Hide and seek (26 page)

Sparta paused beside the long-abandoned radio tower on Stickney’s rim, a gleaming relic of the first human exploration of Mars. The little hut at its base had a bronze plaque beside the hatch: “Here men and women first erected a permanent structure on a body beyond the orbit of Earth.” It was a qualified distinction–that bit about “beyond the orbit of Earth” was meant to exclude the moon–but a worthy distinction nevertheless.

As Sparta gazed upon the pocked and grooved landscape commanded by the tower, she sensed something besides fear for her safety or anger at her attackers. She sensed exhilaration. When
Doradus
had failed in its sneak attack, the initiative had passed to her.

Already Mars was waning visibly as Phobos swept toward the night side of the planet. She could make out the lights of an isolated settlement far over her head, gleaming faintly in the twilight of the Martian outback. All else was stars and silence and a lumpy horizon, so near it seemed she could almost touch it. Mars, overhead, was a very useful clock. When it was half full the sun would rise, and quite probably, if it had not risen already, the
Doradus
would rise with it. The ship already knew or would soon learn the location of the buried penetrator and would put down a party to retrieve it.

She tugged the net bag of tools behind her as she entered the danger zone. The landing of a search party would not be a problem; it would be an opportunity.

 

* * *

From his command couch the commander of the
Doradus
could see over the heads of the pilot and engineer to an unobstructed view of the highresolution flatscreen that stretched across the width of the bridge, displaying a telescopic view of approaching Phobos. A slowly widening cloud of sparkling dust was suspended above the moon’s limb–the remains of the
Mars Cricket
.

“Have we acquired a signal from the objective?”

 

“Not yet, sir. We are still overtaking. The objective is not yet within line of sight.”

 

The commander thrust his chin into his hand, brooding.

Somewhere down there–most likely in the eastern hemisphere–was a half-buried set of tiny rocket fins supporting a wire-thin radio aerial.
Doradus
had to stimulate the target to reveal itself by sending a coded transmission; they had to pinpoint its location optically; they had to land people to dig it up and get it back to the ship before Mars Station traffic control began questioning what was going on out here.

One more thing they had to do before they left–they had to find Troy and make sure she would not give away any secrets.

 

The surface area of Phobos was over a thousand square kilometers. If Troy had survived, she was somewhere down there waiting. It seemed prudent to assume she was armed.

Considering the weapons the
Doradus
carried, this last consideration might seem beside the point to some of his colleagues. The commander hoped he never had to explain to them why it was very far from being so. In the ordinary course of business, sidearms and other portable weapons are as much use in a space combat as cutlasses and crossbows, perhaps even less so. A handgun is a dangerous thing aboard a spaceship or a space station–or an airplane, for that matter–for it is quite capable of punching a hole through the metal skin that keeps in pressurized air. For that reason, working handguns were universally barred in space.
As it happened, the commander of the
Doradus
–quite by chance and strictly against regulations–had a Luger pistol and a hundred rounds of ammunition stored in his cabin; the gun was an heirloom, inherited from an ancestor who had served under Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. As for the ammunition that went with it–well, guns and ammunition were a sort of hobby of the commander’s. And in any event the finger of a spacesuit glove doesn’t fit into the trigger guard of a Luger.

How would Troy be armed? Except on Earth, Board of Space Control personnel resorted to only three kinds of weapons, and then only in pressing need. In artificially pressurized environments, they used guns that fired rubber bullets; their punch was enough to knock people down but leave vital structures undamaged. But if sidearms were needed in vacuum–a rare occasion–laser rifles might be called into play; they were recoilless and if held on target long enough could cut a hole through sheet aluminum or even the layered fabric and metal of a spacesuit. But lasers exhausted their charges in seconds; they were also awkward and massive, and therefore generally useless.

For the worst work the Space Board issued shotguns. Shotguns had the distinct disadvantage of propelling the user backward when fired, but they could rip open a spacesuit, and at close range aim wasn’t much of a problem.

