Defying Mars (Saving Mars Series-2)

by Cidney Swanson

  On the seventh day of this new routine, she woke with a massive headache throbbing through her right eye. You’ll ruin your eyes, her mother had told her when Jess used to read for hours on end.

  Standing, Jess stumbled to the rations room in search of synthetic feverfew. While this did the trick for the headache, she decided to spend her time in more varied ways.

  Searching her brother’s wafer, she found the music of the Cratercoustics, a band popular on Mars, and she cranked the music until it blared throughout the ship. The band was supposed to have played at the planetary celebration, which made her feel a bit sad. But the music was energetic and soon Jess was bouncing down the hall, singing along with lyrics about the girl she’d left behind in Barsoom Station.

  It was a good workout. Crusty would have approved, Jessamyn thought with a smile. If she had to spend some part of each day exercising, she might as well enjoy it. Just in case she managed to land the ship after all.

  The song finished and the crooning voice of the lead singer switched to a melancholy ballad about wearing his heart on his sleeve and how his girlfriend had stolen his jacket away. The words were silly. Very silly, Jessamyn told herself as she sang along, but the emotion felt raw and pure and she found herself remembering Pavel, his smile, his mouth warm on hers.

  Which brought Jess to a new depth of miserable.

  It wouldn’t do. Calling out a command for the ship to cut the audio, she marched to the helm. It was time for a rational activity. Like checking her trajectory.

  Staring at the readings, her mouth pulled to one side in half a frown. Not because anything was wrong, but because the trajectory looked perfect. Mind-numbingly perfect.

  “The Galleon doesn’t need me,” she said to Crusty’s orchid. Fortunately, she’d never once heard the plant respond to anything she had to say.

  She looked for something else to do. She supposed she could swab the decks, but cleaning had never been a favorite task of hers.

  Sluggishly, the days crawled by, Jess filling them with letters to Pavel, strenuous exercise, reading through blueprints of her brother’s inventions, and occasional one-sided conversations with Crusty’s orchid.

  As dull day succeeded dull day, the nights grew ever more wearisome. Jessamyn had stuck to the twenty-four hours and thirty-eight minutes of a Marsian day until she reached day thirty-two, her half-way mark. Since then, she dropped the thirty-eight minutes and set her schedule to match Earth’s shorter twenty-four hour days.

  Not that it mattered a great deal. She lay each night awake for what seemed like hours, trying various rooms to see if change improved her ability to sleep.

  One problem that interfered with sleep was simply that Jessamyn felt as if she were doing a Very Wrong Thing each night by allowing the ship to fly itself. She would awaken with her heart pounding, adrenaline coursing madly through her system, and the fear that she’d forgotten something important, left something critical undone. Which led to an inevitable trip to the bridge to check on the ship.

  She even tried sleeping at the helm. That didn’t last long. As she lay on the floor of the bridge, she couldn’t help but imagine the Red Galleon frowning sternly at her, demanding to know what, exactly, she thought she was doing asleep at the proverbial wheel.

  Her letters to Pavel grew more frequent, although her memory of him seemed each day to thin out until only a gossamer thread of Pavel remained to anchor his memory to her. She recalled in flashes small things: his fingers, with sand pouring off of them; the bright bloom of red as he removed her subcutaneous Terran scan chip; and often, especially as she dreamed, his breath upon her lips as he leaned near for a kiss.

  Upon her fifty-first day in space, Jessamyn broke her self-imposed ban from visiting the observation deck. Pausing before the seal-door, she attempted to brace herself against a rush of memories of her brother, an ache for his companionship. But as she passed over the threshold, she saw only the stars. Glorious, infinite in number, bright against an inky backdrop.

  She sighed as she moved across the shallow room to lean her forehead upon the window. Why didn’t I come here before? She had no answer. Only a certainty that she’d been a fool to cut herself off from such beauty. It looked to her as if someone had frozen in time an image of rain, the small pelting bits caught stationary and then lit with fire, stretching unto an infinite distance.

