The storm shrieked against the pressure bubble. Winthrop Magnus Wellington III, known as "Welly" to his friends, shivered as the red Martian sand battered the double-thick insulated plastic. The dome had been guaranteed to withstand storms such as this, but a manufacturer’s warranty was small comfort when the full fury of a planet’s atmosphere howled only centimeters away.
Bentley, his manservant, turned up the portable furnace a notch. Good man, Bentley. Unobtrusively helpful, yet ever observant. His family had served the Wellingtons for generations, possibly all the way back to the British exodus when the monarchy had removed to Mars, though Welly secretly doubted that. The Wellingtons’ pedigree extended back to a peerage granted by King William in the twenty-first century, but the family fortune had waxed and waned several times since then. Welly’s father would never speak of them, but there were entire decades when the Wellingtons would probably have served the Bentleys if pride had allowed it.
Fortunately, those times were at least two centuries in the past. The terraforming project had provided income and prestige for the family since its inception, and Welly was confident that it would continue to do so long after his portrait began gathering dust in the hall of ancestors.
He was somewhat less confident that he would actually survive to sit for that portrait, but he was working on it. He had spread a map out on the folding table and was expanding the view of their route one section at a time.
"What do you think, sir?" Bentley asked, rattling pans on the camp stove. Always puttering with something, even on a night like this.
Welly zoomed his map back out to an overview again. "It doesn’t look good," he said. "The weather satellite shows everything socked in from Noctis to the volcanoes." A green dot on the plains south of Noctis Labyrinthis caught his attention. "I say, this is news: someone’s on top already. Bet it’s Radcliffe–weasel of a racer, that Raddy. Always taking the safe route. Well, he’s getting the full blast of this storm, eh?"
Bentley nodded and handed his young master a porcelain cup full of steaming tea. "Not ideal conditions for the Water Race this year," he said.
The wind dropped for a moment, and Welly could hear the camels groan. "Oh, but I do love the adventure," he said, taking the cup and settling back in his folding camp chair. "Battling the elements and all that. A stiff spring gale is just the ticket to separate the sheep from the goats."
If Bentley had a reply, it was lost as the bubble wall bulged inward and the wind shrieked loud enough to drown out conversation. Mars’s terraformed atmosphere was coming along nicely, Welly noted dryly. Air pressure had risen by nearly fifty millibars in just the twenty-four years that he had been alive. It was even breathable without masks if you felt brave.
He studied the map again. Thirteen green dots were scattered across the terrain. In addition to the one on the southern plateau, four had veered north and seven more were arrayed in various canyons just behind Welly. The way the sand shifted from year to year, there was no single best path through the Labyrinth. Every race was different, and every team searched for a route that would give them an edge over the others.
"You’ll never catch up with me, no matter which way you go," Welly muttered. "It’s not the route, it’s the camels that matter most, and I’ve got the best camels on Mars."
Indeed, as Welly’s father often joked, the Wellington family put great stock in the annual Noctis-to-Pavonis water race. It was one of the few opportunities for the twelve great families to jostle for status in the old, time-honored tradition of adventure. Each year when the incoming ice asteroid from Saturn docked with the upper ballast mass of the orbital elevator, all the stockholding families in the Marineris Valley pooled 10 percent of their holdings and raced from the valley floor to the foot of the volcano for the prize: all twelve Saturn-shaped water rings–one from each family–representing not only their winning status, but also a very real and very valuable interest in the water.
Even now, three centuries after the Exodus, water still controlled the economy, if not the lives, on Mars. Welly touched the contoured map, traced his finger along a sinuous channel a billion years old. Some day it would hold water again.
Tomorrow it would hold the winning racers. "I’ve been examining the terrain," he said to Bentley, "and I believe if we stick to the valleys we can stay below the worst of the storm and still make fairly good time while everyone else waits for it to blow over. We’ll go a bit more westerly than we’d originally planned, but I’ve found a rille that leads northward again and should put us back on the plains just about the time the storm lets up."
"Let’s have a–"
A bright flash of green light lit up the dome, and a crack of thunder rattled the table.
"Lightning?" asked Welly in an incredulous voice.
Bentley’s eyebrows narrowed. "I’ve heard of it happening occasionally now that the atmosphere is thicker, but the odds of actually being hit by it . . ." He trailed off, frowning.
Welly slapped him on the shoulder. "Won’t we have a story, then! First the storm, and now lightning on the first night out!"
He looked back to the map, which was now a uniform gray and flat as a piece of paper. "Oh, bother. It’s finished the map." He tapped the control strip along the side and managed to retrieve the contours, but a warning blinked in the sidebar: "Stored image–not in real time." The green dots of the racers’ camps were not displayed.
"The map works," said Welly. "It must be the antenna. Can you dig out a spare?"
