Fight for Life - 1

Belatedly I remembered that capsules were color-coded in an obvious manner, as it could be exceedingly awkward to open them in a vacuum to check their contents. Glaring orange was the code for explosives.

Explosives are normally used for excavation work. It is not feasible to light fuses or whatever in a vacuum—oh, yes, they do have a fuse that burns in empty space, with its own oxygen built in—but it takes special equipment to start it going. So most small explosives are contact-detonated.

The effect of this one did not seem great, but of course this was a mini-charge, and the debris settled out almost instantly, because there was no air to buoy it. Had that bomb struck our transporter, those of us who were not directly injured would have died from suit destruction. Even a little bomb is devastating when it detonates in your face! My father had caught on and swerved just in time; we had struck no craterlet.

The saucer swerved to get above us again. I saw its pincers, holding another bomb. There was now no doubt about its hostile intent! But, though the immediacy of the threat somehow abated the fear I should naturally have felt, my curiosity remained undimmed. Who was trying to do this to us, and why?

My father swerved again and braked, and the second bomb missed us to the left front. This time all of us were hanging on firmly, so neither the swerving nor the jolt of the ground from the explosion dislodged us. The forward bumper took the brunt of the flying debris, and we all ducked low so the rest passed harmlessly overhead. This was nervous business, though. Sand is sharp, and while space suits are tough, they aren't that tough.

Still the saucer pursued. It was more maneuverable than we were, and faster; I knew we could not escape it long. I didn't know how many bombs it had, but all it needed was one score on our vehicle. Each cylinder was small, and the saucer's hold could contain hundreds of them. Weight wouldn't make much difference, with the gravity shielding; a full hold weighed about the same as an empty one.

The pincers carefully lowered each bomb below the shield before releasing it, as I mentioned; otherwise, instead of dropping, the cylinder would remain in the chamber until it banged, into something there, and—

That gave me a notion. If I could somehow jam a bomb back into the hold, or set it off before it dropped—

I got out my laser and took a shot, but the two vehicles were jogging about so violently relative to each other—I'm sure it was mostly us, but it seemed at the time like the saucer, which is a useful exercise in perspective—that I couldn't aim well, and I missed.

I wasn't at all sure the laser beam would detonate the bomb anyway. Light and heat were one thing; abrupt collision was another. In any event, if the bomb did explode above us, shrapnel could rain down on us and wipe us out.

Even if it also took out the saucer, what good would it do us then? Maybe it was best that I had failed. I had no business depleting the charge in the weapon uselessly.

The third bomb missed behind us as my father accelerated, once more outsmarting the saucer pilot. Actually, it is very hard to align with an erratic target; pure chance gave us the advantage, if you consider having a chance to survive such a threat an advantage. The saucer was in no danger; it was the aggressor. These misses were too close; I knew they couldn't go on much longer.

Then Spirit jammed her helmet against mine.

"Look!" she yelled. "The ice caves!"

She meant the excavations made by the city of Maraud to mine clean ice. A community of a hundred thousand people needed a lot of water, and the recyclers were always breaking down and it was too expensive to replace them with new and reliable ones, so it was simpler just to quarry the water out of the ground.

If there is one thing Callisto has in abundance, it is ice! The bedrock ice is very close to the surface in some places, and here there was a combination strip-and-tunnel mine. The top ice at this site was blended with minerals, but the deep ice was as clean as nature had formed it four billion years ago.

Huge chunks of it were blasted free with bombs similar to those being used against us now, and gravity shields were used to float the icebergs to the dome, where smaller pieces were cut and taken inside for melting and using. There was always an iceberg perched near the dome, our guarantee that one thing we would never suffer was thirst.

I leaned over to touch helmets with my father, who was intent on his pedaling, steering, and the saucer. He was really working hard, but he kept his helmet still for me. "The ice caves!" I shouted. "We can hide in them!"

"Get rope!" he yelled back, and I realized he had been angling for this all along. I didn't know what good rope would do, but I scrambled out of my seat and across Faith in the back, delving for the flexible cable every outside vehicle had for towing and such.

In a moment I found it, as the vehicle swerved in crazy patterns, preventing the saucer from getting a good line on us. I realized the saucer was floating too high, so my father could see when the capsules were being released, and could dodge out of the way before they arrived.

Things didn't fall very rapidly out here in quarter-gee. Faster than they would in atmosphere, of course, as the prompt settling of the dust showed; but any distance made the slower pattern of natural acceleration evident. Human reactions, geared for Earth-type acceleration, were quite ready to cope with Callisto acceleration.

The saucer, however, was catching on. First it angled toward the ice mine as if to block us off from it; then, realizing that this ploy was ineffective because we could zigzag toward the mine anyway, the saucer floated lower, so as to cut the fall time and prevent us from dodging effectively.

My father made a throw-gesture with a free arm, and I caught on. I could use the rope against the saucer! It had been floating too high for the rope to reach, before, but now it was coming down close enough. My father was still outthinking it.

I made a lasso noose as I eyed the saucer. If I could loop that extended pincers, I could put it and the saucer out of commission. The lower the saucer got, the more in reach it got.

I flung the loop, but missed. I wasn't experienced at this; I didn't know how to lasso a moving object in low-gee. The dynamics were all wrong. In addition, that hovering bomb made me excruciatingly nervous. If it dropped now, could I catch it—and do so gently enough to prevent it from detonating? I doubted it.

Spirit climbed back to join me, moving lithely. She always had been an active type, able to fling herself about like a little monkey. She put her helmet against mine.

"Dad says jump!" she cried.

"And desert the family?" I retorted.

"No."

"With the rope, dummy! Here, I'll do it." She reached for the lasso.

