Three minutes later, the big hatch opened, exposing the Martian landscape before Suzanne. As she gently engaged the electric drive motor, the MAT began its long journey south into the unknown.
It moved sluggishly at first, then, as if it had found its legs, it began to move outside the airlock dome. It pulled onto the desert illuminated a ruby red by the dim Martian sunrise.
To nearly everyone’s surprise, Kerry walked up to the side of the MAT in his space suit and rapped on the window. It seemed to surprise Suzanne as much as anyone and as she saw the figure rapping on the window, she jumped. “Bob!” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Just wanted to walk you out the gate,” he replied, holding one of Brinker’s shotguns in the air.
Suzanne laughed loudly. “Ok, partner. I’ll ride and you can walk.”
The assembled colonists inside heard the exchange through the speakers and cheered.
“Going offline now,” she said as she switched to direct communications with Kerry, which was followed by a collective moan from the crowd.
Peter looked at Brinker and gave a thumbs up. If Covenant were going to ambush her on the way out of BC1, he was going to have a nasty surprise.
Kerry walked alongside the MAT until he reached the outskirts of the camp. There he stopped and the colonists watched as the suited figure tenderly touch the window of the MAT. The overloaded vehicle slowly pulled away as Kerry waved. He stood there, slowly waving his arm until the MAT disappeared over a nearby ridge.
31
nside the MAT, Suzanne watched Kerry recede through her side mirror, while keeping a careful eye on the older MAT track ahead of her, radiating away from the camp. She would try and remain on the worn path for as long as she could, making the best possible speed as she departed BC1. But the well-worn trail disappeared just 20 minutes after departure. Taking advantage of BC1’s tall antenna sitting atop the launch tower at the Crippen Spaceport, Suzanne stopped and radioed back to base.
“BC1, MAT1, over.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve reached the end of our last trail south now. I’m going to begin the transit phase.”
“Godspeed, MAT1.”
Suzanne sighed deeply. In less than an hour, BC1 would have disappeared not only from her view, but from her radio range as well. Having only a line-of-sight transmitter, BC1 was about to fade into the distance for real. From then on, they would have to communicate by the difficult, arduous method Toon had worked out through the remaining navigational satellites. In order to do so, Suzanne would have to stop the MAT, rig the navigation receiver and burst transmitter, and then decode its reply through the onboard computer. They would have only sketchy communications at best.
Suzanne looked ahead of her into the unforgiving and hard Martian desert called Elysium. As the red dot of a sun rose over the horizon to her left, she eased the MAT’s electric drive engine ahead and onto un-trodden sand. From this point on, she knew her eyes would see things no other human eyes had ever seen directly.
The trick to navigating the deserts of Mars was straightforward – avoid the rocks. The navigation routine was to try and avoid as many as you could. Since it was impossible to miss the rocks altogether, the plan was to run over as few as possible and only the smallest ones. Yet, since the MAT had four rather large tires, the idea was to do the best you could with the rocks you had no choice but to roll over. The MAT was designed for this kind of abuse, and while it was not an unforeseen hazard, certainly the extent and incredible duration of this task was never in the designer’s wildest dreams.
Inside the squat, fat MAT, the seats were designed as suspended web affairs built for day trips – not for long, relatively endless, straight-line jaunts across the continental expanse. Nor was it designed for long term comfort. The MAT’s suspension system worked very well at protecting the vehicle from damage by repeated encounters with rocks, but the human was jolted with each one.
Not only was Suzanne tossed, rattled and jerked continuously, but she had to maintain extreme vigilance as the MAT rolled along the desert to avoid any rock passing beneath or even nearby that could snag or cut the fragile, thin skin of the vehicle. Any cut, gash or tear would be instantly fatal to the mission and ruin the gas and energy balance, making it impossible to repressurize it at a later date. It could also cut or tear wiring bundles, optical cables or hydraulic lines.