The
Doradus
carried three shotguns modified for use in space.

 

“What is the status of the landing party?”

 

The voice came back from the crew deck. “Suited up and standing by, sir, at the main airlock.” There were two men and two women in the party, old space hands and dedicated members of the Free Spirit.

 

“Break out the shotguns,” the commander ordered. “The party is to go down armed.”

 

“Yes sir.”

 

“Sir,” said the pilot, “we have acquired the objective’s signal.”

 

A squeak and chatter of telemetry issued from the speakers, earlier than expected.

 

“On the western hemisphere?”

 

“The near southwest quadrant, sir. Apparently the penetrator rocket somewhat overshot its target.”

The terminator of Mars was now a perfectly straight line overhead, and at almost the same moment the sun came up–not so much like thunder as like a salvo of atomic bombs. The sun seemed smaller here than from Earth or Port Hesperus, but unfiltered by atmosphere it was blindingly bright. The filter of Sparta’s helmet visor had instantly adjusted to the glare. No sign of
Doradus
on the toobright horizon . . . Sparta sought the shadow of a nearby crevice, one of the peculiar linear grooves that streak Phobos like furrows in a ploughed field.

Whatever had hit Phobos hard enough to make Stickney’s big crater had almost squashed the moon, like hitting a watermelon with a mallet. The dust-filled grooves that radiated from Stickney, some of them up to a couple of hundred meters wide, were the scars of the encounter–splits in the moon’s rind.

Up to her knees in the soft powder that filled the shallow trench, Sparta peered over the edge and scanned the horizon all around her. Her gaze lifted to sweep across the sky overhead. She was reluctant to move into full sunlight, for
Doradus
was no doubt equipped with powerful optics. With her own right eye Sparta could match them, if she knew where to look. But just now she could see nothing but stars.

She turned up her suitcomm to maximum volume but got nothing but static on the standard channels. She tuned it down again. Unless they were keeping radio silence, the landing party would have to communicate over standard suitcomm channels. To locate them she had to keep her suitcomm open and get within range.

Doradus
must have rendezvoused with Phobos by now. The big ship was not afraid of her–she was hiding from it, it wasn’t hiding from her, and its one overriding task was to recover the penetrator. If she could not see it from her present position, it was more likely behind her than in front of her.

She could sit here, exposed in sunlight, or she could retreat with the terminator line that marked the creeping edge of dawn. On a planetoid where flying was easy, it was equally easy to keep up with the sun. Cautiously launching herself along an almost horizontal trajectory, she began to circumnavigate her world.

She skirted Stickney to the north this time. The narrowing crescent of Mars rose and, as she kept moving, began to sink again, until only one vast horn reared itself enigmatically against the stars. It irked her that she could see no sign of
Doradus
. The ship was painted the standard white, and anywhere above the horizon it would be a bright beacon.

She paused, instinctively sinking into the blacker shadow of a nearby hummock. Doubt assailed the dictates of logic: what if she’d moved in the wrong direction? What if
Doradus
was stalking
her
, circling the moon behind her?

Just then she glanced up, and her heart skipped a beat. Something quite large was eclipsing the stars almost vertically over her head, moving swiftly across them. How could she have blundered right under the belly of the monster?

In a fraction of a second she realized the black shadow slipping across the sky was not
Doradus
at all, but something almost as deadly–something far smaller and far closer than that first startled glance had suggested. If she had correctly identified its silhouette, the thing floating above her was a search-anddestroy missile.

Sparta froze in place. With the suit’s chin switch she instantly shut off all her life-support systems. The suitcomm shut down with them. If she did not move, if the SAD got past her before she was forced to gulp air, the infrared radiation from her spacesuit’s life-support systems might escape its notice.

She was good at holding still and holding her breath.

