Rainbow Mars (15 page)

After a long silence Miya asked, “Hanny, how the futz would
I
know if they drained the tank?”

Svetz said, “Get some sleep.”

Driving a sailcar was fun. He'd had days to grow used to the screaming wind; it lost force now because they were racing ahead of it. The car was rolling too fast to sink through the dried dust. The canal was so wide that he couldn't see both rims at the same time. It would be hard to hit anything.

A line of big birds, needle-nosed and wingless, chased them for three or four klicks and never quite caught up. Svetz wondered if they were his dinner, then if they were chasing their own dinner. They looked to be just having fun. But the nearest one seemed to be wearing—

“Miya, give me a sanity check.”

She wriggled around to look where he was pointing. Zoomed her faceplate. “That thing is wearing a belt. Or maybe it's a collar. With tools hanging on it.”

“Matth said there are five sapient species in their funny alliance, plus the observers. This would make seven intelligent species, right? How could this many all evolve together?”

“Can't,” Miya said.

“They could evolve separately,” Svetz mused. “It's another quantum mechanical thing.”

“I'm tired, Hanny. What are you talking about? Time lines merging?”

“Yes, just before everything ends for this whole world. Like virtual particles, no investigator is supposed to see this.”

“But we're seeing it.”

“Maybe we're not supposed to be here either.”

But Miya was asleep. In the morning she remembered nothing of big needle-nosed birds wearing tool belts.

*   *   *

Come night, Miya wanted to keep moving.

They mounted her flashlight on the roof, pointing straight up. She hovered above him on the flight stick, in the beam, while Svetz sailed.

At midnight they switched. Miya made him take the blaster. He showed her how to use the needle gun.

At dawn Miya slept again. She didn't wake until near sunset. Svetz got an hour's sleep before night fell, and then they both had to be awake to drive.

After two days of driving she was caught up on sleep.

Dawn. He flew above dark green canyons cutting through red desert. Far ahead was a row of … something repetitive. He took his time descending.

Pyramids. The row began above the canal, and the first was no bigger than a fist. Each that followed was larger, and each had been broken open. The row descended to the canal floor as if the architects had mindlessly followed the disappearing water.

The line continued. Built on the floor of what had been a canal, these last could hardly be ancient tombs. More like row houses.

The last was as big as a mansion, and the peak was missing. They gave it a wide and wary berth. They were already past when Svetz saw a skinny arm emerge from the pyramid with a rounded brick in its hand.

*   *   *

Midnight. Miya brought the flight stick down to the aft boom, tied it, walked forward. They traded places at the wheel. Svetz crawled back along the boom. He didn't have Miya's balance, and it was very dark.

Svetz flew high. The tiny flashlight on the sailcar was a bright pinprick on black land. A moon ghosted overhead, west to east: Phobos, a featureless pale lamp much larger than any tiny captured asteroid. Stratospheric ice crystals? Its light illuminated nothing until he'd flown for hours, until his night vision began to adjust.

Below, wide to the left and far aft, motion reflected the moonlight.

Svetz moved out of the sailcar's flashlight beam. He could still see the light as a wobbly line of lesser darkness in his peripheral vision. An intruder in the sky was catching up with them, their paths slowly converging.

“Miya?”

“How you doing, Hanny?”

“We have company. Turn the flashlight
off.
” Already the intruder was an enemy. Strangers met during his trips to Earth's past had usually been suspicious, jumpy, ready to kill a man who didn't dress like they did.

He used his faceplate to zoom on the intruder. He got a jittery image of a smooth-surfaced silver lens. “One ship. Big, I think. Flying double-wok, rounded, with no decks. Not the same style as
Skyrunner
was. Some other race.”

What had Matth called them?
Skyrunner
had been destroyed by a ship like this, armed with a heat cannon.

The intruder was nearly alongside Svetz, but far to the left. Svetz dropped the zoom. At once he saw the second ship, flying even higher than Svetz and just above the larger ship, tending it.