  Dear Pavel, she composed the letter in her head, I am staring out at Zhinü and Niulong this morning—if you can call it morning—and wondering if you think of me when you look into the night sky. I am surrounded by eternal night (or perhaps it is eternal day), and I know now that I cannot live without the beauty of this vision spread before me. Will we, as the lovers in the tale, find one another? Form a bridge across the distance? I am not crossing the Milky Way. My journey is a minute one, Pavel, and sometimes I have a sense of being caught in a river that carries me to you. Well, I hope it will. Earth seems so tiny when I view her in the vastness of space. How hard could it be to find you upon so small a surface? Your friend, Jessamyn

  It wasn’t a letter she committed to her wafer. These were thoughts only, ephemeral, private, foolish. She walked to the far end of the arched window and tucked herself against the wall, watching the fiery worlds, wondering if any watched her back. And then, trying to number the stars between the smallest space she could form between two fingers, she fell asleep.

  When she awoke the next day, she decided to move the orchid from the bridge to the observation deck. “The view’s a lot better from there,” she murmured to Crusty’s plant as she carried it. Pausing to open the ob-deck door, she disturbed the pot-within-the-bowl system Crusty had set up for watering. Instantly, her nostrils were assaulted by a smell so rare upon Mars that she had to stop to think where she’d encountered it before.

  “Algae rot,” she murmured finally. “Like Mom’s bad pots.”

  Wrinkling her nose, she adjusted the ob-deck’s low lighting so she could see the orchid better. The smell definitely originated from the plant—Jessamyn discovered a layer of slime where she’d disturbed the bowl. Quickly, she shifted it back to its former position as best as she could, hiding the slime and the odor.

  Jess remembered how her mom got angry when Jess or her father accidentally turned off the lighting over the algae pots. Maybe the orchid needed more light. She fiddled with the ob-deck lighting, aiming one light at a spot just in front of the window. Carefully, she set the plant in the light.

  “There,” she said. “That should help you get better.” But as she said this, she saw a black spot on one of the leaves. Rot, she thought. She had no idea how to treat a plant for leaf-rot.

  How did a plant even contract such a thing out in space? Frowning, Jessamyn walked to the door, looking back over her shoulder at the plant. The orchid did look happier here.

  “You’re losing it, Jaarda,” she said as she exited the ob-deck.

  Sleepless nights became an increasing challenge as Jessamyn hurtled through space to her rendezvous with Earth. No longer able to stick to a schedule where she’d be awake at the same time every day, Jess began to set reminder alarms so that she could check her course at twenty-four hour intervals.

  She wondered again if sleep might come in a different room, a different bed. A move to the ob-deck had helped, initially. She decided to try out the captain’s quarters next. Walking down the hall, she shuffled inside, bleary-eyed, before depositing herself upon the slightly larger bunk.

  A few days ago, her throat had begun to feel irritated. Tonight, the night of day fifty-seven, it felt worse. She yawned, wincing at the ache in the back of her throat. Apologizing in her mind to the citizens of Mars Colonial, Jessamyn reached for a second evening water packet and guzzled it gratefully.

  It was only as she crossed from fatigue into the liminal stage preceding sleep that it occurred to her the scratch in her throat might be an indicator of air filter malfunction.

  27

  WATER-WEIGHT

  The desert
looked much as Pavel remembered it from childhood. Browns and tans, pinks and peaches, and everywhere, dirt. He brought the ship down to the east of the San Bernardino mountains where Brian Wallace assured him, despite appearances, a small community flourished. Observing the terrain, Pavel wondered how anything could flourish here. He still found the desert beautiful, but it appeared threatening as well to his now-adult eyes. There were few signs of water—a handful of shriveled-looking trees—Joshua trees, he recalled, and small desiccated shrubs which clung to the ground as if shrinking from the desert sun.

  Then there was the additional and invisible danger of radioactivity—the real reason no one lived here anymore. Pavel had already applied tattoos which would keep a count of the daily doses of radiation taken in by the party of five, but he had no really effective counter-remedy to offer. Modern medicine’s best treatment consisted of avoiding places such as this. It troubled Pavel. He could only hope their stay would be of short duration.

