circuitous route to get us there. Fourth line of defense is that by this late you must be tired, meaning you might even fall asleep on the journey—indeed, you’ll want to, since it’ll take hours, and we won’t be able to accomplish much until dawn.”
I’d kind of hoped to make it over to The Bent Chisel tonight to see Diana, but at least he was agreeing to take me. “All right,” I said, getting up as well.
“Great. Bathroom’s down there, old boy—better avail yourself before we head out, and . . .”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Haven’t used it myself in months—not since I transferred. I hope I remembered to flush.”
SEVENTEEN
Since the episode with Joshua Wilkins, I’d researched ways to kill a transfer, just to be on the safe side. Sadly, except for using a broadband disruptor, there didn’t seem to be any reliable method. That made sense, of course: the bodies were designed to cheat death—they were highly durable, with vital components encased in protective armor. I’d tried to find a way, but it seemed kryptonite was hard to come by on Mars.
Even so, Pickover made me leave my gun in a locker at the western airlock station—I guess he was afraid I might try to do him in once he’d shown me where the riches were located. He didn’t know I’d acquired a switchblade from Dirk, though, and he was too naïve to give me a pat-down before we headed out, so I kept that in my pocket.
My detective’s brain was hard at work trying to figure out precisely where he was taking me. First clue: we’d exited through the western airlock, and this was the one bit of information that couldn’t be misdirection for my sake, since it was where he’d parked his privately owned Mars buggy when he’d last returned from the Alpha.
Thank God Pickover had bought the buggy prior to transferring, because it was the expensive kind that had its own life-support system. If he’d been buying one today, he’d doubtless have opted for the cheaper—and more reliable—ones that simply provided transportation.
Pickover rented me a surface suit. He paid for it directly, since he would have ended up being expensed for it, anyway—but I didn’t have to wear it for the long drive, although he did make me put the fishbowl over my head. On Earth, that would have been uncomfortable—normally, the suit’s collar bore the weight of the helmet—but the thing wasn’t heavy enough here to be bothersome. Pickover did make it opaque, though, before we started tooling along.
A planitia is a low plain, and just like their counterparts on Earth, they tended to be nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. We chatted a bit at first, but having to listen to Rory’s voice echo in the fishbowl was unpleasant, and after a time we both fell silent. I confess I wiled away the hours thinking about Diana, Lacie, and Lakshmi, separately and in various permutations.
I possibly did doze on the trip—tough guy like me doesn’t often think about his childhood, but when my mom wanted me to sleep and I wouldn’t, she used to take me for a drive. Pickover had also made me leave my tablet computer and phone behind; I had no tools that might help me calculate our location. But by the time we got to where we were going, the sun was rising in the east. I’d been hoping it would be coming up over jagged peaks or broken crater walls that I could match to topographical maps, but the illuminated part of the horizon—and, as I saw as the sun climbed higher, the horizon all the way around—was just more smooth ground, with one exception: to the west, there was the crumbling wall of a small crater.
I used the buggy’s toilet then got into the rented surface suit—this one was kind of a drab olive green—and exited the vehicle. The buggy had springy wheels almost a meter across, and a boxy clear passenger cabin; the Martian atmosphere was tenuous enough that streamlining didn’t matter for surface vehicles.
Pickover went to the buggy’s trunk and pulled out a device that looked a bit like an upright vacuum cleaner with no bag attached.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A metal detector. I just got it yesterday.”
“I’d have thought those would be useless on Mars,” I said, “because of all the iron oxide in the soil.”
“Oh, it’s easy to tune metal detectors to ignore iron. But I did have a devil of a time finding