Red Lightning (27 page)

"Push me forward!" I told Evangeline, and immediately I could feel her hands on my back. She was leaning back against the sissy bar, so she had some leverage, and after a few seconds I was able to wrap both hands around the grips and get to work. I don't recall thinking about it, my training and instincts took over, and I slued left, away from an approaching canyon wall, got us upright again, and applied full thrust. We pulled five or six gees for a few moments, close to blacking out, and then rose above the rim of the canyon to about a hundred feet. I cut the drive and we were weightless, in a slow arc that would take us to the ground in about a minute. Ahead was the town, and way beyond that was the black aircraft, banking hard and looking like it was coming in for another run at us, this time head-on.

"I'll
kill
that fucker!" I shouted, with more bravado than sense. But the fact is, if I'd had guns mounted on the board, I'd have been blazing away.

"We'd better get down on the ground," Evangeline said. "He's bigger than you, and I'll bet he's got guns."

"Who the hell
is
he?" I said.

"I have no idea. But if you fight him, you're going to lose."

She had a point. Still raging inside, but feeling more rational, I brought the board down to the ten-foot level and scuttled – that's what it felt like, anyway – over the loose stones to the back of the Red Thunder.

No more than a hundred yards from the door another craft of the same design came swooping out from behind a building, positioned itself in front of us, and hovered there. There was a dark plastic bubble in the front and two things I was pretty sure were machine guns aimed at us.

They were sending us the warning again, but I could hardly hear it over the various alarms my board was giving me, and I didn't have a lot of choice in the matter, anyway. Hovering like that, his downdraft was terrific, and once more the board twisted out of my control. I was still too high to just cut power, so I wrestled with it and managed to bring us to a sliding halt on the left rim of the heat shield... and then the wind caught the remaining wing and blew us over. I yanked my left leg up just in time to keep it from getting pinned, and cut power to all systems except the air.

"You okay?" I asked as I struggled with my safety belts.

"No. I think I may be in trouble here."

I didn't like the note of fear I heard in her voice. I managed to get myself free and off the board and turned around. Her leg was trapped under the edge of the board.

Mass and weight. You don't think about it on Earth, you're used to it being the same thing. So though my board massed about as much as a big Harley motorcycle, it weighed a lot less on Mars, and one guy could set it upright.

But because of its mass, its inertia remained the same as on Earth. That means, if you got in its way while it was moving, it would hit you just as hard as that same mass would on Earth. Not something to trifle with. But we hadn't been moving very fast when we hit, so I hoped none of her bones were broken.

I started to tilt the board off of her and pull her out. "Don't!"

"What's the problem?"

"I don't think I'm hurt, but it feels real cold there. I think I may have a leak."

That word set off a series of actions that had been drilled into me so well that it almost felt like a reflex. I noticed a faint mist in the air around her calf, and some ice rime forming on her suit fabric. I realized the weight of the board was pressing her leg against the ground, and that was probably closing the puncture, at least a little. Leave it there until I was ready, as she'd already realized. I slapped the pocket on the front of my leg and the suit dispensed a patch about the size of my hand. The protective skin peeled itself away from the sticky side, and I knelt beside her.

"Ready?" She nodded, and I shouldered the board off her and dragged her a few feet away with one hand. There was now a pronounced jet of mist.

"Cold," she said.

"I've got it." There was a rock embedded in the suit fabric, about the size of a grape. I brushed it off, and there was a burst of vapor. Bad puncture. I slapped the patch on, held it tight with one hand while sealing the edges with the fingertips of the other. That should hold it, but better safe than sorry. I opened the tiny cargo space under the board's seat and grabbed a duct tape dispenser.

We call it duct tape, and that's pretty much what it is, but you can't buy it on Earth. It's stickier, and resists cold and vacuum. I made three winds around her calf, then a fourth for good measure. The mist was no longer coming out.

"Okay?" I asked her.

