Pale Mars

by Garnett Elliott

  "Yegor, Gennady," Nadezhda spoke over the com, "suit up and meet me in the hold."

  The two men were still dressing when she climbed down into the Sokol's womb-like cargo area. Gennady's body looked lean as a stoat's, while Yegor, approaching the career-ending age of forty, was paunchy. She pulled her own vacc suit off the rack and began the tedious process of slipping inside.

  "So Alyona's staying in orbit?" Gennady said, snapping the seals on his gauntlets. He'd been sulky ever since his tantrum in the hab.

  "For now."

  Yegor grunted. "Won't that make a rescue take longer? We'll have to shuttle survivors back and forth in the Volga."

  "We need to assess the situation first. There's been no radio contact with Chrysetown for weeks."

  To punctuate the seriousness of that statement, she took a key from around her neck and opened the weapon locker. Four Topchev pistols lay encased in foam. Gennady's eyes brightened when she handed him his, but Yegor only frowned. "I thought this was supposed to be a diplomatic mission."

  "Standard precaution."

  "Mars doesn't have many dangerous predators, kapitan. I remember reading—"

  "Thank you for the reminder, Mr. Bortnik. You'll both be pleased to know we won't be needing cold weather gear. The vacc suit's heating elements will suffice. And a full helmet isn't necessary on the surface, either. Just a respirator."

  Yegor looked dubious, but made no further comment. They finished suiting up and double-checked each other's seals before crawling through a connecting tube to the ship's compact hangar. The Volga lay atop her launch cradle; a sleek landing craft with airfoils designed for thin atmospheres. Nadezhda would've preferred her old boat the Dniepr, but that was being refitted on Luna.

  She opened the canopy. The Volga's fission pile had already been primed, sending a powerful vibration through the cockpit as they climbed inside. Seals closed and hissed. Nadezhda strapped herself into a six-point harness before activating her helmet's com.

  "Alyona, hit the doors."

  Steel valves at the rear of the hangar split open, revealing star-flecked blackness. The Volga's atomic jets fired at a fraction of their power. Mars swam into view as the craft slid free, a scarlet curve so close it overwhelmed the senses. The dark crisscrossing of the planet's ancient canals stood out clear as the veins on an anatomy chart.

  "It must be summer in the northern hemisphere," Yegor said, craning his head. "Look down there."

  A spiral-shaped cloud radiated out from the uppermost pole. Whorls of white, reaching for the equator. "Axial tilt causes the ice at the caps to melt," he explained, "releasing carbon dioxide in great storms …"

  Nadezhda let him rattle for a while. "Gennady, try the radio channels. Check for weak signals, anomalies, anything we can home in on. Otherwise we'll have to spot the colony from the air."

  "Aye, kapitan." Pulsing static, punctuated by hisses and pops filled the cockpit.

  She angled the Volga's nose for entry. "You're quite knowledgeable about Mars, Yegor. Have you been here before?"

  "Never, kapitan. You?"

  "The refueling station at Deimos is as far as I've gotten. There's not much call for visiting a world on its deathbed."

  She opened the main rockets at a quarter-power. The gravity well of Mars reached up and grabbed them.

  "Once we hit atmosphere," she warned, "it's bound to get choppy."

  Orange-red traceries appeared along the wings. Seconds later a fireball engulfed the canopy. The Volga roared and shook, but Nadezhda, a veteran of Earth re-entries, found the pyrotechnics unimpressive. The flames tapered off minutes later; they'd punched through to hazy clouds. Below sprawled a sea of russet-colored dunes.

  "Looks like the Tharsis region," Yegor said. "We must be cl—"

  A wind-shear gusted from nowhere and struck the Volga like a fist. She tumbled sideways, careening into an uncontrolled spin.

  The cockpit somersaulted. With real gravity tugging at her stomach, Nadezhda fought back nausea. Her training as a fighter pilot took over. She lowered landing gear and raised wing flaps. Increased drag slowed the craft; she got the nose up and the Volga wobbled into a semi-stable trajectory. Quick as it had struck, the howling crosswind vanished.

  The radio chose that moment to cut in with a clear signal. A woman's voice crooned in English, accompanied by guitar.