He watched it for some time before he saw it swing right, abandoning its post for something more interesting. The second intruder had seen Miya.

Svetz saw the lens-ship tilt nearly to vertical. Saw an aperture open in the rim, and that was enough.

“It's after you,” he said. He'd been keeping the blaster in a zipped pocket. He drew it carefully, knowing how much he didn't want to drop it.

“Shoot it!” Miya demanded.

He fired. “Way ahead of you.”

The smaller ship rocked in the jet of flame. It fired a wild actinic jet of its own. Not a laser, it spread too much, but it didn't spread like a rocket exhaust. Maybe a plasma jet held together by its own magnetic fields.

For an instant it held, and then the flying wok flared. Svetz saw the ship shred itself inside a dying fireball.

He lifted. He could do that by touch. There was nothing solid above him. Eyes aboard the large intruder might have seen him when he fired, as the point on a line of white plasma; but now he would be only a dark dot on the sky.

“Hanny, report! I saw—”

“I got the little ship. The big one
had
to have seen me. I'm lifting. They'll try to chase me. There's no chance they'll find you until dawn if you'll just turn off that futzy flashlight!”

“I did. Why not just shoot them down?”

“I blinded myself.”

She didn't say anything.

“There's nothing that can hurt me this high,” he said. “I'll just wait for my sight to come back.”

“Good plan.” Miya sounded jittery. “Look, if you don't find me then, just keep west to Mons Olympus. Get to the
Minim.
”

“Right.”

*   *   *

He couldn't see. It was chilly without his cloak, but no worse than chilly. The flight stick flew on, altitude unknown.

Miya called not much later. “I saw where the wreck hit. I'm going to look it over.”

“Bad idea,” Svetz said.

“In and out quick, trust me.”

It felt like hours passed before she spoke again. “What did your rebels call them? Softfingers? I've found parts of at least four bodies. They look like dry-skinned octopuses. They've got ten arms with no bones in them. They're bigger than men. Oversized heads with an external skull, and big bulging eyes.

“The undersurfaces of the tentacles are thick with callus right up to the … shoulder. The underside of the pressure suit is a curved plate, a skid. I pried one up. It's covering the air supply. The mouth is on the bottom.” Pause. “Hanny, do you remember Gorky's maps?”

From footage taken by the descending Tanker, Gorky had made maps of every size. They'd all studied them so that they could find the Tanker.

“Remember a white rock formation on Mons Olympus? It looked chopped, sculpted, but no special shape? Well, that was a Softfingers skull.”

“Charming.”

“Hanny, I found rolls of mirror cloth. It's solar sail material harvested from the skyhook tree's leaves.”

“An innocent cargo ship? They had one futz of an energy weapon.”

“Aye aye, but I sure hope we know what we're doing.”

“Miya, get out of there before they come to bury their dead.”

“
You
don't know they … right.”

*   *   *

Something blurred and bright floated in his sight. Joy flooded through him: his sight was returning. He watched it for a time, trying to guess its size and distance.

“Miya? Is it still night where you are?”

“Sure. How high are you?”

“I can see the curve of the planet.” An arc of light, without detail. “And I can see Mons Olympus.” The crater's rim was aflame with dawn. No mistaking it now, though his sight was still blurry.

“Go for it.”

24

He said, “Zeera?” and waited.

These were the foothills of Mons Olympus. The mountain looked like a tilted continent from this close. Zeera should be in line of sight.

“Hanville Svetz calling Zeera Southworth for the Institute for Temporal Research. Zeera, answer.”

“Svetz?”

“Hi, Zeera. What's happening?”

“They shoot at me when I try to take off. If I try to work the airlock, they shoot. Sometimes when I look out.”

“How many? Where are they? Can you see them?”

“They shoot at me when I look! They've got things like blasters, but big!”

“How much damage have you taken?”

