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wait longer while you have the vapors?"
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Nango could say only one thing, and he said it: "No, sir."
"All right, then." Onishi broke the circuit. He watched with satisfaction as the other crawler came abreast
of his. Nango was all right. No one could call him a shirker.
They sped past the place where the tire tracks of the United European crawler stopped short. Onishi
admitted to himself that they did end rather abruptly, but he was damned if he'd say so out loud. It was of
no consequence, anyway.
He gave Nango credit. The ensign was even trying to get ahead now; sulfur powder flew from his wheels
as he accelerated.
Onishi watched for several seconds before that registered. If there was still dust here, then the crawler
they were afterhadn'tcome this way and probably had a reason for it.
"Reverse!" the sublieutenant said urgently. "It's a "
Before he could finish, the ground buckled beneath his crawler. It happened with eerie slowness, as
most things do on a low-gravity world, but no less inevitably on account of that. Slabs of yellow sulfur
gave way like thin ice.
The crawler tipped with that same sense of nightmare leisure. Through the window, Onishi, who was
cursing and praying in the same breath, saw Ensign Nango's crawler go down nose first.
One after another, alarm bells began to ring.
From their hiding place behind a boulder close by the circling crawler, Renée and Alec watched fearfully
as the lights from the Japanese vehicles stabbed toward it. When those lights suddenly slewed wildly,
Renée let out a whoop that almost deafened her inside her helmet.
She hugged Alec. It wasn't much of an embrace; the thick suit material saw to that. The crawler pilot did
not care.
Alec pressed his helmet to hers. "We did it! We did it!" he shouted over and over. He was yelling in
English, but Renée did not care about that, either. She knew what he had to be saying.
They danced round and round in glee, holding each other's hands. At last, panting, Renée thumbed her
portable transmitter. The crawler obediently broke off its circuit and came over to the boulder. With a
deep bow, Renée waved Alec into the airlock ahead of her.
Once they were both inside the crawler, they shed spacesuits with cries of relief. No one would be
shooting at them now. And neither of them seemed surprised when the shedding did not stop there; tunics
and shorts quickly followed. The latter were not made for modesty in any case, having openings here and
there for the suits' sanitary arrangements.
The crawler's bunk was narrow, and covered only by a thin foam pad. In .18g, that didn't matter.
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"Very glad to see the two of you. To be honest, I didn't think I would," said Jacques Guizot,
commandant of Lola Station. The office in which he received the newcomers was small and cramped,
like all the chambers in the station's tunnel system. The domes above were abandoned, though thus far
the batteries around them had knocked down all incoming missiles.
"To be honest, we didn't expect to get here," Renée said.
Beside her, Alec nodded. "We were very lucky."
"No," Renée said, giving him credit. "It was your cleverness. If you hadn't thought of how the Japanese
were unfamiliar with Io, we'd have been done for."
"It never would have occurred to me without you," he insisted, "and I'm not a good enough driver to
have brought it off by myself."
Guizot raised a bushy gray eyebrow at this mutual admiration society. "What exactly did you do?" he
asked at last.
"We lured them into a hot patch," they said together.
The commandant's other eyebrow shot up. His thundered laughter was positively Jovian. "Magnificent!
How did you manage that?"
"I drove up to the very edge of the patch," Renée answered, "Then I reversed, backing up in my own
tracks till I could turn and skirt the patch. Once I was on the other side, I set the crawler to circle, as if it
were disabled."
Alec took up the story: "Then we both EVA'd and hurried back to sweep away the tracks that showed
where we'd turned. Luckily, we were in eclipse we just had to get rid of a few meters of the trail, what
the Japanese headlights would pick up. After that, it was hide and wait and hope."
"And they fell into the trap," Renée said. "Literally."
"Why not?" Alec said. "They were used to driving on Luna, which has been dead for billions of years.
But hot patches are places where molten black sulfur reaches the surface. Once it gets up there, it starts
to freeze again, and gets covered over by yellow sulfur dust, but underneath "
"Underneath, it's still black sulfur," Messier interrupted with a savage grin, "and a lot like hot black tar.
Only the thin crust on top keeps it from showing its true temperature "
" which is around 200 Celsius," Alec finished. "And the crust isverythin. When a crawler tries to cross
it& "
"Magnificent!" Guizot said again. "Using the enemy's ignorance against him is a first principle of warfare."
"My own ignorance, too," Renée confessed. "I said Luna and Io were much alike. You can imagine, sir,
how glad I was to be proved wrong. And, as is more often said in another context" she looked fondly
at Alec "vive la différence!"
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Tales from the Slushpile
Margaret Ball
«^»
Halfway through the SalamanderCon panelOn Thud and Blunder, the stuffy hotel air was likely to put me
to sleep before my demo came up. Right now Brian Spooner was droning on about how the sociology of
most sword-and-sorcery novels was completely off base, they didn't begin to understand how many
peasants it took to support one fighting man(man, naturally; this was one of the Spooner-Upshaw Gang
talking). He had all kinds of numbers and charts to support his contention. He was also way off base, not
having actually lived in a society where personal combat was a way of life. One thing he hadn't taken into
account was how many swordspersons (to be non-sexist about it, Paper-Pushers style) it took to protect
a string of farms in border territory. Another thing he didn't consider was the effect of motivation on
productivity. Those tests about how long it took English students to build a replica of an early Norman
castle were completely irrelevant. I've supervised quick fortifications out on the boundaries of Duke
Zolkir's territory, and I can promise you those kids would've worked a lot faster given the
encouragement of a swordswoman behind them and Baron Rodo's roughs just over the hill, raring to
skewer them for brunch.
But I wasn't here to argue with Brian Spooner's book-based theories of how agrarian societies actually
worked, or even to enjoySusan Crescent 's wickedly funny comments on writers who thought a horse
was a kind of four-legged sports car requiring no daily maintenance. I wassupposedlyhere to
demonstrate my military expertise to D. McConnell. Who had still not put in an appearance.
"But now," the moderator interrupted Brian, as the audiences coughs and shuffles threatened to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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