wide, but she didn’t seem too broken up by it, and, after a moment, she said, “Even better.”
I looked over at Pickover, and, yeah, I thought about it for half a second. Now, you could say that all things being equal, it made more sense to share the wealth with Rory, who’d never tried to kill me, than with Lakshmi, who’d happily shoot pitons into my chest, too, if given the chance. But old Dr. Pickover wasn’t going to let these fossils be sold, so there was no sharing to do with him.
Still, I liked the guy.
“No dice,” I said. I reached down and wrenched the piton gun from her and sent it flying—it was easy enough to toss it clear over the crater’s rim. “Roll over,” I said. “Face down.”
Lakshmi hesitated, so I pushed the shotgun muzzle right up against her fishbowl. She nodded within and turned onto her stomach. “Don’t move,” I said.
I went over to Pickover. If he’d been knifed, the standard advice would be to leave the blades in, lest removing them exposed gaping wounds through which he’d bleed to death. But I thought in this case the metal spikes might be causing electrical shorts inside him, and so I grabbed them—my suit’s gloves insulating me—and pulled them free. One came out clean; the other was covered with black machine oil. I tossed them aside.
“You okay?” I asked.
He looked no worse for wear—although the workings of his face were still exposed. “I think so.”
I glanced at his bound ankles. “You still have my switchblade?” He’d kept it after using it to disarm the two mines.
“In the pouch,” he said.
I opened his equipment pouch and took out the knife. I tried to cut through the material, but my guess had been right: it was carbon nanofiber; the knife didn’t even make a mark on it. Still, that didn’t mean we were out of luck. I went over and kicked Lakshmi none too gently in the thigh. “Up,” I said.
She got to her feet.
“You made the lasso,” I said, pointing. “Untie it.”
She hesitated for a moment then bent over to do so. It took a particularly good figure to look attractive through a surface suit, but, admiring her from behind, it was clear that that was precisely what she had.
“Come on!” I said. “Hurry up!”
“I can’t,” she said after trying for a bit. She held up her hands. “The gloves are too thick.”
“Take them off, then.”
“It’s fifty below zero!”
I considered. “All right. Rory, can you manage it?”
He sat up. A jet of oil squirted from one of the holes in his chest, but he didn’t seem to notice. His fingers were unencumbered, and I imagined he’d opted for a super-high degree of dexterity, since part of his job was preparing minute fossils. I kept the shotgun trained on Lakshmi, while he struggled to loosen the loop—and, at last, he succeeded.
He surprised me by holding out a hand so I could help him get up—but that might just have been the natural thought of the middle-aged mind within the transfer body; I was counting on him not actually being severely injured. I put my gloved hand in his naked one and pulled him to his feet. He nodded his thanks and stepped out of the lasso. I bent over, picked it up, and slipped it over Lakshmi’s head and shoulders, pulled it down past her breasts, then cinched it tight, binding her arms below the elbow to her waist—which, again, emphasized her remarkable figure.
I took the other end of the cord, holding it like a leash. I gave her a little shove, and she started walking in front of us. Pickover fell in next to me. I had to let go of the cord to let her, and then me, scramble up the inner crater wall and down the outer one. We’d come out about thirty degrees around the rim from where I’d gone in, and—
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I probably should have mentioned that.”
Pickover’s artificial jaw had dropped to half-mast. Lakshmi stopped dead in her tracks. “How are we going to get home?” she exclaimed, looking at the two wrecked buggies.
“That’s a very good question,” I replied. Mars had no telephone system outside the dome, no global positioning system, and no string of communications satellites—it was the frontier. And the planet’s weak and wonky ionosphere was no use for bouncing signals, so radio worked only more or less over line of sight—meaning there was no way to call