Hide and seek (19 page)

 

Now the girl’s belly wound had closed in a purple scar, but she had aged and was still aging with her pain. Her eyes speared Sparta with their light.

Sparta, full of fear, felt for the wind with her wingtips, found it, and rose into the pink sky. The runes were all around below her, carved in the polished desert stone. If she could stop the world from spinning long enough, she could read them . . .

She mounted higher, making the painful climb–

 

–to consciousness. She was in the cockpit of the marsplane. She was alone. The sun had dropped low in the west, and moving upward past it was the crisp thin crescent of Phobos.

 

The moon Fear.

 

Sparta lay motionless for a moment, not denying her fear but acknowledging it, acknowledging the likelihood of her approaching death. She let the fear of death wash through her.

 

When she had accepted it she let it drain away. Then at last she could turn to the business of life.

She tried the switches of the air pumps and found that they still worked. But she had already evacuated the air from the canopy–why had she forgotten?–and her suit was still sealed. This time, when she reached to release the canopy locks, the pain in her belly was only a twinge.
She stumbled out upon the steep slope of ash. The wind was steady from the west at twenty kilometers an hour. She noted the way the plane’s wings had been detached from the fuselage, the way everything had been neatly pinned to the ground.

The plan and layout of the marsplane were evident. She had no doubt that she could reassemble it–it had been designed that way. But before she did anything, she needed to find out what had gone wrong. She went to the instrument access panel in the fuselage and opened it.

Her darting macrozoom eye traced the visual outlines of the devastation inside, the fused microconnections of invisibly fine solid circuitry.

An electromagnetic “pulse bomb,” a surge generator like one she’d seen only once before–in a Board of Space Control class on sabotage–had been lodged in the autopilot comparator. It wasn’t there now, but Sparta could picture it clearly.

It would have been a steel ball about the size of a lime; greenish-blue discoloration after detonation would have made the sour-fruit comparison even more apt. Before detonation it would have contained a microscopic sphere of frozen hydrogen isotopes, tritium and deuterium, surrounded by larger spheres of liquid nitrogen, liquid lithium, high explosives, and insulators, all under immense pressure. Triggered by an external signal, the explosives would have crushed the hydrogen isotopes, creating thermonuclear fusion–a microscopic H-bomb. The products of the miniature blast would have radiated outward, some ions at a much higher rate than others, and even though the actual force of the blast wouldn’t have been enough even to rupture the superstrong steel casing, the radiation, moving at different velocities and spreading apart like the sound of a handclap in a culvert, would have produced a sort of electronic whistler, an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to fry all the unshielded circuits in the vicinity.

It was the kind of specialized and hideously expensive device that required the capacities of a rich institution: a powerful corporation, a big union, a whole nation, or a group–such as the Free Spirit–more resourceful, if less visible, than any of these.

Khalid must have taken the gadget with him.

 

The plane’s ruined circuits couldn’t be fixed, only replaced, and the marsplane didn’t carry that kind of spare part. Sparta closed the access panel.

She leaned against the fragile fuselage and watched the languidly sinking sun. Maybe Khalid was telling the truth. His advice to stay with the plane may have been well meant. Nothing necessarily ruled against him; he may have removed the pulse bomb to give it to the patrollers.

Still, with the best intentions, he could die in the desert. And if he did not have the best intentions, he might save himself and see to it that no one found her for weeks.

Common sense said she had to leave this place immediately.

 

Methodically she rooted the pitons out of the sand ash and recoiled and repacked the lanyards, leaving only the wingtips anchored. She reassembled the huge plane, piece by piece.

 

A few minutes later the whole immense and fragile assembly was trembling in the wind, pinned to the ground by its wingtips.

There were hydraulic linkages from the pilot’s seat to the wingtip lanyards, the designers having anticipated that in some situations sophisticated electronic systems would be wholly inappropriate. With the right wind, Sparta could pull the pins and let the plane rise, even without rocket assist.

She’d never flown one of these craft; until a couple of days ago, she’d never set foot on Mars. Right now there was a twenty-kilometer crosswind, not the ideal circumstance for an unpowered launch. But she had a knack for this sort of thing.

