by Allen Steele
“Oh, yeah, it’s a mess down there…major mess,” Lincoln McGrath said. “Hell of a place to get lost, lemme tell you. Couple’a years ago, I took a National Geographic team through it. One of those guys was a big-shot writer…what’s his name, I can’t remember, wrote a book about it later…and he thought he was ready for it ’cause he’d climbed K2 and been down the Amazon and all that, and I thought he was gonna crap in his suit when one of our air recyclers went on the fritz and we lost track of where we were. But we got out of there all right, of course. I was with them.”
As he spoke, McGrath half-turned around in his seat next to the pilot to peer at Camille Bacquart again. The airship had left Arsia Station about four hours ago, and he hadn’t shut his mouth the entire time, delivering a non-stop prattle of travelogue, trivia, and tall tales while his gaze constantly returned to the young woman seated behind him. Like everyone else, she’d made herself comfortable in the pressurized cabin by unzipping the front of her skinsuit and pulling its top half down around her waist. She wore a black tank-top beneath her EVA gear that she filled out nicely, and McGrath couldn’t seem to be able to take his eyes off her.
Again, Baynes wondered why Jenkins couldn’t have found someone—anyone—else to guide them on this trek. McGrath was a familiar type to him, one of those guys who’d come to Mars because he wanted to pit his machismo against the red planet. Most of the time, they either went home after a couple of years, having discovered that they weren’t as tough as they thought they were, or they got themselves killed in one stupid accident or another that they usually brought upon themselves. Somehow, McGrath had beaten the odds. Almost too big for a skinsuit, with curly black hair tied back behind his neck and a thick beard framing a heavy-featured face, he looked like he would have been comfortable aboard a pirate ship. The only thing out of place were the rimless glasses perched on the bridge of his flat nose; they made him appear a little wiser than he actually was.
Camille paid little attention to him. She was focused almost entirely upon the false-color topographic map she’d pulled up on her pad. “The valley where the lander crashed…it’s quite deep, isn’t it?”
“Miles and miles, sweetheart, miles and miles. It’s…”
“Depends where it actually came down.” Baynes was tired of McGrath dominating the conversation. Leaning forward in his seat, he placed a fingertip on the pad and moved it sideways, causing the map to scroll across the screen. “On average, Ius Chasma is only about three kilometers deep, although in places the floor can be six klicks down. But it’s over 900 kilometers long, and it’s also the most narrow part of the Valles Marineris. So even though we’ve got a rough idea of where the crash site is, getting there is going to be tough.”
“No problem.” McGrath shook his wooly head. “Once we reach Base Camp Three, the rest will be easy. We’ve already got a couple of rovers parked down there, and if the transponder signal wasn’t off too much, the crash site is only about a hundred kilometers east of the camp.”
“A rover,” Camille repeated, and both Baynes and McGrath nodded. “I don’t understand. Wouldn’t it be quicker simply to fly straight to the crash site? This airship…”
“I won’t take you into Ius Chasma.” Emil D’Oro, the pilot, spoke up for the first time. “The wind patterns can be unpredictable. We once lost an airship down there. I don’t want to be the next one.”
“Then a spacecraft…”
“Nope.” McGrath shook his head again. “No can do.” His eyes narrowed as they turned toward Baynes. “You can thank the colonial government for that.”
Bacquart looked at Baynes in disbelief, and he fought an urge to snap at McGrath. “What Link means is that the colonies have strict rules against using rocket vehicles to explore the Valles Marineris. The canyon floors contain native microorganisms which are quite vulnerable, and rocket exhaust could wipe out habitats which have been there for thousands of years. Even using a rover is taking a risk. We may have to stop the vehicle and go the rest of the way on foot, if we come upon a cryptogam field on our way to the crash site.”
“Goddamn nuisance, if you ask me.” McGrath peered at him over the top of his glasses. “I swear, guys like you, there’s times when I wonder whose side you’re on…ours or Earth’s.”
