The brand itched on his forehead, and scalded in the sweat that poured down from his close-cropped blond hair. With his marshelmet on, there was no way to scratch it. It throbbed.
Even if he reached the dome, or any dome, that brand guaranteed that he would be shot on sight.
Soldiers of the Imperial Government of Mars had dropped the jetcopter to the sand hours before, and turned Robbo Shaan out to die. He had stood on the red sand and watched the 'copter with the four-winged eagles painted on its sides, as it rose and fled away from him in the direction of Mars City.
He smiled grimly. The Imperial Constitution did not permit the Government to kill a man outright, no matter what his crime. This was the way they did it instead.
Robbo Shaan's crime was simple. He believed in the old democratic form of government the Martian dome-cities had had after the Martian people won their freedom from the Earth corporations in the Charax Uprising—and had recently lost. Shaan had talked democracy, and under the new Imperial Government that was treason.
There was no appeal from his sentence. If he lived—and how could he live without food or oxygen?—he was an outcast. It was a peculiar legal contradiction; the government was prohibited from executing him outright, but, once he had been branded, it was the duty of every loyal citizen to shoot him dead on sight.
Shaan checked his oxygen dial. There was only about an hour's supply left. He couldn't cut his use of it down.
Instinctively, his hand dropped to his belt, but the vial of suspensene he'd carried so long was not there. They wouldn't leave him that. Suspensene was a drug that would put a man in suspended animation for twenty-four hours. It was used in such emergencies when oxygen ran low, to preserve life until rescue came.
What good would it have done him, anyhow? There would be no rescue for him. The radio equipment had been removed from his marshelmet. Even if it hadn't, no one would help a branded man.