by Paul Preuss
“Only telemetry.”
“Khalid, do you understand why we must erase this conversation?”
“Yes, and I’ll help you. I’ll use side channels to fill the hole with background–the wind on the wings, cockpit noises. Chances are, nobody will listen to the black box anyway, and if they do they won’t notice, unless they already know what they’re looking for.”
“They tried to kill me, Khalid. They tried to kill my parents.”
“We heard your parents died in a helicopter crash.”
“Maybe. I didn’t see their bodies. I’ve never met anyone who did, and I’ve spent a lot of time looking.”
“You mean they’re still trying to kill you? Who are they?”
“I’m in this plane because I hope to prove that you aren’t one of them.”
He jerked around to look at her. “Me?”
Again his surprise seemed genuine. If he had not really recognized her, though, if instead he had known all along who she was, then there was no mystical SPARTA bond, and he was one of the prophetae and an accomplished liar.
“Yes, you. Ten years ago, Jack Noble was one of your sponsors to the SPARTA project. Did you know that? And he’s on the board of the Mars Terraforming Project.”
“What does that have to do with your situation?”
“I have evidence that he’s one of them. No proof, only suggestive evidence. The group that sponsored you, the Tappers, has ties to the prophetae of the Free Spirit. And I do know that it’s because of SPARTA that the Free Spirit wanted my parents out of the way.”
Khalid was turned around in his seat, watching her intently, letting the plane fly itself.
“And that they want me out of the way,” she said–
–and then she screamed. The pain that went through her head originated in the middle of her spine and shot upward. Suddenly her torso was on fire from her belly up, and the fire was spreading to her rigid, trembling arms, which thrust themselves outward of their own accord. Her hands curved into hooks as if to seize the ether.
Sparta began to tremble. Her teeth chattered and her eyes rolled up in her head until only the whites showed between her trembling lashes. Thirty seconds later she collapsed.
IX
A skinny black shadow tumbled pellmell from the sky. Contending winds, invisible in the clear pink sky, tossed the stricken plane first one way and then another across the wrinkled desert that rapidly rose to swallow it. The marsplane’s slender wings fluttered and twisted and bent back on themselves so far it seemed they would crumple and snap.
Radar, satellite radiolink, holo projection, onboard computers, even the commlink–everything had failed at once. Without computers to continuously warp and trim its control surfaces, the marsplane flew no better than a torn scrap of paper.
In the lurching cockpit Khalid tapped switches and tweaked potentiometers as calmly as he could while being tossed from side to side in his harness. What had been thick colored air all around him, the construction of the holo projector, was now a view of real sky and sand and rock swirling sickeningly across the plastic arc of the canopy.
Auxiliary power from shielded batteries came back online. The control computers had lost the flight destination program and many of their other functions; Khalid had to remind the amnesiac electronics that their primary job was to keep the plane upright and aloft. Another minute passed as he worked at the programs.
Finally the plane recovered from its violent and irregular plummet.
The scarp of an awesome cliff rose before them, black with basalt, red with rusty iron. The plane flew straight toward it, undeviating. With fatalistic calm, Khalid watched the impenetrable barrier approach.
The plane was seeking an updraft. Finally it found one, a dozen meters from the vertical rise of rock. As swiftly as it had fallen the plane mounted, but its long wings brushed the cliff twice before it reached the rim and won through to free air. Khalid took control of the craft then and flew it by joystick.
Auxiliary power had failed to salvage the guidance instrumentation. The radar altimeter remained out of commission, and Khalid had no communication with satellites in space or with any ground station. From the displays, he judged that the onboard inertial systems were fried. He switched off the snowy screens.
He eased back on the stick and headed the low-flying glider back in what he judged was the direction of Labyrinth City. It was the only plan he had, the only sensible thing to do. He was hundreds of kilometers from his target, but tiny as the city was it had a wider cross-section than any other inhabited place on Mars.
Each time the plane climbed too high, it would lose ground-measured distance; it was essential to stay out of the opposing winds aloft. The jetstream had already blown them so far in an hour that they would need a day of jibing around buttes and mesas, across canyons and dune fields, to regain the Labyrinth.
With the plane under his control, Khalid took the time to peer around his seatback. Sparta lolled in her harness, her head thrown back from the last violent swoop of the plane. Her face was ashen; her forehead was dewed with perspiration. Yet her breath came evenly, and the pulsing vein in her throat showed that her heartbeat was strong and steady.
He turned his attention back to the controls.
