he could just run off—he could move faster than Lakshmi; for all I knew, he could even outrun her in the buggy, if she ever got it going again. But I’d saved him from that torture room, and I’d saved him again when I hid his identity from the legitimate Pickover, who, had he known of this one’s continued existence, would have demanded he be terminated. I doubted he was going to take off on me. And, after a moment, he confirmed that. “All right. What now?”
“See those two pits, there? That’s where your, ah, brother and I removed two of the land mines. You can safely move in and out if you go between those pits.” The bootleg nodded, and I went on. “So, let’s go. Our first order of business: disarm Lakshmi.”
“Okay,” said Pickover. “But how?”
“Improvise,” I replied as I started running toward the others: sailing forward, kicking off, sailing forward again. Pickover must have hesitated for a moment, but he soon fell in beside me.
It didn’t take long for Lakshmi to react. She assumed a marksman’s spread-legged stance and aimed her gun at me, which was precisely what I was hoping for, because it meant she could no longer cover Ernie. As soon as she swung the gun away from the big man, Ernie did the best leap he could manage. He might have weighed only a third as much here as he would have on Earth—a fact that let him clear the ground by half a meter and come forward a meter and a half—but he massed exactly the same, and he slammed into Lakshmi from behind with a lot of inertia. While Pickover and I continued to close the distance, Lakshmi pitched forward, legs still splayed. Ernie landed on her suit’s backpack, and although my view was bouncing as I ran, it looked like he was trying to disengage her air tanks.
Pickover suddenly surged in front of me, his artificial legs pistoning in a way mine never could. Despite doubtless having the wind knocked out of her, Lakshmi was struggling to lift her head and get the gun up again, and she squeezed off a shot at Pickover. I thought the paleontologist was hit—he did a headfirst roll into the ground—but then I realized it was a deliberate evasion tactic, and he somersaulted perfectly, Lakshmi’s bullet flying above him while he rolled. He sprang back into a running posture and continued in.
I was now close enough to make out more detail. Blondie was still kneeling, and—no, no. That wasn’t it. She wasn’t kneeling; she was sitting cross-legged on the sand, and Reiko Takahashi’s helmeted head was cradled in her lap.
Ernie was still doing things on Lakshmi’s back, and—yes!—he managed to disengage her tanks and toss them aside. Doubtless there was still some air in her helmet, but the writer couldn’t have more than a couple of minutes left to live.
Suddenly my own helmet exploded around me. Lakshmi had shifted her aim from Pickover to me and had squeezed off another shot. I couldn’t see for a moment—the atmosphere that had been in my fishbowl turned into a white cloud of condensation—but as I continued running forward, I left the cloud behind. The tanks on my back were still working, though, and oxygen was being pumped though the tube from them. I stopped running for a moment, hoping that Lakshmi had shot her last, and yanked on the tube, pulling it farther up; they were designed to have some play for just such emergencies.
I felt the skin on my face freezing, my eyes hurt from the cold and the exposure to near vacuum, and my sinuses were seizing up. But there was warm air coming through the tube, which I’d now stuck in my mouth and was clamping onto with my teeth. I continued to run because I didn’t know what else to do. I think I was bleeding from my scalp; shards from the fishbowl must have sliced into it.
I needed another helmet and fast. Ernie was clearly conscious of my plight: he was trying to undog Lakshmi’s fishbowl. I was having trouble seeing now—I think my eyeballs were freezing in place, and—
And everything went dark and I went plowing face first into the ground. I managed to lift my chin and spit out the oxygen tube just in time to keep it from bashing my front teeth out. And then I felt the weight of someone on my back, and strong hands grabbed the