“I can't tell. Maybe none. The blaster only shoots heat beams, I think, and it recharges in ten minutes. There are two at least. The
Minim
's hull superconducts heat, it can take that much energy and radiate it away before they can fire again, but my engines overheat and shut down and I fall about a meter! I did it twice more. I thought you'd need the data.”

“
I'd
need—?”

“You, Miya,
somebody!
”

He heard the edge of hysteria in her voice. She wanted rescue! He said, “Well, I'm here.”

“Just stay away. You'll go like an ice cube in coffee.”

“I can't leave things the way they are. We'll starve. You've got all the food. Zeera, did the Tanker look ruptured?”

“Not ruptured, but they took off one of the landing motors and tested it,” Zeera said, “and they built a kind of token wall around the nuclear pile. Radiation must have made someone sick.”

“They didn't cut the cable?”

“No, they're letting it run.”

“Who am I fighting?”

“I started a war, coming down. The people around the Tanker were human. These things with all the arms and no bones, they're astronomers. I'm not guessing, Svetz. They use radio. I tuned in and used the translator. There was some kind of long-term truce. The men had the Tanker and the … astronomers—”

“Softfingers.”

“—Softfingers had the telescopes, but they both saw the
Minim
come down, and that set things off. I heard them fighting over me.”

“Sanity check,” Svetz said. “You hovered above the crater because you wanted to see the telescope setup. The Softfingers saw you then. Then you went into a landing pattern over the Tanker. They fired on you?”

“Yes, the men. They had impact weapons. I put some mountain between me and them, fast, but I could see the astronomer ships coming down at me. They've got aircraft like two saucers set lip to lip. They were blasting the camp around the Lander when I got out of sight. One came after me. He got me with a heat cannon. My engines started to shut down. I hit the override and got down as fast as I could, and I've been here since.”

“Okay. Stay put. I'm on it.”

“The astronomers killed most of the people and kept the rest as … the translator says
slaves.
Hanny, what are you going to do?”

“Maybe I shouldn't tell you. If you heard them, they could listen to us.” Svetz didn't believe they could translate, but he didn't have a plan, either.

*   *   *

He was well up Mons Olympus now, just a few klicks high, though that still put him above where a man could breathe. He might still be too small to notice, but as soon as he fired a blaster, they'd be after him.

The Tanker had taken pictures all the way down. Gorky had maps of every size, and Svetz had studied them for months. He didn't expect to have trouble finding the Tanker. But where was it?

He
could not
keep circling forever in hope that something would look familiar.

Wait now … he
knew
that white rock formation from Gorky's maps. Miya had dissected a Softfinger, and she said this was the shape of its skull. So the Tanker should be … there. Svetz looked for a compact silver bullet shape. The Tanker was Moon-built motors, turbines, compressors and the nuclear pile to power them, but most of its volume would be tanks.

It was there. It was nearly hidden in a maze made up of ladders and pipes and flattened spheres, a long silver line of cable that led to the nuclear power source on its tractor treads, a dismounted rocket motor braced against a hillside, and a score of little buildings too pretty to be prefabs, too hastily built to be houses … martian work in the style of Hangtree Town … and two bigger structures that looked more like beehives.

Still, he could not imagine how he'd missed the Tanker. It sat on the highest flat spot the Tanker's computer could find. Space Bureau wouldn't
hide
the fuel it would take to get their samples home!

“Zeera, I have the Tanker in view. Tell me again how you get them to shoot at you.”

“Any time I try to take off. Any time the airlock door wiggles. Sometimes if they see me in the flight dome, they blast a granite outcropping. I'm right under it.”

“So the rocks around you would be covered with scorch marks, would they?”

“Yeah! Look for kind of a big rounded granite skull. They shoot it any time I poke my head into the flight dome. They shot the eyeholes first. Now they're shooting just over my head and making gaps for teeth.
Human
skull.”

He'd found another little beehive high above the Tanker, beside what might be a heat cannon, though he'd never seen a weapon like that one. A line ran down to a patch of black cloth or paint. Heat radiator?