Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

“But that counter slab you brought to my office was solid, even at room temperature.”

“Only because I’d infused it with a stabilizer, replacing the water content with thermoplastic.”

“Ah.”

He rose and continued walking. After about forty meters we came to a spot where there was a big divot out of the ground. “That’s where the mine that blew up was,” he said pointing. “And over there’s where I recovered that one that was rusted through.” He indicated a much smaller defect in the surface.

I began a slow minesweep of all 6,000 square meters of what Pickover had identified as the Alpha Deposit; he walked behind me.

While we walked along, I tried to commit landmarks to memory; this was my first time here at the Alpha, but I suspected it wouldn’t be my last, and knowing the terrain is halfway to winning a battle. Going right back to the first Viking landers, people had been giving whimsical names to various Martian boulders. Off to my left was a big one that looked like the kind of car I’d seen in 1950s movies—it even had a couple of fin-like projections; I mentally dubbed it “Plymouth.” And to my right was a head-shaped rock with craggy good looks; the old-movie buff in me felt “Hudson” was the perfect name for it.

It turned out the Alpha wasn’t surrounded by land mines—which, after all, would have required a lot of them. But there was an extant line of twelve, each about eight meters from the next, along the eastern perimeter of the Alpha; the one that had exploded, and the one that had rusted out, would have been two additional points along that line. I guess that meant New Klondike was indeed east of here, and Willem Van Dyke had assumed anyone out looking for the Alpha would come from that direction.

If this were an old battlefield, we’d just lob rocks at the remaining land mines and blow each of them up in turn. But that might damage precious fossils, and so instead we set about carefully clearing them. The mines were mostly buried under a couple of centimeters of dry sand. Rory used his blower at a shallow angle to remove the sand from on top of one of the mines, and sure enough, the deactivation hole was visible right in the middle of the disk. The hole was actually plugged with sand, which is something neither of us had anticipated but we both probably should have. But after a moment, a thought occurred to me. I had transferred the knife to the equipment pouch on my surface suit. I pulled it out.

“What’s that?”

“A switchblade, I said.

He frowned, clearly unhappy that I’d brought a weapon along. But I handed it to him, and showed him the button that caused the blade to spring out. He had better balance than me, better reflexes, and had already proven he could survive a land-mine explosion. And so he stood over the mine, one leg on either side of it, and he bent over, positioned the closed switchblade above the deactivation hole, and pressed the button.

The blade shot out, nicely slicing through the sand, and its tip must indeed have hit the button down below because a little mechanical flag on the top of the mine, near the center, flipped over from red to green—just as the material I’d read said it would.

Rory couldn’t let out a sigh of relief, but I could, and did. He then pried the mine up; it seemed stuck a bit in the permafrost beneath it, but it finally came free. We repeated the process eight meters farther along, deactivating and liberating another Caldera-7.

We could have continued on, deactivating all the other mines, but by this point I needed something to eat. And so we each picked up one of the deactivated mines and headed back toward the buggy; I’d bought some sandwiches from the little shop at the airlock station but needed to go inside the pressurized cabin so I could take off my fishbowl to eat them.

Before we did that, though, Pickover opened the buggy’s trunk again, and we put the deactivated mines inside; on the way back home, we’d find someplace to dispose of them. There were brown fabric sacks in the trunk; part of a paleontologist’s kit, I guessed. Pickover used some of them to make nests to carefully cushion the mines, just in case.

While he was doing that, I looked out at the area, which, to my eye, seemed no different from anywhere else on this part of Mars: endless orange plains under a yellow-brown sky, and—

Oh, Christ.

“Rory,” I said, over my helmet radio, “do you have telescopic vision?”

He closed the trunk, straightened, and faced me. “Sort of. I’ve got a twenty-to-one zoom built-in. It helps when working on fossils. Why?”

I pointed toward the horizon. “Is that what I think it is?”

I watched as he turned his gaze. Nothing happened on his face, making me wonder what mental command he used to access the zoom function. “Who could that be?” he asked.

Damn. So it was another Mars buggy, sitting out on the planitia. We’d been tailed through the dark, all the way here from New Klondike. Normally, I’d have spotted a tail almost at once, but I’d had this stupid polarized fishbowl over my noggin for the whole ride out.

And Pickover had made me leave my gun behind.

Ithink we should get out of here,” I said into my headset microphone.

“We can’t leave the Alpha exposed to looters,” Pickover replied.

“Rory, we’re defenseless.”

“The fossils are defenseless.”

“Damn it!” I intended the curse for him, but as I said it, the distant Mars buggy started moving in, kicking up a plume of dust as it did so, and Pickover took the words as a response to that.

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re barreling directly toward us.”

The radio we were using was supposed to be encrypted, but whoever was coming at us now might have bribed the guy I rented my suit from to reveal the encryption code. The person or persons in that Mars buggy might well be listening in on everything I said to Pickover, and so now knew that they’d been spotted.

When two biologicals didn’t want to use radio on the surface, they touched their helmets together and let the sound pass between them. Pickover wasn’t wearing a helmet. I wondered if he’d opted for super hearing as well as super vision—although I couldn’t imagine what use the former would be for a fossil hunter. I turned off my radio and shouted, “They might be listening in on our communications.”

The Martian atmosphere was only about one percent as thick as Earth’s; it conducted sound, but not very well. Pickover was looking at me but it was clear that he hadn’t heard what I’d said. I walked over to him and motioned for him to stand still. I then leaned my helmet against his artificial head.

“I say!” he exclaimed as I did so.

I spoke only slightly louder than normal. “They may have been listening to our radio. Turn yours off.” I pulled my head away, and he nodded but didn’t do anything else, again making me wonder how that worked for a transfer—what did he do inside his mind that deactivated the transmitter? But although I could make noise—my helmet was pressurized—his jaw was flapping in the tenuous Martian air and wasn’t making any sound I could hear. I was good at reading lips—a marketable skill for a detective—but the restrained movements of his were different enough from those of a biological that I wasn’t able to make out what he was saying.

I touched my helmet to his forehead—the only time in recent memory that I’d done something similar was head-butting a drunk at The Bent Chisel. “I can’t hear you,” I said loudly. “Let’s separate. They can only come after one of us in that vehicle. You stay here. I’ll see if I can draw them away from the Alpha, okay?”