She smiled at me behind the helmet glass. I saw her eyes scanning the data there, invisible to me.

"Yeah, all systems go. But my whole leg feels cold. That's going to leave a chilblain."

"Sissy," I said, and held out my hand. She took it, and I pulled her to her feet, and she promptly winced and raised her foot off the ground.

"Ouch. The ankle. May have sprained it. But I can walk on it."

"What's the point?" I said, and picked her up and hurried to the emergency lock door, thinking about who I was going to kill first, the pilot of the first plane or the second one. Far as I was concerned, they were dead men.

We don't really have hospitals as such on Mars, in the sense of big buildings devoted to nothing but medicine. We have any diagnostic or operative equipment you can find anywhere on Earth, but it's scattered. We're too small to need more than one gene therapy lab or organ-growing facility, so the costs of big-ticket items like that are shared among the various corporations that own the tourist facilities.

What we do have is a first-aid station right next to every air lock. Some of them are not much more than a cupboard of medical supplies and a hot phone to call for help, which will be there in two minutes, maximum. But the big locks, the ones used by large numbers of people every day, have full-scale emergency rooms attached.

I cycled through the lock and turned right and went through the emergency room door. The nurse on duty took in the situation at a glance and we both helped Evangeline out of her suit. She only cried out once, when we eased off the boot. The ankle was starting to swell. The nurse briefly examined the site of the puncture on Evangeline's calf, pronounced it to be no problem, and spread a cream on it. Then she wrapped an electric blanket around Evangeline's leg and switched it on.

"We'll X-ray that ankle," she said, "but it doesn't look too bad."

"What the hell is going on out there?" I asked her. She looked up at me, and for the first time I noticed she looked scared.

"Where have you been'?"

"Phobos."

"Okay. I don't know much. Nobody does. About an hour ago those ships landed, and they started ordering people around. They say there's bigger ships in orbit."

"Who are they?"

"Soldiers. They're dressed in black, and, they're carrying big weapons. Everybody's been instructed to return to their rooms or their homes. I stayed here, and nobody's bothered me yet."

Homelanders? That didn't make any sense. I knew the situation was chaotic back in America, there was a lot of debate about who was in charge and some of it was being settled with planes and tanks. But what did they care about what happened on Mars? Why not invade Antarctica, if they wanted to waste their time? It was a lot closer to home, and would seem to be about as important, geopolitically.

"We didn't get anything from the web on our way down," Evangeline said.

"They've taken control of all the transmitters. All we're getting is these announcements. 'Stay in your rooms. There is no danger. This is all routine, don't worry.' All the time they're pointing guns at people and herding them around. You can't make a phone call, I tried. Not even over the emergency line."

Neither Evangeline nor I was wearing our stereos, and we had our helmets off. I hunted through my suit pockets for mine while the nurse was applying a quick-drying plaster to Evangeline's ankle. In moments it hardened with just her toes sticking out. The toes were turning purple.

Sure enough, no matter what icons I ticked on, all I got was a window with a continuous scroll of
Emergency Regulations
. They were extensive, but added up to "Stay at home and do what we tell you."

"There's supposed to be some sort of announcement in three hours," the nurse said.

"You okay, Evangeline?" I asked. She nodded. "Then let's get out of here." We thanked the nurse and headed for the door to the emergency room.

It took us right into the spacious lobby of the Red Thunder. I'd never seen it looking like this. It was almost deserted. A couple who looked like tourists were at the front desk, looking very angry. There was nobody behind the desk. That had never happened, in my experience.

In fact, other than the couple who probably intended to ask for a refund, there was no one in the lobby at all except for armed guards in black uniforms stationed at all the four portals to the concourses and the escalators to the lower levels.

Then four men in black uniforms came up the escalator, in a big hurry. They turned left and came straight at us. Something in their attitude made me think they weren't here to apologize for almost killing us.