Baynes had heard this sort of thing before. There was a strong sentiment among many settlers that the Seven Colonies should declare independence from Earth and join the Pax Astra, the interplanetary alliance which had been formed among the lunar and orbital colonies. One of their chief complaints was that ConSpace and the Earth governments that supported it had imposed too many rules and regulations upon the Martian settlements, some of which were impediments to the colonies’ economic growth.
This was the first time, though, that he’d heard this charge leveled against an environmental regulation that almost everyone agreed to as being common sense. Was McGrath one of the secessionists, or even a sympathizer?
“I didn’t know that there were two sides,” he said. “Why do you think there are?”
For a moment, it appeared that McGrath was going to argue with him. He merely shrugged, though, as he turned back around his seat. “I’m just sayin’, that’s all,” he murmured, then he rocked back his head and closed his eyes. “Gonna take a nap for awhile. Wake me when we get to the descent station.”
At least he’d finally shut up. But once again, Baynes wondered if Jenkins had made the wrong choice for the guy who’d take him and Bacquart into the canyons.
Descent Station Three was one of six scattered around the rim of Valles Marineris.
Located midway up a long, narrow gorge on the northern side of Ius Chasma, it wasn’t until the airship came in for landing that Baynes saw the base for what it was, little more than an elevated steel platform projecting out over the gorge.
He was surprised to see a rover parked beside the dome. Three figures in skinsuits waited for the airship to touch down. As D’Oro dropped the mooring lines, they trotted forward to grab the ropes and haul them to iron posts hammered into the ground. Once the men signaled the pilot that the lines were secure, D’Oro brought the airship the rest of the way down.
By then, everyone had put their helmets on and closed their suits. A final check to make sure that they’d not forgotten to pressurize their suits, then D’Oro depressurized the cabin. A minute after the single fat tire of the airship’s landing gear bounced across the rocky ground, the pilot popped the portside hatch. Baynes pushed it the rest of the way open and lowered the ladder, then climbed down from the gondola, Bacquart and McGrath behind him.
“Hello, there,” he said to one of the men who’d acted as ground crew. “We weren’t expecting to find anyone here. Thanks for the help.”
“No problem.” He was a young guy, a two-day beard visible through his helmet faceplate. “We were on a survey job when we spotted your ship coming in. Thought you could use a hand.”
“Much obliged, amigo.” McGrath put down the canvas equipment bags he’d carried off the airship, stuck out his hand. “Link McGrath, from Arsia Station.” He didn’t bother introduce his companions, Baynes was annoyed to notice.
The other man hesitated before shaking his hand. “Smith, from Wellstown.” He didn’t introduce his friends either. “Where’re y’all going?”
“Into the gorge, then up the valley.” Baynes stepped forward. “I’m Will Baynes, and this is Camille Bacquart. Did you say you were from Wellstown?”
“Uh-huh,” Smith replied. “Out on a water survey, saw your ship, decided to come over and pitch in.”
His story sounded innocent enough, but nonetheless Baynes became suspicious. True, Wellstown was the nearest place for these men to have come from, a large settlement in the southern part of the Lunae Planum, yet it was over a hundred kilometers from this part of the Valles Marineris. Survey missions undertaken by rovers usually didn’t venture that far from home; beyond seventy-five kilometers, airships were used instead. And the subsurface aquifers w
hich the colonies depended upon for drinking water were seldom, if ever, found in this region; the ancient rivers which helped create the Valles Marineris were long gone, and the last remaining water on Mars was located beneath the rocky terrain of the northern tundra.
Then there was the fact that Smith’s skinsuit lacked a name patch. There was a bald spot on his chest where one appeared to have been recently removed. Why would he want to conceal his identity? Barnes wondered if Smith was even his real name.
“Well, we appreciate it. Thanks.” Baynes turned to McGrath. “I imagine Emil wants to get home before dark, so let’s hurry up and get the gear unloaded.”
McGrath nodded, but he didn’t move from Baynes’ side. “So what’re your plans?” Smith asked. “I mean, what are you going into the valley for?”
