In the Hall of the Martian King (23 page)

With a deafening
kerfoom!
the emergency hatch blew off, revealing the warm Martian desert night and the light of the still-burning Fuel Tank One. A
moment later the evacuation slide deployed, rolling out like an old-fashioned carpet, stiffening and reshaping until it was
simply a large version of a playground slide. Pikia leapt up, grabbed the overhead bar, pulled her feet up, and swung out
into the night, dropping onto the slide and whooshing down it like any otter or small child. The slide took her all the way
down the side of the embankment that supported the linducer track.

She came up in a neat roll at the end of the slide and ran toward the blazing Fuel Tank One. “I set off all the internal fire
alarms when the exit deployed,” her purse said, more smugly than ever. “And about half of the sprinklers. And two of the foam-smother
systems. They’ll be busy for a little while.”

Pikia dashed toward the blazing tank, as tall as a seven-story building. She specked that getting a fire that big, even a
relatively cool and controlled one, behind her would be a pretty good way to shake off any pursuers, and anyway, it was only
a slightly longer way to the monitor tower.

She was running more slowly than usual, with her hands clasped in front of her, holding down the reward spot on her purse,
so hard and for so long that its happy cheebles blurred into a trill. She could do something about the smugness some other
time.

Jak and Sib had begun to reassure each other frequently (in a way that meant, to anyone who knew them, they were both nervous)
when they saw the abnormally tall, oddly jointed figure break from one side of the Princess’s yacht, followed by the smaller,
more muscular one; both leapt over the end of the lowered cradle in one long bound, and raced for the monitor tower. Jak specked
that pursuit had to be white-hot. He raised his purse to his mouth to give an order—

“Let ’em get clear,” Sibroillo said, “but if there’s any sign of pursuit—”

A nose gun on the Princess’s yacht fired, but it didn’t depress quite enough; the hypersonic round left a bright streak of
artificial lightning in the thick air, and Dujuv and Shadow went sprawling from its sonic boom, but a moment later they had
rolled back up to their feet and they were running again.

Jak couldn’t let that gun fire again—especially because as Dujuv and Shadow got farther away from it, it would be able to
bear on them—so he just had to hope that Dujuv and Shadow on the Frost were far enough away. “Hose ’em down,” he said to his
purse.

The monitor tower thundered and boomed like the end of the world, but the Princess’s yacht vanished in a great swirl of rolling
and curling white water that flooded the cradle and piled in mountains of foam over the edges. If they’d left any doors open,
they were probably regretting (and trying to correct) it, right now. Jak hoped to Nakasen that no one was trapped between
the yacht and the cradle wall—anyone in that situation had surely been battered unconscious and then drowned.

“Weehu,” Uncle Sib hollered into Jak’s ear, “
that
did more than you planned on. I’m glad I forced everyone out of the tower before I left.”

Jak turned to see the control tower bending, dancing, wobbling, like a drunken dancer who is trying to get the engineer’s
attention in a slec space (the kind of drunken dancer no slec engineer will ever point a camera at). “Long lever arm,” he
said, cupping his hands around Sib’s ear. “The command deck is at the top, and it’s wide, and the whole tower is almost a
kilometer tall. It’s like a man trying to hold up a snow shovel against a fire hose. Where did you send the tower crew?”

“Over to the main hangar. If they didn’t turn back—and these were technicians, not soldiers, they wouldn’t turn back, I don’t
speck they would—well, anyway, they should have gotten there before now.”

With a bass twang that they felt through the soles of their feet, the control tower went over backward.

“If that just landed on the main hangar,” Jak shouted, “I think those technicians are feeling very unlucky right now.” He
told his purse to switch the water jets that had been on the control tower over to the Pertrans and main linducer tracks.

The elevator doors opened, and Dujuv bellowed, above the din, “That was the most inept guard I’ve ever seen. He just walked
up to Shadow, completely unfocused, and said, ‘Papers?’ Shadow threw him against the wall.”

“It seemed like the minimum necessary. Is Pikia here yet?”

“No, but we still have fifteen minutes till pickup.”

“Then she will be. She has considerable skill and she is a person of honor.”

“Did you get the lifelog?”