Then I understood. In low-gee we could jump much higher than normal. It wasn't as simple as jumping four times as high in one-quarter gee; it depended on technique and the center of body mass. I hadn't had much practice at this either, but I had a general notion.

As the saucer swooped low, lower and closer than before, I launched myself upward, carrying the loop of rope in both hands. I imagined myself a rocket, jetting from a planetary berth with an important payload.

It felt like straight up, but of course it was at an angle, with the inertia of the vehicle's forward motion slanting me. There was no atmospheric drag to slow me; I shot straight for the saucer.

I was amazed, though I shouldn't have been; the power of my leap should have taken me up a meter within the dome, which translated to somewhere in the vicinity of four meters here, allowing for the uncertainties of the situation. That was how high the saucer now floated.

I came right up under the bomb, and with my two hands looped the rope around the extended pincers. Then I fell away to the side, slowly—and saw to my horror that I had dislodged the bomb, or at least failed to prevent it from being released.

I grabbed for it, but that was futile. I was already out of reach, and it was falling at the same rate I was. It was traveling right toward the transporter.

I watched helplessly as that terrible cylinder descended. Time dilated for me; everything was in slow motion. My family faced destruction—and I could only watch.

Then Spirit jumped up and caught the bright capsule in her hands. Still aloft, she flung it from her, behind the vehicle. She had been alert, bless her, and had done what I could not. Once again she had backstopped me, and perhaps saved us all.

The bomb exploded as Spirit and I landed on either side of the transporter. Both of us managed to get turned to face forward and hit the ground running, for we still had that forward inertia. It was rough, but I managed to keep my balance, and so did she. We jogged to clumsy stops well behind the transporter.

The rope was tied to the saucer pincers at one end, and anchored to the land vehicle at the other. The two machines were tied together.

The three oldest Hubrises were in the transporter—and who was in the saucer?

Spirit rejoined me, touching helmets.

"Sierra," she said.

"What?" My mind was distracted by more important things than her chance remarks.

"The scion on the saucer!"

Suddenly it came clear! The one we had humiliated! Naturally he was out to get revenge, and he hadnot been satisfied with our departure from the dome of Maraud.

Out here at night he could destroy us and get away with it! We had fled the dome of our own volition, leaving the protection of its law, such as it was; we had become fair targets. There wouldn't even be any inquiries.

Sierra must have been keeping track of us, unsatisfied without the taste of blood. The arrogance of scions was almost beyond belief; a personal humiliation by a peasant was justification for murder, in this person's view.

But not open murder, for then it would be known that he had acted in a cowardly manner, bombing a pedal-powered vehicle from a saucer. The nature of his humiliation might also become known. So his revenge had to be private and complete. Yes, it made sense at last.

The saucer wrenched upward as its pilot realized that something was wrong—and it skewed crazily as it snapped on the end of its tether. The rope provided with out-dome vehicles is tough, for it has to stand up to the abrasion of sharp rocks and the stress of hauling a vehicle out of a mine cave-in. That saucer could not break free!

With a gravity lens, a saucer can lift any amount that will fit in its hold, because the load has no weight—provided the lens is between the load and the planet. But the rope anchored the saucer to the transporter below the lens, with its full quarter-gee weight. This was too much to lift. The propulsive rockets (no propeller out here in vacuum, of course) weren't designed for significant lifting, only forward thrust. What a lovely trap!

With its pincers unit immobilized, the saucer couldn't drop any more bombs. We had muzzled it as well as tethering it. Because the pilot was sealed inside, he couldn't go to the airless cargo hold to untie or cut the rope. Not unless he had a space suit—which was unlikely. Trying to scramble into one of those bulky things in the confines of a cockpit was so awkward as to be something a scion would not consider, anyway.

On the other hand, we couldn't let the saucer go without being in trouble again. It was similar to the way I had grabbed the scion's foot, really incapacitating us both. Only then he'd drawn the laser—

Oops! If he had a laser now—

No, that seemed unlikely. No laser cannon was mounted on the saucer itself, as lasers weren't very useful for cutting this ice of the mine. It simply melted, flowed, and refroze in an instant, absorbing an enormous amount of energy in the process.

It takes as much energy for a laser to do its work as it does to do the work any other way; there is no such thing as free power, other than what we draw from the sunlight. So the ice had to be cut physically, without wasteful heating.

Anyway, if the scion had had a laser, he would have used it instead of the clumsy blasting cylinders. So it seemed we really had evened the odds.

Then my mind, which never knows when to stop, brought up another thought: The scion could have a laser in the cockpit, but not have used it because that would have holed up our suits and killed us without destroying the evidence of the murder.

A person or a family could run afoul of blasting cylinders by error, perhaps, but there had to be another party to fire a laser at five separate people. So I could not afford any complacency on that score.

The transporter reached the ice mine, hauling the saucer along on its tether. On the shallow-crater region of the planet the saucer had the advantage, when it was loose, for there was no place for a vehicle to hide or avoid it.

But the mine was deep, convoluted, and jagged, not having had the necessary billion years or so to melt into anonymity. This terrain was no picnic for a ground vehicle, but it was downright dangerous for a low-flying saucer on a tether. If we let the scion go here, he would probably just have to float home.

But if we did that, and the saucer did not go home, we would be trapped in the mine, unable to proceed to our rendezvous with the bubble. Safety in the mine was no good when we had a time limit for crossing the landscape.

The saucer could hover indefinitely, outwaiting us. We had no great supplies of food or water, and in any event had to reach the bootleg bubble before it departed without us. So we had to hang onto the saucer.

But could we haul it all the way to the bubble? That was unlikely—and if we did, the operator of the bubble might decide to take off before we arrived, fearful that the saucer represented the authority of an official. Our predicament had changed its nature, but not its urgency.