Nick looked over my shoulder, reading the request for proposal. “We can do that in two days. Ask Adam to send us the mission profile—if that doesn’t break shiva. We’d better get moving.”
Core samples are finicky work. It depends on the soil. When it was soft, we could practically push the bore in. When it was hard, it was a delicate balancing act to push the drill through, but not push so hard as to dull the bit or break the bore.
But Nick and I had done plenty of these in our time. We were just pulling up our fifth core and wrapping it for analysis when Nick stopped and looked around. “He was nowhere near here,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Jacob. Whatever he was working on, it wasn’t part of this survey.”
I nodded, a pointless gesture in a helmet. “Adam never said what they were working on, but it must have been a different project. You know what their business had been like. They had taken on so many projects, plus they had expansion plans in the works. I had never heard of any out in this area, but we just have not kept in touch like we used to. Maybe it wasn’t a project at all, just long-term planning.”
“Still,” Nick said, “he was a long way from his crawler when we found him. I wonder what drew him to the crevasse.”
“We may never know,” I said, “now that it has collapsed.”
Nick sighed, and then went silent, staring off into the distance as if he could see the crevasse from here. After all these years, I could guess what he was thinking: there were unanswered questions, and he himself had unwittingly buried the answers. He would kick himself for that for a long time.
We finished our scheduled core samples for that day early, so we got in three more before the sun set over Phoenicis Lacus quadrangle. Then we went into the crawler, took off our suits, and settled in for a nice meal of tofu and tomatoes. I was very proud of our tomato crop that year. Our bedroom was half-full of Lada units. The Russian-designed hydroponic systems produced a lot of fresh vegetables in a very small space, and without breaking our consumables budget. The loss of bedroom space was worth it to have fresh tomatoes whenever we wanted them. They reminded me of mamãe’s garden when I was a child. We had been poor, but we were seldom hungry, thanks to the garden she had kept. The tomatoes were always my favorite, and Nick knew that, so he had surprised me with the Lada units on our first anniversary. Between the tomato plants and Nick’s bonsai, our apartment was very green.
After a night in the crawler, we got back to work. Again we finished the core samples early. We got them back to Maxwell City, and we handed them over to a tech from Trudeau’s lab. Then we went home to scrub off two days of suit dirt.
With a little free time in our schedule, I had an idea. “Should we go check in on Althea, see how she is doing?”
Nick looked at his comp. “It’s too soon,” he said. “I think she’s still sitting shiva. Let’s give her one more day.”
“Is she?” I wondered. “Is she supposed to sit for seven Earth days? Or seven Martian days? In the Hebrew tradition, the day starts at sunset. I know that is local sunset, but does that apply here?”
“I asked Jacob about that once,” Nick said. “Given the importance of the calendar and the Sabbath, I wondered if Jewish rituals followed the twenty-four hours, thirty-nine minutes, and thirty-six seconds of the Martian day or the twenty-four hours of the Earth day. He said when the first Jewish settlers came to Mars, they consulted with the rabbis; and he said that as usual, when you have two rabbis, you get three opinions. Some argued that in the Torah it is written about sunrise and sunset, not about twenty-four hours. Others argued that if you’re going to base your calendar on local astronomical phenomena, then you would have to base your month on the waxing and waning of Martian moons. Even if you went with Deimos, that would end up with a month of only thirty and one-third hours. You might as well call that a day. And they also argued that bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs would happen much later because of the longer Martian year. Why should the children have to wait that long to become adults?”
“So what did they decide?”
“Like so many other human traditions, there are different points of view, and they try to get along. They use lunar months, and where it matters, lunar years. They use Martian days for everything else. There are some in the community who see it differently, but I know that’s how Jacob and Althea practiced. So they’re still in their seventh Martian day of shiva.”
“All right,” I said, “we can stay in and eat then.” And we did. Nick made an excellent tofu salad, with pão de queijo on the side. It was simple, but better than survival rations. And then we went to bed.