  Oh bury me not, on the lone prairie

  These words came low, and mournfully

  From the pallid lips, of a youth who lay

  On the bloody ground, at the close of day

  Gooseflesh lifted along Nadezhda's arms. For a moment she felt she might be anywhere, but not fifty kilometers above the surface of Mars.

  "Where's that coming from?" she said. "Is it the colony?"

  Gennady peered at the radio panel and shook his head. "High orbit. Must be the Deimos station."

  "Then we do this the hard way. Eyes sharp."

  * * *

  They traveled over sand-swept gullies and dimpled mountains of vermillion, past city-sized craters, dead volcanoes, and rifts so deep they seemed to drop all the way to the planet's core. Nadezhda kept one wary eye out the cockpit and one on the fuel gauge. The terrain gradually flattened, easing visibility. She found a dry canal incising its way across the plains and followed it, an old trick aviators had used with railroad tracks during the Great Patriotic War. "This has to be the Chryse Planitia," Yegor said at last. "I'd wager my tea ration on it."

  Ten minutes later they spotted a cluster of dark shapes too geometric to be a rock formation. And just in time; a kilometers high curtain of roiling red haze was marching from the west, threatening to envelope the landscape.

  "I'm taking us down." Nadezhda banked the Volga into a tight spiral.

  Chrysetown didn't look like much from the air. Plastic pressure-domes enclosed several buildings of drab concrete, with tubes connecting them. A storm wall of rammed red Martian dirt encircled the complex. Closer, and they could see damage. One of the domes had exploded, its hexagonal panels and metal girders curling outwards. The steel skeleton of a communications tower, badly charred, canted at a steep angle.

  "That explains the radio silence," Yegor said.

  Gennady forced a smile. "Maybe the Yanks have problems with rebellious colonies, too."

  The Volga dropped towards a circle of blackened concrete. The landing area, or what remained of it. A twisted derrick, probably a launch gantry, had toppled slantwise across the pad. No other craft were visible as the Volga touched down, her retros kicking up a cloud of black ash.

  Nadezhda shut down the main pile. She radioed Alyona via tight-beam they'd made planetfall.

  "I'm going to unseal the canopy in a moment," she said, removing her bulky helmet, "but don't try breathing the air au natural for too long. Without respirators you'll fall unconscious in ten minutes."

  She took one of the spidery masks from a rack and slipped it over nose and mouth. Once her crewmates had fitted theirs she flipped a toggle; the canopy hissed open, admitting a spray of fine grit. Martian winds growled as they clambered down the ladder. The lesser gravity might've felt more comfortable if she hadn't spent months under weak centrifugal force. As it was, she barely noticed the difference when her boots touched the pad.

  "Not as cold as I thought," Gennady said.

  "Wait till nightfall." Nadezhda glanced around the empty landing space. She felt a mild headache tingling from the drop in pressure, and a sense of vertigo at having open sky overhead. Her respirator condensed the Martian air but couldn't change its taste; desiccated, with a papery tinge suggesting bone-dust and moth powder. In a word: dead.

  Then she looked up.

  The sky gleamed bright turquoise, but only near the horizon. At higher altitudes the air thinned, blueness giving way to purple, then black void at the apex, with an iris of winking stars.

  "Kapitan," Yegor said, "there's shrapnel everywhere."

  She brought her attention back to the ground. Jagged bits of charre
d metal had been lodged in the concrete, jutting up like plants.

  "Another explosion," Gennady said. "I bet they had a rocket, right here, and it took out the gantry."

  All three of them checked the Geiger counters in their suits' wrist array. Only the Volga's pile registered a slow metronome click; the rest of the pad was clean.

  "Americans still use primitive chemical rockets," Yegor said. "If the colony was keeping an emergency craft in reserve, likely these are the remains."

  Nadezhda eyed the ruined com tower in the distance. "No radio, and no means of escape. As if someone had wanted to trap them here."

  The sky darkened. A veil of sand from the encroaching storm slid over the sun, looking like a dwarf version of itself among alien clouds. Winds skirled. Past the wreckage of the gantry lay an airlock, crushed on one side, but still accessible. A tube connected it to a nearby dome.