The sun had just set when she released the right wingtip. Simultaneously she leaned on the stick. The right wing lifted and the whole marsplane immediately pivoted backward on its tethered left wingtip, skimming centimeters above the slope. Half a second later, a little before the plane was head-on to the wind, Sparta released the left lanyard and leaned right on the stick. The plane quivered, tried to stay aloft–the left wingtip sank again and bounced–then rose confidently and glided slowly downslope, its line of flight falling and curving over the saddle of the dark cinder cones.

Sailplanes rarely sail at night, when the cool, dense atmosphere is falling groundward, but Sparta knew that there would be bright patches of sand in the desert that would give up their heat in rising columns some hours beyond the setting of the sun. She would have no trouble finding them. Her infrared vision, swamped in broad daylight, was at its best in darkness; she needed no holographic projection to see the atmosphere at night.

The barely visible landscape of the Tharsis Plateau was rendered in shades of midnight blue and starlight silver. Overhead, shining Phobos moved against the stars, casting deep shadows from the slopes of the desert buttes and dunes. To Sparta’s eyes there was more to the scene: the desert glowed with shades of red as the rocks and sand gave back the day’s heat at different rates. Revealed by their relative warmth, spirals of rich maroon slowly twisted in the dark blue atmosphere over the night landscape–escalating funnels on which the marsplane could hitch a ride.

She skimmed the plane over the dunes and caught the nearest of the updrafts. Soon the plane was wheeling high above the desert and Sparta was searching her eidetic memory, trying to match the remembered map to the remembered territory, seeking the airy thread that would lead her to Labyrinth City.

XIII

A warning light glowed yellow inside Khalid’s helmet, telling him his batteries were low, but he did not see it. Half the night he had slept in dreamless exhaustion while the cold wind sent trickles of sand to cover him like a comforter.

Weariness had overtaken Khalid, and he had curled himself into the shelter of a steep dune face. He knew even as he’d succumbed to sleep that he was risking the last of his precious reserves, but in the long run a human can no more do without rest than without air.

The last thing he’d done was to make sure he was lying with his face toward the east. For it would surely take the full light of the rising sun to wake him.

When it rose the sun was small, low in the east, and climbing fast. The undulating surface of the sand in front of the speeding marstruck was as smooth and sensuous as a discarded kimono of yellow silk, with folds as high as the hills. Since before dawn Lydia’s marstruck had been racing across this dune field, the largest expanse of dunes Blake had ever seen or imagined.

There were tread tracks across the sand, rising and falling over the waves, and they were a remarkable palimpsest, for as faint as they were they were still visible in the slanting light. Only the persistently reapplied imprimatur of passing vehicles could have frustrated the erasing wind.

Sixteen hours away, across the endless dunes, was the pipeline camp. They would drive all day and well into the night, reaching it when the stars were bright and the moons danced in the sky.

 

Lydia squinted at the road. With the sun low, every little ripple was a line of brightness and shadow. She had long since resumed her taciturn silence.

 

Blake’s eyes were fastened on the horizon instead of the road, and he saw the apparition first.

 

“Good God, do you see that?” he whispered.

 

She slowed the truck and looked where he pointed.

It was a human figure, a man by his size and build, trudging the faint track far ahead of them, oblivious to their approach. He was frail and bent, a dark stick-puppet moving with painful speed toward Godknew-where.
Blake and Lydia sealed their suits and Lydia pumped the cab to vacuum. She sent the truck careening over the sand. Even before she drew alongside the walking figure she knew who he was. She knew his stance and gait.

She skidded the truck to a halt beside him. Gaunt and parched, the man stared up at Blake.

 

Blake stared back. “Khalid!”

 

Khalid must have heard him through his commlink, but he was too dazed or dry throated to reply. He only stared.

 

Lydia had her door open and was already out of the cab and running. Blake jumped down to join her.

 

“Battery light says he’s got maybe two hours’ charge,”

 

Lydia said to Blake.

 

“By God, he was lucky.”

 

They lifted the frail and dehydrated man over the treads and into the cab. A minute later, Lydia had the cab resealed and repressurized. While Blake supported Khalid, she lifted the helmet from his head.

 

Khalid had fixed his dark gaze on Blake.

 

“Khalid, do you recognize me?”

