'Let me get my bearings,' said the Doctor. 'That way.'
They came to a door marked 'Locker Room - Authorized Personnel Only'. The door had been left slightly ajar.
There was a dead body inside. Some poor dust jockey that had the bad luck to be changing when Benny came through. A blackened gunshot wound in his chest. The Doctor knelt uselessly to check his pulse. He must have been reading a hard copy of
Porn Technik
when she'd hit him. There were glossy pictures of naked people scattered around his head, high resolution bodies in poses as stiff and lifeless as his own. Some of the pages were charred at the edges.
'Now we know,' said the Doctor.
They ran down the short corridor that led to the hangar. A glance at the status board on the inside of the blast door showed the stolen dustkart moving out on to the Tharsis Plain.
'There she goes,' said the Doctor.
The blast door slid slowly upwards, and the Doctor ducked underneath it before it was completely open. A line of dustkarts were parked inside. The Doctor headed for the vehicle nearest the hangar doors. The dustkart was painted a virulent shade of dayglo orange shot through with triangular silver flashes for satellite identification. The main body was ten metres long and slung between six man-high wheels with independent suspension.
By the time she reached him the Doctor had already undogged the side hatch and was pulling himself inside.
Kadiatu grabbed the side handles and swung up behind him. The underside of the cabin had patches of bare metal where sand had scoured off the paintwork.
Inside the cabin smelt of acetone and old sweat. It had two sprung seats placed in front of the windscreen, their size indicating that it was usual to drive suited up. An airtight door leading back to the main cabin. The Doctor sat down in the right-hand driver's seat and looked over the controls. He flipped up a failsafe flap and punched the button inside. The side hatch slammed shut and Kadiatu felt her ears pop as the cabin pressurized. Servo motors whirred as she lowered herself into the left-hand seat, finding the optimum ergonomic position for her body.
The controls were clumped together in little groups with the kind of backlit push-down buttons and liquid crystal VDUs that Kadiatu associated with immediate post-war design.
There was a sudden vibration through the cabin floor as the Doctor kicked in the engines. He flexed his fingers and put his hand on the negative feedback joystick.
'Get on the radio,' said the Doctor, 'and see if you can get them to open the airlock doors.'
'How?'
'Extemporise,' the Doctor told her.
Kadiatu found a headphone set hanging over the windscreen. Stuck next to it was a flat hologram pin-up from
Porn Technik,
a leggy blonde with green scales growing out of her perfect skin. Kadiatu got a queasy feeling thinking that the headphones probably belonged to the dead man in the locker room. Sex and death, she thought as she settled them over her hair and adjusted the pin microphone in front of her lips.
'Anybody there?' she asked.
'This is Achebe Rim traffic control,'
said a voice in her ears,
'calling Rover three-two. You are without authorization. Shut down your engines and open hatches.'
'Traffic control,' said Kadiatu. 'This is Rover three-two, we are in hot pursuit of a murder suspect, open the airlock hatches.'
The engines roared as the Doctor pushed up the accelerator handle and the dustkart jumped forward.
'Rover three-two,'
said traffic control,
'what is your authority?'
The Doctor swerved the dustkart round to face the airlock doors and accelerated. Kadiatu watched horrified through the windscreen as the doors loomed up.
'I'm not going to stop,' said the Doctor.
'Listen, traffic control,' said Kadiatu, 'our authority's lying dead in the locker room and if you don't open the doors we're all going to find out just how strong they really are.'
The airlock's inner doors slid open just in time and the dustkart barrelled through. The seat tightened around Kadiatu's hips and shoulders as the Doctor jammed on the brakes. The dustkart halted just short of the outer doors. The inner doors clanged shut behind them.
'Now they've got us trapped,' said Kadiatu.
'Keep talking,' said the Doctor, sliding out of his seat and vanishing under the dashboard.
'Traffic control decompress and open outer doors.'
'That's a negative Rover three-two,"
said traffic control.
'Remain where you are. We have police inbound.'
There was an atinic flash under the dash and the Doctor cursed.
'Stop messing us about, traffic control, our suspect is getting away.'