  "I feel like someone's watching us," Gennady said.

  Yegor nodded at the Volga. "Kapitan, do you think it's wise to leave her here, unguarded? She's our only link to the Sokol. If the colony's rocket was sabotaged …"

  "A good point. Gennady, are you going to throw another fit if I order you to stay behind?"

  "No, kapitan." She could've sworn he licked his lips, beneath the respirator's mask. "I don't like this place."

  "Good. You can wait out the storm in the cockpit. When it gets dark, turn the floodlights on. If anything approaches with hostile intent, you have my permission to shoot."

  He paused. "Kapitan?"

  "Yes?"

  "You said anything. Not anyone."

  "That I did, Mr. Nureyev. Keep your com channels open."

  The engineer turned and clambered back up into the Volga.

  With a nod to Yegor, Nadezhda paced over to the airlock, careful to avoid the bigger pieces of shrapnel. Some type of dried residue crunched beneath her boots. The storm descended, howling, but the colony's earthen walls blunted most of its force. Mid-day changed to dusk in seconds. Behind them, Gennady had already snapped on the Volga's floodlights. She could see his silhouette up in the cockpit, waving.

  Yegor chuckled. "Mars has put the frights into him. He claims to be a Sensitive, you know."

  "He is. A Level Two. They had him tested at Vladivostok." She craned her head to examine the airlock. The outer door hung open on a single hinge, but the inner one stood intact. "Unfortunately, he's also an ass."

  "Agreed."

  They squeezed their way past the ruined portal into a three by three-meter chamber. The inner airlock had a small window with light glowing beyond it.

  "They must still have power, at least," Yegor said.

  "A good sign. They'd freeze at night without it. Or asphyxiate, when the air compressors went down. Oh, don't tell me … that door's manually operated."

  Yegor examined the locking mechanism. "Afraid so. Risky to open, given the pressure difference."

  "You want to look for another way in?"

  "Not during a storm."

  She activated her mike. "Gennady, we're about to open a pressure door. If we come bowling out of the airlock, you'll know why."

  "Aye, kapitan."

  They braced their shoulders against the door. On a three count, Yegor hit the release mechanism. A violent pop sounded and a deluge of warm air rushed past, shoving them backwards. After a couple seconds the force slackened. Yegor slipped through, followed by Nadezhda. With two sets of hands pulling, they got the door shut again.

  Gennady's voice crackled from the wrist com. "You alright, kapitan?"

  "We're inside. I'll contact you if we find something significant."

  They stood at one end of a long tunnel, similar to a boarding corridor at an airport. Carpet covered the floor, and a slideway ran down the center. Soft music played, almost muffling the wind outside. A section of wall close to them flickered, becoming a curved, floor to ceiling telescreen. English letters scrolled up:

  WELCOME TO CHRYSETOWN

  HOME OF THE MARTIAN TOWERS

  ***

  ***

  ***

  AFFORDABLE TOUR PACKAGES AVAILABLE

  ENJOY ICE COLD COCA-COLA DURING YOUR STAY!

  Yegor shook his head. "Capitalists."

  "This colony … it's a tourist attraction, isn't it?"

  "What else would bring people to Mars? Not much here in the way of fissionables, or heavy metals. Not like Mercury. All this planet really has is its ruins."

  She tugged her respirator aside and took a quick breath. No tang of contaminants; no gray spots at the corners of her vision. "I think the air's safe."

  Yegor tried a breath of his own, concurred. They removed masks.

  A short walk took them to the far end of the tunnel, opening onto a dome—thankfully intact. Clear plastic panels kept pressure in and let a grayish-amber haze of storm light filter down. Five meters from the entrance, a large fountain thick with algae bubbled. Nadezhda wrinkled her nose in pleasure; after months of breathing recirculated oxygen, the plant-freshened air smelled like a meadow breeze. Potted ferns and dwarf palm trees further enhanced the illusion.

  "Capitalists can get some things right," she said.

  "They appear to have difficulty with colors, though." Yegor nodded towards the dome's sole building. Brick plaza surrounded a concrete, two-storied structure, painted, for some reason, in ultramarine blue and bright orange.