For two hours the plane flew on without incident, entering the huge plain of Tharsis. Khalid had memorized the map of Mars; from thousands of hours aloft he could match much of it to the territory. He could read the windsign in the sand below, spot dust devils spinning like dervishes twenty kilometers away; he could find the updrafts he needed to stay airborne.
What he could not do without instruments was see over the horizon.
The marsplane soared along a line of steep cinder cones, their fresh and iridescent black lava dusted with orange sand. The cone at the end of the line was the newest and highest; as the plane banked around its shoulder, an endless dune field opened to the southwest.
When Khalid saw what was out there he whispered, “God is good.”
A boiling duststorm was crawling across Tharsis, spreading wings of dust from north to south as far as Khalid could see. Its towering front bristled with dry lightning in a phalanx of glittering spears.
Wheeling the marsplane back toward the saddle between the two nearest cinder cones, Khalid dove for the ground. He pulled up in time for the plane to skim the steepening slope. He hit switches on the console and the wing sprouted dozens of upright spoilers. At stall angle the plane was hardly a meter above the slag; it lost forward speed and gently grounded itself.
Khalid slapped his harness release, threw up the canopy, and jumped out. Reaching up under the plane’s wingroots, he threw a series of locking bolts and pulled the left wing free of the fuselage. He ran to the left tail boom attachment and released its latches, laying the boom and its vertical fin flat against the ground.
He ran on to the wingtip. A slender fiber lanyard was coiled in a recessed pocket at the wingtip. Khalid pulled it out. He took a long piton from the thigh pocket of his pressure suit and clipped it to the lanyard. From the same pocket he took a steel tool like an ice axe and pounded the piton into firm lava.
More lanyards were concealed at intervals along the leading and trailing edges of the wing and along the tail boom. Working his way back toward the fuselage, Khalid nailed the disassembled left side of the marsplane to the ground. By the time he had repeated the process on the right side of the plane, the sky beyond the saddle was dark with smoking columns of dust.
His final task was to lash the fuselage pod to the ground. When it was secure he climbed back in and jerked the canopy down. He had to pull it hard in the teeth of the howling wind.
He looked at Sparta. She was still breathing, still unconscious. The pain had eased from her sleeping face. He faced front again. Inside the rattling cockpit he watched the rolling storm loom over them like an oncoming tank tread over an ant.
And suddenly it was on them, streaking toward them like a live thing, swallowing them whol
e. A scurrying stream of soft dust hissed over the canopy. Seconds later the air was dark, made visible again by suspended matter that hid more than it revealed, a murky scab-colored brown through which Khalid could see no more than a meter or two.
The plane’s detached wings trembled against the ground. No moving atmosphere could get beneath them, and before long their surfaces were obscured by writhing snakes of dust.
Khalid imagined that the atmosphere was alive with wriggling creatures, with newts and minnows of blowing dust, with anacondas of dust.
He dug in the pocket of his pressure suit and pulled out his astrolabe. Its electronics no longer functioned. The alidade no longer pointed to Earth. Nevertheless, he had a general notion of the direction of his birth planet.
It was time to pray.
Night. Blue lights and stainless steel at the Park-Your-Pain: Blake screamed at Lydia over the howling synthekord. “I don’t know whether you remember me, but . . .”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“. . . we met the other night. My name’s . . . oh, you remember?”
“You’re Mycroft. What do you want?”
“Listen, remember Yevgeny said he got me a job at the line head? Well, I really need the job, but they say they’re not running the crummies because of some accident. I’ve got the job, but I need a ride.”
She looked at him, incredulous. “You want a ride to the line head?”
“Yeah. I know you said you never take passengers, but if you knew what it meant to me . . .”
“Wait here,” she said. “I have to talk to somebody.”
“I’ll pay you. I mean, I can’t pay you right now, but I’d be willing . . .”
“Shut up, will you?” Her irritation was real enough to make him back away. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
He watched her elbow her way through the crowd. He could barely see her between the bobbing heads, back there in the blue shadows, yelling into her commlink.
A minute passed. She came back. “Know anything about trucks?”
“Not much. I’m a plumber.”
“Sure you are. I guess that’ll have to do.”
“You’ll take me?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“When do we start?”
“Dawn.”
“Great! Thanks, Lydia. Can I buy you a . . . ?”
“No,” she said, cutting him off. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Do me a favor and get lost until then.”
Khalid roused himself from a troubled sleep. It took him a moment to realize what was missing: he’d grown used to the buffeting of the wind, but it had fallen to a gentle shiver.
Outside the canopy the last stars were fading and the sky was warming to dawn. He turned and shook Sparta’s shoulder, but she was deep in sleep.
