Light flared and something whoomphed. A blast picked her up and tumbled her forward. One gleaming shepherd leg cartwheeled past her in Martian air suddenly thick with dust. Then the figure was helping her up and she recognized Lopomac’s pudgy face, its skin webbed with ruptured capillaries, yet to heal since the decompression he had survived three months ago. Pausing only to snatch up the rifle she had dropped, he pulled her towards the airlock and inside.
‘You saw Le Blanc’s little speech?’ Var asked, after she removed her EA suit helmet in the suiting antechamber.
‘No,’ Lopomac replied, resting the assault rifle across his shoulder. ‘We were too busy watching you fucking over Hex Three.’
Carol was waiting here, Kaskan too, his eyes reddened. All three were watching Var with something approaching hunger. Carol and Kaskan wore EA suits too, as if all three had been readying themselves to come out to her, before Lopomac destroyed the shepherd and got her back inside. Should they go out again? She didn’t know. She needed to assess the situation here first.
‘We’ve been abandoned,’ she said, probing her cracked rib. ‘The Committee has left us out here to die, though apparently someone back there convinced Ricard that a reduced base staff can survive the fifteen or twenty years, until they build another Traveller to send out here.’ She decided not to mention Messina’s Alexander – it didn’t seem relevant.
‘Another Traveller?’ Lopomac echoed, puzzled.
‘All the others have gone through the Argus bubblemetal plants.’ She then focused on Kaskan. ‘Kaskan, I’m sorry . . .’
‘No need.’ He waved a hand in irritation, almost dismissively. ‘I saw what that shepherd grabbed from the crawler before Ricard turned it round.’
Her throat tight, Var turned to the other two. ‘What’s the situation here? Ricard captured Miska, and I’d have thought he would have got you two as well.’
‘Kaskan saw Ricard and two of his enforcers dragging Miska off towards Hex Three, and told us,’ said Lopomac, something odd in his expression.
‘Ricard seemed to have forgotten about the cams up on the roof, too,’ said Carol. ‘We were watching when you rounded Shankil’s Butte with that shepherd almost on top of you just about when he sent us a summons. We decided we’d best not respond, and broke into the geology storeroom instead.’
‘Hence the seismic survey charge?’ suggested Var.
‘Lopomac’s idea,’ Carol explained. ‘He decided we needed to first lose our ID implants, then cut the cam-system feed, and then arm ourselves.’
Good, that meant Ricard would not be able to keep track of them, though he would know which airlock she had used, so they had to get out of here fast. Lucky for them it had been decided that Antares Base should not carry readerguns. ‘How many charges?’ she asked, now heading towards the door, the others falling in behind her.
Carol grimaced and held up a single cylindrical charge, its detonator and detachable remote control already in place. Really, it surprised Var that any of these things had been available, since they’d stopped doing seismic mapping on Mars over five years ago.
‘Speaking of which’ – Lopomac nodded towards the assault rifle – ‘you got any ammo for this?’
Var reached into her hip pouch, took out the remaining clip and examined it. ‘Plastic only, I’m afraid.’
She tossed it to him. He caught it negligently, held it up and frowned at it. Then, showing none of Var’s hesitation, he removed the empty clip and replaced it with the new one, setting the rifle over to single shots. Var meanwhile opened the door from the suiting antechamber and stepped out into the corridor.
‘The situation is this,’ Lopomac said, as he followed her out. ‘Ricard has two enforcers guarding Hydroponics. He’s got four in the community room, along with that shit Silberman – where all staff were summoned just ten minutes ago.’
‘They’ll have seen Le Blanc’s speech,’ said Var.
‘Not much help while they’re under guard.’
‘Miska?’ She halted at the end of the corridor, wondering where it would be best to head now.
They seemed reluctant to say anything for a moment, then it was Lopomac who spoke. ‘We didn’t break out those charges just because Ricard summoned us, nor because he’d got a shepherd up and running.’ He paused, not looking at her, but frowning down at the assault rifle he held. ‘On the way to Hex Three, Ricard stopped off at an airlock – the outer door is still open because someone is lying across the threshold.’ He looked up. ‘We guessed that someone isn’t Ricard or one of his men.’
Var felt the tight ball of doubt in her gut expand and dissipate through her limbs, to leave her with a colder and more pragmatic clarity. If there had been any doubt that Ricard intended to carry through his orders, it had just been dispelled. Her own ruthlessness had now been utterly justified.
‘Very well,’ she said succinctly. ‘Silberman is the only exec Ricard has left. I killed the other four. I also killed four or possibly more of his enforcers over at Hex Three.’ She awaited some response to that, but only Kaskan reacted.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘but maybe not good enough.’
She nodded. ‘Ricard still has Silberman and the six you mentioned in the community room and Hydroponics, plus himself and two others still over in Hex Three. We have to deal with them or we die – if not very soon then later, when he truly fucks things up here.’
‘They’re all armed. Ricard controls the reactor and we can’t afford to use that seismic charge or get into a fire-fight in Hydroponics,’ Lopomac pointed out, adding, ‘Even with plastic ammo. Then there’s that.’ He pointed to one of the nearby metre-square windows, providing a view across to where she had entered, and then out towards Hex Three. The dust was settling and, coated with it, the remains of the shepherd looked like some strange Martian cactus. However, just beyond it, the second shepherd was striding into view.
Var reached into her hip pouch to take out the remaining side arm, then just stared at it. Ruthless she might be, but simply not ruthless enough. Kaskan was right: even with potentially a hundred and fifty people against them, Ricard’s men still held the upper hand. Four or five assault rifles – and she guaranteed that Ricard still had some ceramic ammo available – could easily turn that number of people into mincemeat. But even if the enforcers presently in the Community Room were somehow driven out, they could simply withdraw to an airlock antechamber like the one she and her friends had just departed – easily defended – then head out of the main base. No one would follow, not with assault rifles trained on the exit, and certainly not at risk of being snatched by a shepherd.
Thereafter, Ricard controlled the reactor, which meant, essentially, that he could shut down all systems. Eventually the air would turn foul and he could dictate whatever terms he chose. She suspected he would just wait until there was no need to turn those systems back on again. He was stupid enough.
‘We need to take off the head. We need to get Ricard,’ she decided.
‘We can’t get to him through Wing Five,’ said Lopomac. ‘We’d need to repair the window and repressurize before we could open either of the bulkhead doors, and that would mean going outside just to get to that section.’
‘Maybe we can make it to Hex Three without that shepherd getting to us first,’ she suggested weakly.
‘Maybe,’ said Lopomac, ‘though the closest we can get to it without actually going outside is the Hydroponics hex, where Ricard has two enforcers. If I didn’t know him to be so stupid, I’d reckon he was covering that approach, too.’
‘I can kill the two in Hydroponics,’ said Kaskan.
‘But how do we do that without risking the glass being smashed, and wiping out any chance we have of surviving here?’ Var asked.