him—or the woman who was also closing rapidly. There was another blast—visual, not aural—from the shotgun, and this time I was hit in the shoulder. The impact knocked me sideways, and I sent up a dust cloud when I fell. Beneath the dust, there were loose rocks. I grabbed one about the size of a grapefruit, scrambled to my feet, and continued running. My shoulder hurt, but the suit seemed intact, and—
And, no, damn it, there was a chip out of my helmet. It hadn’t broken all the way through, but the structure had doubtless weakened; another hit, and I’d be sucking in nothing but thin carbon dioxide.
The man was slightly outpacing the woman, and that was working to my advantage—she seemed reluctant to shoot again with him in front of her; perhaps she was worried about going wide enough of her mark to hit him instead of me.
I had no such compunctions. The man was now close enough that I could throw my rock at him. All that bench-pressing at Gully’s paid off, and I had plenty of experience throwing things under Martian gravity—as Buttrick at The Bent Chisel could testify. I hit the man right in the faceplate, and it cracked in a spider-web pattern that probably obscured his vision but I didn’t think was going to result in him gasping for breath, unfortunately.
Still, it slowed him down enough that the woman was now in front again, and she brought the shotgun up to her red-suited shoulder. She was clearly about to fire when Pickover’s voice burst into my helmet, and hers, too, presumably. “Look out, Alex!”
I swung my head to the right and saw our Mars buggy rushing toward us, a great cloud going up behind it. As I leapt to one side, I was touched that Pickover was willing to drive over his precious fossil beds to rescue me. He slammed the brakes in a way that would have made a screeching sound in a real atmosphere, and popped the clear habitat roof open. I leapt in, and he put his metal to the pedal. I thought he was going to take us through a wide one-eighty, but instead he aimed directly for the woman in red. I struggled to pull the lid down over the habitat as he continued to roar toward her, clearly aiming to mow her down. But she was aiming, too—right at us.
That the woman was reasonably new to Mars was now obvious. The best way to stop a car on Earth was to shoot out the pneumatic tires, but we favored springy wiry things. The angle between the spokes changed constantly under computer control, and each spoke led not to a continuous rim but to a separate pad. A camera up front watched for obstacles, and the spokes configured themselves to make it possible to go over most rocks without even touching them. Trying to shoot such wheels out was useless, but she nonetheless fired at our left front tire—and it didn’t slow us down at all.
The man in the blue suit started running back toward their yellow Mars buggy. He wasn’t going as fast as he’d been before; I suspect he’d slowed down not so much out of fatigue—having a guy hurtling toward you in a motorized vehicle tended to get the old adrenaline going—but because he was having trouble seeing through the cracks in his faceplate.
Pickover had to make a choice: go after the woman with the gun or after the apparently unarmed man who had a chance of getting back to his buggy. I could think of arguments for either selection, and didn’t gainsay the one Rory made: he decided to pursue the woman, who was running like the wind.
There was no way she could outrace us on a flat surface, but even a planitia has some craters on it, like God had peppered it with his own shotgun. She was heading straight for the one I’d noticed before; it was maybe thirty meters across. The crater wall rose in front of us. To get up it, she had to drop the shotgun, and it skittered with Martian indolence down the crater face. She scrambled up, gloves clawing for purchase. Damn, but I wished I had my gun! It would have been easy to take her out while her back was to us. Our springy wheels did their best, but when the slope exceeded forty-five degrees, they weren’t able to get enough traction, and we started backsliding.