was—could possibly be in a surface suit. But Pickover was—well, I couldn’t exactly say he was a lover not a fighter . . . but he definitely wasn’t a fighter. Although it was true she no longer had a gun, she did apparently have a lasso: a loop of what, judging by its dark color, were fibers made of carbon nanotubes, meaning it would be almost impossible to break even with a transfer’s strength. And she’d managed to get it around his ankles and had pulled it tight. While I watched, she gave the lasso a yank, pulling Pickover’s legs out from under him. He tumbled backward—a body slam, not a slo-mo fall—landing flat on his back and sending up a cloud of dust.
As it happened, Pickover was facing my way; she had her back to me. I could make it two for two, pumping shot into her from behind, but her suit might protect her. And, besides, I had questions I wanted to ask. I hauled myself up over the crater rim and clambered down the crumbly incline. The two of them were just shy of the crater’s central bulge.
Pickover tried to get to his feet. The woman yanked the lasso again, and he tumbled backward once more. I think she’d have preferred to hog-tie him, but she didn’t have enough rope for that—I imagine she’d improvised the lasso out of line she’d brought along to help with climbing; she must have thought the Alpha might have been deep in some crevasse, and—
Yes, that was it. She didn’t have another real gun, true—but she had a piton gun attached to her suit’s belt, and she bent over now and positioned it against the center of Pickover’s artificial chest. She presumably hoped that firing a metal spike into his innards would damage something that would incapacitate him. She pulled the trigger.
Pickover screamed and his torso convulsed. It was like watching a biological getting defibrillated, but the intent was the opposite. I had made it down to the reasonably flat bottom of the crater. There was hoarfrost along this part of the wall, since it hadn’t yet been touched by the rising sun.
The woman, who was straddling Pickover, moved the piton gun farther down his chest and fired again. Once more, Rory convulsed from the impact. I brought the shotgun to my shoulder and Pickover seemed to be tucking his knees up toward his torso, maybe to protect his nuts and bolt.
I fired, the recoil pushing me backward a bit—and Pickover got his knees through the woman’s spread legs and kicked her in the chest with his bound feet. She went flying up a good two meters, and the bulk of my shot flew through the gap that had appeared between her and Pickover before she came down again.
Rory rolled onto his side so she wouldn’t fall on top of him, and I hurried in. She hit the ground before I’d closed all the distance and was in a push-up posture, trying to get to her feet, by the time I got there. I grabbed her shoulder and flipped her onto her back, then loomed over her with the shotgun aimed right at her helmet.
“Can you hear me?” I said into my suit radio.
I gave her time to weigh whether she wanted to reply—and, after a moment, she did, although the connection was staticky and hard to make out. “Yes.”
“I want to see your face. There are two ways that can happen. One is I blast open your helmet. The other is you depolarize it. Your choice.”
She just lay there. Maybe she was hoping blue boy would come to her rescue, jumping me from behind. I wanted to see her face when I broke the news—not out of any sick desire to watch her feel hurt, but because her reaction would be a useful clue to the nature of their relationship.
“Five seconds, lady,” I said. “One. Two. Three.”
She moved her right hand to the bank of buttons on her left forearm, and the bowl went from reflecting a distorted image of me to being transparent.
And that face I did know, a gorgeous symphony in chocolate shades: brown skin, brown hair, brown eyes. Lakshmi Chatterjee, New Klondike’s writer-in-residence.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “I thought we had something special.”
“We still could,” she replied. She indicated Pickover, who was lying on his side. “With him out of the picture, you, me, and Darren split it three ways.”