"I’m afraid not, sir. We cut it from the cargo manifest to save weight."
"Then we’ll have some repair work to do tomorrow. We can’t navigate without a real-time map."
Bentley shivered. "No sir, that would be most unwise."
In the morning, when they donned their insulated coveralls and breathing masks and crawled out of the dome, they saw the remains of their navigation antenna dangling from the bracket they had screw-drilled into the rock beside their dome. Most of the dish was gone, but what remained had been melted–parts of it vaporized–by the blast.
"Incredible," Welly said when he saw it. "I had no idea lightning was that destructive. There’s no fixing this."
"That was no lightning strike," said Bentley, his voice sounding tinny over their oxygen masks’ two-way radio. "The antenna was hit with a laser."
"Laser?" Welly asked. "Are you sure? There was thunder with it."
"Quite sure," Bentley replied. "I’ve seen laser damage before, out at the firing range at the club, and this is what it looks like. The noise was probably airborne sand vaporizing in the beam’s path." He looked out into the storm, and Welly followed his gaze, but he could see nothing beyond a few dozen yards. "It would appear that someone has attempted to put you at a disadvantage," said Bentley
Welly was shocked to the core. "Oh, Bentley, no one in the Twelve Families would ever stoop to such . . . ah, yes. Twelve Families. But there are thirteen running the race this year, aren’t there?"
Bentley nodded. "I was thinking the same thing."
"LeBrue," Welly said contemptuously. Gordon LeBrue, a recent émigré and gold digger who had charmed Welly’s sister, Victoria, into an unlikely–and decidedly unpopular–engagement. Gordon had been neck-and-neck with Welly since the beginning of the race, and was almost certainly in one of the other camps nearby; he could very easily have sneaked over under cover of the storm and shot out Welly’s navigation receiver.
And what else might he have done while he was at it? Welly peered fearfully through the blinding dust toward the camels, expecting to see empty tethers, but the five Sandship hybrids were still right where Bentley had left them, hunkered down against the wind and chewing their cud behind their face-fitting oxygen masks. Their air tanks still hung on either side of their double humps, and their packs waited on the ground nearby, drifts of red sand in their lee. Apparently Gordon assumed that sabotaging the antenna was enough, that Welly would give up at the first setback. He obviously didn’t know his Wellingtons!
"Pack up, Bentley," said Welly, "and let’s get moving. We have a race to win."
"Yes, sir." Bentley trudged off toward the camels and busied himself with replacing their depleted air tanks and strapping on the mountainous bags of camping equipment. Welly deflated their dome and rolled it up, then helped Bentley strap it onto one of the ungainly beasts.
Bentley had already saddled up Welly’s riding camel, Huntington Overlord Waterford Greene. "I dare say, if we weren’t traveling so light, we’d need an extra hand," he said as he struggled in the gusting wind to winch the other camels’ bags and panniers in place. At last he got everything tied down, and the two men climbed atop their kneeling mounts. They twitched their quirts and with groanings and remonstrations, the camels rose and padded west along the rocky terrain, their caravan bell clanging out the Wellington family E note. Behind them, empty oxy tanks lay in a heap on the sand, and empty field ration containers skittered and flew in the early morning gusts. Welly felt a brief pang of conscience at the sight, but they could ill afford to pack garbage with them for the entire race.
The storm let up by early afternoon, but without a real-time map they were still riding blind, reduced to merely following the canyon’s twists and turns and passing tributaries one after another as the stored map image directed. At least Welly hoped they were following the map; he was learning that one depression in a canyon wall looks pretty much like another when you don’t have a you-are-here marker to refer to.
He turned around in his silver-inlaid leather saddle and held Hunter’s two fat humps for support while he peered back the way they had come. He could just barely see the black dots of other racers far behind them, but he couldn’t tell, even with binoculars, which caravan was Gordon’s.
He took the map from his coverall’s thigh pocket and examined it again. "It looks like once we round this bend we’ve got another two side canyons, plus half a dozen smaller channels to go past, and then we can head up the rille and straight out for Pavonis." He looked up, hoping for a positive reaction from Bentley, but his manservant just rode along on his own camel, holding the reins of the three gear-loaded pack camels and looking to the far distance.
"Yes, well then," Welly said. "That’s what we’ll do. Whoa!" A sudden gust of wind blew at the map, nearly tearing the contoured plastic out of his hand. It flapped mercilessly for a moment until he could gather it back again, but by the time he regained control of it, half the map had lost its relief and displayed nothing but static like the surface of a bubbling pan of water. And of course that was the half they needed most.
"Bother!" Welly yelled. "Now we’re in for it. I swear, if I ever get my hands on Gordon, he’ll rue the day he put me in this position."