I wasn't familiar with the uniforms – no surprise, Earth has so many armies only an expert could keep track of them – but it was clear these were of a different class than the grunts guarding the doors. They were dress uniforms, officers. The largest of them, slightly ahead of the others, had stars and ribbons and medals all over the front of his uniform. Clearly the man in charge. We waited for them. They had sidearms, but they were in holsters on their waists. Evangeline grabbed my arm and held on tight.

They stopped with the "general" about three paces from us, and the other three men moved to form a loose circle around us.

"Ramon Strickland-Garcia?" he asked.

"My friends call me Ray. But I don't think we're gonna be friends."

He ignored that. I felt a hand grip my right arm, and looked down to see the guy over there holding on to me. He reached into a pocket and came out with a set of handcuffs.

"And who are you?" the general asked Evangeline.

"My name is Evangeline Redmond," she said, and took two quick steps toward him; timed so that she was set perfectly to swing her foot with the cast on it right into his crotch. It lifted him six inches in the air before he quite knew what hit him.

"Run, Ray!" she shouted.

Well, it wasn't quite the strategy I'd have taken if I'd had time to think about it, but suddenly it felt right.

Not the running part, though. Where would I run?

I jerked to my left and the guy holding my arm pulled harder. I reached down, grabbed his forearm, and then leaped into the air and did a backflip. I took his arm with me, but not his body. I could hear something cracking in his shoulder, and his grip came loose.

I was hearing a high-pitched shriek from the general and a whimper from my guy when another of the officers started toward me. He was reaching for his weapon. I aimed a punch at his head and he reacted. He overreacted, which is what I was counting on in a guy who hadn't gotten his Mars legs yet. His muscles, which should have just tensed, pushed him about six inches in the air and he hung there longer than he wanted to, which gave me time to sweep my leg under him and he found himself lying sideways, overcompensated again, and I kicked him in the face before he hit the ground.

The guards at the portals had noticed something was happening. They started running toward us, and two of them promptly jumped way too high and didn't land well. I was watching their guns, and they weren't pointing them at us. If they had, I'd have given up right there. No point in getting shot. But I was hoping they didn't have orders to shoot, and it looked like they didn't. Any one of them was big enough to tear me limb from limb, but they'd have to catch me first.

Adrenaline can slow time for you. That's what I felt, like I had all the time in the world with these clumsy Earthies. I remember turning and seeing Evangeline as though she was frozen in midair, but the foot with the cast on it moved lightning quick, to the side of the head of another officer. How many was that? I'd lost count, and reinforcements were coming up as fast as they could, not knowing the proper way to run on Mars. I grabbed Evangeline's hand before she even hit the ground and pulled her toward me. She almost slugged me before she realized who I was. Her eyes were wide and she was grinning, out for blood. In fact, there was a little blood on her lips. Not hers; she had bitten one of the officers.

"Let's go!" I said, and got us both headed for the front desk. That was about all the plan I had at the moment. My helmet was back at the lock, and she didn't have any part of her suit, so outside wasn't an option. But I knew places in the hotel even the staff didn't know about. I figured we could hide.

Then Evangeline stumbled and dragged me down, and when I looked at her I saw her eyes were rolled up in her head and she was jerking spastically. I noticed two sets of thin wires with hooks at the end pricking the fabric of my suit and realized we had both been tazed. My suit had protected me.

I scooped her up in my arms again and as I was rising, looked up to see a soldier with a billy club. I saw the club coming down, and that was that.

I later learned that those were the only casualties inflicted on the occupying force during the invasion of Mars. Some military statistician somewhere at the rear must have cataloged them all:

One (1) shoulder: dislocated

One (1) jaw: broken

One (1) concussion

One (1) laceration (bite: human)

One... well, probably two (2) very, very sore jewels: family

So although they won the war, technically, we sure beat the living crap out of them, didn't we?

But that was later.

I woke up in a cell. It wasn't much longer than I was, had a hunk and a steel sink and a steel crapper. The bunk was hard, the room was cold, and I was naked.