by Kate Moretti
She panned the rover camera over the endless terrain of red. It looked as if there wasn’t anything else around for miles. But there were other caches out there, and finding them could save the family.
It was a risk worth taking, and with a flip of the joystick, she sent her rover forward toward the next blip on the screen.
The second cache was tougher to find than the first.
It was hidden on the fringes of an ancient volcano, and the terrain around it proved to be soft and unstable. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you could risk bogging your unit down in the loose soil and finding yourself stuck for a millennium. Helen’s dad had decided to work in this region for that very reason—most operators chose to stick to areas where others congregated, and when one unit hit a vein, others swarmed into the region, hoping for their share. Sometimes, temporary robo-settlements cropped up as others hoped to get in on the success of the first units in an area.
These places tended to be hotbeds for Marauder activity. Her father had mentioned visiting some of them, but for the most part, he preferred to work alone. He’d thought if he could find his own vein in a place with unstable ground, he’d be in an ideal situation. He’d been convinced that few would risk following him there, that—because of his knowledge of geology—he’d be able to mine the area safely, without fear of harassment.
But he wasn’t the only person in the world with knowledge of Martian geological topography. He tended to think of Marauders as the equivalent of roaming street punks on Earth—people who didn’t have the scientific background needed to safely work an unstable area and who therefore wouldn’t bother with it. But for all he knew, the leader of the pack who’d jumped him could have been a professor at MIT, with the same training and ideas that he had.
Even still, picking this particular spot to place a cache hadn’t been a bad idea. Working alone way out here, the rover would likely go unnoticed. The unstable terrain gave it another layer of protection because this was a location few would dare bother with—not unless they had a working knowledge of the area’s geology. Which Helen didn’t. She was no better off than the people her dad had been trying to hide from.
So close. Don’t give up now.
She took it slow as she moved into the volcano’s base. The soil was loose and soft; one wrong turn and the rover’s tires could get bogged down in it. Having the cache so near gave her comfort. But this terrain! Three meters in, her left front wheel began to spin. She veered to the right to compensate, only to find another patch of loose sand. Two tires went in this time.
For a moment, she thought that it would be easier to turn around. To move on to the next cache, tag that, and come back to this one at some future date.
But she shoved that voice down and pressed on. She’d come too far to give up now. The cache was right there, and this was too important. Three caches equaled freedom. Two only meant continuing work.
Go!
The tires moved another few feet, spun, sank, and then moved forward again. It was like trying to navigate a minefield, but the rover continued to slip forward, the cache growing closer and closer with each passing moment. Ten feet. Eight. Seven.
Suddenly, all six wheels started to spin. And the more they did, the deeper the unit sank in the course red dirt.
“No!” she shouted, jerking the joystick left and right, inwardly screaming for the wheels to comply. “Move, you piece of junk!”
The unit obeyed as if it could hear her, its wheels abruptly freeing themselves from the soil and moving forward again. She breathed a sigh of relief and focused on the screen, leaning forward a bit in her nervousness. Six feet. Five. Four.
By the time she got close enough to touch the cache, she thought her head was about to explode. But no matter; she’d made it. Using the good arm, she took a free tag from the base compartment and slapped it on the pile.
Two down, one to go.
It was another hour before she made it out of the quagmire and back onto more solid ground, a final bleep on the vid-screen leading her to the third and final pay-pile.
This one was further away than all the others. She’d already been working late into the night, and was exhausted, but she had to press on. On Mars, the distant sun still shed a faint glow of light over the blighted land. And this couldn’t wait. Too much was at stake. She had to finish this tonight.
So she kept with it.
Her eyes never left the vid-screen.
Her hand remained firmly gripped around the joystick.
Her mind stayed focused on the desperate mission before her.
And finally, when it seemed as if the vast stretch of Mars would have no end, she was there. Next to a large cropping of rocks sat the final pile of chromium—a prize more valuable than gold. One more tag. One more code. And then…
Her joy died seconds later.
Beyond the cache, in the distance depicted in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, she could see what looked like three mechanical beings moving at full speed in her direction.
It was the Marauders. They’d found her.
At first Helen didn’t understand.
How could they know to find me way out here?
Then it occurred to her. She had read that some Marauders placed mining tags on other rover units to act as tracking devices and lead them to other people’s caches. It must have been how they’d found her dad’s cache in the first place. At some point, probably when he visited one of the robo-settlements, he’d been tagged by these guys, who had been slowly working their way toward him ever since. They’d probably assumed that his rover was out of commission for good after the initial attack and moved on.
But when Helen had gotten the unit up and running, they must have seen that it was still operational and decided to turn back, hoping it would lead them to more booty.
Why didn’t I think of that before? Stupid! Then she wondered… The tracker. Where was it?
