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.