the habitat lid, and it fell open, letting me hop out. The buggy managed to reverse its slide and climb back up a bit farther after the weight of me and my surface suit was no longer in it. But soon the slope proved too much again, and Pickover abandoned the buggy, too; the vehicle came to rest half-on and half-off the sloping, crumbling crater wall. I flipped open the trunk, exposing the land mines. The activation knob was on the underside of the mine, dead center, behind a little spring-loaded safety door. I reactivated both mines, and saw that the flags on their upper surfaces turned red. I then picked up one of the mines, supporting it underhanded by its rim.
The man had succeeded in his retreat; I could see him in the distance clambering into their buggy. I’d thought he was going to hightail it away from here, but he came charging toward us again. I chinned my radio: “One warning only: get out of the buggy!”
It was possible that the damage to his helmet had wrecked his microphone in addition to impairing his vision. Or maybe he just didn’t feel inclined to take orders from me. Either way, he kept racing my way at a clip I couldn’t outrun. I took a bead on the approaching vehicle, and flung the land mine the way you’d toss a discus. It spun through the air and—
Ka-blam!
—hit the flat front of the buggy’s habitat, exploding on impact. The canopy was reduced to crystalline shards that went flying. I saw the man in the blue suit throw up his arms, trying to cover his face—
His exposed face: the glass visor of his helmet was gone. He gasped for breath—and I imagine he felt the linings of his lungs seizing up in the wicked cold of an equatorial Martian day.
His vehicle was still moving, though—the habitat was wrecked, but the chassis was intact and those big wheels kept on rolling, propelling it at high speed along the wall of the crater and—God damn it!—straight toward me and our Mars buggy.
I ran as fast as I could, but the incoming vehicle plowed into our buggy, and the other land mine I’d activated in preparation for throwing it went off, and I watched as the axles snapped on the incoming yellow buggy and our buggy burst into flames that almost immediately were snuffed out by the carbon dioxide atmosphere.
We were all marooned in the middle of nowhere.
NINETEEN
Irushed over to the man in the blue surface suit. He’d tumbled out of the wreckage and was still desperately trying to cover his face. I looked around for anything that could help him do that: tarpaulin, plastic sheeting, even paper. But there was nothing.
I doubted he could still hear me, given that the air was out of his helmet, but I said, “Hold on!” anyway. I used my gloved hands in addition to his own to try to make a new front for his helmet. For a moment, I thought it was working, but even though clouds of air were still coming out of the tubes attached to his tank, his fingers went slack and his arms dropped down, and there were now huge gaps that I couldn’t cover.
And so at last I got a good look at his face. His nose had bled—low air pressure or the impact—but the blood had now frozen onto his face, a narrow face that was Asian, perhaps sixty years old, with thick gray hair. I didn’t recognize him. His mouth worked for a few moments—gasping for air, or hurtling invective at me, I couldn’t say which. And then it just stopped moving, about half open. I took no pleasure in watching this man expire, even though he’d tried to kill me—but I didn’t waste any tears over it, either.
I’d lost track of Pickover during all this, and, swinging my head in the fishbowl, I saw no sign of him—which meant he must be inside the crater, along with the lady in red. I looked around for the discarded shotgun and found it. Damn thing had gone barrel-down into the dust and probably had a bunch of it in the bore now. Still, I grabbed it and scrambled up the crater’s rim, which was about three meters high, and peered over the edge.
I’d expected to see Pickover having captured her at this point. After all, she was now unarmed and he was much more nimble as a transfer than she—whoever she