although I wondered if they were actually our rocket exhaust or water vapor from the melted permafrost. Phobos is hard to see during the day, and catching sight of Deimos is a good sign that you don’t need your eyes fixed; I managed the former, but not the latter, although who knew if the little terror was up, anyway.
I still had my gun out. Blue Sky looked like he was slumped over unconscious, but he could just be playing possum, waiting until we were near enough that he couldn’t miss. But as we got closer, he really did seem out of it, and when I knelt next to him, I could see why. “Ooops,” I said.
Pickover sounded aghast. “You just killed a man, and the best you can manage is ‘Ooops’?”
“Well, he did try to kill us,” I said. My bullet had gone a little higher than I’d intended and had shattered his helmet, exposing him to the subzero cold and the razor-thin atmosphere. It was an odd sight: the youthful face was clearly dead, the eyes were locked open and staring straight ahead, and a trickle of blood, already frozen, extended down from a corner of his mouth. But the snake tattoo on his left cheek was still animated, the rattle on the tail moving back and forth. It was Dirk.
“I know him,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Dumb punk, recently arrived from Earth.” I shrugged a little.
“Ah,” said Rory, I guess because he needed to say something. But, then, after a moment, he went on. “Hello, what’s this?”
Lying on the ground nearby was an excimer-powered jackhammer, like the one Joshua Wilkins had used to fake the suicide in the basement of NewYou.
“He must have used it to push the locking wheel against your strength, Rory.”
“Ah, right. But what should we do with this poor devil? We can’t just leave him here.”
“No,” I said softly. “We can’t.”
For once, Rory was being more mercenary than me. “It’s the color of his surface suit,” he said. “Anyone coming this way is bound to spot him. We don’t want people stopping near the Alpha for any reason.”
I pointed back the way we’d come. “But even if we bury him, that giant lander lying on its side is bound to attract some attention.”
“Then we’ve got to move it.”
“How? Juan’s buggy can’t haul that.”
“There’s no reason to assume the ship is no longer flightworthy,” Pickover said. “Let’s get Mudge to fly it back to New Klondike.”
Normally, I’d have had Pickover carry the corpse, since it would have been no hardship for him, but he was still limping. I put Dirk in a fireman’s carry, and we took him back toward the pit left by the lander. We could have used the jackhammer to dig a grave through the permafrost, but the pit, and the area for a bunch of meters around it, was still mushy enough to make it possible, though difficult, to inter him by hand, so we did that instead. When it was done, I stood over the spot for a few minutes, trying to think of something appropriate to say. But, for once, I was at a loss for words.
I assume it was Dirk who had rescued Lakshmi when we’d abandoned her here. She hadn’t seemed like she expected the cavalry to come charging over the hill—so my guess was that while she and Darren Cheung had followed us, via the tracking chip in the switchblade, he had tailed them, hoping for his own crack at Alpha riches. And, to his credit, when he came upon Darren dead and Lakshmi getting that way, he’d rescued her rather than left her to die. Maybe there was some honor among thieves after all.
It wouldn’t do to leave Dirk’s buggy here. I knew from the old movies I liked that the terms “manual” and “automatic” used to refer to types of automobile transmissions, but the switch on the buggy’s dashboard labeled with those two words simply selected whether the vehicle drove itself or not. I had Rory help me rotate the buggy so that it was facing northeast—vaguely toward Elysium—and then set it on its way; the buggy’s excimer battery showed a three-quarters charge still, so the damn thing should go thousands of klicks before running out of power.
We then turned our attention back to the lander—and discovered we had another difficulty. If there was a way to talk to Mudge from the outside, we had no idea what it was. I doubted there was an external