We woke to find a recorded message from Adam, thanking us for fulfilling his contract with Trudeau and apologizing that we had been drawn into the unpleasantness. We stopped by briefly to see Althea. She offered us a light lunch and some coffee. I took the coffee out of courtesy, but I still could not enjoy Martian-grown beans. Brazil had spoiled me for what coffee should taste like: rich, strong, and earthy.
Then we left, and we resumed planning our scouting expedition. Nick was eager to get out on the Martian surface again—not for core sampling, just pure exploration. He had spent so many years on the Aldrin, safeguarding travelers to Mars while never getting to go himself. So many had traveled in his footsteps, to explore the planet that he had helped open up. Now he was not part of any official mission. The System Initiative would sooner see him in prison than on a Martian team. But we still filed our own reports, and we had been published in several astronomical journals. Since he had been a very little boy, Nick had craved being out here, discovering, and setting his own course. And Mars still had plenty of opportunities for that.
The next day, we packed up enough food, water, and air for two Martian weeks. We only expected to be out for one, but we both believed in planning for the worst. Then we signed out a crawler and went out for our first real exploration in almost a Martian year.
Exploring Mars was as close as we ever got to the honeymoon we never had. Exploration was in my blood, too, and we both had a passion to do it right and safely. Nick, at least, had been on the second Bradbury mission. Even with all its troubles, he had had time to explore Mars as part of an official mission. But he and I had both gotten sidetracked for decades. When I was stationed here, I had been the admiral in charge of orbital traffic control. A flag-rank officer in many ways has less freedom than the newest enlisted personnel. I was free to explore Mars as much as I wanted—between all of my official duties. That meant that on a really good day, I could have gotten as far as two hours away from my command post. And most of the time I had been stationed on orbit.
But now we were civilians, virtual exiles on Mars, and we no longer had official duties. So anytime we got to explore Mars for real, well, it brought back our youth. It made both of us feel like kids again; but older, wiser kids, who understood how many ways Mars could kill you.
We spent the first three days in travel, back and forth across the Coprates quadrangle. In the morning, while Nick drove, I made observations, took videos, and annotated maps. Then in the afternoon, we traded places, Nick climbing up on top of the crawler while I drove. Every night, we went over our maps and videos, identifying points of interest and sorting them into three different categories. One was places that looked like good opportunities for further surveys we might turn into research papers for publication. The second was places that would provide interesting obstacles that would challenge the survival school students, but hopefully not kill them. Killing your customers is never a good idea—but neither is making them so weak and foolish that they cannot survive on their own. And we both knew that accidents happened in training. If we could not live with that, we should scrap our business plans now.
The third category was locations for a special project that we never discussed with anyone else: São Paulo, a Martian homestead that we would build for ourselves, far away from anyone else’s rules. It was just a dream at that point, but a shared d
ream. A vision we both had had since our first arrival on Mars. Someday . . .
At the end of our fourth day, we made our first camp. We were both tired of being stuck in the crawler, so we broke out the Mars shelter, set it up, and tested it out. This was a self-inflating model similar to those used on the Azevedo expedition to Mars, where the professor had gotten himself killed, all those years ago; but it had many improvements designed by people who had actually lived on Mars for a decade and more, and who understood the territory better. Once we had it secured to the ground and tested for leaks, we climbed inside and out of our pressure suits. It was nice to have so much room after sleeping on the narrow floor of the crawler for three nights.
When we were sure that the dome was secure and would shelter us for a night, we broke out a picnic lunch: feijoada made with black beans and shrimp, and pastéis filled with cheese. It was simple fare, reheated in a small radiant oven; but after four days of survival rations, it was heavenly.
As I sat back and enjoyed one last pastéi, Nick stood and walked to the dome wall. He found a zipper for the privacy cover, and he started unzipping. “What are you doing, Nico?” I asked.
