Terry Pratchett - The Long Mars

She walked forward for a closer look. The ship had obviously come down hard, and was ripped open, but it must have looked weird enough beforehand. There were padded things with grooves in them that could have been seats. She glimpsed what looked like bones, gleaming beneath rotted fabric.

And Willis was holding a skull; it was crested, arrow-shaped and two or three times bigger than a human head.

Again something moving overhead caught Sally’s eye. She tipped her head, angling her flashlight, trying to find it again. Something pale, flapping.

‘The ship doesn’t concern us,’ Willis said. ‘Leave it for the expeditions from the universities. We’ll take images, a few samples. Bits of bone. Maybe this skull. Then we’ll get our chunk of cable material and get out of here . . .’

The thing that was falling from above came closer now, drifting slowly in the thickening air, the low gravity, flapping gently, like a damaged bird. As it settled to the life-crowded ground, not far from Sally, she saw that it was a ceramic panel fixed to aluminium struts, painted with the corner of a Stars and Stripes, clearly visible.

It was a piece of Woden .

THOR BURST OUT of the hole in the Martian ground and into the light of midday.

Mars, more than half as far again as Earth was from the sun, had always struck Sally as a murky kind of world, swathed in twilight colours. After emerging from the pit, though, it seemed dazzlingly bright, the opened-out landscape huge, and it took her a few seconds to get her bearings.

Then she saw chunks of wrecked glider scattered all around the rim of the pit, bone-white fragments chopped and chewed as if by some huge jaw.

As soon as he had gained some altitude from the thermal uplift that he got from the pit, Willis immediately turned the glider’s nose westward, towards their overnight camp. He dipped low for speed; the glider whipped across the rock-strewn ground. There were tracks, Sally saw, like ski marks, cutting across the thin lines of Neil Armstrong spacesuit-boot footprints the crew had made yesterday between their camp and the pit rim.

Then she was distracted by something moving, out in the distance. It raced over the rocky ground, drawn by a mud-brown sail, riding on some kind of ivory-white runners, raising a big rooster-tail of dust. Just as she’d seen a million worlds back: it was a sand-whaler.

Back at what was left of the camp, they circled over the wreckage. The glider was so comprehensively trashed that Sally could barely make out its narrow-winged cruciform layout. Their bubble-dome shelters were still standing, amid scattered bundles of gear, food, water, blankets, clothing, bits of comms and science gear.

And, in the camp, there was Frank Wood, she saw to her relief, standing and waving at them, apparently uninjured, his pressure suit intact.

Sally called down, ‘Frank? You OK?’

‘See for yourself.’

Willis called, ‘I’m putting her down.’

Frank turned, scanning the horizon. The racing form, the dust cloud, was a good distance away. ‘Yes. Do it. He’s far enough away for now. We need to salvage as much of our stuff as we can. But, Willis, keep the launch booster primed for takeoff. We can’t afford to lose our last glider.’

‘Noted.’ Willis dipped the nose and brought the glider down in a hasty, bumpy landing.

Sally immediately unbuckled and opened the canopy. ‘In fact, Dad, why don’t you stay on board? Stay ready to take her up and out of the way of danger.’

Again Willis hesitated, thinking it over. ‘That makes sense.’

Sally strode over towards Frank, who called back, ‘Now do you see why I insisted on fall-backs?’

‘Not the right moment for a lecture, Frank,’ Sally snapped.

‘So how was the pit?’

‘Nor for a travelogue. Frank, I get the feeling we haven’t got a lot of time here.’

‘You’re right.’ He glanced over at the dust plume again. ‘I was looking east – the way you two had gone. He came in out of nowhere, from the west. He just drove his sand-yacht straight into the glider, severed a wing in the first pass. I was near the bubble domes. I grabbed a strut from the wreck – nearest I had to a weapon – I stood by the bubbles and the rest of the gear while he tore into the glider again. Well, he smashed up the bird, and then he took chunks of it off to the pit. I saw him throwing the gear in.

He’s smart, you know; he’s modified the survival bags to give him self a lot of flexibility.’

‘He?’ Willis called. ‘Who the hell is this?’

Frank looked across at the glider, bleakly. ‘You should know, Willis. Remember the whalers, a million worlds back? You traded them Steppers, for access to those monoliths. Do you remember how it went? One of those ten-armed characters got hold of your boxes and survival bubbles, and started lording it over another of them—’

‘You called him the prince,’ Sally said.

‘Yeah. That was one pissed-off crustacean. Well, my guess is he got hold of one of those Steppers and all the survival bubbles he could steal, and he took off stepwise, chasing us.’

Willis grunted. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Dishonour,’ Sally said. ‘Revenge. Just as Frank has been saying. Maybe you destroyed his social standing in front of his peers, Dad. Shit. I thought I saw something following us. A light in the dark. I didn’t figure it out, never put it together.’

‘And you, Willis,’ Frank said, ‘this is all your fault. You inflicted a Step Day on those guys, just like you did to humanity. It was just a means to an end to you, a way of getting to the next stage in your grand plan. You never thought of the impact it might have on them , did you? And it’s already been a pretty savage one judging by this guy’s obsessive, murderous rage.’

Sally watched the dust plume. Was it coming closer? ‘I think Frank’s right, Dad. And now he’s coming back for more.’

Frank punched a fist into a gloved palm. ‘And we’ve been standing here yakking and haven’t loaded a damn thing. We can’t let him get at the second glider, Willis—’

Willis hesitated no longer. He fired up the launch rocket and the glider leapt into the air, wheeling over the two of them on the ground. ‘Listen,’ he called down. ‘I’ll draw him off with the glider. You get the stuff packed up. When he’s out of range I’ll come back – the glider is a hell of a lot faster than that damn sand-yacht – and we’ll load up and step away.’

‘Come on.’ Frank led the way, collapsing the bubble-dome shelters, bundling up pallets of food and water. Sally followed his lead, making for the wreck of the Woden to see what she could salvage.

Willis dipped the glider over the sand-yacht, and Sally saw that, yes, the yacht was turning, following the bird in the sky. Willis called, ‘He’ll follow us when we step. But he’s not going to be able to get any closer to us while we keep moving stepwise.’

‘Dad,’ Sally said urgently. ‘Why not just kill him?’

‘I got nothing to kill him with.’

‘Come on. I can’t believe you didn’t pack any weapons. Some kind of handgun adapted for Martian air.’

‘Believe me. I didn’t.’

She hesitated. ‘OK. Well, I did. In the back of the food lockers, on both the gliders. I stowed away crossbows. To work them, you just have to—’

‘Found them. Took them out. Dumped them. Sorry, kid.’

She felt unreasonably enraged. ‘Why the hell? Listen to me, Dad. Weapons like that have helped keep me alive a long time in the Long Earth—’

‘Don’t hold with weapons. Wouldn’t expect that from a guy from Wyoming, would you, Frank? Weapons kill people, in the hands of idiots. And since most of the human race are idiots—’