"Triumphing against the odds would be the best revenge," said Bentley. His voice, still tinny through the oxy mask’s speaker, nevertheless carried the tone of gentle reproach that Welly knew from his childhood.
"Quite right," said Welly. "And triumph I will. But he’ll answer to me personally as well." He twitched his Sandship’s rein. "Come on, boy! Let’s go!" Hunter turned one eye to glare at its master, spat a line of green cud through its oxygen mask’s mouth opening, and kept to its normal pace. Welly drew his quirt and whipped it into a jog.
He kept a running count in his head of the washes and gullies they passed. Two big ones and six little ones; how difficult could it be to find the rille?
Apparently more difficult than he thought, for they still had one to go when Bentley brought the pack train to a halt as they drew abreast of a U-shaped side canyon and said, "I believe this is the one we want, sir."
"This?" said Welly. "This one’s a dead end. There isn’t a bit of flood debris at the mouth of it. That means it’s short."
"Begging your pardon, sir, but it’s a rille, not a canyon. A collapsed lava tube. It never was a water channel."
"Hmm, perhaps you’re right," Welly admitted, "but I’ve been keeping count and we’re definitely not there yet. It’s the next one."
"I think not, sir," Bentley said.
Welly favored him with a cross look. "Well, I do," he said. "I’m perfectly capable of counting how many canyons we’ve passed, and the one we want is up ahead."
Bentley looked at the tiny dots of the riders behind them and sighed. "We had best investigate it quickly, then. We won’t keep our lead if we waste much time backtracking."
Welly could hardly believe his manservant’s tone. "No, we won’t," he said coldly. "Nor do we have time to waste on the wrong cutoff."
He spent the next quarter kilometer anticipating Bentley’s apology when they arrived at the correct rille, but his expectations fizzled when they rounded the bend and saw a debris-choked water channel that not even a Sandship could navigate.
"It must be one farther yet," Welly insisted. "We have to keep going."
"No, sir," Bentley replied, reining his camels to a halt again. "We have already gone too far."
His tone was definitely not the subservient one Welly was used to. What had gotten into him? "It’s you who have gone too far," Welly said ominously. "You–"
He didn’t get the chance to finish, because a dust-covered rock beside him suddenly raised up and became a red-shrouded figure who slapped the sand from its robe and said, "On the contrary. You have both gone just far enough."
Welly lunged for his pistol–a Nodout full-spectrum sonic stunner–but his camel bellowed and danced backward, forcing him to hang on with both hands. He fought Hunter back down, but before he could grab the pistol, two more rocks rose out of the sand. The first figure said, "Don’t be stupid." The business end of a dark metallic weapon of some sort emerged from the sleeve of his robe.
Welly looked to Bentley. His manservant had already drawn his pistol, but the other two of their three assailants had him in their sights. The third held his gun on Welly.
"Your move," said the one aiming at him.
The gun looked to be a projectile weapon, and it had a rather . . . voluminous barrel.
"I think discretion is the better part of valor in this instance," Welly said to Bentley. "Holster your weapon and let’s reason with these people in a civilized fashion." He turned to the person holding the gun on him and, shouting to be heard through his mask, said, "If it’s money you want, we don’t have any. We’re on the Water Race; we’re only carrying essentials,"
"Money is little good to us," said the first hooded figure. "However, you look like a man with too many camels."
Welly choked off his usual brag, that they were the finest camels on Mars, instead saying, "I’ll have you know we’re winning the Water Race with these camels."
"Not that way. The only way to Pavonis is back the way you came."
"And what makes you so sure of that?" said Welly.
The figure reached a hand out from the folds of the robe and pulled back the hood, revealing a woman’s head. Her hair was thick, black, and intricately braided all around her tanned, windburned face. She wore no respirator, Welly noted with surprise. She grinned. "I know because I live out here," she said. She spoke to the other two figures in a language Welly had never heard before, and they pulled their hoods back to reveal two more women.
"Nomads," muttered Bentley.
The leader nodded to the other two figures. "Apang, Netia, take the pack animals."
"No!" Welly shouted. "We need them!"
"Nobody needs five camels. Be glad there are only three of us, or you would be on foot from here."
Apang and Netia took the reins of the three pack camels from Bentley’s hands, led them a few paces away, and began pawing through the panniers.
"Good grief, Katurah, will you look at all this junk?" one of them said. "They’ve got a generator in here. And enough water and oxygen tanks to supply a city."
"We need them," Welly said. "Look here, if it’s supplies you want, I can give you my credit–" He reached for his wallet, but she fired a shot into the air, spooking Hunter, and the next thing he knew he was on his back in the sand. He hadn’t been hit, but his ears rang like an alarm siren.
"I told you, we don’t want your money," Katurah said. Her voice had taken on a cold tone that raised the hackles on the back of Welly’s neck.