  “Astonishing resemblance to your planet, eh?” said Brian Wallace to Ethan and Harpreet.

  “It is what our world might be,” replied Harpreet. “With adequate water.”

  “Hmm,” mused Wallace. “Looks a wee bit lacking in water to me.”

  “Let’s have a look round,” suggested Pavel, peering out the window before pushing upon the hatch.

  A blast of heat, fierce and dry, entered the cabin of the craft.

  “Gracious,” murmured Harpreet.

  Wallace laughed. “A person underestimates the intensity of the heat,” he said. “It’s like one of those heat-blowers the barber uses aimed straight at the face, isn’t it?”

  Pavel leapt ahead, reaching down to grab a small rock. He fingered it for a moment, savoring the rough surface, the heat it had already captured, and then he threw it as far as he could, listening for the satisfying thunk.

  Ethan, all the while consulting the screen on his chair, spoke to the group. “I believe this direction will lead us most swiftly to encounter the residents of the area,” he said, pointing to the right.

  Pavel rejoined his companions and the five ambled toward an outcropping of what looked like hillocks.

  “They’ve no notion of proper houses out here, do they?” asked Brian Wallace.

  “Proper in such an environment would of necessity differ from what would be considered proper in most other locations,” replied Ethan.

  Pavel grinned. Jessamyn’s brother could interject unintended humor into any situation.

  They crested a tiny rise. Ethan, pointing ahead and left, said, “The dark spot is the entrance to a domicile.”

  “Hands loose at our sides, then,” said Wallace. “Don’t look threatening.”

  Pavel pulled his hands from where he’d stuffed them in his pockets.

  As they marched toward the dark opening in the ground, something diminutive emerged from the space. Something human. A small child, shouting.

  “Renard, Renard, Renard!” the child cried. “Alice said you weren’t coming back but I knew she was wrong and I told her so a thousand times and now she’s going to have to—”

  Abruptly, the small boy stopped running and shouting some ten or twelve meters away. He stared at the strangers. “You’re not Renard.” For a brief moment his body language suggested tears. Then he placed tiny fists upon his tiny hips and demanded, “Who are you?”

  “Friends,” replied Harpreet. “Or, rather, we hope to become friends. Is there an adult about, child? With whom we might speak?”

  The boy turned tail and dashed back to where he’d come from. Pavel beheld a rough-hewn set of stairs leading belowground, looking much as though they had been carved by winds. Wallace strode forward, calling out a halloo which went unanswered.

  “Well, I suppose it’s wait outside, then?” asked Brian Wallace.

  “That would be our least-threatening course of action,” replied Harpreet.

  A moment later, the small boy reappeared mid-way up the stairs. “Come inside,” he shouted before disappearing below once more.

  Pavel took a step toward the entrance and the others followed. They seemed to have entered a residence, but no one appeared to greet them. Pavel was at the point of asking aloud if anyone were home when Wallace cried out.

  “Well, isn’t that hospitable?” he asked with delight. A basin of water sat upon a counter, surrounded by small drink cups.

  “No,” called Dr. Zaifa just as Brian prepared to dip one of the cups into the basin.

  “Nay?” asked Wallace, his hand halfway to the water.

  “It’s not ours,” she said simply. Turning to Ethan, with whom she’d been forming a sort of friendship, Dr. Zaifa asked, “Where you’re from, would it be bad manners to take a drink from someone’s home?”

  “It would be unthinkable,” murmured Harpreet.

  “Wet rations are assigned per person,” added Ethan. “One does not simply drink a ration belonging to someone else. It would be considered theft.”

  Pavel restrained Wallace, shaking his head. “We don’t drink. Not unless it’s offered. This is a desert, man.”

  A woman stepped forward as if emerging from the wall. Dressed in the same tans and browns of the desert, she might have been standing there all along.

  “You’re not thieves, then,” she said. “So what are you?”

  “We’re visitors,” said Pavel.

  “Greetings, friend,” said Brian Wallace.

  From a shadowy corner of the room, a man emerged to join the woman.

  “I see no friends here,” grunted the man. “I see intruders—two young, one old, one fat, and one cripple.”