'Be advised Rover three-two that we have the fugitive's vehicle under satellite surveillance. It's not going anywhere and neither are you.'
A klaxon went off somewhere in the airlock and the outer doors began to crank slowly open. The dustkart rocked on its suspension as the pressure differential caused a rapid outrush of air. Kadiatu saw scraps of paper whirl past, something banged along the roof and a tubular metal chair went flying out through the widening gap.
'You should really clean this airlock more often,' Kadiatu told traffic control, but they didn't reply. The pitch of the klaxon scaled up as the attenuated atmosphere shortened its wavelength until it began to sound vaguely hysterical through the bulkhead.
The Doctor climbed back into his seat and started them moving. 'There's nearly always an override somewhere,' he said.
The windscreen polarized by sections as they moved out from the airlock and into the naked sun. The ground sloped gently upwards towards the Tharsis Bulge in the north. There were three distinct tracks leading away from the rim station, each marked by beacons stationed every five hundred metres.
'Which way did she go?' asked the Doctor.
Kadiatu looked over the controls in front of her. They were labelled with icons originally derived from the warspeak vocabulary. She saw one that might have resembled an uplink dish and pressed the button. One of her VDUs changed to display a top-down GIS graphic of the Tharsis region. Kadiatu touched the screen to scale down and centre the image on their dustkart. If traffic control was right, there should be a marker for Benny's position. Sure enough a red cross appeared on the screen to the east of them; touching the cross brought up a side panel that displayed co-ordinates and speed.
'She's on the left-hand track,' said Kadiatu, 'and doing about two hundred klicks.' That kind of speed over rough terrain couldn't be safe.
'You should see her on horseback,' said the Doctor.
Managona Depot (P-87)
The
razvedka
were packed three deep into the black train, webbed up in a matrix of deacceleration paste. There was the occasional movement as someone used their cramped circumstances to cop a feel.
Snug as bugs in a rug, thought Mariko smugly. Termites have nothing on us.
Naran and she were in the nose, where the controls would be were this a real train, which it wasn't. It was better than a real train. It was made out of folded segments of reality and held together by sheer perversity.
'Right,' said Mariko, 'who's for a sing-song then?'
Tharsis Rim
They were two hours out from Achebe Gorge and twenty klicks behind Benny when the satellite trace vanished from the screen.
'We've lost the trace,' said Kadiatu.
'I noticed,' said the Doctor. 'We should be able to track her by her dust plume. See if you can find it.'
Kadiatu activated the dustkart's HUD and looked forward. A section of the windscreen in front of her cleared to show a composite image from the bow cameras. They were still following a marked trail that traversed the Tharsis Bulge going west. Ahead, the summit of Arsia Mons, the southernmost volcano of the three that crossed the bulge's centre, was visible on the horizon. Kadiatu had to compensate for the sun's glare as it shone directly into the cab.
Even with digital compensation, x100 magnification was still jumpy. Kadiatu did a slow pan left to right and found the top of the plume. The laser rangefinger used yellow light to avoid absorption by the red Martian dust; she used the touch pad to key the data into the navigation console. The trace icon reappeared on the GIS map, surrounded by colour-coded zones of probability, as Kadiatu locked it in.
'Got it,' she told the Doctor. 'Still on the track and about twenty-one klicks ahead.'
'I think we should close the gap,' said the Doctor. 'Don't you?'
As the LCD speedometer climbed above 250 kilometres an hour Kadiatu looked in vain for some sign of strain on the Doctor's face. They hit a bump and the wheels spun free as the dustkart left the ground. Kadiatu gripped her armrests as they slammed back down. She'd felt safer divebombing Kings Cross in Francine's jet.
'Don't worry,' he said. 'I never drive faster than I can see. How are we doing?'
'Gaining, twenty klicks give or take two hundred metres.'
'I wonder where she's going?'
Kadiatu checked the map. 'There's nothing ahead except a couple of geological stations on Arsia Mons.'
The Doctor veered sharply to avoid a fresh crater across the track. The dustkart tilted violently over as the right-hand wheels clipped the edge.
