bad luck or a conscious decision on her part. I thought of the darkness within her box, the isolation from the rest of humanity, and shivered. I turned the heat back up a notch and did my best to sound cheerful. “Okay, but I spend a lot of time looking at my feet, so I’ll start there. They are size fourteen or so, large enough to qualify as battleships, and covered with reddish Mars dust.”
Loni laughed, and thus encouraged, I continued. Describing what I saw to my sightless passenger forced me to realize how beautiful my surroundings were and made the time pass quickly. It seemed as if little more than a few minutes had elapsed when Dawkins announced the halfway point and declared a ten-minute break.
Mules headed in every direction as they looked for places to sit. Talking to Loni had been pleasant, but Sasha was very much on my mind, so I waited for the greenie to light on rock and ambled over. Loni was telling me about her VR-driven training, but I cut her off in mid-sentence. “Sorry, Loni, but I’ve got a personal matter to attend to. Hold that gafornk.”
The greenie turned her helmet in my direction but made no effort to avoid me. There was plenty of room on the rock she had chosen, so I sat down beside her. My helmet thumped against hers. It’s hard to be brain-damaged and subtle at the same time. I wasn’t. “You shot at us.”
Her reply was direct. “Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why shoot at us?”
“Because I was ordered to do so.”
“By whom?”
“Screw you.”
“What about the girl? What happened to the girl?”
The woman shrugged. The suit fit fairly well and shrugged with her. “Beats me. The gas put me out.”
I swore. The woman hooked her thumbs under the pack straps that held her cyborg in place. I could barely see her eyes through the sand-abraded face plate. Was it sympathy I saw?
“You really like her, don’t you?”
I was confused. “Like who?”
“The girl.”
“Yes, I really like her.”
“Well,” the woman said, “think about her before you unleash whatever technological hell you’re working on.”
“I’m not working on a technological rebonk.”
“Really?” the woman asked. “Then what are you doing here?”
Part of me wanted to give the obvious answer, to say something about protecting my client, but the rest knew she was right. There was something more going on, something Sasha at least partially understood, assuming she was alive, that is.
“On your feet,” Dawkins ordered. “We have about twelve miles to go and barely enough air to get there. Let’s haul ass.”
The next two and a half hours were difficult. Perhaps some of the others had thought to catheterize themselves prior to departure, but I hadn’t and needed to pee. Add to that the fear of what we might find when we arrived at the crash site, and my concerns for Sasha, and it made for a hard, cold lump that rode my gut for the rest of the day. It was twilight by the time we hit flat ground and the mule called Swango saw the first chunk of wreckage. He sounded worried and ecstatic at the same time. “Dawkins! There it is! A piece of wreckage!”
“Good boy,” Dawkins said calmly. “Now stay away from it until I get there and take a look-see. It could be dangerous.”
“Or it could be loaded with goodies like oxygen,” Loni said over our private intercom.
I hadn’t thought about that but knew it was probably true. If the mules stumbled across some O2, the Field Supervisor’s immediate authority would be considerably lessened. And, while the mutineers wouldn’t have any place to go after their rebellion, Dawkins could be more than a little dead in the meantime.
The wreckage consisted of a huge engine, one of four required to keep a shuttle aloft in the planet’s thin atmosphere, and glittered with a coating of diamondlike ice crystals. I figured some sort of liquid had been liberated when the engine tore free; then it had vaporized and frozen in a matter of seconds.
We were close now, and picked up the pace without being asked to. It was relatively easy to follow the trail of debris, which, thanks to the lighter gravity, was much longer than it would have been on Earth. Judging from the wreckage, and the huge scars scored in the rocky soil, the shuttle had cartwheeled for two or three miles after it hit before finally coming to rest.
We found more and more wreckage as we followed the trail. I described it to Loni. “And there’s something that looks like a piece of wing with part of an engine still attached.”
The cyborg sounded concerned. “But no sign of the fuselage?”
“Nope, not yet.”
“Good. The walkers can take a lot of punishment, but they’ll do best cradled in the cargo hold.”
The bits and pieces gradually grew thicker until someone spotted the main part of the wreckage. “There it is!” a woman exclaimed. “Straight ahead.”
I arrived five minutes later and was amazed by the sheer size of the downed shuttle. The hull towered three or four stories over my head and stretched hundreds of feet in both directions. There were no signs of a fire, which wasn’t too surprising, since there was very little oxygen available to feed on. All the damage was impact-related. A huge circle served to contain the Marscorp “M” and adorned the side of the hull. It was split down the middle, a fact that eliminated the need to find a hatch.
Dawkins ordered us to wait and entered through the crack. I checked my oxygen supply, saw that I was down to eighteen minutes’ worth, and thought about the assumptions the corpies had used. That we would make the trip inside of six hours, that we would be able to salvage the oxygen we needed from the wreck, and that at least some of the walkers would be operable. Then I realized something that should have been obvious from the start. It didn’t matter if we got back. As long as the borgs made it to the crash site, and Dawkins installed them in their machines, the corpies would deem the mission a success. Which explained why Mars fodder like the greenie and myself had been selected as mules. We were expendable.
Suddenly I saw Dawkins in a new light. He’d known what I’d just managed to figure out all along, and not only planned to carry out his mission, but save our asses as well. The fact was that we had been lucky, very lucky, and I wondered if our luck would hold.
And much to my amazement it did, as Dawkins emerged, announced that six of the walkers were operational, and started the search for an airtight compartment. We spent ten minutes on the task, but couldn’t find one. So, with our air running uncomfortably low, we were forced to inflate one of two emergency shelters carried aboard the shuttle.
The second was missing. A more imaginative person than myself might have spent a significant amount of time considering what might have happened if the first tent had been destroyed, but I felt no desire to do that. No, it was much nicer to cycle through the lock with the warning buzzer sounding in my ears, strip off my suit, and seek the solace of a small but well-designed inflatable rest room.
It was only after I had taken a much delayed pee that I remembered Loni and the fact that I discarded her along with my suit. I hurried back. The shelter had been designed to accommodate twice our number, so there was plenty of room. I wound my way between people, unoccupied suits, and built-in equipment to find that a pair of mules were disconnecting Loni from my suit. I put on one of my most intimidating frowns. “Hey…what’s going on?”
The man had his face plate open. He looked in my direction, then looked again. “Dawkins told us to collect six borgs and connect them to the walkers.”
I nodded my understanding. “Great…but let me say goodbye.”
The man looked unhappy but decided to go along. “Okay…but make it snappy.”
Loni’s umbilical was still connected to my suit. I left her on the floor, lifted the suit, and draped it across my back. The helmet felt natural after wearing it for so long. “Loni?”
“Well, if it isn’t my own personal chauffeur. You disappeared.”