If the MAT lost pressure permanently from a puncture that could not be repaired, Suzanne could not then remove her pressure suit helmet. Without that ability, she would not be able to refill her suit's water reservoir or change out her carbon dioxide scrubber canister on a daily basis. Within 30 hours of latching her helmet, she would die.
In light of the gas and energy balance, the BC1 engineers had worked out a series of concentric circles radiating away from BC1. The inner circle was labeled, “TRANSIT PHASE”, or the beginning of the non-surveyed and unmapped regions. The next circle was drawn and it was called “ASSISTED RETURN”, when the energy of the MAT was low enough that a safe return was not possible without another standard MAT ready to meet it somewhere in the middle. If beyond this circle the MAT was disabled, not even a rescue vehicle could reach her. Another ring further out was labeled “NO RETURN” when no safe return was possible at all, even if the MAT turned around and made the run back in the direction of BC1. Beyond that was the distance to the meeting point with the Soviet SAR. If anything happened to the MAT beyond that point, any rescue by either Shturmovoi or BC1 was out of the question.
By mid-sol, Suzanne had reached a set of small canyons that were well marked on her map. She began to thread her way through them, first driving down into the canyon and between the walls, rising hundreds of feet over her head. As far as Martian canyons were concerned, these were definitely small fry, but to her, they were very impressive, dwarfing her and the MAT and casting cold, frightening shadows before her.
As the sol wore on, and she threaded and turned her way through the canyon walls like a huge maze, Suzanne becameg intensely uncomfortable. The seat was nothing more than a nylon-webbed affair draped and fastened around an aluminum tube frame. She was strapped in while dressed in her pressurized spacesuit, gear jammed in all around her so that she could barely move. While the Martian gravity was just a third that of earth, she had become accustomed to it and the constant jolting about was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Even worse, she had a problem with an ingenious system the engineers had devised just before the trip. They had come up with a system where she could use the bathroom in her suit for five sols, if necessary, without changing. It was not working as they advertised, and it was starting to become annoying to the point that all the danger around her seemed inconsequential. Finally, between a cut in a very large canyon wall, she stopped the MAT.
In the full light of the Martian sun, she unstrapped herself from the vehicle, turned the drive motor to idle, unlatched the door and stepped outside. Since the mission called for full, continuous pressurization of her spacesuit for safety, the MAT itself was not pressurized during the drive.
As she stepped out of the MAT, Suzanne looked around her, supremely self-conscious about what she needed to do. Then she laughed at her own sense of paranoia, standing in this canyon where she assured herself that no human eyes had ever gazed. She gripped the crotch of her suit with both hands and straightened the equipment out that had been pinching her for so many kilometers. Finally she breathed a long sigh of relief. Comfort at last! While it was not exactly the most lady-like movement, it sure made all the difference.
No one had ever discussed stopping and getting out of the vehicle at any point in the mission planning. But it felt so incredibly, deliciously good, Suzanne decided to risk it every two to three hours. Then she climbed back in and resumed her traverse.
Just before the first sunset, she pulled away from the canyon and onto another expanse of desert. Here on the broad and empty plain, she would be forced to stop for the night. She planned to press
urize the MAT for 11 hours to enjoy dinner, the first scheduled communications with BC1, a movie on a portable entertainment system Ashley had given her and hopefully get some much needed sleep. Her entire body felt like a bowl of gelatin.
As she finally stopped, the sky darkened perceptibly and quickly. With little atmosphere to scatter the light, night fell suddenly on Mars.
Inside the MAT, Suzanne was dead tired. She allowed herself the opportunity to step outside one more time to stretch her legs. As she did so, the darkness was nearly complete. There was no moonlight as on earth – tiny Phobos was like a brilliant satellite, at best, streaking unceremoniously across the deep blackness of space over the desert. All she could see outside was illuminated by the interior lights of the MAT and some nearly ineffectual starlight. As Suzanne adjusted her suit around her again, she did a few deep knee bends.
