“Where the hell did that come from?” the guard next to Leppo called to the driver, pulling himself up on the door pillar hand grip.
“I don’t know. It’s . . .”
The driver’s voice dried up. He looked from side to side. Figures in EV combat garb were rising from behind rocks and out of the gulleys, their weapons trained on the car. Two were holding emergency life-bags. It was an indication that they meant business. A few shots would be enough to decompress the vehicle. They would then storm in and cocoon the occupants, unconscious, or at least incapacitated. Resistance was out of the question. Nobody inside could even bring a defensive gun to bear.
“We’ve got no chance,” the driver threw back over his shoulder. “What do I do?”
“Call them,” the one beside Leppo said tightly. The sound of engines growing louder came from overhead, and moments later an airborne armored personnel carrier with mercenary markings landed ten yards or so behind the car. The driver picked up the headband carrying his stem mike. “Okay, okay. Hold your fire. You’ve got us cold. What do you want?”
“Very sensible,” a voice agreed over the speaker. “You’ve got two good friends of ours in there. Get them into breather sets and jackets, and send them out. Then, if you behave yourselves, as far as we’re concerned, the other three of you can be on your way. You’ve got three minutes. Fair enough?”
Leppo turned in his seat and looked back disbelievingly at the jaunty, red-suited figure that had come out from the APC and seemed to be doing the talking. He’d recognized that voice the moment it started speaking. And the face behind the visor—still brown, but familiar enough by now—confirmed it.
It was the Knight!
* * *
The APC rose slowly until the slack was almost gone from the line connecting it to the trailer frame blocking the road. “Slow . . .” Major Everit gauged the distance from a screen showing the vertical view below. “Hold it there,” he instructed the pilot beside him. “Now, slow again . . .”
“Taking weight,” the pilot confirmed. “Okay, I’ve got it. . . . It’s good.”
“Fine. Get rid of it.”
The APC lifted the frame clear, hovered for a moment, and then moved slowly forward to release the suspended load over the downward slope below the road. The car with the three guards inside waited warily; then, when nothing further happened, it began edging forward. Mahom watched it through a window as the APC resumed its ascent.
“I’m not so sure we should be letting them go like that,” he muttered to Kieran, sitting across from him behind the flight deck. “The first thing they’re gonna do is call ahead with the bad news.” Kieran hadn’t ordered the vehicle’s phone or the guards’ personal phones to be disabled to buy extra time. Deliberately leaving people out on the Martian surface without communications just wasn’t done.
“They’d just have been in the way here,” Kieran answered. “And the Stony Flats celestial choir is no doubt tracking them. If the car had stayed there much longer, they’d know something was wrong, anyway.”
Next to the pilot, Major Everit was looking perturbed. “Two troop carriers and a gunship rigged for ground suppression,” he said, turning to Kieran. “We don’t have the firepower to take on something like that. We were commissioned as a light defense force.”
“It’s bluff,” Kieran assured him. “They want me and a couple of other people they think are down there. They won’t just come roaring in with guns blazing.”
“So what do you need us for? If you’re not there, they’ll go away again.”
“A show of force on the ground—so those goons don’t take it into their heads to start slapping any scientists around.”
Everit still didn’t seem happy. “I don’t like asking my men to face odds like that. If we had firepower to offset that gunship . . .”
“There’s the Guardian Angel,” Leppo said from the seat behind, where he and Casey were listening.
“What’s the Guardian Angel?” Everit asked.
Kieran turned his head abruptly, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it. “Sol and Casey’s flymo,” he said to Everit.