right-hand turn onto the Third Circle. The cop didn’t fire—probably didn’t want to deal with the paperwork that followed a weapons discharge—and if he shouted anything after us, my ears were still reverberating too much from the horn blast for me to make it out.
This close to the center, the curvature of the concentric roadways was obvious, and I had to bank the buggy so much that the left-hand wheels actually lifted from the ground. More people were crossing the street in front of us, and I careened right then left then right again to miss them—one by just centimeters.
This route took us by NewYou. I tried to look in the showroom window as we raced past, but there was too much glare. After hurtling along a quarter of the arcing road, we took off down Third Avenue, heading out toward the dome’s edge again. Suddenly a dog—one of the handful on the planet, an honest-to-goodness Mars rover—was chasing us. We bipeds could manage a good clip in this gravity, and quadrupeds could move like the wind. This one—a lab, it looked like—was running at a speed a cheetah on Earth would have envied, and—
“Son of a bitch!” I yelled—rather aptly, I thought. The damn thing had leapt onto the buggy’s short hood, making it hard to see what was up ahead.
“Slow down!” Juan shouted.
I stole a glance at him. He looked terrified—but whether over what I was doing to his buggy or what was about to happen to us, I couldn’t say. The dog was yelping something fierce, but seemed to be enjoying the ride. I craned my neck, trying to see around his bulk. We hit something small in the road—rubble or rubbish of some sort—and the car bounced, and Juan let out a yelp of his own.
This wasn’t the street I wanted to be on, so I made a hard left at the next intersection, but there was a hovertram dead ahead. I slammed on the brakes. The buggy started spinning. The dog decided this was a good time to get off, and he did so. I was pressed over into Juan’s side in a way that pushed the boundaries of a good bromance. When the car stopped spinning, we were facing in precisely the wrong direction. I did a quick U-turn, then headed on toward Shopatsky House, out at the rim. We were on the correct radial artery now—and it looked like smooth sailing for most of the rest of the way. Ah, the open road! All this rig needed was stereo speakers blaring out classic 2040s rock ’n’ roll.
I ran the buggy right up onto Shopatsky House’s fern-covered lawn and popped the canopy. Juan and I jumped out, and we bounded over to the building, sailing three meters with each stride. I left the buggy running, just in case we needed a fast getaway.
I thought about kicking the front door in, but that’s actually hard to do, and my ankle couldn’t be fixed as easily as Pickover’s had been. And, anyway, I didn’t have to do it. If Lakshmi had been as busy with underhanded stuff as things seemed to indicate, she wouldn’t have had time to replace the back window I’d so carefully removed earlier.
I gave Juan the spare gun I’d brought for him, and we ran around to the rear, me taking out my own gun as I did so. Juan probably wasn’t the best choice for backup—he was a thin guy with typically underdeveloped Martian musculature—but he was better than nothing. I motioned for him to stay out of sight; I wanted Lakshmi to think I’d come alone.
There weren’t any winds or precipitation under our dome; the main reason for fixing the window would have been to keep nasty folk out, but with the window hidden back here, facing toward the dome’s edge, no one probably even knew that it was gone. I crouched low and made my way over. I’d hoped to overhear something that would give away the situation within—either “actually, for your rhyming scheme, you need a word with emphasis on the penultimate syllable” or “and so, before you die, it’s only fitting that you know exactly how I plan to take over this entire planet.” But instead I heard precisely nothing, and so I rose up enough to peek into the hole where the window had been.
The room had been straightened a bit since my struggle with Lakshmi—but only a bit. I clambered over the sill and entered