  Wallace chuckled softly, patting his belly.

  Pavel, however, took offense at the man’s use of cripple to describe Ethan. “This is how you greet strangers? With insults?”

  “There is no offense in his descriptions,” said Ethan. “They are accurate, however incomplete.”

  “Sir, we apologize for entering your dwelling without permission,” said Dr. Zaifa. “There was a child—”

  “It ain’t my place,” said the man. “It’s hers.”

  “Where’d you come from?” asked the woman.

  “Here and there,” said Wallace, smiling pleasantly.

  “You’d best see the Shirff, then,” she responded. “C’mon. Follow me. Roy? You just make sure as they do.”

  Roy grinned, placing one hand upon a knife stuck through his belt. The boy, emerging from under the table where the water rested, stared at the strangers with wide eyes.

  “What’s a cripple, Roy?” asked the young boy, skipping alongside the man.

  “It’s when a feller can’t pull his own water-weight,” replied Roy.

  Pavel was on the verge of snapping an angry retort, but Ethan placed a hand upon Pavel’s arm and shook his head no.

  Pavel contented himself with clenching and unclenching his fists instead. It had been two years since he’d thrown a punch, and that had been a mistake, but he felt as though this situation warranted one. He’d met some intelligent people working in hospitals, and Ethan outsmarted any of them. The Marsian could more than pull his own water-weight.

  “I saw them first,” said the boy, skipping ahead to stare at the strangers. “I thought it was Renard coming home.”

  “Hush, Samuel,” said the woman. “It’s not proper to speak of him.”

  “I know,” said the child, head hanging to one side. “But I’ll still think about him, even if he decides not to—”

  “Hush!” said the woman again.

  The “Shirff” being apparently out to parts unknown for the morning, the five visitors were invited to bide their time awaiting him in an underground chamber similar to the one they’d left, but with a gated passage.

  “We didn’t do anything,” muttered Pavel.

  “It’s much the same welcome ye might expect if ye came unexpected to me cousin’s island,” replied Wallace.

  “The Isle of Skye?” asked Pavel.

  �
�Nay, me cousin the chieftain runs Madeira and a few other wee islands, she does. As Head of Clan Wallace, she’s very fussy about the security of those she oversees,” Wallace explained.

  Pavel grunted in response and then looked over to the holoscreen Ethan had pulled up. “What’s that?” he asked his Marsian friend.

  “I am examining schematics detailing the consumption, regulation, and reclamation of water in Yucca,” replied Ethan.

  “That’s … the name of this place?” asked Pavel. “Yucca?”

  “That is correct,” said Ethan.

  Roy entered with someone new. “This here’s the Shirff,” he said. “Rise out of respect, now.”

  Wallace, Pavel, Harpreet, and Kazuko rose. Ethan paused and then moved his chair several inches higher, which caused the Shirff to chuckle.

  “Greetings, strangers,” he said. Then, turning to the two desert-dwellers, he asked, “Will you stand witness to my conversation with the new arrivals, Roy and Marie?”

  The two nodded.

  Samuel let out a loud sigh.

  “And you, too, Samuel,” added the Shirff before returning his attention to the visitors. “Now then, what brings you to the desert?”

  Harpreet presented their interest in requisitioning a deep-space satellite dish, Wallace adding his willingness to finance the endeavor.

  The Shirff nodded. “You didn’t happen upon us accidentally, then.”

  “Nay,” said Brian Wallace. “Me cousin’s done business with ye in the past. Do ye know the name of Cameron Wallace?”

  The Shirff pulled absently upon his substantial mustache. “Well, sure I know who Cameron Wallace is. We built a radio system for the clan chief not three months ago.”

  “I’d heard as much,” replied Brian. “She spoke well of the workmanship. However, I’ll not hide from ye that she and I are not on the best terms at present. I’m as great a disappointment to her as an empty whiskey bottle is to a sober man.”

  “I don’t see as that should stand in the way of our doing business with you in the meantime,” said the Shirff. “Like as not the two of you will patch things up before long. You’re family. We all need one another in times like these.”