“We’re searching for—” Bacquart began.
“Microfossils.” Baynes interrupted her before she could tell the truth. “Dr. Bacquart is an astrobiologist from the Sorbonne in Paris. She’s hoping to find something in the eastern end of the Noctis Labyrinthis that earlier expeditions may have overlooked.”
He hoped this sounded more plausible than the story Smith had told him. Call it instinct, intuition, or outright paranoia, but nonetheless he had a gut feeling that Smith and his crew shouldn’t know the truth. The Labyrinth of Night lay behind them, in the opposite direction from where the lander was thought to have come down. If he could mislead them into believing that this was just a routine scientific expedition…
“Oh, all right,” Smith said. “I was just wondering if you might be looking for the lander that came down yesterday. We heard about that, and kinda thought y’all might be going down there to hunt for it.”
Baynes felt something cold in his stomach. News travels fast in the colonies, and for once he regretted it. “Nope,” McGrath said before he could muster a reply. “Just lil’ bitty Martians, that’s all.”
“’Cause if you were,” Smith went on, “me and my boys would be happy to lend a hand.”
“Thanks, but that’s not necessary.” Baynes tried to maintain a casual and friendly tone. He glanced at the airship. Its outboard props were still slowly turning; D’Oro was keeping the engines at idle, preparing for an immediate lift-off. “Anyway, if you don’t mind…”
“Sure, sure. You got things to do.” Smith stepped back. “Anyway, nice to meet you. And if you run into any trouble, give us a shout. We’ll be monitoring the emergency channel.”
“Will do, thanks.” Baynes turned to McGrath and Bacquart. “C’mon, let’s get the rest of our gear. We need to get into the valley before dark.”
The three of them turned away from Smith and his men. By the time they finished unloading their remaining equipment from the airship and released the lines, the Wellstown men had climbed back into their rover and driven away. Baynes watched as it trundled away, its six wheels causing a plume of red dust to rise behind it. It was headed west, he noted, a direction which would take it further along the valley rim, not back toward Wellstown.
“Why didn’t you tell them where we’re going?” Bacquart asked. “They offered to help us.”
“I don’t think that’s what they had in mind,” Baynes replied, but he didn’t take time to explain. Besides, there was always a chance that his suspicions were wrong.
There were two ways of getting down into the gorge. The first was a man-made trail that meandered its way down the steep, alluvial slopes to the narrow floor two kilometers below. McGrath assured Baynes and Bacquart that it would take nearly four hours for them to make the hike; by the time they reached the bottom, there would be no daylight left, and they’d be forced to travel the rest of the way to the base camp in the dark.
The other way was the zipline.
“No, no. I won’t do it.” Standing on the platform, Camille stared at the elevated steel cable that descended into the gorge. “I can’t do it…I just can’t.”
“Sure, you can.” McGrath knelt before her, tightening the straps of the girdle-like harness that wound between her legs and around her waist. “It’s perfectly safe, I promise. Hell, it’s fun.”
“But this thing goes straight down…”
“No, it doesn’t.” Standing up, the guide attached a carabineer to the long strap hanging from the harness center. He gave it an experimental tug that yanked her slightly closer to him. “There’s seven more platforms just like this one, and the farthest distance between them is only half a klick. We’ll go from one to the next until we reach the bottom. All you have to do is hang onto this strap and enjoy the ride.”
Baynes gazed down the length of the zipline. As McGrath said, the next platform was only two hundred meters away, its support posts sunk into an outcropping that protruded from the gorge wall. Suspended from masts erected at the center of each platform, the steel cable continued downward in a zigzag line, its angle never more than forty-five degrees.
“Looks simple enough,” he murmured, trying not to sound nervous.
“Done it myself dozens of times. Believe me, when we’re down there, you’re gonna wish this thing worked uphill, too.”