"Take it all," she said to her companions. "This one’s too stupid for favors."
"What about the other one?" asked one of the women. "He’s cooperated well enough."
The leader spat on the sand a foot or so in front of Welly. "All right, then," she said. "Leave the old one enough food and water to make it to Pavonis. It’s up to him if he wants to share with his young fool of a companion."
"You can’t–"
Boom! Sand flew up from right next to Welly’s face. She blew on the end of her pistol. "Don’t push your luck, worm."
Worm! To think that a Wellington had lived to be called "worm" by a common thief! Welly fumed while the women tossed a paltry half-dozen oxygen tanks and two water bottles to the sand, then led the three stolen camels up the side canyon.
When they were out of earshot he snapped at Bentley, "Some help you were." He stood up and slapped the dust from his trousers. His face still stung where the bullet had sprayed sand against it, and his ears still rang from the explosion.
Bentley spoke his first words since they had been waylaid. "Those were Matrika nomads."
"And what’s that supposed to mean?"
"It means we are very lucky to have survived the encounter." He didn’t say it, but Welly could hear "Despite your best efforts to get us killed" in his voice.
"It would seem the race is over for us," Bentley went on. "Should I use my emergency beacon to call for assistance? Your father could have a lifter out here in a couple of hours to pick us up. And possibly the camels, too, if he brings enough men, though I would advise against trying it."
"No," said Welly, real fear striking him for the first time. "He’d kill me. We’d be the laughingstock of the race. Bentley, can you imagine what would happen if I came crawling back with only two camels and no gear? And if word got out that a trio of vagabond women had stolen them? What the men at the club would say?"
Bentley shrugged. "Perhaps," he said, "we could tell your father and your friends that the camels got hit by lightning, too?"
It was a tempting thought. Bentley’s wry grin as he suggested it even brought a fleeting smile to Welly’s face, but he shook his head and said, "No, Bentley, we’ve got to go get them back ourselves. We’ve got to finish this race, no matter what. With all our camels."
Alarmed, Bentley said, "You can’t mean to go after the Matrika?"
Welly reached up to his saddle and unholstered his stunner. "I do," he said. "They made a stupid mistake. They left us our weapons."
"They left us our lives, too, but I don’t think it’s wise to press our luck. They won’t be so generous a second time."
"Bentley, are you afraid of a few desert women?"
"Yes," Bentley replied sincerely. "And you would be, too, if you knew anything about them."
"I know that they stole our camels; that’s enough for me. Come on, let’s get moving."
Bentley continued trying to talk him out of it, but Welly would have none of it. He gathered up the few meager supplies the nomads had left them, helped Bentley tie everything onto their saddles, then together they followed the wide, shallow footsteps of their stolen pack animals into the side canyon.
The debris field that had looked impassable from the main canyon turned out to be less than a hundred meters deep, and the Matrika’s trail led through it with surprising ease. Beyond, the canyon became much more hospitable. There was actually grass in the sheltered spots where morning dew could condense and provide enough water to support it. Welly saw from their footprints how the camels had tried to reach it, but each time the women had turned them aside. They obviously didn’t want to waste time letting the beasts eat; that meant they were afraid of pursuit. Hah! Bentley’s paranoia was groundless. Without the element of surprise, these thieves were as vulnerable as anyone else.
They didn’t even make any effort to hide their tracks. Running like scared dogs, they were! They would soon regret their impulsive crime spree, though Welly realized with a start that he wouldn’t be able to bring them in to the authorities. Not and win the Water Race. Prisoners would only slow them down, and Bentley was right about one thing at least: they’d already spent too much time off the right track.
All right, then, he would content himself with taking back what was rightfully his. It was more than these slatterns deserved, but circumstances dictated leniency. Perhaps they would learn some humility from the experience.
Welly and Bentley urged their camels into the rhythmic stride wherein both legs on each side moved in unison. The resultant pace rocked them from side to side as well as back and forth, making Welly a bit seasick, but eating up the kilometers as they raced after the women.
Sure enough, an hour or so later he saw a faint cloud of dust as they rounded a bend in the canyon, and he turned to Bentley. "This is it. Draw your stunner and ride!"
"You can’t mean to attack them head-on!" exclaimed Bentley, his voice even higher-pitched than the radio in his oxygen mask usually made it.
"I do. They’re obviously used to skulking about under cloaks and in shadows; it will be the last thing they expect. In this twisty canyon we’ll be upon them before they know what hit them."
"But–"
"Don’t hesitate to shoot. The stunners won’t knock a camel out for more than a few minutes, but they’ll put those thieves down for half an hour or longer."
"And their bullets could put us down indefinitely," Bentley said, but he was speaking to Welly’s back.
