That was me, the master tracker of Mars! Those little successes helped prop up my confidence, let me tell you. Without them it would have been hard as hell to keep from thinking about the fact that I’d never make it more than halfway back before my suit’s power failed. By staying focused on each little victory, I kept my mind busy.
After an hour, I sat down to rest for a bit. Lighter gravity meant that walking wasn’t so bad. My legs were tired and my ankle was burning by then, though. It was time for a brief break. I popped the radio back out to check it again. Still no power, no light, no anything at all from the stupid device. It was toast.
If I did make it back alive, I was going to write a scathing report about why water-resistance was a valid element of an emergency radio, even on Mars.
That was beginning to feel like a bigger if all the time, though. I hadn’t made it as far as I’d hoped in that first leg of my hike. My ankle was more sore than ever, which would only slow my progress more. It wasn’t looking good.
But there wasn’t anything to do but just go on and keep trying anyway. I wasn’t going to lie down and just accept my fate or some such nonsense. I’d keep fighting until I was out of air.
Four
I got up and continued walking, thinking about my life and my likely impending death. What had I left behind me? I had no wife, no kids, no real life outside of the Navy and the space program. I’d been an officer and then an astronaut. That was my entire adult life in a nutshell. There had to be more to a life well lived than that. Assuming I somehow survived this, I promised myself I’d go find out.
Hey, maybe I could get Sandy to go on a date with me. The thought made me grin. She was a hellfire of a woman. Pretty much had to be, on a base with mostly men. Some of the guys had tried to proposition her, early on. I’d gotten to watch the show once. It was a thing of beauty. By the time she was done, the poor mechanic who’d asked if she needed company was darned near in tears.
You had to admire someone like that. She had guts, brains, and the determination to stand her ground when others would have thought better of it. I’d admired her from the first, but never tried to poke or pry. Guess that was why we’d become such good partners on the scouting missions. Why we’d managed to work out a friendship.
Not the sort of thing you wanted to mess up. I laughed in my helmet, thinking about the idea of me getting my tail reamed the way she had that other guy. No, I didn’t think that was such a good idea.
But life in general? Yeah. If I made it out of this mess, I’d try to find a way to do more with it. More? I’d been to Mars! What else is there, after that?
A little voice whispered in the back of my head, talking about home, and family, and building something lasting instead of just voyaging to new places and seeing new things. I shook my head and checked my CO2 meter, making sure that I wasn’t already suffering oxygen deprivation. No, the air was still good. But I was getting melancholy as all get out.
Guess that’s what happens when you’re facing certain death and trying to play the denial game? I didn’t want to think about what was coming, so instead my mind wandered to just about anything else it could.
A big hill loomed ahead of me. I checked my battery level again. Not a ton of charge left. Maybe if I climbed the hill I could see the base from there? The trail led around it, but I could just pick it up on the other side. It would be worth it, if I could just get a glimpse of home. That would lighten my mood better than anything else.
I started up the steep incline. It wasn’t an easy climb, especially with my ankle throbbing with each step. The hill was strewn with rocks. I had to wander around several big boulders on the way up, and stopped twice to rest, panting for breath.
Each time I stopped I waited as short a time as I could. There was a sense of sand slipping away through my proverbial hourglass. I was running out of minutes. By the time the rock leveled out some, every step was an agony. That ankle was burning so bad I didn’t want to lean on it at all. I sort of stumbled forward, limping my way to the very peak of the hill.
I could see for miles in every direction from there. Down toward the bottom of the hill, I spotted a place where my rover’s trail was easily visible. I’d be able to link back up and follow it with no trouble.
What I wasn’t seeing was any sign of humans. Not a single light. No rockets towering against the skyline, waiting to take us home when the mission was done. Wherever home base was, it wasn’t in my line of sight. It had to be even further than I’d thought.
A big chunk of rock shaped like a table sat just about at the top of the hill. I stumbled over to the thing and sat down, resting my legs. There was nothing left to do. I had another hour of air, but if my destination wasn’t even in sight then there was no way I could reach it before I ran out of power.
One more scan of the skyline, looking for any sign of humanity. When there was nothing, I decided to lay back on the rock and stare at the sky for a while instead. Some stars were already becoming visible as the sun continued to set, the daylight fading away toward night.
I admired the stars for maybe ten minutes before I got bored and sat back up again. It just wasn’t in my nature to give up and lay there until death came. My ankle wasn’t hurting as badly, but it would if I started walking again for long.
That was something I could maybe fix, though. I rummaged in the emergency bag and pulled out the inflatable shelter. It was strong material, designed to keep air in and the cold out. There were also a set of ribs which ran through the shelter to help keep it up.
I took a sharp rock and went to work on the shelter. Since it was powered by my suit’s battery, it wasn’t going to do me much good anyway. There was a better use I could put the material to. Once I had a good size chunk cut away, I wrapped it around my right ankle so that the ribs would support the injury, held in place with the shelter material. Then I tied it tight enough that it made me wince.
