Free Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi Page B

the frozen moment of delicious possibility.
     

The People of Sand and Slag
    "Hostile movement! Well inside the perimeter! Well inside!"
    I stripped off my Immersive Response goggles as adrenaline surged through me. The virtual cityscape I'd been about to raze disappeared, replaced by our monitoring room's many views of SesCo's mining operations. On one screen, the red phosphorescent tracery of an intruder skated across a terrain map, a hot blip like blood spattering its way toward Pit 8.
    Jaak was already out of the monitoring room. I ran for my gear.
    I caught up with Jaak in the equipment room as he grabbed a TS-101 and slashbangs and dragged his impact exoskeleton over his tattooed body. He draped bandoleers of surgepacks over his massive shoulders and ran for the outer locks. I strapped on my own exoskeleton, pulled my 101 from its rack, checked its charge, and followed.
    Lisa was already in the HEV, its turbofans screaming like banshees when the hatch dilated. Sentry centaurs leveled their 101s at me, then relaxed as friend/foe data spilled into their heads-up displays. I bolted across the tarmac, my skin pricking under blasts of icy Montana wind and the jet wash of Hentasa Mark V engines. Overhead, the clouds glowed orange with light from SesCo's mining bots.
    "Come on, Chen! Move! Move! Move!"
    I dove into the hunter. The ship leaped into the sky. It banked, throwing me against a bulkhead, then the Hentasas cycled wide and the hunter punched forward. The HEV's hatch slid shut. The wind howl muted.
    I struggled forward to the flight cocoon and peered over Jaak's and Lisa's shoulders to the landscape beyond.
    "Have a good game?" Lisa asked.
    I scowled. "I was about to win. I made it to Paris."
    We cut through the mists over the catchment lakes, skimming inches above the water, and then we hit the far shore. The hunter lurched as its anti-collision software jerked us away from the roughening terrain. Lisa overrode the computers and forced the ship back down against the soil, driving us so low I could have reached out and dragged my hands through the broken scree as we screamed over it.
    Alarms yowled. Jaak shut them off as Lisa pushed the hunter lower. Ahead, a tailings ridge loomed. We ripped up its face and dropped sickeningly into the next valley. The Hentasas shuddered as Lisa forced them to the edge of their design buffer. We hurtled up and over another ridge. Ahead, the ragged cutscape of mined mountains stretched to the horizon. We dipped again into mist and skimmed low over another catchment lake, leaving choppy wake in the thick golden waters.
    Jaak studied the hunter's scanners. "I've got it." He grinned. "It's moving, but slow."
    "Contact in one minute," Lisa said. "He hasn't launched any countermeasures."
    I watched the intruder on the tracking screens as they displayed real-time data fed to us from SesCo's satellites. "It's not even a masked target. We could have dropped a mini on it from base if we'd known he wasn't going to play hide-and-seek."
    "Could have finished your game," Lisa said.
    "We could still nuke him," Jaak suggested.
    I shook my head. "No, let's take a look. Vaporizing him won't leave us anything and Bunbaum will want to know what we used the hunter for."
    "Thirty seconds."
    "He wouldn't care, if someone hadn't taken the hunter on a joyride to Cancun."
    Lisa shrugged. "I wanted to swim. It was either that, or rip off your kneecaps."
    The hunter lunged over another series of ridges.
    Jaak studied his monitor. "Target's moving away. He's still slow. We'll get him."
    "Fifteen seconds to drop," Lisa said. She unstrapped and switched the hunter to software. We all ran for the hatch as the HEV yanked itself skyward, its autopilot desperate to tear away from the screaming hazard of the rocks beneath its belly.
    We plunged out the hatch, one, two, three, falling like Icarus. We slammed into the ground at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Our exoskeletons shattered like glass, flinging leaves into the