  She cupped her hand around her mouth and called out in careful English: "Hello!"

  Silence. Yegor tried a moment later. "Anyone here?"

  A light flickered in the garish building's second story window, then extinguished.

  "I think we may have found our survivors," she said. "Keep your hands away from your weapon, unless I say otherwise."

  "That would be my normal inclination, kapitan."

  She approached the building slowly, arms out at her sides. A sign over the front entrance read:

  HOWARD JOHNSON'S OF MARS

  Below that, blue neon flashed VACANCY.

  Yegor stopped short. "Look at the windows."

  What Nadezhda had first taken to be bars or grills of some sort covered every window on the ground floor. But now, closer, she realized the pieces of metal hastily welded together were something else.

  Christian crosses.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The hotel's glass doors slid open as soon as they stepped near, revealing an orange and blue lobby transformed into a redoubt. A low wall of stacked rubble cut the room in half. Turquoise curtains had been hung across the opposite side, allowing someone to peer out without being seen. Nadezhda held up empty hands. "Attention! I am Kapitan Gura, cosmonaut with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My crew and I are here to rescue you. We have access to medicine, food stores, and transportation off-planet. Please show yourselves, so we can render assistance."

  A section of curtain fluttered. The movement was so faint it could've been an air current.

  "Wait here," she told Yegor.

  The rubble wall came up to her abdomen. She braced herself at the top and climbed over. The curtain fluttered again; a slender metal cylinder poked out from the folds. It uttered a sharp cough just as she leapt aside. A shower of crystalline fragments exploded from the cylinder's mouth, slow enough she could see them glinting like a flight of glass bees. The shards missed Yegor by centimeters, to embed themselves in a section of wall.

  She reached down and grabbed the weapon. Yanked. Out came a hand curled around an elaborate trigger mechanism. Pivoting, thrusting her shoulder up into her would-be shooter's armpit, she bent at the waist. Her sambo throw sent a slight male figure sailing over her shoulder to crash against the rubble wall.

  Yegor already had his Topchev out and trained. She glanced down at the strange gun still clutched in her hand; a brass tube, or some metal like it, carved with a serpentine motif.

  "Hold it right there, little lady."

  The curtains parted. Out stepped a tall, dusky-skinned man wearing a cowboy hat and brandishi
ng a sword he could barely hold. The blade was too long for his height, and the hilt too wide for him to grip properly. She recognized it as a Martian relic from pictures of a similar one she'd seen in Pravda.

  "What we have here," the man said, "if you'll pardon the irony, is a Mexican standoff." He touched the brim of his hat. "My name's Ray. Ray Ramos. I've already heard yours."

  She nodded towards the man she'd just thrown, in the process of regaining his feet. "Your friend tried to shoot me."

  "Well, Jimmy's always been nervous. Makes for a good sentry. How about you ask the bald guy to lower his fancy gun, and I'll lower my sword?"

  "What about this?" She waggled the brass tube.

  "Ah, I'm not worried about that. Takes fifteen steps to reload the goddamn thing after it's fired."

  She turned to Yegor. "Do it."

  "Can we trust them, kapitan?" he said in Russian.

  "Our mission will be very difficult otherwise."

  Yegor holstered the Topchev. Ramos kept to his part of the bargain and let the sword drop. "You meant all that about rescue, huh?"

  "Yes."

  The part of his forehead visible beneath the big hat furrowed. "I suppose you could've come in here blasting with those energy weapons, you wanted to. I'm not ready to abandon my stake, but I can't speak for the rest of the group. Let's get you inside."

  "Wait a moment." She gestured at the redoubt wall. "What's the purpose of these fortifications? And the crosses on the windows?"

  "It's … well, it's just a bunch of theories, at this point. We don't really know what's going on."

  Jimmy brushed the dust from his pants. Nadezhda realized with a start he was only in his teens. "Can I have my gun back, Miss? I'm sorry for taking a shot at you, but we don't trust russkies much."

  She gave him the strange weapon and he immediately went about reloading it, taking a handful of violet crystals from his pocket and pouring them down the barrel.

  "Our armory blew up," Ramos said, by way of explanation, "so we had to scavenge Martian antiques from the museum."