“There should be stars” was all he said as he peeled back the opaque cover, revealing the transparent outer layer of the dome. The sun had set, and yes, there were stars. Everywhere. When there were no storms, night on Mars was almost as beautiful as being in space.
Then Nick returned to his backpack and pulled out a surprise: Grandma Ruth’s old blue e-reader. He pushed a button, and I heard the familiar opening guitar notes of “Brigas Nunca Mais.” Our song: “Never fight again.”
“May I have this dance, meu amor?” Nick asked, holding out his arms.
In one smooth motion, I leaped from the ground and into his arms. Nick caught me with perfect timing, and we danced. We could not do the Coriolis leap that we had mastered back on Farport Station. There was no significant Coriolis effect on a planet, and the dome roof was too low. Plus even in Martian gravity, we were getting a little old for that. But Nick had lost none of his grace, and the weariness seeped from my bones as the music enveloped us. We danced for hours: every old song, every memory. For one night, Mars was just the two of us.
Later we made love in the starlight. Afterward I lay back on top of him. In the low gravity, he was the softest, warmest pillow, with his strong, hairy arms clasping me to him, close and safe. Then with his right arm, without saying a word, he pointed out Deimos passing overhead. I knew Phobos was soon to follow, and I spotted it first. Then we spotted objects in the deep black sky, stars and planets and man-made satellites. A few galaxies, even. We whispered their names to each other. Canopus. Acrux, Mimosa, Gacrux, and Delta Crucis. Rigel and Betelgeuse and Bellatrix. Andromeda and the Magellanics—not to mention our own Milky Way. Plus Jupiter and the Galileans, beckoning across the AUs. These names were beautiful poetry shared between us. We lay there, sharing the night sky. Sharing the closeness, and what followed after.
5. THE EDGE OF THE CREVASSE
So we passed the time in our outing: In the days we planned out simulated emergencies, and in the evenings we planned the academic side of the training. And every night, we lay beneath our stars.
Toward the end, I noticed that Nick was taking an odd route back. I was riding on the roof again, making sightings, and I noticed something up ahead. I checked the map. Then I called down over the comm, “You are going back to the crevasse.”
“Yes, we are,” Nick said. “From the other side.”
“Do not get too close, Nico. We already saw that the ground is unstable.”
“We saw that one side was unstable. Assuming can get you killed out here. It can also make you blind to details.”
“I know, Nick, I am not some greenhorn! But I think we should keep our distance. That is the best way to make sure we get home.”
“I have to do it, Rosie,” he said. And I knew that tone in his voice very well. He was not kidding, it was a compulsion: when he had a question, he had to know the answer.
“So what are we looking for?” I asked.
“I screwed up last time,” he said. “I was so glad to get you out alive, and so sad at finding Jacob. I had so much adrenaline running through me from almost falling into the crevasse that I never thought: we only searched one side of it.”
“That was the side from which he would have approached from the crawler,” I said.
“But that was too long of a trip for one person to make on foot,” Nick said. “He’d have to have extra oxygen packs, maybe even some water tanks. We didn’t find any of that.”
“So what do you think we shall find on the other side?”
“No,” Nick said. “We’re not guessing, we’re investigating.” I had heard him give that answer to his teams many times over the years.
So we continued toward the crevasse until we got within one hundred meters. Then fifty meters. “All right, Nick,” I said.
The crawler stopped immediately. “What’s the matter, Rosie?”
“We are here,” I said. “We can go the rest of the way on foot. And with safety lines. I do not trust that edge.”
“I don’t think he did, either,” Nick said.
“He? He, who?”
“I’ve been watching,” Nick said. “Head over to the port side of the crawler. Look down.”
I looked over the side as instructed. There, only slightly obscured by the sand whipped up by the wispy Martian winds, were crawler tracks that stopped about where ours had. Looking more closely, it looked like the crawler had backed out on the same path.