A few experimental tests of the ankle said it was much improved from before. It still hurt to put weight on it, but I could walk again. That was good enough for now.
I looked out toward the horizon again, trying to get my bearings. That’s when I saw something that made my breath catch in my throat.
The sunset caught on an object there, off in the distance. A reflection, like light glinting off metal.
It wasn’t quite where I thought home should be, but clearly my sense of direction was a bit off. Shiny metal almost certainly meant ‘made by people’. That had to be the base, some bit of exposed metal glinting in the light as the sunset’s rays caught it just right.
I sighted in the spot and laid in a series of landmarks between myself and it, so I wouldn’t lose my way. If I went straight toward the glint, instead of taking the winding patch laid by my rover, then I might just make it.
“Ain’t over until it’s over,” I said aloud. “Here’s hoping that isn’t just a toolbox George left out on his last mission.”
I chuckled at the thought. I knew that wasn’t true. Our gear was tightly controlled. Even losing a wrench out here was a big deal. Replacing gear was expensive unless it was something we could 3D print for ourselves. No, that was the base. I felt sure of it.
With careful steps, I started on down the hill in the direction of salvation. The sunset had given me an opportunity to get out of this mess when I thought I was toast. It was up to me not to blow it.
Five
I’d made past the first two landmarks before my suit beeped at me loudly that it was down to emergency levels of charge.
“Recharge now. Recharge now,” it blared in my ear.
Like I wasn’t aware the suit charge was critically low? I shut the speaker off. No sense listening to the annoying voice telling me something I already knew, and it was just burning more power talking at me anyway. That made me consider whether there might be anything else I could turn off on the suit, to eke out just a few more minutes of life from the battery. The problem was, there were two main drains on the charge
. Both of them were vital to survival.
“Which is more important, the air or the heat?” I mused. It seemed a damned shame to make it so far and not get all the way home. But the truth was that I needed both of those things to survive very long on the surface of Mars.
It was cold outside my suit, brutally cold. The temperature would only continue to drop as night fell. Without my heater I’d start cooling off rapidly. Hypothermia would set in. How soon, I didn’t know, but it would happen.
The air recycler was just as crucial. I could live on what was in my suit for a short while, but soon I’d be rebreathing my own exhaled carbon dioxide. I’d get giddy, then hallucinate, and then I’d die.
Neither of the choices presented felt particularly appealing. That said, I was moving at a decent pace, now that my ankle had some support. If I kept moving my muscles would keep burning energy. I’d keep myself warm that way. Well, maybe not warm, but at least maybe I wouldn’t turn into a popsicle right away. The suit was designed to keep heat in. My body was designed to create heat. It seemed like a match made in heaven.
Walking without breathing, on the other hand, just wasn’t going to happen. I’d get a short distance, but then I’d pass out, fall over, and suffocate. I’d be a warm dead person, but that wasn’t much help.
All these things went through my head pretty quickly. It’s remarkable how morbid one can get when they’re pretty sure they’re done for. I stopped myself once I realized I was debating whether it was more polite for folks to find my body as a toasty corpse or a frozen one. The truth was, by the time anyone got to me I’d be frozen no matter which way I went.
“Heater it is,” I said, and shut the thing off. More warning beeps popped up, but I silenced those as well. As I walked, I went through the suit’s electronics systems, turning off everything except the air and a pair of LEDs on my helmet. They didn’t draw much power anyway, and I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere if I couldn’t see where I was going.
Progress was being made. I was still on the last dregs of emergency power, but this would let me eke out another mile or so, maybe.
What if I’d turned the heater off right away, you ask? Well, that would’ve been cool. Cold, even. Heat from my body was only going to go so far. That’s why we had heaters in the suits in the first place. I doubt I would have managed to get half as far as I did before hypothermia sank in, and then? It’s a short slide from there to sleepy-land.
Anyway, it started feeling colder right away. Not like I could see my breath inside my helmet or anything, but I shivered with a chill that was probably in my head. My suit wouldn’t cool off that fast.
The best way for me to make sure I stayed warm was to move, so I set about it with gusto. My stomach growled a bit. It had been quite a while since lunch, but stopping for a bite to eat wasn’t in the cards. I just couldn’t afford the time.
Every so often I caught a glimpse of that tiny reflection in the distance. I’d been a little worried that it was a star showing up on the horizon, but it wasn’t moving. That made it a fixed point, which told me it was on the ground. There were only a few satellites above Mars, and neither of them were big enough to glint like that. They were tiny things for retransmitting signals.
I kept moving, one foot in front of the other, headed toward that spot on the horizon as quickly as I could. It was like a star guiding me home. All I had to do was keep walking.
Six
When my power failed, it did so without fanfare. There were no blaring alarms or warnings. I’d turned them all off, remember? In fact, the change was so subtle I missed it at first. The gentle hiss of air flowing through the suit vanished, and my LED lights dimmed a little bit. Those kept running. For all I knew, they were running off my body heat or my movement or something.
I took another three or four steps before I realized what that silence meant. Then I stopped walking. My breaths started coming closer and closer together, turning into little gasps.
