Vaulting out of this pit wasn’t an option with his leg messed up. The obvious escape route was the conveyor. This was not moving. It consisted of a broad band of flexible rubbery stuff, maybe six feet wide, running over rollers that folded it into a U-shaped cross section to contain the powder. From his point of view right now it was just a ruler-straight yellow brick road to the sky. He had only one decent option, which was to go up the thing until the pile was beneath him, providing a surface—soft and
yielding, he hoped—that would cushion his fall. Breaking very much out into the open, he began climbing the conveyor, taking long strides with his one semi-good leg and then toppling into the flume of sulfur in the belt as his other knee came down. No drones came after him. Either they were running low on those, or his move onto the conveyor had surprised them and they needed to re-vector the ones they had.
He just kept gaining altitude as best he could. As he did he gained a better view. Finally the end of the conveyor approached. From it sulfur simply fell off onto the apex of the pile and avalanched down its slopes. The drop was maybe ten feet. Rufus just dove right off and plunged belly first into the top of the cone. He was half buried in the stuff now. He kicked his legs free while elbow-crawling forward. The more he moved, the more he sank into the powder. Some of that was good if the stuff could slow bullets. Too much could be very bad. He pulled his rifle free, upended it to dump sulfur out of the barrel, then popped the dust caps off the scope and shouldered it. He blew sulfur away from the bolt and chambered a round. A drone was headed up the slope toward him, manifesting as a yellow whirlwind. No time to switch weapons. He obliterated it with a rifle shot, then worked the bolt and chambered another round. An eagle screamed overhead. He hoped the birds would look after him while he ended this. He centered the crosshairs on the elevator doors, then swung the sight picture down and back until Big Fish was centered in his view, moving pretty badly now as it seemed the one leg was completely disabled. And the pack on his back wasn’t helping. Piet hadn’t been wrong. It was heavy. Big Fish was maybe fifty feet from the elevator doors, partly in profile but showing his back to Rufus. Rufus made a small adjustment to his sight, centered his crosshairs on the briefcase strapped to Big Fish’s backpack, had it all lined up for a second, then lost it. At any point he could have hit Big Fish, hurt him at least, maybe killed him. But he had really hoped to get through the day without murdering someone. That briefcase was the real target. But it was strapped to Big Fish, who was moving. Not in a steady way but lurching on a bad leg across broken ground.
But then all of a sudden he just stopped. Big Fish straightened up and just stood there stock-still.
Rufus put his crosshairs on the target and pulled the trigger.
Halfway to the head frame, Laks had an insight about how over-reliance on technology could lull you into a dangerous complacency. Sadly, what triggered this realization was his looking down to see that a diamondback rattlesnake had plunged its fangs into his right leg just above the knee.
They did not have such things on the coast of British Columbia, which enjoyed an Ireland-like immunity from venomous serpents. He had heard of them inland, where Uncle Dharmender lived, but had never seen one. Having spent some time in India he was not an absolute stranger to poisonous snakes. But the sheer size of this creature was appalling. Three meters if it was an inch, and meaty. You could feed a family with this thing.
As soon as he understood the nature of what was going on, he kicked it away. The weight of the pack pulled him off balance and sent him tumbling. The snake coiled up and rattled its tail as Laks scooted away on his butt. When he had got well clear, he climbed to his feet and put a little more distance between him and the snake, now scanning the ground more carefully in case there were others.
He sat down, took out his knife, and slit the leg of his earthsuit just above the right knee, where the fangs had gone in. It didn’t look like much: two neat little punctures, the skin around them getting red and beginning to swell. He had a vague recollection that you were supposed to suck out the poison. Which might have been possible if it were lower on his leg, but only a contortionist could have got his lips onto this wound. He tried squeezing the area around the bite and got some blood to leak out of the holes but he hadn’t a clue whether that was going to help him.
The only thing for it now was to keep going. The head frame was all of a thousand meters away. There was nothing between him and it but flat, albeit rough, terrain. On the far side of it was a freight train, its cars laden with yellow powder, feeding a big pile of the same, which was not too far from his destination. He’d