by S. J. Morden
What power they had was going to have to be rationed, at least to start with. They had only enough to work a domestic water heater, but a lot of the systems were designed for low energy consumption. The ship had its own generator that was nowhere near as powerful, but still potentially useful, if everything was combined.
Brack had nixed that idea almost as soon as the words had left Declan’s mouth. The ship stayed intact. End of.
The next priority was air. The air plant would need electricity, which they didn’t have enough of, to produce oxygen, which they didn’t have enough of either. With five of them now awake, they were getting through the stores faster, and it seemed that XO had neglected to pack any spare in case of emergency.
The buggies needed a full half-day plugged in to strip the water back down into its component gases, ready for the next mission, but the air plant also had to refill the oxygen tanks in their suits’ life-support systems.
Frank didn’t like the sums either, especially when other necessities like water and heating and light were factored in. They were always going to be short, having to choose which things to turn off if they needed more elsewhere.
“That’s over your pay grade, Kittridge,” said Brack. “You need to concentrate on getting everything back here and working.”
He debated whether saying anything more would help, and eventually decided, almost solely because of the expression on Dee’s face, to speak up. “And what if we can’t? What if we don’t have enough kit to make a viable base out of what’s reached the surface in one piece?”
“Have we not got an atmosphere in here? Are you struggling to make out my words?”
“What’s our contingency? What’s the fallback position?”
Alice reached out to put her hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he shrugged it off, almost instantaneously. There was no space on the lowest level to escape from anyone. They were face to face, whether they liked it or not.
“You have one job here,” said Brack. “One job. To get the base up and working. If you don’t like it, there’s the airlock. Go find someone to complain to.”
Frank could feel uncharacteristic heat rise inside him. All he had to do was hit Brack first, a good solid punch to the head so that he smacked him against the ladder as well. What did the man actually do but just breathe and eat and drink, without contributing anything?
But there was the promise: if they lived—if they both lived—they’d both go home.
“No one’s explained to us why we don’t have enough food. No one’s explained to us what happens when we run out of that, or water, or air. Maybe if we knew what was going on …” He crushed his emotions. “What else can we get while we’re out there?”
“Better. We can’t keep on drinking our own piss indefinitely, but we can manage for a while. We’re going to run out of food before we run out of water. Get a hab module. Next run out after this will be the hydroponics.” Brack stood there, hands on hips. “So what are you waiting for? You and Stutter-boy need to suit up and head for the hills.”
Alice retreated to the place they’d all started calling the ice-box, even though the crew in storage were only cool, not freezing. Frank checked over his suit, and encouraged Dee to do the same—the boy had a strangely lax attitude over something that was only going to preserve his life if it worked perfectly, each and every time.
He checked his tanks, his scrubber, filled up his water supply and put a fresh energy bar into the holder, and watched while Dee happily played with the chest console, tapping buttons and scrolling through the menus.
Frank synced the tablet to the main computer, getting updated map information and details. Now that, Dee was interested in. He waved for Frank to hand him the device, and he poked around on it while Frank started climbing into his suit.
“Dee, put it down and get ready. We’ve got work to do.”
“Just checking what I’ll be working with, when it’s all up and running.” He handed Frank the tablet and looked to see where Brack was. The man was standing at the main terminal, his back to the pair, and Dee gave Frank an exaggerated wink. Frank had no idea what that meant. Brack was working the controls almost absent-mindedly, concentrating on something on his screen, and saw nothing.
Frank clipped the tablet onto his waist belt, along with one of the now-charged nut runners, before easing the top half of his body into his suit. His head pushed through the neck ring and into the helmet. He was getting used to the muffled, close sound it surrounded him with. He closed up his suit, checked all his numbers and the flow of air around his face, before giving Dee the thumbs up.
Dee finished climbing into his own suit, and closed and sealed his back-hatch. Frank went first into the airlock.
He felt the now familiar filling out around him as the air was pumped away, and was ready for the sudden suck as the outer door opened. He stepped out onto the platform, and looked at his surroundings. There were the buggies. There was the ship. There was the crater wall. There was the hazy sky, pink and blue. The addition of the black RTG—as tall as Frank and as wide as his arm span—didn’t make much of an impact.
Declan and his jigsaw puzzle of solar panels was more obvious. His suit moved among the components, testing and connecting and disassembling. The frames for the circular panels littered the near distance, but none were yet complete.
“Declan. How is it?”
“It could be better. It could be worse. This is supposed to be a fifteen-kilowatt array, for an average load of ten kilowatts. The good news is, both battery packs are intact. The casing’s cracked on one of them, but that’s just cosmetic. The bad news,” he said, gesturing around him, “is that we’ve seven kilowatts of generating power at best. Add it to the three we get as baseload, and that makes about ten. Which is fine for between mid-morning and mid-afternoon. All other times, we get less, and only the three at night if we don’t use some of the daytime juice to charge the batteries.”
“We need more power.”
“Another couple of kilowatts would mean we could heat the habs at night. If,” he added pointedly, “we can’t use the ship’s generator, we’re going to have to try and think of something else.”
“Like?”