Shadow on the Frost shouted, “Thanks to your clever friend Dujuv, yes. Without his intuition we would have been lost.”

Dujuv unfastened his tunic and pulled out a scorched, soggy, multicolored ball of lacy fabric. “I was running with it in my
hands till that gun went off and you wet them down. Which I’m glad you did, because that flash had set my shirt to smoldering,
too. Anyway, I scooped it up, and if all these provided enough protection—”

Jak began to laugh, and then Sib joined in.

Shadow explained. “We got into the Princess’s yacht and liberated weapons; smashed into her boudoir and sealed the door to
the room where she was bathing; blasted her safe, and found … nothing. It was about to be for nothing. And then Dujuv whacked
his forehead and said, ‘Where do women put something valuable?’ ”

“And it was in her underwear drawer, right enough,” the panth finished. “Which also gave me something to wrap it in.” Nakasen’s
lifelog lay on the plotting desk, among a large heap of soggy, shredded, and scorched lace panties, but the layers nearest
it seemed to be dry and undamaged. “By the way, sir,” he shouted to Sibroillo, over the roar of the monitors, “you’re right
about historic events needing something to frame them! The biggest religious revelation in centuries didn’t arrive through
normal diplomacy and bureaucratic procedure. It arrived in a panty raid!”

Pikia stared in dismay at the artificial river now pouring past her; the water washing from Cradle Two had created a torrent
that she was guessing was at least as deep as she was tall. She couldn’t very well swim that, let alone wade it.

Well, it would have to fan out sooner or later. She trotted beside it for a half kilometer before she came to a place where
she judged it safe enough to try for a crossing. She was almost right; she only went down into potholes twice, going over
her head each time but immediately washing up onto the soft sand on the downstream side, spitting mud and using language that
might have surprised her friends.

As she climbed out onto the far bank, she considered her mauled hair from earlier in the evening, the drenching she had just
taken, and her exhaustion, and decided that she wanted to see Clarbo Waynong again soon, and she wanted him to say something
about her appearance, so that she could rip off his genitals and force-feed them to him.

Once she was on the right side of the water, it was a relatively short dash to the monitor tower, and the prospect of having
all of this be someone else’s decisions to make and problems to solve seemed very promising indeed. As she approached the
tower, she lost all ability to hear, for outside the din of the big monitors was even louder than inside. It was like standing
close to a large waterfall.

As she rushed in through the door, she thought she might have to fight the guard, but something about her seemed to make him
cower in the corner and say, “Don’t hurt me.” The elevator doors opened, and the rest of the party stood there, staring at
her—soaking wet, missing hair from half her head, covered with mud, grinning like a maniac, and clutching a sling-bag of weapons.
“Hey,” she said, “can you boys come out and play?”

O
utside it was far too noisy to hear the two ground-effect buses, and Gweshira and Xlini were driving with the lights off,
so they were almost on top of the party when they braked by the monitor tower. “Looks like you had success at the motor pool.
One hour of dark remaining,” Jak said. “That should just cover our run to Freehold.”

“Will someone, somewhere, sometime, tell me what is going on?” Waynong asked, and got no answer. Everyone climbed in as quickly
as possible, and the hovercars shot off into the night.

The hovercars were capable of about 250 kph on flat ground or calm water, and in this part of the Chryse Desert, the anchored
dunes rolled gently and low. Freehold was only about twenty minutes away, and figuring that it would take at least ten minutes
for the other side to organize a pursuit—which could not be coming by anything much faster than a hovercar—it seemed certain
that they would reach Freehold, and assured political asylum, well before anything could close in on them.

Freehold was the capital of Magenta Yellow Amber Cyan, a Harmless Zone nation devoted to a kind of passionately mad capitalism
in which every odd thing the market did was taken to be a parable of moral instruction. A sudden rise in the price of plums
might be read as instruction on chastity; a brief shortfall of soap powder, as a lesson on the vanity of earthly greatness.
Whatever happened in the city’s markets—a decline in rents in one neighborhood, an increase in durable goods orders, a brief
blip in the consumer interest rate—was interpreted by an academy of priest-economists for the archive that Freehold maintained
“for whenever the solar system is ready for it.” One popular tour guide described Freehold as “Emerald City if it had been
designed by Ayn Rand specifically to produce self-help books.” But peculiar as Freehold was, it had a tradition of giving
asylum to all who asked, and it was close.

