“Good to hear,” Kumar says.
Borden quietly observes that central peak until it’s out of our sight. I wonder what she knows—what she thinks she knows and how that fits into why I’m here. “What do you see out there?” I ask her.
“Same things you see,” she murmurs.
“I do not like being kept ignorant,” I say.
“Neither do I. When I know for sure what I’m seeing, I’ll tell you. And you’ll tell me. Deal?”
“Yeah,” I say.
We backtrack, then head northeast. In the rear of the warm Tonka we absorb ourselves, hide ourselves, by finishing the cooling coffee.
Once we are well under way, Litvinov arranges his words carefully, with a tinge of bitterness. “Where we are going, three camps have been attacked and destroyed. For safety, some settlers and your people move into second mine. We delivered to them your token, Master Sergeant Venn.” Litvinov reaches into his belt pouch and brings out a quarter-sized circle of inscribed platinum. I recognize the spiral of numbers. It looks like the coin I brought back from Mars, hid from the medicals, then smuggled out to Joe, along with my notes.
“I don’t know who it belongs to—I found it in—”
Litvinov waves that off as well. “Joe Sanchez tells me to give it back, so you will know,” Litvinov says, and hands me the coin. “Reminder of hard things yet to do.”
I’m trying to remember how well the colonel fought back in the bar at Hawthorne. Funny—that stuff is less clear to me than what it feels like to be ridden by a smart parasite under a hundred klicks of ice. I’m thinking the Wait Staff had good reason to be concerned and keep me locked away.
I might not be human much longer.
ACROSS THE DUSTY DESERT
We’re twelve hours crossing the huge basalt plain. The going is smoother the farther east we move, away from the battle zone. Kumar is awake but unfocused. Borden spends most of the time sleeping. I’ve napped and played a little helmet chess with the starshina, a slender young woman with small green eyes named Irina Ulyanova, who in other decades might have been a ballerina or a gymnast.
Even the thought that I might see Joe and Teal again is darkened by the realization that it’s been a while since we were here and so many things could have happened. Teal could have been forced to mate with one of the Muskies, the Voors—one of de Groot’s sons—and squeeze out that fabled third-gen baby, momma and poppa and then infant double-dosed with Ice Moon Tea. I do not want to think about that.
Joe’s being here—and Joe himself—are complete ciphers. Was he ever really back on Earth? Alice said he was, but could I trust anything Alice was telling me, back in the condo? After all, I ended up in the hands of the Wait Staff. I never made it to Canada and freedom.
You don’t know folks until you’ve fought with them. In large part because of my relationship with Joe, fighting fills the list of important things I’ve done for twelve years. It’s all I know, really: how to train to fight and travel to fight and arrive to fight and then just fight. Make scrap and stain on the Red. I’m sick and tired of fighting. I want to be done with it. Don’t we all. I’m avoiding the main issue, aren’t I?
It really disturbs me to think about Teal and what might have been. It disturbs me more that I wasn’t here for her, but what disturbs me most is the uncertainty she would even have wanted me to stay and help in the first place, or the second place—or any place.
I don’t know nothing about anything.
And I’m hungry.
The wind is blowing strong enough to rock the Tonka. There’s a light patter on the outer skin.
“What’s that?” Borden asks.
“Storm,” Litvinov says, hunching his shoulders. “Strange weather always now.”
I lean over and look through the windscreen. Little hard bits of white are striking the Tonka—hail. I’ve never seen hail on Mars. The wind picks up.
Borden becomes sharply interested. “It’s because of the comets,” she says. “More moisture in the air.” As if in a trance, she tries to get closer to the windscreen, but Federov holds out his arm.
“Two kilometers from mine camp,” Durov announces. “Going dark fast.”
Litvinov squats behind Federov to study the forward view. The silvery light through the windscreen darkens from pewter to gray steel. The line of vehicles keeps rolling, but this degree of wind and hail is not part of our training. Nobody’s fought on Mars during such extreme weather.
The Tonka sways as if kicked by a big boot.
“Tornado!” Durov shouts. The dust devils have given up scribbling and combined to form a Dorothy-sized funnel of dirt and rock, swaying and touching down to our left, rising and wagging like the tail of a huge dog, then digging up our right. I don’t know if it has enough strength to lift us—the air is so thin! I can’t work up the brainpower to understand how the hell this is even happening—
Then I hear another voice, clear but far off—far inside. Bold but also scared:
Let me hook you up to the straight shit, Skyrine. There’s a lot to see, but they won’t let me do it without you, and I’m getting bored.
I jerk and look around, but nobody’s playing a joke, the others are as quiet as little packaged lambs. I stare at Borden. She’s focused on the storm. The Tonka shudders and the steely sky flashes. A brilliant white arc moves from left to right across our path.
Sergeant Durov shouts back, “Bolt!”
Litvinov drops his hand. Everyone in the cabin charges sidearms. The whees of ramping energy are painful in the enclosed space. Durov turns the wheel hard left. Through curtains of hail, we see the Trundle in front go just as sharply right. The line is splitting to form a perpendicular to the arc of the bolt, a decent enough maneuver for running over flat and open, if one shot is the only info you have as to location and concentration of opposing force.
Federov returns fire but his choices are few—his targets unseen.
Another bolt. The Trundle on our right erupts in a brilliant violet flare, lighting up the storm and flinging molten chunks of fuselage and frame, then veers toward us and slams our tail, front wheels chattering against our bumper and almost locking before the pilot torques us right and we’re free again. We’ve all sealed our faceplates. We know what’s going to happen next. We’re sitting ducks in here.
“Outside!” Litvinov shouts. The airlock hatch blows and we push through and jump free, trying to find someplace, anyplace, to lie flat and return fire. The hail is pea-sized and falls faster than it does on Earth—really stings, even though it weighs less. There’s a wall of dust and what might be mud spinning off to what I think is the south, obscuring the outline of the big Chesty, which is now laying down a series of sizzling purple barrages.
Then something over to our left fires a volley of chain ballistas, designed to take out vehicles—the double strike of a first charge hitting one side and six meters of thin, strong chain swinging the second charge around to the other side.
One of our guns? I don’t think so.
Chain ballistas tend to belong to Antags.
Jacobi is right beside me and Borden is opposite. We all go flatter than flat as two more of our vehicles, right and left, are blown to hell. Sizzling blobs of aluminum and steel and flaring pieces of composite drop all around.