Chapter 12: Yesterday's Dreams

The platform rose to control-room level, the electro-engine clicked off, and the stabilization bars slammed into place.

"Hello, sweetheart."

Quaid spun around to find Lori standing about 15 meters away with an assault rifle aimed at his belly.

"People are dying," he told her and pointed to the control pedestal. "We have to turn on the reactor so that they can have air." He stepped off the platform.

"Fuck them," she sneered, "and FUCK YOU! Dammit Doug, we had a good thing back on Earth. A damn good thing! We had a nice apartment and healthy incomes. We were planning to have kids, remember!"

"You said you didn't want to."

"I said I had to think about it! Shit, I'm really married to that loser Richter. Even so, I was ready to give him up, to give everything up for you. Then you had to come running back to Mars, which means now I going to have to fucking kill you, and I'm going to end up stuck on this goddamn planet married to that asshole Richter. I should kill you for that alone!"

"Kill me if you want," said Quaid, stepping toward the control pedestal, "but let me save all those people first."

She fired a short burst which just missed him. He froze.

"I don't give a damn about them!"

He inched towards her and said in a gentle voice, "Hey, that's not the Lori that I know and love."

"You never loved me. You love her. You love Melina."

"Don't be ridiculous. She can't hold a candle to you," he lied. He kept creeping forward.

"You dreamed of her every night, every goddamn night! You'd fuck me and then dream of her. Damn you."

Suddenly, Quaid slapped the muzzle of her gun away. He saw her beautiful eyes blaze with blue fury, but she wasn't foolish enough to try and swing the muzzle of the gun back. Instead she kept spinning in the direction of his blow and used her calf to sweep his legs out from underneath him. Only then did the gun come back.

Quaid hooked one foot behind her heel and used the other to shove her kneecap away. She fell over backwards, the assault rifle flying out of her hand. He scrambled afterward her, crawling over her to get to her throat. She kneed him in the balls.

The agony sent him rolling away and gasping.

She was on her feet, looking for the gun. She spotted it and dove. He grabbed her flying ankle, and she crashed to the floor. Quaid dragged her backwards and again started crawling over her to get up to her neck. She elbowed him in the throat.

When he shuttered in pain, she managed to twist around underneath him to get on her back. She smashed the heel of her hand into his nose, and then used her legs to flip him over her head.

Quaid spotted the gun and scrambled for it. Lori ran passed and stomped on his wrist. She scooped up the gun.

He grabbed her ankles and pulled hard. She fell on her butt. Quaid heard the bolt of the assault rifle being pulled back, and so he tightened his grip on her ankles and stood up, dangling her like a prize marlin. He began to spin, whirling her around, keeping the centrifugal forces on her maximized. Nevertheless, the black Cyclops eye of the gun muzzle sought him out.

There was a burst of automatic fire.

The gun was ripped from Lori's hand and her shoulder bloomed into bright crimson patches. The blood began to spread.

Quaid glanced over at the platform which was rising back up to control-level height. Melina stood magnificently on it, holding her smoking assault rifle. "Hauser, where would you be without me?"

He shrugged.

They went towards each other. A sonic grenade dropped neatly between them. He shouted, and they jumped in opposite directions a mere second before the grenade thundered.

Quaid landed on his belly only to find he was looking at yet another sonic grenade. He scooped it up and hurled it back a Lori. But the grenade sailed passed her and bounced down into one of the cavern's many alcoves.

A roar of the sonic explosion was drowned out by what sounded like the shriek of a hundred newly castrated banshees. Air yowled out of the cavern and screamed through a breach in the cavern wall.

Lori was sucked up as if she weighed nothing more than a piece of paper and was carried by the artificial hurricane down into the alcove, out through the breached wall, and into the nearly airlessness of Mars.

Quaid had grabbed onto the side of the pedestal.

Melina had a cabinet but lost her grip and slid across the floor until she could grab a railing.

All the demons of hell howled around them.

"Melina! Hold on!"

Dangling from the pedestal, he walked his hands up to the control panel. In the domed top was an imprint designed for a three-fingered alien hand. He gripped the pedestal with his left hand and, using all his strength, he reached up and slapped his hand into the three-fingered indentation.

Loud thumps and clicked echoed even above the shriek of the air. Quaid brought his hand back down to grab the pedestal again. Craning his neck, he could see the matrixes of tribinium cores on the ceiling of the cavern were beginning to glow with a yellow-white iridescence, and the matrixes were beginning to lower towards the ice floor.

A shriek snapped his attention back to Melina. She had lost her grip and, like Lori, was being sucked outside.

"Melina!"

In a heartbeat, she was gone.

The white-hot tribinium cores contacted the ancient ice, which squealed, hissed, popped, cracked, exploded and steamed. Great roaring streams of vapor blasted through the cavern. They were dozens of times stronger than the wind which had carried away Lori and Melina.

Quaid was plucked off the pedestal and was flung outside.