He yawned, then, “Sorry. Yeah. I was thinking about that. You left it running at Shopatsky House, right? I figured I should go collect it this morning. The excimer battery should last for weeks, but—”
“Lakshmi has taken it outside the dome.”
“Hell, Alex. I can’t afford to lose that vehicle.”
“I know, I know. I’ll get it back for you. What’s the remote shutoff code?”
He told me, and my phone recorded it. “But if you’re using your phone to send it, you’ll have to be within a hundred meters or so for it to be picked up,” he added.
“Right, okay. And the code to turn it back on?”
He told me that, too.
“Thanks.”
“Alex, I need—”
But I shook the phone off, grabbed my gun, and ran out my apartment door.
* * *
It would eat up half a day getting to the Alpha by Mars buggy; that would never do. And although O’Reilly and Weingarten’s descent stage could fly there quickly, assuming it had enough fuel left, I’d have to get the damn thing hauled onto the planitia first, and that would take forever. And so I went to see the one person I knew who had every luxury item, including an airplane: Ernie Gargalian of Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.
“Mr. Double-X!” Gargantuan exclaimed as I came into the empty store.
“Hey, Ernie.”
“I hear you’ve had some adventures of late, my boy.”
“Oh?”
“They say you’ve recovered Simon and Denny’s third lander.”
“Who would ‘they’ be?”
“I keep my ear to the ground, my boy.”
I suspected if Ernie ever actually adopted that posture, he wouldn’t be able to get back up. “Well, yeah,” I said.
“There might be a market for it.”
“For the ship?”
“There’s a collector for everything,” he said. “Would you like me to see what I can arrange?”
“I guess, sure. So, listen, can I borrow your airplane?”
Ernie had a hearty laugh, I’ll give him that. “By Gad, my dear boy! You do have gumption.”
“You can’t spell gumption without P-I.” Actually, maybe you could—but you’d have to do it phonetically.
“And just where might you take my plane, Alex?”
“To the Alpha Deposit.”
Ernie’s demeanor changed instantly. “You know where it is?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. When do we leave?”
I’d expected this to be the price I’d have to pay. Rory wouldn’t have liked it—but Rory was dead. Reiko, on the other hand, was probably still alive, but quite likely wouldn’t be for much longer. “Right now,” I said.
Just then a customer tried to enter. “No, no,” said Ernie, hurrying to the door. “We’re closed.”
The customer—a woman in her forties—pointed at the laser-etched sign. “But the sign says . . .”
“A typo!” declared Ernie. “I’ll get it fixed.”
Crossing the room had been enough to set Ernie to huffing and puffing; there was no way he could walk all the way out to the edge of the dome; his plane, I knew, was parked outside the north airlock, coincidentally the same one Lakshmi and Reiko had exited through. But a man of Gargalian’s stature—literal and figurative—did not trifle with public transit. He went into his back room and emerged floating on a hoverchair—and I saw that he’d also fetched a rifle.
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