It was an effort of will to slow my breathing down again. Panic was setting in, and that would get me dead faster than anything else. My air wouldn’t go bad right away. I had time. Not a lot of time, but some. I stepped off and continued marching, timing my breaths with my footfalls so I would remember not to hyperventilate.
My feet and fingers were getting cold, too. I wiggled my fingers and toes to force circulation back into them. It worked a little. I could still feel the limbs, but they were still chilly.
One step after another, I kept plodding in the same direction as before. My head was getting spacey, my mind distracted. That would be the carbon dioxide. All I had to do was think that and my mind went down the trail, recalling every symptom of CO2 poisoning and how quickly it should happen.
I stopped in place and looked up, not recognizing the rock in front of me. That wasn’t one of the waypoints I’d mapped out in my head, was it? I’d gone foggy in my thoughts. Had I wandered off the track while I wasn’t paying attention?
The horizon. The light. It had to be out there somewhere. I scanned, looking for it, and couldn’t see anything at first.
There! The smallest glint. Not far away now, from the looks of it. The sun was finally going down. I’d lose the reflection any second, so I carefully sighted in a few landmarks to take me in the right direction.
Sunset was complete. Darkness fell across Mars. Our sister planet doesn’t have as much atmosphere as Earth, so there isn’t as much to reflect and refract the sun’s light. That means when night falls, it happens pretty darned quick. No long, lingering, romantic sunsets on Mars.
I stumbled on, trying my best to stay on track. It was getting harder to walk. My whole body was cold, despite the walk. I shivered with each step. Sooner or later I’d stop shivering. That’s when I’d be in real trouble, when my muscles ran out of fuel to keep the shiver going.
The brain fog was getting worse, too. My mind kept wandering off on whatever thoughts it felt like. I had a harder time each digression hauling my brain back on task.
In short, this part of the trip sucked way worse than the earlier part. Including the bit where I was sitting in a busted vehicle suspended over a yawning chasm of doom.
I was so tired and groggy that I almost stumbled over the glint. I’d been expecting something big, you see. My base was large enough I’d see it from a good distance. I kept my eyes up, staring ahead and hoping for that first look to tell me I was home.
Instead I almost bumped into a chunk of half-buried metal. I froze just short of it, willing the thing to be a mirage. It wasn’t, but it was even worse. The light from my LEDs reflected off the metal just like the sunlight had earlier. This was the light I’d been following? Not my home at all, but some random piece of space junk?
I wanted to kick the thing. When had we started dumping our trash on Mars, anyway? It was clearly from Earth; the little NASA logo was a dead giveaway. I sank to my knees, exhausted, frozen, and gasping for air that just wasn’t there anymore.
My trip was over. I’d done what I could, gone as far as I could get. I figured I’d made it a lot further than some folks would’ve, so there was that. I leaned back, settling down against the sand next to the strange bit of human history half-buried on Mars. It wouldn’t take too long for me to drift off, I figured.
But it couldn’t have been more than a minute before my curiosity got the better of me. What can I say? I was an explorer for a reason. I wanted to find out stuff. Like, all the stuff, about everything. Even if I was dying, that trait was still part of who I was.
I rolled back to my knees and turned to the chunk of metal. It was from NASA. But what was it? I brushed some of the sand off, revealing some old solar panels. A camera rose from the thing, stalk-like, into the air above it. The whole body was pitted, scratched, and scarred. It had been there a long time!
I kept digging out sand and spotted wheels and a mission designation, mostly scoured away. There was still just enough of it left that I knew in a flash what I had in front of me.
This was Opportunity, one of the first automated rovers we sent to explore the planet Mars. The little robot traveled much further than anyone had ever expected and lasted way longer than it had any right to.
“Sort of like me, in that,” I gasped out, chuckling. “I shouldn’t have made it this far, either.”
I couldn’t help but feel a kinship to the drone and the men and women who’d sent it. Sure, we had a manned base on Mars now. We used human drivers in our rovers. But the same spirit that guided us was the one which had made people create this little bot and ship it zillions of miles from home.
Well, we were more alike than that. After all, just like Opportunity, I was going to die out here. Maybe someday a decade or two from now, someone else would see the glint of my suit and Oppy’s metal, and come find us. Maybe they’d run out of steam right in this spot, too, and we’d be a triad. The thought made me giggle, even as I had a flash thought that giggling was a bad sign.
“We’re two of a kind, you and I,” I said. I gave the rover a pair of hearty smacks on its side, like I was patting a buddy on the back.
A light on its side winked on.
Seven
I sat there staring at it for a few seconds. That light was important somehow, but my fogged brain wasn’t making the connection right away. Then it snapped into place. Light meant power. Power meant the little bot was more like me than I’d thought. Just like me, it wasn’t quite dead yet!
“Holy shit!” I said. I reached over and started fiddling with the rover, checking it out.
The batteries on this thing should have died years ago. If they were still working, they wouldn’t have a lot of charge. It might be just enough, though.
Ghost of an Opportunity Page 2
