Up Against It - M. J. Locke [153]
Xuan summoned indignation. “No, sir. Your assumption is not correct. I am head of the Astrogeology Department at Phocaea U. Check it for yourself; my bio is on the university’s wavesite under faculty. You asked for someone on short notice. All the grad students were already assigned to other duties. I have no idea who you people are or what you are doing, other than surveying a potential ice claim, nor do I know why my wife’s name should matter to you.”
Mills chuckled. “Ah, I see. He has no idea who we are, gentlemen. Let me set you straight. We are the new bosses in town, and we don’t like people like you and your wife getting in our way.”
“The last thing I want is to get in your way. I just want to do my job.”
“Maybe he’s telling the truth, sir,” Jesse said.
“Let me handle this,” Mills snapped. “Professor, have you ever seen what this”—he swung the wrench—“does to a faceplate in a vacuum?”
Xuan saw in Mills’s gaze that he wanted Xuan to defy him. He was looking for an excuse to kill him. The sun was down now, but with his augmented vision, Xuan could see clearly. Five armed men were at the base of the ramp, and Mills, a man nearly twice his size, had a firm grip on his air hoses. If he tried to leap away, Mills would smash his faceplate, or wrench his lines out. And even if he could escape, where would he go? He only had a few hours’ worth of air, and didn’t know the codes to the mine locks, or if the mine was even habitable anymore.
I won’t survive this, he thought. He wished he had thirty seconds out-of-time so he could send Jane a note. Tell her how much she meant to him. Tell her to tell the kids good-bye.
Buy time, he thought. “Might I point out that I would be more useful to you prior to exposure to vacuum than I would be afterward, if my wife is indeed obstructing your efforts?”
Mills eyed him, swinging his wrench back and forth, back and forth. Then he shrugged and lowered the wrench. “You have a point. Oh well.”
He gave Xuan a sudden, vicious shove. Xuan tumbled into space. He flailed, and slowly settled to land in a crouch at the base of the ramp. “You want to stay on my good side,” Mills said, “then rerun your test.”
Xuan came back to his feet. He had already removed the bolt from the pendulum wire—the bolt that had shortened the pendulum and made the gravitometer lie about the rock’s density. Mills would kill him if he tried to reinstall it. But they were going to anyway. He might as well try. He directed Jesse and the others to take the equipment back to the location where he had done the testing earlier.
As they neared the spot, two rocketbikers came out from behind the equipment racks at high speed. They had a net stretched between them. Mills saw them and shouted, but too late—two of the hired hands got caught in the net. Xuan’s night vision allowed him to see them just in time to push himself out of the way. The net swooped past. He saw that Jesse and another of the guards had leapt out of the way. In his radio headset, a young man shouted, “Professor Xuan—run!”
He didn’t need to be told twice. He leapt up and out, off the mine tailings and over the shuttle—with a kick off its top fin, to launch himself higher—and arced toward the bikes, which were hauling a bouncing load of arms, legs, and asses off into the distance. The two unbound mercenaries stumbled after them, shooting. As Xuan sank beyond the shuttle, he looked back: Mills had pulled his gun. Xuan of course heard nothing, but a bullet nicked the top fin, just missing him, and blew up. Exploding bullets: nasty. The mist that dispersed after the explosion suggested they might also contain a biotoxin. Then the shuttle blocked Mills from view.
Xuan landed in a crouch, and started bounding away from the two guards. The bikers had jettisoned their net and were skidding in an arc back toward the shuttle as Jesse and the two hired hands, still enmeshed,