Probably somewhere hard to spot. The trailer, most likely.
Working a control on the joystick, she quickly cut the magnet and detached the rover from the trailer. It might be too late to stop them from finding her, but that didn’t matter—she could move faster without it. And right now, speed was just the thing she needed. Not wasting a second, she pressed the accelerator and made a beeline for the final cache. If she tagged it and coded it before the Marauders reached her, she could call for a hover-scoop and there wouldn’t be a thing they could do about it.
But the Marauders were fast.
Maybe they had figured out ways to modify their units for greater velocity. She didn’t know. From what she could tell, they were moving at a speed twice her own. With each foot she gained, they gained two. Where she was only one, they were three.
The final cache loomed directly ahead. But before she could upload the code, she’d have to get to it and tag it. It was only a hundred feet away now. Ninety… Eighty…
Stealing her eyes from the image of the cache, she looked to the left-hand corner of the vid-screen, hoping that she still had more time. But the Marauders were no longer just a blip in the distance.
They were getting closer.
The cache was just ahead. But the Marauders were so fast.
By the time she got to within forty feet of it, the first Marauder was right on top of her, slamming the brunt of its weight into her left side, and tipping her over.
Helen used her good arm to right herself. By the time she had all wheels to the ground once again, she was convinced that one of the Marauders had already reached the cache and was coding it for themselves.
To her surprise, though, the three units had stopped and were now parked directly in front of her, staring her down. None of them had made a move for the cache yet.
Why?
She found out a moment later, when the
eyes on the lead Marauder unit started to blink.
Seconds later, the words appeared on the vid-screen.
Obviously, in the thin atmosphere of Mars, verbal communication between rover units was impossible. So the designers at MARSCORP had created a means of two-way communication that relied on blinked codes, which could be read by software embedded in the camera system and relayed to the operator’s vid-screen in the form of typed words. The result was a crude form of dialogue between units.
“I know you have more caches,” the lead unit coded. “Give me the coordinates and we’ll let you go.”
So that’s it. Having settled for a small score last time, they were looking for a bigger one now.
The thought infuriated her. It wasn’t enough that they’d already taken so much, they’d put her and her family in this situation and threatened to ruin their lives forever. Now they wanted more.
Quickly, she typed her response.
“Go suck a moon rock.”
“Don’t be stupid,” the leader blinked. “Give us the coordinates and roll away. You can mine for more. Otherwise, we’ll finish what we started three days ago.”
She knew full well that if she blinked the locations of the other caches, they’d rip her apart anyway and have it all.
That left just one option. Swallowing hard, she rolled the unit forward, raised the tip of the rock breaker, and jammed the sharp end directly into the lead Marauder’s left eye. The suddenness of it must have shocked the Marauders, as none of them moved a diode at first. It wasn’t until she’d hit a switch on the joystick and began to jackhammer away at the leader’s head that the others finally got their senses together enough to react.
On the vid-screen, a bevy of mechanical arms and robot tools flew at her rover, reaching for it.
Working the joystick, she extracted the hammer from the leader’s eye and backed away quickly. Wherever the owner lived here on Earth, she could imagine him screaming into his vid-screen as a now-shattered camera cut his view of the Martian surface forever in half. The rover rolled away, looking disoriented and confused, and leaving just two more to contend with.
But the Marauders weren’t without weapons of their own.
The one on the left came at her with a diamond-tipped drill while the one on the right swung what appeared to be a makeshift mace designed for busting through soil and, apparently, other rovers.
Helen continued to back her rover off, bringing her rock breaker up to protect its body from another smashing and piercing attack.
The drill came first. But unlike her dad, Helen was ready for it. Using the breaker as a block, she deflected the drill and twisted to the right just as the other attacker was coming around. The second Marauder swung the mace at her head, but was just a second too late. The mace did find a head, but it didn’t belong to her rover.
Instead, it smashed into the head of the unit with the drill bit, sending it reeling in a daze to the side.
Taking advantage of this turn of events, Helen lashed out with her rock breaker, jamming it into the chest plate of the mace Marauder and jacking away at its innards. After a moment, the unit went limp, its inner components busted beyond any hope of repair.
Extracting the breaker from this now-dead unit, she turned her attention to the attacker with the drill. The blow to its head had knocked it aside momentarily but hadn’t broken any cameras or spilled any mechanical brains.
It was still a threat, and now, it was coming for her at full speed.
In the five seconds she had left, Helen chose to pan the camera around behind her to see that the one-eyed leader was already there with its mechanical arm raising a rock hammer over her rover’s head.
Just one chance.
Working the joystick, she shifted her rover’s tires 180 degrees to the left. She pushed forward on the joystick and sent it shooting in the direction of those repositioned wheels—left, instead of forward.