"Faster, Hunter!" Welly urged his camel.
"Sir, this is lunacy!"
"This, Bentley, is bravery!" Welly said without turning around, though in truth his heart was thudding in his chest like a drum bouncing down an escalator. He had no choice, though; it was either take back his honor here or die of humiliation back home, so he nudged his camel with his heels and urged it again, "Faster!"
The beast picked up its pace for a few steps, but immediately slowed to its rocking gait again. "I mean it," he threatened, and to prove it he drew his quirt from its loop on his saddle and whipped the camel on its wooly flanks. It bawled indignantly, but he quirted it again and again until it began to gallop.
He exulted in the sensation of wind in his face. The camel rocked back and forth as it ran, and Welly hung on one-handed while he drew his stunner. The camel’s wide, padded feet made practically no noise in the sand, and Welly resisted the instinctive urge to howl a battle cry.
He rounded the bend, and just as he had expected, there were the three thieves, riding their stolen camels at a steady walk, talking and giggling and no doubt congratulating themselves on a fine day’s plunder. They cocked their heads at the sound of hoofbeats, then turned, puzzled, as Welly bore down on them. He was close enough to see the priceless look of astonishment in their faces as he aimed and fired his stunner.
"Hah!" he said as one of the camels staggered to its knees, then pitched over sideways, pinning its rider’s robes. "Score one for the good guys. Take this!" He fired again, and another woman toppled off her camel.
Bentley, having no other choice, joined in beside him and galloped straight for the struggling camels and cursing women, his stunner whining as he fired again and again to knock the third woman down.
Welly reined in his mount and leaped off to deal with the woman who had been pinned under her camel. It turned out to be Katurah. She struggled to free her gun from beneath her stunned camel, but had no luck.
"Don’t be stupid," Welly said to her, laughing at the irony of it. He heard Bentley’s stunner whine, and one of the other women sighed softly as she dropped into dreamland.
"Are you an idiot, or what?" Katurah asked him.
"That would have to be ‘or what,’" Welly replied. "Consider yourselves lucky that we’re also civilized men, or you would never have lived long enough to insult me a second time." He waited just long enough to make sure she understood him, then he pulled the trigger and she dropped back, limp, to the sand.
"I can’t believe it!" Bentley exclaimed. "We did it!"
"Of course we did it," said Welly. "Now let’s gather up our possessions and be off."
"Er, that won’t be so easy," Bentley said. "We’ve stunned two of the camels."
That they had. So, since they had a few minutes to kill, Welly dug into one of his recovered saddlebags for something to keep his teeth from chattering from the adrenaline rush. "Biscuit?" he asked Bentley, holding out the plastic package.
Bentley had been tipping a small silver flask to his lips; he swallowed, sighed happily, and exchanged it with Welly for the cookies. Welly took a cautious sniff. Whiskey! And a good time for it, too. He took a generous swallow. The stuff burned nicely on the way down, and he only coughed a little bit when he tried to breathe again.
"By god, that makes a man’s blood run hot, doesn’t it Bentley? Rushing headlong into battle. Makes the race seem a pitiful thing by comparison, doesn’t it?"
"Indeed it does, sir."
"All for a handful of water rings. Who needs them, anyway, in this day and age?"
Bentley nodded at the unconscious women. "I wager these three could use a few. Water’s a precious commodity in the desert."
"They could certainly use a bath, at least," Welly said, laughing.
One of the camels groaned, then thrashed its legs as it tried to right itself.
"Look out there!" Welly said, dropping Bentley’s flask and grabbing the woman he’d stunned just in time to drag her away from the camel’s feet. "Pull those others clear as well," he ordered Bentley. He dragged his captive out of harm’s way, then came back to help Bentley calm the camels and get them to their feet.
One of the panniers had broken when the camel carrying it had fallen, so they spent a few minutes duct-taping it together. They eventually got it, though, and gathered up the other camels’ reins in preparation to leave.
"Should we drag the Matrika to shelter?" Bentley asked.
"Yes, that would probably be a good–oof!" All the breath left Welly at once as one of the women landed a kick to his ribs that sent him reeling backward to land on his butt in the sand. He drew his stunner, but she kicked that as well, sending it flying between the legs of a camel.
"Bentley!" he croaked, but his manservant was already fighting a battle of his own. The women had apparently awakened when they had been moved, and had bided their time until they could once again catch Welly and Bentley by surprise.
The woman who had attacked Welly raised her foot for another blow. Katurah again. He threw sand in her braid-wrapped face and leaped at her instead, grabbing her leg and pulling her to the ground. He tried to pin her arms behind her back, but he couldn’t grab even one of them; she twisted and bit and pummeled him with her elbows and fists faster than he could react. Within seconds, he was the one on his back with his arms pinned. He struggled and broke free, but she jabbed him hard in the side and when he reflexively reached to cover his tender spot, she pinned his arm again.