“It’s not as if we can go down the wholesaler’s for parts, is it? I’ll have to see what I can come up with. And Demetrius is supposed to be my second. He should be helping me sort out this god-awful mess.”
“Brack decided. You can have him back when someone else volunteers to drive the other buggy.”
With Demetrius out of the airlock, they were now wasting air-time. They unplugged the buggies, checked the fuel cells, and Frank felt the need to tighten the frame and wheel nuts with the nut runner. Most were on tight enough. One or two were worryingly loose, and he didn’t know if that was because they’d been shaken free, or whether they’d not been done up properly in the first place.
“We’re losing daylight,” said Dee.
“I’m saving your life. Again.” Frank went round the trailers too, pressing the bit onto the top of the nuts and giving the trigger a squeeze. “One of these comes off, we’re in trouble that we didn’t have to be in.”
They drove to the drop-off, and because no one was going to stop him, Demetrius called it the Heights, and the crater floor the Valley. The raised ridge that ran the length of the center of the crater became, inevitably, Beverly Hills, and the route they took to the south of them, Sunset Boulevard.
They passed three craters on the way that were too small to have official names, but were large enough to have to drive around. The first was Compton, the second, Vermont, and the third Hollywood. Frank was a San Franciscan native, but Dee had grown up—until he’d got locked up—in LA. Frank didn’t know if the labels were ironic or descriptive: probably both. And none of them had any weight, save what they gave them themselves. Either they’d catch on, or they wouldn’t.
But when they stopped at the bottom of the crater wall, at the point where they’d driven up the day
before, Demetrius took the tablet from Frank and somehow entered the names onto the map itself. He named the upslope they were about to tackle Long Beach.
Dee beckoned Frank closer, and opened the suit controls on his chest. He pressed buttons, as he had done on the ship, then did the same for Frank. He leaned their helmets together.
“Can you hear me?”
And Frank could: just not through the speakers inside his suit. Dee’s voice had carried through the touching perspex.
“What did you do?”
“Turned the microphones off. The transmitters are still working, so they won’t flag as a fault, but no one else can overhear.”
“Neat trick. How do I turn it back on?”
“From this menu here: down, down, right, right, down, select. That’s on and off. Pretty certain it’s not supposed to be there, but it is.”
“Privacy. As long as we stand like this.”
“D-did I do good, Frank?”
“You’ve done fine, Dee.”
“We might need it. Maybe. At some point.”
“You never know. We’d better turn them back on, though, in case they notice the drop out.” Frank tried to remember the sequence, and Dee talked him through it again. They separated, and Frank said: “Ready to tackle the wall again?”
“Sure.” Dee went back to his buggy, and climbed on. Frank took the lead, but didn’t know whether driving up the same path was a good thing or a bad thing. The tracks he’d left were smudged but still prominent. At least he knew that there were no terrible surprises on that route, no sudden collapses or sandtraps or impossible gradients, so it was worth trying again. It might not always be that way, and complacency might see him break down or turn the buggy over.
They ought to schedule a visual inspection of what was so far the only way up out of the crater, but that might only become an important factor if they had reason to leave Rahe after they’d collected all the supply drops. Otherwise, it became something for someone else to do.
They reached the top, and were confronted by the same wide open vista, Mars in all its naked, frigid, terrifying glory. Frank pulled over and showed Dee the map.
“The air plant cylinder is twelve miles north-east. The nearest hab unit to that is three miles further on, due east. That gives us a total round trip of about sixty miles. If there are any problems, we abandon one or both cylinders, and the trailers if we have to, and make our priority to get back to the ship.”
“Frank, it’ll be fine. Sixty miles is nothing.”
“It’s two thirds of your air. No one’s going to be calling triple-A for us. Do you remember what it was like when you split your suit, and Alice had to stab you to seal it? Do you remember how scared you were?”
“Sure, but they really weren’t going to let me die, were they?”
Frank jabbed the tablet against Dee’s hard torso. “We’d have got a new guy the same way we got Declan. They didn’t give a shit about you. We didn’t even have suit patches.”
“We’ve got them now, though.”
“We’ve only got them because it’ll cost them a fortune to ship another con to Mars. To them, we’re a resource. To us, we should be more than that.” Frank walked back to his buggy. “No one is going to keep us safe but us. You need to start thinking that way.”
And while Demetrius thought about that, Frank got to consider how they were going to recover the cylinder that was eighty miles away. At that distance, plus the time it took to load the cylinder onto the trailer, it was out of range. They needed a pressurized environment to change out their life-support systems, and unless they built one, say at the top of Long Beach, there was no way they could collect all the parts.
So that was the obvious solution. Erect one of the habs with an airlock out on the plain, pressurize it, and use it as a staging post for as long as they needed it. Then, when they didn’t, take it down again. The only problem he could see would be taking the air to the hab once it was up. It only needed five psi of pure oxygen to work, but whether the scheme would work was dependent on whether they could find enough tanks to fill.
