Terry Pratchett - The Long Mars

Sally yelled, ‘Including me, you pompous old tyrant? Including Frank, for God’s sake?’

‘Anyhow we don’t need weapons to get rid of this guy. He’ll destroy himself soon enough. He can’t do me any harm up here. And then, the ride home. It won’t be comfortable but we’ll make it. Look, he’s a long way out, and heading away now. I’ll come back in and—’

Sally saw a blinding light coming from the plain, from the sand-yacht dust plume, directly under the glider’s elegant form. And a spark, bright as the sun of Earth, lifted up into the sky, trailing black smoke.

A spark arcing straight up at Thor .

Though Willis banked with impressive reflexes he only had a second or two to react. Sally saw the spark rip through the fabric of the glider.

When Willis came back on line, Sally heard alarms sounding in the background, patient artificial voices explaining the nature of the damage. ‘Shit, shit . . .’

‘Dad, what the hell was that? Some kind of rocket?’

‘I think it was natural. Like the dragon-beasts, like those fire-breathing columns we saw. It’s like a methane-burning worm, flying through the air, using that burning breath as a rocket exhaust. A living missile. Maybe the whalers cultivate them, as weapons. Saved that up for a surprise when he needed it, didn’t he? These guys are pretty smart.’

Frank said, ‘Yes, they are. And you thought the prince couldn’t touch you.’ Despite the peril of the situation for them all, angry as he was, Frank sounded like he was almost gloating. ‘You were wrong again, Linsay.’

‘We’ll discuss my personal flaws later. Listen, the wings are intact, but my controls are mostly shot, and I’m losing pressure . . . I’m coming down. Let’s stick to the plan. We’ll load up what we have, launch again, get out of here. There should be time before he reaches us. When we’ve outrun him stepwise we can land, make proper repairs—’

‘Just get that bird down here,’ Frank snapped.

And Sally was watching the dust plume. ‘He’s closing. I think you keep underestimating this guy, Dad. He is a hunter, from a culture of hunters.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Later. Coming in.’

The landing was heavy, but, as Frank remarked, in these circumstances any landing that left the fuselage intact was acceptable.

To Frank’s curt orders, Willis stayed in the cockpit, at the controls, ready to get the bird back in the air at short notice. Frank and Sally, meanwhile, began to bundle their goods into the glider’s slim fuselage. They had to work around the scorched, gaping hole in the rear where the rocket-worm had passed straight through.

Frank muttered and growled. ‘Hell, I hate the idea of launching again without taking care of that damage.’

‘We have to. And we can’t leave the gear behind.’

‘I tried stepping, you know,’ Frank said. ‘When he came in for his first passes. Sally, he stepped straight after me. Even with the anti-nausea drugs, stepping slows me down, just a little. Not him, not the prince—’

‘Don’t talk,’ Sally said. ‘Just load.’

‘And we’re below capacity too. We’re going to have to leave stuff behind if—’

‘Shut up.’ At the foot of that racing dust plume, Sally saw another spark of light, this time racing over the ground. Racing towards her, she realized. ‘He’s firing at us, this time. Dad, incoming. Get her up again, now.’

‘Roger that—’

The glider scraped into the air with a flare of booster rockets.

And Frank Wood was standing there, staring at the approaching rocket-worm.

Sally leapt forward. She endured an age of low-gravity slow-motion falling towards Frank. At last she slammed into him, her arms around his waist, pushing him to the ground.

Not a heartbeat later the rocket-worm hammered into the ground. Sally felt the pressure wave, feeble in the thin air, a stronger blast of heat.

When it was over she was on top of Frank, who was on the ground, on his back, gasping. She rolled off him, clumsy in her pressure suit.

Frank said, sitting up, ‘What the hell – would he have hit?’

‘He was damn close.’

‘If it is some kind of living being, this weapon – internal methane and air sacs – I wonder how close you can aim it?’

Willis called down from the spiralling glider, ‘If it’s alive, maybe it aims itself. Meanwhile he’s coming back for more, on that damn sand sled of his.’

Sally saw the looming dust plume. There was a figure on the deck, beneath the big sail: that body like a huge upright centipede, incongruously wrapped in the plastic sac of a survival bag, wielding some kind of spear.

Frank stood, breathing hard. ‘By Christ, I’m getting old. Look at that bastard. He’s relentless.’

Sally glanced up. ‘Keep on climbing, Dad. Just stay out of the range of the rocket-worms.’

‘Roger. But what about you two?’

Frank faced the plume of dust. ‘We split up.’ Without hesitating he turned and began to run, clumsy in his suit, across the dirt. He looked back once, still running. ‘Move out, Sally. Thataway.’

She stood frozen for a heartbeat.

Then she began to run in the opposite direction. She ran with her head down, her body tilted forward, her boots thrusting back at the crusty ground. She had practised running on Mars. This moment was why.

‘He can only come for one of us at a time,’ Frank called. ‘He can strike at us from a distance, but this way at least one of us has a better chance. And if we keep on moving, maybe we’ll wear him down.’

‘Maybe. We could have just stood and fought.’

‘With what? This is the better way, Sally. Weaken him, finish him later.’

‘Dad? What can you see from up there? What’s he doing?’

‘Hesitating. He’s by the campsite, what’s left of it. Making another couple of passes through the wreck of the Woden , just for fun, I guess. Listen, I’ve a better idea. I’ll come down, pick one of you up.’

Frank seized on that immediately. ‘Do it.’

Sally said, ‘Leaving one at his mercy?’

‘We’ll deal with that when we get to it,’ Frank said. ‘Come on, Willis, do it.’

Sally stopped running, breathing hard, and looked up at the circling glider. Willis hadn’t yet made his move to land, she saw. Looking back she could see the sand-yacht, the trail its runners made in the dirt, the bulky form of the whaler swathed in the survival bag. And beyond that, the smaller figure of Frank, still running awkwardly. From the point of view of her father, up there, the situation must look perfectly symmetrical, she thought. The hunter at the centre, his two prey to either side, more or less equidistant. Whoever of them Willis chose to pick up first was going to have a markedly better chance of survival than the other; she knew that, and so would Willis. So who would he choose?

She was Willis’s daughter. She imagined that for most people that would swing it. But Willis was no ordinary father.

Still Willis hesitated. He was actually thinking it over. Choosing between her and Frank Wood, who to save, as she waited.

At last, with a dip of its wings, the glider came out of its banking circle, like sliding off an invisible summit in the air, and swept down towards the ground.

Heading straight at Sally.

In the glider, Sally and Willis watched from the air as the whaler’s yacht closed on Frank Wood, trailing plumes of red Mars dust. Frank made his last stand, lashing out with his gloved fists as the yacht made pass after pass. There was nothing they could do to help.

Finally the crustacean jumped off his yacht, hitting the ground running, though he was obviously impeded by the layers of survival bags he wore. He leapt straight at Frank, driving his spear forward even as he completed the low-gravity stride. Frank tried stepping even now, but the crustacean went straight after him, so that the two of them strobed between the worlds, fighting in the dirt.