangtree was below the horizon, not even a silver highlight now.

*   *   *

Noon of the third day: now he could begin to worry.

Miya didn't answer the beam.

He waited through the fourth day.

*   *   *

In the afternoon there came a dust plume on the horizon. Svetz zoomed on a spidery crucifix moving across the desert. It resolved into a low-built vehicle.

The helmet said, “Hello, Hanny!”

“Is that you? West of me, on the ground?”

“Yes. I couldn't get to Zeera. We've only got the one flight stick, but I found this.”

Miya was sailing along the dry canal. There was a wheel under the open cabin and four more wheels on long springy booms, and sails splayed on a mast and the booms.

He ran down to meet her.

“Get aboard,” she said. “I don't want to stop in one spot. We might sink.”

Svetz tossed his burden in and climbed after it.

“What's that?”

“You hungry?”

“Don't ask.”

“Here.”

“What
is
it?”

“Don't ask.”

“Take the wheel.” She examined the leg briefly, then ate as he'd showed her, helmet back, filter helmet on. Lift the edge of the filter helmet, bite, close it.

“Just keep us pointed west. Stick to the canal,” she said. “It's light enough, it won't break through the crust. Hanny, this is
good.
Are you going to tell me—?”

He told her. She asked for more.

*   *   *

Zeera was pinned down with monsters all around her. Miya couldn't get near her. They'd talked by beam.

“Is she hurt?”

“No,” Miya said, “but she's given up. I had trouble getting her to talk at all.”

The crater in Mons Olympus was an observatory. Zeera had looked down into a vastness of telescope mirrors. Square klicks of mirrors and framework still didn't fill much of that tremendous crater.

The Tanker was half hidden in a tangle of structures, two klicks northeast of the crater rim. A laboratory and army bivouac had grown up around the Tanker. When Zeera hove into view, they fired on her.

She flew out of their range and uphill before she brought the
Minim
down.

“Did they damage the
Minim?
”

“Not then and not after, but Zeera says they could, any time,” Miya said. “Now the
Minim
's surrounded too. Zeera's safe in the cabin, but they shot at me as soon as I got close.”

“Projectiles?”

“No, they've got blasters! Big heat beam projectors! Did you know the outer hull of the
Minim
is a heat superconductor? Makes reentry easier, but it also means a blast of heat won't melt holes in it.”

“Did you try your blaster on them?”

“Hanny, I thought I'd better get you first.”

Instead of leaving him four thousand klicks away, without air, food, water, or transport. “Good. I'm still catching up here. They've got a whole laboratory around the Tanker, right? And it's been there for years? We're lucky if they haven't taken the Tanker apart. Did it look all right?”