"You don’t give up, do you?" Katurah said, panting just a bit. Welly wondered how she breathed at all without an air mask. Perhaps she had an inhaler hidden in her braid.
"No, I don’t give up!" Welly wheezed, still recovering from the kick to his ribs. "These are my camels."
"Your camels? We already went over this. What would a little boy be doing with five whole camels?"
"I was winning the Noctis to Pavonis Water Race. Now I’ll be lucky to finish at all–no thanks to you."
"Ah, the race," she said. "Well, you’ll just have to finish it some other year."
"No, I’ll finish it now," he said forcefully.
"And how do you plan to do that?"
"By having my manservant stun you from behind while you prattle on. Bentley, if you will." It was all bluff, but Welly hoped Katurah would look up and give him a moment’s advantage. She did just that, but a moment was all he got, and he barely had time to squirm before she sat down heavily on him again. It wasn’t her weight so much as her powerful thighs pinching his arms to his sides that did the trick.
"Well, that was impressive," she said, smiling as she mocked him. "Tell you what. How about if I take your camels to Pavonis and claim the prize for myself?"
"You can’t," Welly told her. "Not unless you hold stock in the Saturn Ice Corporation." But her threat chilled him to the bone. If these women not only stole his camels but showed up at Pavonis with them, he’d be ridiculed for the rest of his life. He held his eyes tight, lest a tear betray his inner torment.
She missed nothing. "What’s the matter, little boy? Never lost anything before?"
"As a matter of fact, I haven’t."
She shook her head. "Get used to the idea. I think you’re about to lose this one."
"It’s beginning to look a bit dicey," he agreed.
"When the wind sweeps to the south, it carries even the small pebbles," said Katurah.
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
Footsteps neared. "It means when your fate blows in the wind, you’d best ride where it takes you," said Bentley. "Perhaps we should petition to discuss terms with the leader of the Matrika."
Welly turned his head to the side; his manservant stood near him, holding out a hand to help him up. Katurah rose and let him go. One of the other women stood behind Bentley, holding both stunners on him, while the third one gathered up the camels’ reins.
"Discuss terms?" Welly asked. "You don’t discuss terms with thieves."
"I’m getting tired of that word," Katurah warned.
"And I’m getting tired of you taking my camels. It is thievery, and no amount of semantic legerdemain will make it otherwise."
His words did seem to hit their mark. She said, "All right, call it what you like, but I’m not giving them back. They’re only toys to you, and you’ve probably got lots more at home. If you want to plead your case with the Matriarch, that’s fine with me, but don’t get your hopes up. The tribe comes first."
Welly looked from one woman to the next, and to the next. Grimly determined, all of them. There would be no more surprising them. And the prospect of a night outside without the dome didn’t appeal to him at all. "All right, then," he said. "We’ll talk to your matriarch."
The women allowed the men to climb into their saddles, while they pulled themselves up to sit atop the other camels’ bulky packs. The five of them plodded on up the canyon in the direction the women had originally been headed.
Within half an hour they reached a cave mouth in the canyon’s north wall, and when they approached it dozens of women and children ran out to greet them. They spoke among themselves in their own language, but Katurah said, "Come with us," in English and led the way into the cavern.
It was an enormous lava tube, one of the few that hadn’t collapsed over the millennia since the volcanoes had been active on the Tharsis plateau. It was easily thirty meters wide and who knew how deep. Some of these things went on for kilometers. The women led Welly and Bentley a good half kilometer into it and it showed no sign of collapse yet.
They came to an area lit with a string of multicolored lights that looked like they might have come off a Christmas tree. In the middle of its circle of illumination sat an old woman, her face weathered from years of exposure to the harsh Martian atmosphere. She looked at the two men and spoke something in that strange language of theirs.
Bentley replied with a hesitant word or two of his own.
"Bentley?" Welly asked. "You speak this argot?"
"A few words is all, sir," Bentley whispered, "but I shall try to communicate our concerns to her."
The old woman nodded, and Bentley knelt before her, placing his hands on the sand in front of the woman’s feet. She asked him questions and he answered, relying at times on Katurah to provide words he didn’t know, then he haltingly asked a question of his own. Welly was dying to know what they were talking about, but he kept silent. The old woman spat out a burst of syllables. Bentley nodded. Then she issued a command to the women surrounding her. This set them muttering among themselves, but they eventually gave their assent.
When he saw this happen, Bentley kissed the palm of his hand, then laid his hand on the sand in front of the old woman’s tattered boots. She said one more thing, and Bentley blushed.
The woman laughed. "Dak?" she asked. Around them, the other women smiled.
