The First Gunslinger on Mars [2]

With his destination just over twenty kilometers away, he figured that he would be there before they could close the gap, until he saw the second rover coming over the rise just ahead.

Cursing his luck, he grabbed a spare suitpack and his toolbag from the rover and headed for the boulder field below the nearer rim of the canyon.  While not a lot was known about how the raiders operated, the general idea was that they fried a rover with an electromagnetic pulse, killing any and all electronics - including those of any suits in the area.  They then punctured the hull and gassed the occupants.

He had little hope that his escape on foot wasn't seen by the second rover, but if he could get far enough into the boulder field, he hoped to be out of the reach of the rover's pulse generator, although he had no way to know what its effective range was.  As he climbed the slope up amongst the rocks, he kept looking back, watching the two rovers closing in on his.

The second rover arrived first, stopping about 100 meters away, and pausing there for several minutes before closing the distance.  Stopping almost half a kilometer up the slope, he figured that the raiders must have paused to disable his rover, and then moved in to make the kill.  Within a half hour, both rovers were there, and the four raiders who got out were hitching up his vehicle to be towed away.  Once under way, they started heading up the canyon.

Once they were beyond the next rise, he walked back down to look around, but found nothing but tracks.  He knew that heading on to his destination by foot was his only reasonable chance; between his suit's pack and the spare, he should have almost 12 hours of life support, but there was only the one safe harbor within a week's walk, even if he had the air for it.

The sandy ground made for slow going, with his feet sinking in as he trudged up the canyon.  In three hours, he'd only made about five kilometers of progress, when he spotted the three rovers stopped up ahead.  He moved off the trail to crouch by an outcropping to the side, where he could look out and evaluate his options.  He could try to wait them out, but his pace would barely get him to shelter in time as it was, so delaying too long would mean risking running out of air before he got to safety.  He could call for help over his suit's radio, but he knew that no one would be likely to risk coming down into the canyon for him, especially with raiders about, and giving his location over the radio would be giving himself away to the raiders, who were thought to monitor all of the common bands.  He could try to sneak around the rovers, but the canyon was getting to be rather narrow at its upper end, and even if he could get around the group on the trail, he might well stumble into a raider's nest set up near the canyon walls.

Lacking any better options, he began picking his way from rock to rock, drawing closer to the three rovers.  He was within 50 meters when he could find no more boulders big enough to hide behind, so he stood up straight and walked straight toward the four raiders that seemed to be working on one of their rovers.  The first one to notice him tapped the one next to him, and the others all turned to look at him.  He kept walking toward them, hoping that they couldn't fry him with a pulse while they were out in suits as well.

He switched on his radio, which was already set to a common band.  He tried to sound calm, hoping that they couldn't hear the elevated heartbeat that seemed to be surging in his own ears.  "I think you have something of mine," he said...

[To be continued.]