“This was recent,” I said. “Hard to tell how recent, the Martian weather has been pretty mild lately. Two, maybe three weeks.”
“Let’s say four weeks,” Nick said. “About the time Jacob went missing. It’s not proof, but it’s suspicious.”
As I climbed down, Nick got out of the crawler. We both hooked up safety lines, and then we proceeded toward the crevasse, carefully avoiding obscuring any tracks, and videoing every step along the way. Now that we knew where to look, we found boot prints. The wind would cover them soon enough; but for now they were too deep for that.
Deep. “Nick, these are too deep,” I said. “As if someone were carrying a heavy load.”
“Almost double,” he agreed. “But look very closely.” Nick took out a laser pointer, and he outlined a second set of tracks coming back. These were shallower, already mostly buried by the wind.
“Nick, you cannot mean . . .”
“Somebody went out there, massing roughly twice that of a suited explorer. They came back with normal mass.” Nick paused for a moment. “I blew it, Rosie. I should’ve had you video more around Jacob’s body before we lifted him. I didn’t realize that the ledge was going to fall.”
“Do not be so hard on yourself, Nico.” But I knew better. Nick’s crew had always known that he expected perfection from them, but he expected more from himself.
“So someone ran Jacob out here, and then threw him in the crevasse,” I continued.
“We don’t know that,” Nick said. “We don’t have any way to tell now. All the evidence is buried. But all the indicators lead to that hypothesis. Jacob was murdered, and someone tried to hide his body.”
We videoed all of the evidence, including 3D scans of the tracks, both human and crawler. Nick was damnably thorough this time: it took us the rest of the day, and I only pulled him away when it was getting too dark to work. When we got back in the crawler, I wanted to rest so that we could make an early drive back; but there was a recorded message from Anthony waiting for us on the comm: “Nick, I know you turned down that police chief position, but can I at least hire you as an investigator? It’s bad, Nick. Really bad, more important than my campaign. We’ve got people sick. One dead already, and more may be dying. At first, we thought it was an illness, but there are no obvious connections between the victims. Yeah, we’re a closed environment, but a big one. Fifty thousand people. It takes too much ti
me for something to spread through a populace that large, so we looked for something environmental. Dr. Costello has identified it as some sort of industrial compound, very toxic. It strikes people at random. Nick, I’m afraid we’ve got some kind of lunatic here killing people in Maxwell City. Your city. I know you can’t let that stand. Please, wherever you are, come back. We need your help.”
“Nick,” I said, “what could be happening?”
But Nick was already on the comm. As soon as he connected to the Admin Center, he said, “Give me Mayor Holmes.” He did not bother identifying himself. For once, being recognized as a founder worked to his advantage. The communications clerk treated him as if he had authority that he really did not, and she pushed his call straight through.
When Anthony’s face appeared on the screen, Nick wasted no time. “Anthony, it’s in the food supply. Shut down the Tomb, now! Shut it down, seal it off, and don’t let any more organics from it into the city’s nutrition system. Issue a recall notice for any food grown from organics dated from Jacob’s funeral forward. But whatever you do, don’t let them flush the Tomb or dispose of any organics that you got from it. We need that as evidence.”
Anthony’s eyebrows rose. “Nick, are you investigating from out on the Martian plains?”
“I’m telling you how to save lives. Tell Marcus the concentration should be low, so he’s going to have to look for traces in the food.” Despite Nick’s feelings, he respected Marcus as a medical examiner. “You’re probably all getting a dose, but it’s so low you don’t notice it. But some people are more sensitive. Some fatally so.”
Anthony got the faraway look that indicated he was sending instructions through his subcomp. Then his eyes focused back on us. “Nick, this is going to really hamper our food production.”
“How much food do dead people produce? Shut down all the restaurants. Shut down all production from hydroponics until we have a chance to clean the whole system. Tell everyone they’re going to have to settle for emergency rations for a while.”
The Last Campaign (The Near-Earth Mysteries) Page 5