As she turned her faceplate to the ground while stretching her neck muscles, she could see a faint pattern in the sand. Stunned, she looked back carefully, moving her faceplate as close to the ground as she dared. And there it was – what appeared to be an unmistakable vehicle track left in the sand. It seemed to have been weathered over time, but it was faintly visible nonetheless. And it was at least as wide as the MAT’s track, so it was not left by a passing probe from decades earlier.
Suzanne bent over and moved the sand with her fingers. It was a light track, and certainly could not have been there for very long, as the winds of Mars constantly move the sand around. With what she knew about Mars, it could have been there for sols, weeks or even months, but certainly not years.
She stood up suddenly and looked around her in the pitch darkness of the southern Elysium plain. Everything was quiet, black and very dark.
So, she was not the first intelligent eyes that had seen this terrain after all. And with this certain knowledge, she could not suppress an involuntary shiver that ran down her entire body. Was she now alone on the deserts of Mars? She had no way of knowing as she retreated to the relative security of the MAT and latched the hatch tightly down. The next thing she had to determine was what to tell BC1.
She decided to tell them nothing. Peter had assured her that she had total command autonomy on the mission, and so she made her decision. If she changed her mind later, they would be there. She reasoned that the tracks could have been from an earlier Soviet mission years before that had somehow been sheltered from the wind. What she knew for sure was that she did not want Bob or anyone else to worry over inconsequential things that no one would be able to do anything about anyway. Besides, she reasoned, ultimately the mission was more important than her own life and nothing would cause her to turn back.
So Suzanne settled down to pressurizing the MAT and eating. Since she had not eaten for nearly 12 hours, she was totally ravenous. After dinner she set up the communications gear and, right on schedule, she typed in her first report, just a dozen pre-decided words that required over an hour to upload. Her message ended in a sequence of numbers: b1219X5oo. When the message was returned from BC1, it ended in the same sequence: b1219X5oo. It was a code just between her and Bob. As she saw it come across her screen, she sighed and smiled the secret smile known only to lovers. All was well, at least for the moment.
Suzanne skipped the movie and turned the lights out in the MAT. She was totally exhausted and needed the extra two hours. She thought about Bob in the darkness for the first few minutes, then about the tracks just outside. Before she fell asleep, she squinted outside the window once more. Out there in the darkness, where the canopy of bright, steady-state starlight met the black horizon, all was not right. She just knew it. She felt and feared the disorder of it. She hated its uncertainty and she faced it through the thin plastic window, one on one. Whatever it was, she had no control over it anyway, she decided, just as she dropped off into a fitful sleep. Her dreams were full of endless, bouncing motion and sand creatures that left strange tracks wherever they went.
The next morning, the computer awoke her with a shrill alarm. Suzanne could see the sunlight approaching as the Martian horizon glowed in a thin, red line. She immediately sat as upright as she could, her muscles aching and complaining with the cramped sleeping quarters. She ate a quick breakfast, then filled her suit water bottle up with fresh water all the way to the top. After that task was done, she refilled her suit’s odor filtering canister with fresh chemicals. With the rigged bathroom system installed in her suit, the odor canister was a must.
She then reconnected the insanely difficult communications gear once again and broadcast a short message back to BC1 through the navigation satellite that she was about to get underway for the sol. Afterwards she turned on the MAT’s compressor and sucked the vehicle’s atmosphere back into a storage bottle. At 98% vacuum, she popped the hatch and stepped out onto the Martian desert to stretch her legs one last time before starting again. As she did, she noticed the tracks she thought she had seen the evening before were gone.
Suzanne breathed a deep sight of relief, then laughed at herself for being so paranoid as to actually see tracks deep in the Martian desert where no human had even been before. But as she looked closer, she saw that their disappearance was only an illusion. She realized that in the light of the morning, they only appeared to have gone away, but were, in fact, still there. By looking from an exact angle, she could see they were indeed still present – a very, exceedingly light, nearly non-existent trace of a track. If she had not stood last evening with the MAT’s lights at the precise angle they were, she would have missed them altogether.