McGrath pulled three pulleys from a small bag strapped to his waist. He handed two of them to Baynes and Bacquart, then used his own to show them how to clamp its two tandem wheels to the cable and attach the carabineer at the end of the center strap to the pulley. He warned them not to touch the pulley or the carabineers at any time, but just to hang onto the strap. If they wanted to go faster, they could curl up into a ball; if they wanted to go slower, all they had to do was spread apart their arms and legs.
“We’ll send down the equipment first,” he said as he attached three more pulleys to the cable and ran their straps to the harnesses they’d wrapped around the containers they’d taken off the airship. “I’ll go next, so I can be there to catch y’all when you come in. Doc, you follow me. Boss, you bring up the rear. After we get to each platform, I’ll reattach the pulleys to next length of cable, then we’ll repeat the whole thing. Got it?”
Bacquart was staring down into the gorge. “What if we fall?” she whispered, her voice barely audible through the comlink.
“You won’t. It’s never happened. Trust me.”
Trust wasn’t something Baynes was easily inclined to give Link McGrath, but he had to admit that he’d never heard of anyone dying while using the Valles Marineris ziplines. He helped McGrath carry the aluminum containers to the platform’s lip and, one at a time, push them over the side. They shot down the wire, and he watched as they were caught by the nylon net on the platform below. McGrath snapped his strap’s carabineer to his pulley, yanked it a couple of times to make sure it was on tight, and looked back at him and Bacquart.
“See you soon,” he said, grinning at them from within his beard. Then he grabbed the top of the strap, yelled “Geronimo!” and ran straight off the platform.
Dangling from the strap, the guide raced down the zip-line, legs tucked in for speed. In less than ten seconds, he reached the next platform. He took a couple of minutes to switch the container pulleys to the next cable and send them on their way, then he looked back up at him and Camille. “Okay, Doc…ready for you. C’mon on down.”
“I can’t do it,” Bacquart said as Baynes clipped her pulley to the cable and checked her straps and carabineers. “I’ll walk down. You can wait for me. I won’t take…”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Bacquart. Please forgive me.” And then Baynes pushed her off the platform.
She screamed all the way down, but she made it to the next platform. She was still cursing Baynes, some of it in French, when he made his own leap of faith. The strap yanked the harness tight against his groin and his stomach felt as if he’d suddenly gone weightless. He dared not look down, but he barely had time to become scared before his boots touched the edge of the next platform and McGrath reached out to grab him.
“See?” McGrath asked. “Fun, ain’t it?”
Baynes caught the cold glare Bacquart gave him, and
knew that if he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, the palm of her hand would have smacked his face. Oblivious to all this, McGrath was already attaching his pulley to the next length of the zip-line. The third platform lay several hundred meters below; the containers were already there, and within minutes they followed them.
Gliding from one platform to the next, the three of them made the descent into the gorge. McGrath was right; it was fun, once Baynes got used to the initial jump and the high-speed ride that followed. He didn’t think Bacquart ever enjoyed herself, but at least she stopped screaming. As the floor of the gorge came closer, though, the distance between platforms became longer, and it wasn’t until they’d nearly reached the bottom that they reached the most harrowing part of the journey.
The next to last two platforms stretched all the way across the gorge itself, travelling from the west wall to the east. McGrath explained that the team who’d built the zipline had been forced to do it this way because the sandstone near the base of the west wall was too loose to allow for safe anchorage of a platform. So the cable was pulled across the gorge; here, the distance was nearly half a kilometer, with a maximum height of almost a hundred meters.
“This is the best part of all,” McGrath insisted. “Check out the view as you cross. You’re gonna love it.”
By then, Bacquart was beyond protesting. She merely nodded, resigned to the inevitable. Yet she didn’t appear to look anywhere except straight ahead as she soared across the abyss, and when Baynes took his turn, he almost did the same thing. Yet he’d learned how to twist the strap so that he could turn his body from one side to another, so as he made the long crossing, he did as McGrath suggested. The gorge spread out beneath his feet as a v-shaped expanse of red rock and sand, and in the distance lay the lowlands of the Valles Marineris, its southern walls tinted golden by the late afternoon sun.
