I watched as he turned his gaze. Nothing happened on his face, making me wonder what mental command he used to access the zoom function. “Who could that be?” he asked.
Damn. So it was another Mars buggy, sitting out on the planitia. We’d been tailed through the dark, all the way here from New Klondike. Normally, I’d have spotted a tail almost at once, but I’d had this stupid polarized fishbowl over my noggin for the whole ride out.
And Pickover had made me leave my gun behind.
EIGHTEEN
Ithink we should get out of here,” I said into my headset microphone.
“We can’t leave the Alpha exposed to looters,” Pickover replied.
“Rory, we’re defenseless.”
“The fossils are defenseless.”
“Damn it!” I intended the curse for him, but as I said it, the distant Mars buggy started moving in, kicking up a plume of dust as it did so, and Pickover took the words as a response to that.
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re barreling directly toward us.”
The radio we were using was supposed to be encrypted, but whoever was coming at us now might have bribed the guy I rented my suit from to reveal the encryption code. The person or persons in that Mars buggy might well be listening in on everything I said to Pickover, and so now knew that they’d been spotted.
When two biologicals didn’t want to use radio on the surface, they touched their helmets together and let the sound pass between them. Pickover wasn’t wearing a helmet. I wondered if he’d opted for super hearing as well as super vision—although I couldn’t imagine what use the former would be for a fossil hunter. I turned off my radio and shouted, “They might be listening in on our communications.”
The Martian atmosphere was only about one percent as thick as Earth’s; it conducted sound, but not very well. Pickover was looking at me but it was clear that he hadn’t heard what I’d said. I walked over to him and motioned for him to stand still. I then leaned my helmet against his artificial head.
“I say!” he exclaimed as I did so.
I spoke only slightly louder than normal. “They may have been listening to our radio. Turn yours off.” I pulled my head away, and he nodded but didn’t do anything else, again making me wonder how that worked for a transfer—what did he do inside his mind that deactivated the transmitter? But although I could make noise—my helmet was pressurized—his jaw was flapping in the tenuous Martian air and wasn’t making any sound I could hear. I was good at reading lips—a marketable skill for a detective—but the restrained movements of his were different enough from those of a biological that I wasn’t able to make out what he was saying.
I touched my helmet to his forehead—the only time in recent memory that I’d done something similar was head-butting a drunk at The Bent Chisel. “I can’t hear you,” I said loudly. “Let’s separate. They can only come after one of us in that vehicle. You stay here. I’ll see if I can draw them away from the Alpha, okay?”
He nodded his head; it slid against the helmet. It was fortunate that his hair was synthetic; the last thing I needed was a smear of oil obscuring my vision through the fishbowl. Having finished quarterbacking our next play, I snapped, “Break!” and started running in a direction perpendicular to the incoming buggy.
I could run like the wind inside the dome—but the surface suit and air tanks added fifty kilos to my normal ninety, and the layer of dust on the plain made it hard to get good footing. Still, I put everything I had into it, hoping the intruder would go after me: it was the nature of all predators, human or otherwise, to chase after someone who was trying to escape. Looking to my right, it did seem the buggy—still some distance off—was veering toward me.
Of course, I had no idea what I’d do if whoever it was did intercept me. Even if they didn’t have a gun, anything that would smash my helmet would do to finish me off out here.
My heart was pounding, and I was sweating inside the suit—which was not a good thing: I was fogging up the fishbowl. The suit did have dehumidifier controls, but I’d have to stop running to fiddle with them, and I didn’t want to do that. And since the fog was on the inside of the helmet,