But the Marauder with the drill kept going, despite the fact that Helen’s rover was gone. And its only remaining target was the very thing that had been standing directly behind her: the lead rover. Its drill bore down on the other unit’s exposed frame, piercing and chewing through the leader’s chest plate before the operator had a chance to kill power to the drill.
They were thoroughly distracted now, and Helen used this moment to strike.
Spinning around again, she shot forward and shoved the business end of her rock breaker directly through the drill Marauder’s back. A few moments of jackhammering was all it took to render the enemy inert. Looking beyond it, she could see that the one-eyed leader had been equally thrashed by the tip of its comrade’s drill.
Extracting the breaker from the Marauder’s back, she backed off and panned her camera around to survey the scene. What she saw on the vid-screen was the remnants of a mechanized massacre unlike anything she’d ever dreamed of.
All three of the Marauders were completely and thoroughly out of commission.
Rolling over to the lead unit, she faced its one good eye and blinked a message into it. Maybe its operator could still see the message on his home vid-screen. Maybe he couldn’t. Either way, she couldn’t help herself.
“Who’s stupid now?”
With that, she shoved the breaker through its final functioning eye, putting it down for good.
It was done, over. And she’d won.
Beyond the battered piles of trash that once made up the marauding menaces sat the third and final cache. It felt almost unreal to roll up to it, and even more unreal to tag it and upload the final code. Soon after, an automated hover-scoop flew in from its deployment hub and sucked up the precious oar.
Outside, back on Earth, the dawn of a brand new day broke in a distant sky.
“May! Helen! Come quick! It’s a miracle.”
That morning, Helen’s dad had checked the MARSCROP account, only to make a shocking and joyous discovery. A large deposit had somehow been made into the account the night before, and the family’s debt was now completely wiped clean.
“The three remaining caches,” he said. “They must have been picked up. That has to be it! But I don’t understand. I hadn’t finished tagging and coding them when I was jumped. But I must have. It’s the only explanation. Do you know what this means? We’re free and clear!”
The rest of the morning was spent in quiet celebration. And Helen relished every moment of it. It was good to see her mom and dad happy again. That broken, desperate look in her dad’s eyes was gone now, as was any lingering resentment she might have felt toward him. He’d only done what he thought was best for the family, she realized. And now, they were going to be okay.
As far as her parents were concerned, there would be no profit from the family’s brief Martian venture, but there would be no debt, either. Their keel was even now.
As for Helen, her personal stake in the affairs of Mars was far from over.
No longer concerned with the family’s financial well-being, she found herself free to pursue another agenda and had spent several early-morning hours thinking about just that. The command module would be safe in her room for the time being. She doubted that her parents would ever suspect that she’d resurrected the rover, or that she was still able to control it from that once-smashed module, which now looked more like a reconstituted video game console than a sophisticated piece of hardware.
And maybe, in some ways, it was just that.
Thieves like the Marauders chose to treat the situation on Mars as though it were one big game. Well, if it was a game they wanted, then Helen was more than willing to play. There were still well-meaning people up there—people like her dad, who were just trying to get ahead in the world, who were being preyed upon by the marauding droves of cowards that didn’t want to play by the rules.
Maybe those people neede
d some help, someone watching their backs.
Why not her? Here, she was just another face in the crowd. But up there, she could be something else.
Later that night, back in her room with her hand on the joystick and her eyes fixed on the vid-screen, she contemplated where to go first. The nearest robo-settlement, perhaps. It seemed as good a place as any to begin. A quick inquiry typed into the command module brought the coordinates up on the vid-screen.
“Let’s get started,” she said, pushing the joystick forward.
Millions of miles away, a battered but battle-tested rover with a rock breaker for an arm and a trailer full of tools made fresh tracks in the red dust of the planet Mars.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Ebey got his start by taking his once-vast collection of action figures on epic journeys though countless lands full of exotic wonders and hidden dangers. Today, his action figure collection is much smaller, though several still stand guard on his writing desk, ready to take up arms and march into the fray at a moment’s notice. George was born and raised in Ohio, where he still lives with his wife and an ornery cat named Ollie. When he’s not writing or playing with his action figures, he enjoys being outdoors, studying history, and searching for new and interesting places to explore.
THOUGHTS ON BRAVE NEW GIRLS
“In a perfect world, the problem of gender inequality wouldn’t exist. I hope that Brave New Girls will help bring us one step closer to that world.”
Illustration for “Helen of Mars” by Ken Dawson
THE KEYS TO THE STARS
by Stephen Kozeniewski
Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania
2005
Judy Kraybill tucked her pen behind her ear, sandwiched the phone receiver between her ear and her shoulder, and dry-swallowed her bite of cold Pop-Tart.
