Cyber Rogues Read Free Page A

enormous kettledrum exploded in his ears. He lost count of the concussions. Maybe ten, twenty . . . His brain had seized up.
    He was lying by the track of the crawler, his heart pounding and his body shaking. Every inch of his skin felt cold and wet in his suit. It had stopped. He waited, barely daring to breathe. The tension that held him keyed up waiting for it to begin again refused to let go. But nothing happened. He opened his eyes slowly and looked up.
    Cummings was lying on his back with his legs tangled in the steps that bridged the gap between the ground and the floor of the entrance hatch. He looked as if he had been bowled backward out of the doorway just as he had been in the act of climbing in. Still shaking, Paskoe struggled to his feet, rivulets of sticky moondust pouring down the creases in his suit.
    “Tim . . . Tim can you hear me?” He lurched over to where Cummings lay motionless, then stopped. A slab of ice-cold horror dropped in his stomach as he saw the shattered visor. And then a feeble voice groaned in his helmet.
    “Holy Christ, what happened?”
    “Tim? . . .” Paskoe’s voice was almost sobbing with relief. “Tim, are you okay in there?” The sprawled figure moved, and gingerly extracted a leg from the steps above it.
    “I can’t see,” Cummings’s voice came again, now sounding less disoriented. “Something hit me in the face.” The other leg freed itself. Paskoe stooped and helped Cummings to sit up. “Argh! . . . My chest! I think I got hit by a shuttle booster.”
    “Can you stand up? Easy now. I gotcha.”
    “Take it slowly.” Cummings’s words came between heavy breaths. “I think I might have collected a cracked rib.”
    Paskoe hoisted Cummings to his feet and guided his hand to the rail by the door. The chest panel of Cummings’s suit was smashed and the visor an opaque mess of fractured crystal. Paskoe moved around to get at the manual auxiliary controls on the backpack, which appeared none the worse for having taken the impact of Cummings’s fall.
    “Your visor’s cracked but it looks like it’s holding,” he said. “I’m dropping the pressure in your suit to relieve the stress on it. As far as I can tell you’ll be okay for a while, but we ought to get you into another one ASAP.”
    “What happened?” Cummings asked again.
    “I don’t know. If there was a war on I’d have said we just had a near miss from a salvo of 108’s. Maybe it was a meteorite swarm. I don’t know.” While he was speaking, Paskoe was peering into the lower cabin of the crawler. The floor was covered in dust and some larger debris. Shafts of light poured through several jagged holes that had been torn in the far wall. Presumably whatever had made the holes had carried right through and caught Cummings head-on just as he was entering from the opposite direction.
    “What . . . What about Jerry?” Cummings asked haltingly.
    “He got caught in the open.” Paskoe turned from the door and began scanning their immediate vicinity. “I guess he must have got blown away. Bad news I . . . Just a sec. I think I see him.” He could just make out the twisted figure of Fields, crumpled in a mound of dust that had appeared at the foot of a rounded boulder twenty or thirty feet away. The layer of gray powder covering it was so thick that Paskoe had at first dismissed it as an irregular grouping of rocks. Cummings remained silent, still clinging to the handrail while he regained his breath.
    “It’s him,” Paskoe said. “He’s not moving. Looks like he might have been hit pretty bad. Stay there and don’t move. I’m going over.”
    In a few slow bounds he covered the distance to where Fields was lying, and began digging the dust aside frantically with his gauntleted hands. Field’s helmet was intact. Paskoe scraped the layer of caked moondust from the visor and peered at the face inside.
    It was pale, eyes closed; no sign of life. But at least, there were none of the gruesome signs