The hovercars were self-piloting and built to seat eight, so four people in each had some room to stretch out as they whizzed
across the desert. Shortly there was no conversation, just snoring.

Jak’s purse buzzed and rattled to wake him. He sat up and reflexively checked the time—they should be in Freehold in eight
minutes—

“Emergency,” his purse said. “Massive communications and information penetration is under way. It appears to be an attempt
to take control of—”

The hoverjets shut off abruptly and the car dropped the ten centimeters onto the desert floor in less than two seconds as
the overpressure leaked out from under the flexible skirt that surrounded its base. The normal soft-landing safeties were
shut off, so the hovercar was still moving at over 200 kph when its bottom struck the rock-strewn gravel hillside. In a sudden,
mad, four-g whirl, the car flipped over twice before coming to rest on its side.

“Sorry,” the purse said.

“What happened?” Jak looked around; everyone had been belted in and the crash prediction system had worked as advertised,
so Sib, Pikia, and Gweshira, at least, were all right.

Before his purse could answer, Jak got a call from Dujuv. “Jak, are you all right?”

“We just crashed. Probably a software attack. Can you get the lifelog to Freehold?”

“We just crashed too. We’re about eighty meters behind you. Nobody’s hurt here. At least we stayed upright.”

“Must’ve been your skill and daring, old pizo. All of us are all right here, too. But I think we may have a battle at any
moment. And it’s possible our purses have been penetrated and turned.” He thought only for a moment; the situation was clear
enough—the hovercars had simultaneously crashed during a hostile infopenetration, hardly likely to be a coincidence. Besides,
toktru Jak didn’t want to hear Sib’s six standard pieces of advice right now. “All right, then, we have to figure we’re about
to have to fight. Be careful what you send over your purse and run all your defensive software
now.
Everyone out and meet between the hovercars.”

When Jak’s group joined Dujuv’s, in a little depression between the two wrecked hovercars, the first streaks of dawn were
beginning to appear in the eastern sky; another effect of the very large-scale height and the dense gas mix on terraformed
Mars was that light scattered far before and behind the sun, so that sunsets and sunrises lingered for hours. In the dim glow,
he saw Dujuv concentrating on his left palm and muttering.

Jak knew Dujuv too well to worry about security; if Dujuv was using the purse, it was secure to his satisfaction, and that
was more than good enough for Jak. “Getting anything, Duj?”

“Looks like nine heets riding strap-on flyers. Speed and altitude are more than Harmless Zone legal for military—so I bet
payload and weapons are too, and that those are off the Princess’s yacht. Or in short, big, mean, and really open for business.”

“If it’s the Royal Palace Guards, we’re outnumbered but not badly, but if it’s B&Es, we’re dead,” Sibroillo observed.

“That would be my assessment, also,” Shadow on the Frost said, quietly hefting two of the weapons from the sling-bags. “Was
there a B&E contingent on the Princess’s yacht? I didn’t see any evidence of one, and I don’t recall hearing anything about
it.”

“Me either,” Jak said, and the headshakes around him made it unanimous. “But it wouldn’t be hard for them to have concealed
nine beanies, and if that’s what is coming after us, Sib is toktru singing-on right.”

Dujuv grunted. “Well, whatever they are, they’ll be overhead in four minutes. We can’t outrun them and we won’t stay hidden
for long. That leaves fighting or giving up. And fighting has a lot of uncertainties, all of them between bad and worse. I’d
say we’re on the bad side of entropy, old pizo, and maybe we ought to just admit it.”

“Not fight?” Clarbo Waynong asked, sounding shocked.

“I wasn’t calling for a vote,” Jak said. “But since you mention the issue, I’m thinking compromise. Let’s take their first
assault or hear their first offer, and then I’ll decide.”

Everyone except Dujuv was nodding slowly. Jak said, “Duj, I want to hear what you’re thinking.”

“I’d hate to have any of us get killed—or even any of them—just so you won’t have to give up without a fight, or to give you
a basis for making up your mind.”