Bentley, still kneeling, blushed a shade deeper. "Dak," the old manservant said.
Two younger women stepped into the circle and spoke, then pointed at Welly.
Bentley burst out laughing.
The women turned and glared at him. Haltingly, he told them something. They muttered in disappointment, then, with a wave of her hand, the old woman stood up and walked away.
The old manservant rose to his feet and returned to his master. Welly was abuzz with questions. "What did she say? Are they going to give our camels back?"
"Hush," said his servant. "We must act with decorum now."
The women led the two men back toward the entrance of the lava tube, but stopped a dozen yards short of it and led them into a rough-woven tent held upright by spun carbide-steel poles. Welly recognized them as components of a solar panel shielding array. The juxtaposition of technology seemed odd, pointless. Why didn’t they just use a regular tent and be done with it?
At least the floor had been swept clean of rocks, and a layer of soft sand had been spread out for them to rest on. Their captors dropped flaps down behind them once they crawled inside, blocking their view of the camp. There was a single light overhead, competing poorly with the evening sunlight from the mouth of the cavern.
Before Welly could press Bentley for information, someone spoke outside the tent, and Bentley opened the flap. Outside the door lay a hip flask full of water. Bentley said something in their language, then brought the flask inside, took a sip, and offered it to Welly. "It’s a bit mineralized, but drinkable," he said.
Welly took a big mouthful, then spit it right back out onto the sand. "It tastes filthy," he said. "Tell them to bring us some real water."
"This is real water," said Bentley. "And I’m afraid it’s all we’re likely to get. All day." He looked pointedly at the spattered sand at their feet.
Welly held up the tiny flask. It couldn’t have held more than a half liter. "Oh, come on. You’re joking."
"I’m afraid not. These people live on the margin here. They’ve hardly enough for their own."
Welly poked his head out the tent flap and looked around. The nomad’s encampment was alive with people. Outside the lava tube, ragged camels nosed around for the sparse desert grass. Closer at hand, small boys–one of them wearing one of Welly’s shirts, he noted–were practicing their aim with fist-sized rocks against a battered piece of metal that clanked loudly with each strike. Babies and toddlers played in a communal group around their mothers and the older girls, some of whom sat spinning camel wool into yarn while others went through Welly’s and Bentley’s gear. Welly watched resignedly as one woman methodically reduced their inflatable shelter to shreds of plastic. Another pounded apart his silver teapot with the blunt end of an empty air tank. A few yards away, a woman mixed something white and pasty in the bowl of a satellite dish that had evidently belonged to some other unfortunate traveler.
They certainly did seem to live on the edge, as Bentley had said. Perhaps over it, psychologically speaking.
"Where’d all the men go?" Welly asked, pulling his head back in the tent.
"With the caravans, probably," said Bentley. "Matrika men run a trading route to the far eastern colonies."
"Well, their women don’t know the first thing about how to survive out here," said Welly. "They’re hacking our gear to bits."
"Don’t be too sure about that," said Bentley. "They just have different uses for the same materials, is all."
Welly let the tent flap fall down and returned to lie in the sand by his manservant. "Bentley, old man, I’m astonished at you. You speak their language. You seem to know their customs. Wherever did you learn all this?"
Bentley looked away. "Oh, it was long ago. My father was keen on your grandfather’s camel-breeding program. For some reason, he got it in his head that the nomads might know something about camel racing that could serve us in good stead. He hired a tutor to teach me their language–the young pick up languages so much easier than adults, you know. It was all in vain, of course; the few nomads who came to town had little information of value, and I, um, I was never able to procure an invitation to an actual camp."
Welly laughed. "If only you’d known what we do now, eh? Just take a pack train too far into the Labyrinth, and there you are."
Bentley shuddered. "Yes, here we are."
"So, what did that old woman say to you?"
"You don’t want to know."
"Of course I do. Come on, out with it."
"No, sir."
Welly could hardly believe his ears. "Bentley, need I remind you that you were supposed to be negotiating the release of my camels and equipment? I believe I have the right to know how the negotiations went."
Bentley sighed. "Very well. Begging your pardon, but the Matriarch felt you would be something of a burden if you stayed here even for one night. She wanted you to return home. On foot. Two of the women who ambushed us intervened and offered to act as our guides."
"Back home? We’re to be led home by a couple of girls?"
"If it’s any consolation, they were most impressed by your tenacity, if not your ability. It appealed to their sense of humor that you continue the Water Race. The Matrika know of a shortcut that might help us recover lost time."
"Oh," said Welly. "Well . . . in that case."
"We will have to continue, however, using their camels."
"What? We’ll be disqualified."
"Perhaps the judges will not be so harsh. Our gear was sabotaged, our mounts stolen. Perhaps if the theft were couched in vague enough terms, and combined with the sabotage of our navigation dish . . ."