'Benny's the virus, isn't she?' asked Kadiatu as the dustkart righted. 'I mean the core instructions of the virus are contained within her. The vriks from hell and all the rest of it, they're just peripheral.'
'What makes you say that?'
'It's obvious. Benny was the only person caught in the direct line of the initial attack who's still in one piece. The only one.'
'Possibly,' said the Doctor. 'It may have replicated though.'
'But out here she's isolated from the transit system,' said Kadiatu. 'If we destroy her out here ...'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'Because
I'm
not a virus,' said the Doctor.
They hit another ridge, the wheels slamming down out of sequence.
'I'm going to see if we've got any pressure suits,' said Kadiatu. 'We might need them.' She climbed out of her seat and went aft. There were three pressure suits in a locker opposite the toilet, all of them bearing unbroken inspection seals, but Kadiatu already knew that. Instead she opened an equipment locker marked with hazard symbols and picked out a laser torch from amongst the neatly arrayed tools. She thumbed the test button and got a fully charged icon on the status LCD. Set in pulse mode a torch like this could bum a hole through sheet steel at four metres, further in an attenuated atmosphere.
Kadiatu transferred the torch into the thigh pocket of the pressure suit she had picked out for herself. Then she went back to rejoin the Doctor.
'Have we got any?' asked the Doctor as she sat down.
'Three and completely operational.'
'Good,' said the Doctor. 'Because I think she's stopped.'
Benny's dustkart had veered off the marked trail to the south and out across the plain. The fat tyre tracks were clearly visible and the Doctor slowed down to follow them. Kadiatu put up the HUD again and looked around. They should be almost on top of her by now but Kadiatu could only find the rapidly dissipating dust plume.
'I see her,' said the Doctor. 'She's gone down a rabbit hole.
The Doctor got as close to the edge of the pit as he dared The ground must have collapsed under Benny's dustkart, dropping it into the hollow space underneath. It lay twenty metres below, pitched at a forty-five degree angle, nose first.
The shape of the pit bothered Kadiatu. Underneath layers of dust and rubble she thought she could discern straight edges. As if it had been dug out artificially. It made her think of the leopard traps back home.
'Suit up,' said the Doctor, 'and let's follow after Alice.'
Kadiatu had no idea what he was talking about.
The undersuit was made of air-permeable goretex and fit like a second skin. A label heat pressed into the fabric just above a cluster of sensors on the chest said 'Made in Israel/Palestine'. Kadiatu followed the instructions that came on a little laminated card and carefully smoothed out any air pockets. There was even a special hairnet provided to keep her extensions under control. The suit proper was woven out of boron mesh and lined with aluminized latex. Limb and torso lengths adjusted automatically as she put it on.
The Doctor didn't bother with an undersuit and merely pulled the outer shell over his street clothes. They donned their helmets, checked each other's seals and stepped into the airlock.
The Doctor decided that the best way down would be to climb down on to the rear of the crashed dustkart where it was only two metres below the rim. They could enter via the aft airlock and check the inside on the way down.
Kadiatu held the Doctor's hand as he cautiously put his weight on the dustkart's rear bulkhead. Her other hand gripped the duralloy piton she'd shot into the flaky agglomerate of the rim. She'd use the suit override to lock both gloves in position; if the dustkart went, she wasn't planning to go with it.
It seemed solid enough, perhaps it was wedged on a rockpile underneath. When the Doctor had the airlock open she unlocked the gloves and followed him in.
There was less damage in the rear cabin than she'd expected; most of the stored equipment had stayed in its racks. They used the storage bins to slide down the floor in stages. Kadiatu checked the suit locker. Either only two had been installed or there was a suit missing.
The windscreen in the cab had fractured but not broken. Brown liquid was splashed against the glaze, pooling along the join with the dashboard. Some of the controls were dented, some showed scorch marks. A fine haze hung at waist height, smoke particulates lazily settling in the one-third gravity.
'
I hope she's not hurt,'
said the Doctor.
Chance would be a fine thing, thought Kadiatu but kept it to herself. The laser torch was a comforting weight against her thigh.