Even better, just take the airlock. He’d have to practice changing the life support in such a confined space. But that would be quicker and easier to arrange: he could just tow one to the right spot and dump it until he needed it, rather than truck everyone out to the edge of the crater and have them build a full hab. He’d need to pressurize it, but once they got the air plant running, they could use one of the scuba tanks to do that.
It would put everything in range. And it would provide anyone out on the plain with a lifeboat.
Would Brack say no? If he wanted the base actually built, then he’d say yes. He’d be forced to say yes in the end: XO would surely tell him that he had to.
All they had to do now was solve the energy crisis. He had no idea how that was going to pan out. Perhaps XO would demand that Declan took the power from the ship. Perhaps it was XO’s decision not to allow it, and Brack was simply following orders. But surely, if there was spare capacity, then eventually they’d have to use it, allowed or not.
They traveled on. The wheels rattled and bounced over the rocks on the surface, making their hands numb and their teeth ache. And after an hour, the cylinder containing the air plant should have been dead ahead on the wide, open landscape, but Frank couldn’t see the telltale parachute. The canopy was almost thirty yards across which, considering the transponder was giving him a distance of a couple of hundred yards, should have been visible.
He slowed down and edged forward. If the air plant had hard-impacted, then it was pretty much game over. And there was a crater, right in front of him. But it didn’t look sharp-edged and fresh; the rim had eroded down to the same level as the surrounding plain.
He parked up and waved at Dee to do the same. He jumped down, and walked as his map indicated. There was the parachute, and there was the cylinder, some hundred feet down in the bottom of a depression that was a thousand feet across.
“Well, that’s not helping.”
“At least it’s not broken.” Dee stamped his foot on the ground. It seemed firm enough. “Drive down?”
“I’ll walk it, and you can follow. If we leave one buggy at the top, at least we don’t get stuck if something happens.”
“What if we need both to drag it out?”
“We’ve a hundred and fifty feet of cable on each winch. If we can get the trailer to within that distance, we can use both. But the slope’s not so bad, less than ten per cent. Long Beach is steeper.”
Frank stepped down into the crater. The sides were packed-down gravel: the base, a cracked rock pavement. He had thought it might have more dust and sand blown into it, filling it up, but the reverse seemed to have happened. The whole basin seemed scoured, like a pot.
He waved Dee down behind him, and crunched his way to the cylinder. The scorch marks from the rockets had faded to gray, and the painted XO logo was, along with the rest of the white pigment, worn thin. He opened up the cargo hatches and saw that everything was still packed in tightly.
No need to disturb anything yet. Wait until they could get the thing home.
Dee couldn’t back the trailer up, so Frank had to, and it took even him three goes to line it up correctly. They decoupled the motor unit from the bottom end of the cylinder—the fuel remnants were toxic, explosive, and best left where they couldn’t do any harm—and attached the winch cable to the rest, winding it slowly on to the open framework until the balance of the trailer had shifted enough for the weight to tip forward. The rear end came up, and the buggy shuddered as it found a new equilibrium.
“OK. Fast across the flat and let your momentum carry you up. If you start to slip, keep it straight and stop only if you have to.” Frank looked up at the pale sun and checked his timer. Nearly four hours in. “Go. I’ll see you at the top.”
Dee pulled away and headed up towards the lip of the crater, leaving Frank to trudge along behind. The walking was fine, though: a steady
gradient and none of those fist-sized loose surface rocks that seemed to predominate out on the plain.
He was halfway out when his earphones suddenly squawked, overloading with signal. He winced, and instinctively his hands went to the sides of his head, where they encountered only his helmet.
“Who the hell was that?”
“Frank? Frank? It’s me. D-Dee. What’s happening, Frank? What’s going on?”
The back end of the trailer had already vanished over the crater rim. Dee and the buggy were invisible. The only choice Frank had was how fast he dared run.
It was more skipping than running, faster than the low, loping pace he’d managed with Marcy, but slower than a full sprint on Earth. He still spent too long in the air, and not long enough pushing himself forward on the ground. And the suit restricted his full movement, too. He felt strangely incapable of speed, almost as if he was dreaming and fighting to wake up.
He scrabbled up the last few steps.
“Hang on, Dee. Hang on. Don’t panic. I’m co—”
The sight struck him dumb. Tornadoes. A dozen, maybe more, it was difficult to tell, were spinning and snaking towards them. The tubes were almost ghost-like, pale and fading high into the sky, where they maintained sinuous curves. But at their bases, they were white with spinning dust.
“What do we do, Frank?”
Frank was mesmerized. The bright funnels tracked briskly across the ground, and then they were among them. One passed over Frank’s trailer, then right past him. He could hear the patter of dust against his helmet, but rather than pelting him with debris, it seemed to strip off what he’d accumulated, and carried it away.
The twister descended into the crater, obliterating his footprints. The others took their own paths, all roughly in the same direction. The air cleared, and the tornadoes moved away, becoming indistinct in the horizon’s haze.
He was aware of another voice in his ear. Alice.
“Frank. Report.”
“It’s OK. It’s OK. Just … surprised, that’s all. Bunch of Martian twisters ambushed us. I’ll check over the suits and the buggies, but we’re OK. We’ve got the air plant.”
