Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

It was a tight fit to get the hoverchair out through the shop’s doorway, but he did it. I followed, and he spoke a command that locked up his store.

The chair zipped along so quickly that I was huffing and puffing myself by the time we got to the north exit. Ernie had a surface suit stored there that looked like the bag Phobos had come in. It was a struggle for him to get into it—it was a struggle for him to do pretty much anything—but he eventually managed it.

I had to rent a suit yet again. This time, it was the shade of green people used to associate with money. Ernie’s was deep purple; he resembled an enormous eggplant in it.

Ernie’s plane was one of three currently parked here. It was dark gray and had a gigantic wingspan—close to forty meters, I’d say. The front part of the cockpit looked like it had originally been designed to hold two side-by-side seats but had been modified for a single double-wide chair. I was relegated to the back; the habitat was teardrop-shaped, tapering toward the rear, so there’d only ever been one chair there. Once we were inside, Ernie set about powering up the plane.

Not only did you need big wings to fly on Mars, you needed a long runway to take off. The one here was a solid kilometer of Isidis Planitia that had been cleared of rocks. We made it almost to the end before I felt us rising.

I’d flown in small planes on Earth but never before on Mars, and I’d been in hibernation when I’d come here, so this was my first aerial view of New Klondike and environs. I craned my neck to see the city as we sped away from it: a large, shallow dome, glistening in the sun—looking for all the world like God had dropped a contact lens. Then there was nothing but Martian landscape stretching to the horizon below and the yellow-brown sky above. I pulled my tab out of my suit’s equipment pouch and dictated the directions I’d gotten from Mudge to the back of Ernie’s great loaf of a head.

The plane moved quickly but silently. I kept looking down, hoping to spot the white Mars buggy. Of course, it was always possible that Lakshmi had headed somewhere else, in which case I’d kick myself for letting Ernie know where the Alpha was, and—

—and there it was, up ahead, tooling along. We were arriving just in the nick of time; they were now just a few kilometers shy of the Alpha Deposit.

Airplanes on Mars need clear open stretches to touch down, just as they did to take off, and although Isidis Planitia was a plain, it wasn’t a plain plain, and landing our plane was going to be a pain. Ernie was circling, looking for a place to set down. Not much sound carried in the thin Martian air, but our giant wingspan would make us impossible to miss if Lakshmi or Reiko happened to look up.

Ernie swore in Armenian, and his massive head swung left and right as he continued to search. Finally, he muttered, “Here goes nothing!” and we started to descend.

The patch of ground he’d picked didn’t have any boulders, at least, but there were still plenty of rocks up to and including basketball size. The plane had the same sort of adaptive wheels that buggies had, although larger in diameter. Still, when we hit, we bounced several times as the wheels encountered rocks they couldn’t negotiate. My breakfast gave an encore performance at the back of my throat.

We skidded a considerable distance, with Gargantuan yelling “Yeehaw!” When we at last came to a stop, Ernie and I dogged down our helmets, and he made the canopy swing open. He needed both hands to climb down, and so he dropped his rifle overboard, then used the rungs built into the side of the plane to lower his bulk to the surface. Once he was down, he bent over—with great difficulty—and picked his rifle back up.

I followed him down, then looked out at the wide expanse of Martian terrain in front of me. Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of the Gold” was running through my head. It was, after all, greed that had driven the Great Martian Fossil Rush, the Great Klondike Gold Rush, and the Great California Gold Rush, and Morricone’s haunting theme captured that madness well.

Juan’s Mars buggy was on the horizon, coming toward us; the plane had landed in a kilometer-wide strip between it and the eastern edge of the Alpha—the edge that was salted with land mines.

I walked out past the wing tip and told my phone to transmit the OFF code Juan had given me.

The white buggy continued to barrel in. At this distance, I couldn’t see if it had green pinstriping; I suppose it was always possible that this was a different Mars buggy.

I told the phone to transmit again… and again… and again.

The damn thing was still closing, and Lakshmi must have had the accelerator right down to the floor. She was veering to the south a bit, clearly intending to go around our airplane. I had the phone send the OFF sequence once more, wondering if somehow Juan had made a mistake when he gave it to me; he had looked like he’d just woken up, after all, and—

—and, at last, the buggy was slowing. It skittered to a stop about seventy meters ahead of me. I could see movement within the canopy; of course, when the power went off, the life-support shut off, too. I imagine Lakshmi and Reiko were hustling to get their surface-suit helmets on. I had briefed Ernie on the way here, so he understood what was going down. He had his rifle butt against his shoulder and the barrel aimed at the buggy.

I’d put my holster on the outside of my suit. I pulled out my gun and ran toward the stalled vehicle—and the sight of me charging in with weapon drawn had the effect I wanted. Lakshmi popped the canopy on Juan’s car—it opened mechanically rather than electrically, for safety reasons—and she and Reiko scrambled out.

My legs were longer than theirs, and I soon overtook them. We stood facing each other with just five meters of rusty, dusty plain between us. Reiko was in a suit of a darker green than my own and Lakshmi again had on a red one. All of us still had our fishbowls polarized, meaning the women might not have yet identified me; I, of course, could tell which of them was which by their heights.

Behind me, as a glance over my shoulder confirmed, Gargantuan Gargalian was waddling in, and he was now raising his rifle. It looked like Lakshmi Chatterjee’s stint as Shopatsky House writer-in-residence was about to end with a bang.

Ilooked down at my wrist controls to see what frequency my radio was using, then held up my left hand with three fingers raised, then changed it to four fingers.

Lakshmi dipped her opaque helmet slightly in a nod. Both she and Reiko touched their own wrist controls, presumably punching in frequency thirty-four. But neither of them said anything, instead waiting for me to speak. And so I did: “All right. The jig is up. Let her go.”

I glanced over my shoulder again, just to get a sense of where Ernie now was, and—

Oh. He’d never met either of them, and their helmets were polarized. He’d had to choose which woman to take a bead on, and he’d mistakenly chosen Reiko. I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped when a pair of hands reached for the butterscotch sky. One of the raised hands, I saw now, was holding a tiny pistol. But the person raising her hands in surrender wasn’t Lakshmi Chatterjee—it was Reiko Takahashi.

Lakshmi reacted instantly, her right arm lashing out to seize the gun, which she promptly pressed into Reiko’s side. In the second it took for that to happen, it hit me: it hadn’t been Lakshmi who had kidnapped Reiko; it had been Reiko who had kidnapped Lakshmi, so that she could force Lakshmi to show her where the Alpha was. Reiko must have broken her own door lock before going to get Lakshmi—preparing an alibi for when she returned home alone; no one would blame her if she’d had to off her captor to get away.