In the gathering light, Suzanne attempted to see where they led or where they came from. But it was impossible. Without a careful, patient, study of the sand at just the right angle, they could not be seen at all.
She looked all around her again… nothing but sand, rocks, desert and dunes. She was alone on a vast desert, the nearest humans hundreds of kilometers distant. At least, that was the story her well-ordered mind tried to tell her. Her eyes, on the other hand, were telling her quite another story.
Shaking it off, she stepped inside the MAT, latched the hatch and powered it up for the sol. The electric motor whined as it came up to speed. As soon as the tachometer’s light turned green, Suzanne shifted it into forward motion, starting a full 15 minutes before her scheduled time of departure. She had stopped only because it was unsafe in the darkness to navigate the Martian plains in the MAT. But now she had plenty of light and would need all the kilometers she could get. This morning she would cross the “ASSISTED RETURN” line and this evening, just before sunset, she was scheduled to cross the “NO RETURN” line. By nightfall, she would be beyond anyone’s rescue.
32
he second sol’s traverse was much easier than the first’s. Suzanne’s eyes traced her path for safe passage, but at the same time she continuously looked for more tracks. She saw nothing and soon got a headache for her efforts. The navigation satellite had her well ahead of schedule by noon when she stopped to rest for 20 minutes and stretch. The size and number of rocks had dropped off until the MAT hardly lurched at all and she made much higher speeds than any of the mission planners had anticipated.
In the afternoon, she continued to make good progress and by her evening stretch, Suzanne had gained an astonishing 20 percent on her trip schedule. She smiled and slapped the skin of the MAT with her gloved hand. Bob and Fabian would be very pleased. As for her, she could think of nothing better than waiting for the Soviet SAR for four hours while watching the movies that Ashley had sent along. The road had been smooth the entire sol; Mars had been kind.
By nightfall, the small sun dipped below the western horizon and Suzanne could make out a rolling line of hills due south of her position. It was a ripple in the Elysium plain called Cerberus. It was not a mountain range, but a geological wrinkle that passed directly across her path. Cerberus appeared as but a smudge on the southern Elysium plain from orbit, but from the ground it was an elevated, chaotic,
boulder strewn mess an
d there was no way around it. She had a satellite-view plan for getting through the individual geologic formations that made up the Cerebus, but as the earliest lunar and planetary explorers had discovered, the view from the surface was much different than the view from orbit. It was everyone’s prayer that Cerberus would not be as bad as it could be, and the mission planners had calculated a 35 percent reduction in forward speed as she passed through the various chaotic formations of the Cerberus labeled the Tartarus Montes and the Tartarus Colles. But on the other side, following her fourth night, the Soviet SAR was scheduled to rendezvous with her there.
Suzanne repeated her stretch of the night before and looked for more tracks outside the window of the MAT. There were none to be seen. She was so elated at her progress that she ate slowly, savoring her food, and then actually watched a movie after the communications procedure. But just as she turned off the interior lights of the MAT and began to drift off to sleep, the apprehensive feelings returned. Suzanne stared out the window of the bulbous MAT at the brilliant stars studding the velvet and absolute darkness. Sleep escaped her. The uneasiness revisited and invaded her mind. She lay there, knowing sleep was essential and watched as tiny Phobos sailed, as it had before, quickly across the Martian sky. She forced her eyelids to shut. Tomorrow was going to be the test, and she had to be ready for it. In the dark Martian night, the same dreams returned with an unending, continuous motion and peopled with beasts and their funny feet that marred the red desert as they left strange, indelible tracks in her uneasy mind.
Suzanne awoke early the next morning, determined to begin as soon as time and light would allow. She planned to proceed a full hour ahead of schedule and get the earliest start possible. She wanted most of all to be the first to arrive at her rendezvous point and planned a great feast with a movie while she waited for the Soviet to meet her. At first possible light, the MAT lurched forward in its initial motion of the sol.
Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium Page 36