"They’d think it was Gordon," Welly said. "Brilliant! Then it wouldn’t matter what I finished with, would it? People would applaud me for my resourcefulness. And for my–what did you call it?–my tenacity."
"Yes, sir."
"And we can come back later for our Sandships."
His manservant said nothing, busying himself with smoothing out a patch of sand on the floor.
"Right?"
"These women are most impressed by our camels’ wool."
"Their wool?" said Welly. "Those camels were bred to be the fastest, most durable animals on the planet, and these women want them for their wool?"
"And their stamina, of course. They desire to retain our mounts as stud animals. They were most emphatic about it."
Welly realized he wasn’t exactly in a bargaining position. "Okay, they can keep them until winter. But we’ll have to have them back by then so we can train for next year’s race."
"I doubt you’d be able to find them. These people move around quite a bit. I believe their intent is to keep our Sandships for good."
"They can’t! Father will kill me."
Bentley chuckled. "No, he’ll kill Mr. LeBrue, whom he will suspect of engineering the original theft."
Welly cracked a wide smile. "Bentley, you’re a genius." He heard women’s laughter echo in the cave, and remembered one other question. "What made you blush? Back there when you were talking with the old woman."
His manservant said nothing. Welly looked up to see Bentley’s face once again a bright pink.
"What?" said Welly.
"They noticed that our camels are male," said Bentley.
"So?"
"It is not the custom for nomadic women to retain male camels. They’re too much trouble, so they usually sell them to the caravans."
"And?"
"Obviously, our hybrids are superior to theirs. As I mentioned, they intend to mate them."
"The thought of mating camels made you blush?"
Bentley cleared his throat. "You see, sir, it is customary among these people that women choose the mates for their camels. When they find a stud that has been well taken care of, they naturally assume the camel’s owner is of rather superior stock himself. He must know the desert, you see, or his camels would not flourish. When she chooses her camel’s mate, the woman usually invites its owner to her own tent for the night."
Welly frowned. "That old woman wants me to have sex with her? I trust you told her ‘no.’"
"Being only a male, I am not allowed that right."
"What? Bentley, this is outrageous!"
The manservant’s blush deepened to a dark red. "I managed to get you off the hook, sir. I told her that the camels are mine."
"Oh. Well, then." Welly felt a bit of a blush himself. "Far be it from me to dictate what you do on your time off."
"Thank you, young master," Bentley said. "Two of the other women were rather disappointed that you weren’t the owner, but I maintained the fiction."
"Wait a minute," said Welly. "Those two young ones? The pretty ones?"
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sir, but yes. Those two."
"Thanks a lot."
"I was only looking out for your welfare, sir," Bentley said, but he couldn’t completely hide a smirk.
"I bet you were," Welly replied, wondering how he could undo the damage Bentley had done. But unless he could learn the nomads’ language, he realized his chances for sexual adventure had been effectively shot down. There was Katurah, of course. She spoke English. But the very thought made Welly shudder.
And unfortunately, that seemed to be the only pleasure the Matrika had to offer. Dinner that night was half a bowl of boiled grain, a single strip of dry jerky, and a half-cup of water.
"Great," said Welly, sitting by the thornbush cooking fire with all the others of the tribe.
"Yes, sir," Bentley said, a good deal more enthusiastically. "This is a very exceptional meal."
"What? This is–"
"Look around you. Do they look like they could do any better?"
Welly looked at their ragged homespun clothes, their chipped bowls, the lack of even a decent chair. "No," he said. "I guess not. But can’t I get some more water, at least?"
"I’m certain," said his manservant, "they have given you all they can spare."
"They could spare some of the water they stole from us," Welly said, but he didn’t push it. He knew from experience how little good that would do.
Later, after they had eaten, the three women who had captured them got up and told everyone the story of how it happened. Bentley translated as best he could, but caught only snatches. The nomads, though, laughed uproariously. Welly was just as glad he hadn’t understood.
After the story, several women sang a haunting, complicated song that echoed eerily inside the lava tube. Another woman recited a poem. The children did some singing of their own. Long into the night, the group entertained each other. When the stories ran out, they got up and danced. Katurah asked Welly to dance with her, and they briefly became the center of attention as she gyrated around him suggestively and the other women hooted and whistled at them.
He excused himself soon thereafter, and went back to the tent alone. He suspected that he might have had a companion if he’d expressed any interest, but his mind was already reeling with the events of the day; he didn’t think he could pack anything else into it, no matter how pleasant.
He had the tent to himself all night. Bentley didn’t return until just before dawn. "I hope you had a good time," said Welly, half in jest.
"It was . . . interesting," Bentley said. "And now it’s time to be on our way. We have a race to win."
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