I shouted, even though he almost certainly couldn’t hear me through my helmet in this thin atmosphere. “Rory, stop!”
I hadn’t seen the bootleg Pickover since shortly after I’d rescued him from the torture room aboard the Skookum Jim, but I had no doubt that this was him; the face was the one the bootleg had adopted to take on the identity of Joshua Wilkins. He was now just thirty meters from the line of land mines—and closing.
Even in a surface suit, I should be able to do at least as good a long jump as I could have back on Earth. I started running straight for him—meaning I was also running straight for the buried mines. When I got close to the line, I kicked off with all my strength and went sailing horizontally toward him, arms outstretched. He had the most astonished expression I’d ever seen on a transfer’s face as I sailed closer, and—
—and, damn!, my Smith & Wesson flew out of my holster and dropped behind me. It must have hit one of the mines, because I was suddenly propelled forward by more than just the strength of my initial kick. The explosion was deafening even in the thin air. Something tore into my right leg as I collided with the bootleg Pickover and knocked him on his stainless-steel butt.
It took me a second to recover from the impact, but then I pushed myself to my feet and reached down to give Pickover a hand. As I pulled him up, I felt a stabbing in my calf. Land-mine shrapnel had sliced through my suit and the jeans beneath. A piece of skin about as long and wide as a banana was exposed to the subzero air, and blood was flowing down the suit’s leg, although it would soon either freeze or boil off. I opened the suit-repair kit on my belt, pulled out the largest adhesive patch, and positioned it over the cut. Pickover and I were so close now that I could hear him speak. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Someone’s booby-trapped the Alpha!”
I nodded as much to myself as to him; the legit Pickover had discovered that only after this bootleg had been spun off. I changed my radio’s channel. “Channel twenty-two,” I shouted. The transfer nodded, but didn’t do anything visibly to indicate he’d selected that radio frequency. I went on at a normal volume. “What are you doing here?”
The bootleg’s voice—which didn’t sound anything like that of the real Rory—came through my helmet speakers. “I’ve been working a bed twenty kilometers north of here,” he said. “I saw an airplane fly by, and it looked like the damn thing was coming down near the Alpha. I thought I should investigate—and then I caught sight of you.”
“Good to see you, Rory. Some of those people over there want to steal fossils from here. Are you up for a fight?”
His eyes narrowed. “Hells yes.”
Lakshmi, Reiko, Blondie, and Ernie were fifty meters east of us. Blondie was now kneeling next to the fallen Reiko. “The woman on the ground is the granddaughter of Denny O’Reilly.”
“Oh, really?” he said, just as the other Pickover had when I’d first told him.
I wasn’t in the mood for the “No, O’Reilly” schtick, although it is rare that you get to use a joke twice on more or less the same person. “Yes,” I said. “The woman in red is Lakshmi Chatterjee. She’s a writer, and has tried to kill me more than once. As for the transfer babe in turquoise, I have no idea who she is, but she seems to be on our side, or at least not actively against us. And the big guy is—”
“Ernie Gargalian.” Sneering is more effective with a British accent, but even without it, Rory’s contempt was plain.
“Yes,” I said, looking out at the tableau. I suppose it was debatable which of us was the Good and which the Bad, but there was no way Reiko, Lakshmi, or Blondie could qualify as the Ugly—which left Ernie, Rory, and me to vie for that title. “But that’s Ernie’s airplane. He brought me here. The real threat to the Alpha, at least right now, is Lakshmi.”
“I—I don’t want to kill to protect the secret,” Pickover said.
“I don’t see another way,” I replied. “Lakshmi is certainly willing to kill us.” As soon as I said it, I realized that Ms. Chatterjee really wasn’t much of a threat to Rory. Indeed,