 

“Blake,” Khalid said, in a whisper so faint it was little more than an exhalation. Then his long-lashed eyes closed and his head lolled.

 

“He needs water,” Lydia said. She reached for the emergency tube on the dash. She put it to Khalid’s lips.

 

Khalid sputtered and choked, and then began to suck greedily. Water dribbled down his stubbled chin.

 

When he finally released the tube, Blake asked, “What happened?”

 

“Blake”–his fingers feebly grasped at Blake’s chest–“Linda is out there.”

“Linda? You mean . . . ?” “Yes. The plane was sabotaged. This.” His fingers scrabbled at his thigh pocket, and Blake helped him open the flap. Khalid pulled out a steel sphere that appeared to have been burned to discoloration.

“What is it?”

 

“Don’t know. Fried the electronics. She’s still out there.”

 

“How far?”

 

Khalid paused before he answered. “Two days’ walk. Maybe one hundred kilometers, a hundred and twenty at most. Southeast. I’ll lead you.”

 

“What about the emergency beacon?” Lydia demanded.

 

“No good,” Khalid whispered.

 

“Lydia . . .”

 

“Out there, a miss is as good as eternity,” Lydia said.

 

“You can’t refuse to help!”

 

“I’m not refusing help,” she said angrily. “I’ll radio satellite search. Meanwhile the camp can send out search parties.”

 

“Tell them to track
us
,” Blake said. “We’ve got plenty of fuel. We can unhitch the trailers and make good time. Even if we don’t get to her first, we can narrow the search.”

Lydia studied Blake across the body of Khalid, who had leaned back against the seat between them and closed his eyes. “This man’s not out of danger, you know,” she said. “Who is this Linda? Is she more important than him? Who is she to you?”

“That’s not her name,” Blake said uncomfortably. “Her name is Ellen Troy. She’s an inspector with the Space Board. She’s in charge of investigating the murders.”

 

“Yes . . . Ellen,” Khalid whispered. “Something happened to her . . .”

 

“Why was she with you?” Lydia asked him.

He gazed at her. “Because she thought I did it.” Lydia’s mouth tightened, but then some knot of inner resistance unraveled. She looked up at Blake. “How are we going to find her?”

Khalid fumbled in the patch pocket again and brought out his miniature astrolabe. “God will guide us.”

 

“What’s that thing?”

 

He attempted a feeble smile. “Its inertial guidance doesn’t work anymore, but with . . . suitable coordinate transformations . . . it’s still an astrolabe.”

 

* * *

All night Sparta had followed the wind. Phobos was sliding toward the east as the sun climbed to meet it. The low, fast Martian moon crossed the sun more often than Earth’s bigger and more distant companion, but there was rarely anyone in the narrow shadow path of Phobos across the planet’s surface to observe the transit.

As Sparta guided the marsplane higher into the morning’s warming atmosphere she saw the shadow of Phobos passing to the north, a slanted column of darkness in the dust-glistening sky. On the rippled plane of the dune field below, the twenty-seven-kilometer-long blob of shadow crawled eastward like a giant black amoeba.

Soon Sparta was well to the south and west of the moving moon shadow. She never saw the microscopic speck in the dunes that was the speeding marstruck, and the riders in the truck never saw the lazily circling plane that carried the woman they were hoping to rescue.

All day long Lydia drove fast and easily across the trackless dunes, aiming the tractor on the heading Khalid had specified along a snaking path that avoided the sharpest ridge crests but, where there was no alternative, plunging without hesitation down the shadowed slipfaces. Freed of its loaded trailers, the big tractor was an agile dune buggy.

Khalid, restored by water and food and clean air, was in the sleeping box–sleeping through it all. Lydia heard nothing from him until almost nightfall. Then suddenly he poked his head through her lace curtains and demanded that she stop the truck.

“It is time to pray,” he told them.

Lydia, remarkably fresh and alert, or perhaps just running on caffeine–already she was brewing a fresh reservoir in the maker under the console–watched from the bubble as Khalid walked fifty meters into the barren dunes, spread a square of light polyfiber cloth on the sand, and kneeled to prostrate himself in the approximate direction of an invisible Mecca. The wind whipped the cloth around his knees and blew streamers of dust over his bowed back.