If
Doradus
was using the kind of SADs used by the Board of Space Control–supposedly highly classified arms, unavailable for purchase on the open market–they had certain limitations. Unlike torpedoes, SADs did not home on a specific target. They were designed to move slowly, to lie in wait, to detect programmed activities: the firing of a steering motor, the swivel of an antenna, the escape of organic vapor–the signs of life in space. Their primary sensory organ was a video eye. Only when that eye could plainly identify a preprogrammed target, or detect movement, or deduce an anomalous contrast ratio within the field of view, would it focus its other sensors. SADs were not at their best when searching for a woman hiding in a dark jungle of rocks–a woman who could see them first.

With a brief glow of its steering jets, the SAD moved on. Sparta switched on her suit pumps and allowed herself to breathe again.

The incident confirmed her suspicion that the
Doradus
was interested in more than simply recovering the plaque; it also needed to eliminate her as a witness. There are more men on the chessboard now, Sparta thought, and the game is a little deadlier. But the initiative is still mine.

The SAD kept going until its silhouette vanished in the night sky to the southeast; since the missile was traveling an almost straight course in the low gravitational field, it would soon be leaving Phobos behind, unless. . . . Sparta waited for what she knew would happen next. In a few moments she saw it, the brief stab of steering jets: the projectile was swinging slowly back on its course.

At almost the same moment she saw another faint flare far away in the southwest corner of the sky. She wondered just how many of the infernal machines were in action.

She considered what she knew of
Doradus
–there were not so many freighters in space that an officer in her job could not remember the basic facts about them all, even without an enhanced memory.
Doradus
had been built ten years ago at the New Clyde Shipyards, one of the oldest and most respected of the private shipyards orbiting Earth. It was an average-sized vessel for a freighter, unusual at the time only in that it had a somewhat higher ratio of fuel-to-payload mass than was customary. The crew complement was ten, also unusually large–the minimum and customary crew being three–but because
Doradus
was intended specifically to serve the burgeoning settlements of the Mainbelt, it was not illogical that it should sacrifice a bit of carrying capacity for speed, or that it should have a crew large enough to be self-sufficient where docking and cargo-handling facilities were primitive. The ship’s history since then had been uneventful, although Sparta recalled that its maiden voyage had kept it away from Earth for three full years. Sparta wondered just where it had gone during that cruise and how it had spent its time. She had no doubt that some considerable period had been spent secretly converting
Doradus
into a pirate ship.

Even with an extra-large crew it seemed unlikely that
Doradus
had more than one fire-control officer, whose computer would have difficulty simultaneously keeping track of more than half a dozen SADs in a small area–for the greatest challenge of working with SADs was to prevent them from blowing one another up.

Sparta herself could keep track of that many SADs if she could find them. With a bit of luck, that would be no problem–and at the same time, she would find
Doradus
. Somewhere not far away the
Doradus
was pumping out radio power, at frequencies from a kilohertz on up. She switched on her suit’s broadband comm unit again and began cautiously to explore the spectrum.

She quickly found what she was looking for–the raucous whine of a pulse transmitter not far away. She was picking up a subharmonic, but that was good enough: the
Doradus
had betrayed itself. As long as the ship kept a data channel open to its missiles, Sparta would know exactly where it was.

She moved cautiously toward the south,
listening
to the transmitter whine with superhuman sensitivity, analyzing what she heard at lightning speed. With an oscillation imperceptible to ordinary ears the signal alternately faded and increased sharply; the pulsed signal was interfering with itself as Sparta moved with respect to the ship, and the width of the diffraction zones gave her the relative velocity. From the increasing signal strength she knew she was getting closer to
Doradus
. She should see it–

–there. The
Doradus
was hanging just above the southern horizon, perhaps five kilometers above the surface, rimlit in marslight.

Sparta guessed that
Doradus
had made contact with the penetrator rocket and was station-keeping above it, at a sufficient distance that its optical and other sensors could sweep most of the southern hemisphere of Phobos. The scheme gave her an advantage–any landing party would have a long way to go to get to the surface.