it pays to prepare for the worst. Since Blondie, at least, seemed to be an ally, I grabbed her hand—my glove in her naked plastiflesh—and led her perpendicular to the newcomer’s travel, running west toward the Alpha, meaning he’d have to choose whether to come toward me and Blondie, or toward Lakshmi and Ernie. It was soon apparent that the newcomer had altered his trajectory to come after the two of us.
Blondie fell in next to me, matching my stride, and we continued on for a few hundred meters. Although the dust covering Isidis Planitia shifts over time, I could still make out two divots in the surface, and I maneuvered us between them. Then I scanned around for the automobile-shaped rock I’d dubbed Plymouth and the more jagged one I’d nicknamed Hudson. And so I figured stopping here was just right, with Plymouth at about ten o’clock and Hudson standing guard at 3:30.
The intruder was now just a hundred meters away. He was either wearing a beige surface suit, or was a transfer in beige clothes, or—less likely—a naked transfer with beige skin.
I was suddenly distracted by Ernie shouting into his helmet microphone. “Alex! Alex!”
I turned. Somehow, Lakshmi had managed to push Ernie off, or—no, no, that wasn’t it. Reiko had a gun pointed at Ernie. Damn it! While I’d been busy maneuvering Blondie and me to just the right spot, and Ernie had been busy trying to flatten out all the appealing bumps on Lakshmi, Reiko must have gone off to retrieve the piece I’d sent flying earlier. Back on Earth, when people get surges of adrenaline, they sometimes manage to lift cars off trapped pedestrians; the sight of Reiko again packing heat must have been enough to give Lakshmi the jolt she needed to heave Ernie off herself, and she now had hold of his rifle.
Blondie flexed her fingers, disengaging her hand from mine, and in a blur of motion she scooped up a rock about the size of a softball, hauled back, and let loose a pitch worthy of the major leagues. The rock tore through the thin air and made it a good fraction of the distance, but it fell short, and I couldn’t tell which of the three people she’d been aiming at. Ernie was on his feet, and the two women were facing off against each other, perhaps a dozen meters between them, Reiko aiming her pistol at Lakshmi, and Lakshmi pointing Ernie’s rifle at Reiko.
If this had been the Old West, I would have heard the shot ring out, but the air was too thin for that, and instead all I heard was a feminine “Oomph!” over the radio as one of the women was hit, and I waited breathlessly to see which of them would crumple to the ground.
And, after about three seconds, one of them did, with graceful Martian indolence: the shorter of the two, the lady in dark green, the heiress who seemed to have inherited nothing but her grandfather’s obsession with wealth.
Blondie suddenly sprang into action, running toward them. She’d yet to say a word, and I had no reason to think she was listening to the same frequency I was using, but I shouted anyway: “No! Stop! Go back the way we came!”
And either she was tuned into that channel, or else she had bionic ears in addition to bionic eyes, because she skidded to a halt, changed direction, and followed the precise path out that we’d taken in.
Meanwhile, the beige intruder was still coming straight for me. If I moved, he’d alter his course—and so I stood my ground.
Blondie was damn near flying, yellow hair a cloud around her head as she hurried toward Reiko and Lakshmi. Lakshmi aimed the rifle at Blondie, and I guess Blondie and I were thinking the same thing—that perhaps a gun that big would do real damage to a transfer; the blonde goddess started bobbing and weaving as she continued to race in. Lakshmi’s first shot was a clean miss. The second got Blondie somewhere in the torso—hard to tell exactly where when watching from the rear—but it didn’t slow her down.
I turned back to the intruder. It was a male transfer in khaki slacks and a khaki long-sleeved shirt, and he was still coming straight at me. As his shoulders worked up and down, I glimpsed that he had on a backpack—surely not air tanks, but rather a rucksack with equipment. Ah, and at last he was close enough