He raised the canopy and got out. It took him longer to put the plane back together than it had taken to tear it apart, especially when it came to reattaching the right wing, for with the left wing and boom in place the fuselage was canted over to the left. But a hinge and winch arrangement was built into the wing yoke, and before long the whole huge glider was reassembled and the dust shaken from its wings.
He left only the wingtip lanyards pinned to the ground.
In the cockpit, Khalid set the arming switches for the takeoff-assist rockets. His preflight check was almost casual, perhaps because there weren’t any instruments left to worry about. With his left hand he yanked the hydraulic lever that released the wingtips; then, gripping the stick with his right hand, he hit the RATO trigger.
When nothing happened, he went through the preset again and tried once more. Still nothing happened.
The plane stirred in the breeze, eager to rise. Without a lift to altitude it could soon tear itself to pieces on the ground.
Khalid released his harness, swung the canopy up, and jumped to the ground for the third time. He checked the RATO canisters slung beneath the wings. No mechanical problems, and he hadn’t expected any. The marsplane had been crippled by a general and catastrophic electrical failure, destroying every electronic system except the multiply-redundant aerodynamic controls and their shielded batteries.
He went to an access panel in the fuselage and pried it open. There was nothing obviously wrong with the massed circuitry inside, but a foreign object was lodged in the autopilot comparator: a stainless steel ball, discolored to a strange purplish-green that suggested intense heat. He plucked the sphere out of the crevice into which it had been wedged and shoved it into the thigh pocket of his suit.
After a moment’s thought, Khalid, working more deliberately this time, took the plane apart again and again nailed it to the ground. When this was done he leaned into the cockpit, left his tools and remaining pitons on the seat, and dug into the net bags hanging against the thin walls. He scooped up a little less than half the plane’s emergency ration, of food and water and stuffed the food tubes into his pockets.
He studied Sparta’s face one last time. There were one or two things he could try, but none that seemed worth the risk. He left her there, in a coma, and after he had sealed the canopy over her he walked into the desert.
X
This time when Blake showed up at the dispatch office, everybody was quietly busy. Even the fat clerk seemed to be shuffling his numbers with great attention to duty.
“I got a ride, like you said,” Blake said.
“That right?” The clerk didn’t look at him.
“With Lydia Zeromski. Where do I find her?”
The clerk pointed through the big window that overlooked the yard. A truck was leaving the loading area, its turbines blowing blue flame into the orange dawn.
Blake walked through wisps of dust in the raking light, past the blasted fueling shed. The damage was impressive–the twisted remains of the manifold where the explosion had occurred loomed overhead like a plate of spaghetti frozen in midtoss–but the blackened and gutted crummies had been dragged to one side, pipes had been rerouted, and the yard was back in operation.
As he approached Lydia’s truck he caught the scream of its turbines through his helmet, even in the thin atmosphere.
In daylight a marstruck was an even more imposing piece of machinery than at night–part tractor, part caterpillar, part train. The turbines were mounted behind the cab, big gas-expansion turbines fueled and oxidized from smoking dewars of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so that the tractor was almost as big as a locomotive. The two cargo beds behind it were covered with fiberglass cowlings to minimize wind resistance, although nearby trailers were uncovered–Blake knew from hanging out at the Porkypine that there was a debate among the drivers as to whether trailer cowlings were more efficient as streamlining or as windfoils to lift the whole rig off the ground; being an independent lot, the drivers rigged their trucks to personal specs.
Despite their size, there was something spidery about the marstrucks. The treads were steel mesh, not clanking metal plates, and they were mounted away from the body on struts that seemed too narrow to bear the weight. The cargo trailers were long, built like bridges, and looked too fragile for their wide loads.
All this was an Earthman’s illusion. Blake had yet to get used to a planet where things weighed a third of what they appeared and structures were effectively two and a half times as strong.
Lydia’s marstruck was pretty much standard issue, with all its cowlings in place, its paint bright and its chrome polished, and only her name on the door of the cab, in blue and white script painted like flames, to indicate the rig was hers. Blake clambered lightly over the treads on the passenger side and banged on the door of the bubble cab. Lydia looked up from the console, raised a cautioning hand, and then unsealed the door. Blake climbed in.
The inside of the bubble cab was neat and clean, undecorated except for a 19th-century crucifix of polished black wood that hung above the dashboard. Behind the seats was the opening to the fairly spacious sleeping box, veiled with feminine lace.
Lydia checked the dash
lights that indicated the cab was sealed and then popped the air bottles. The cab pressurized. When the board went full green, she pulled open her helmet. Blake did the same.
“You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been sitting here burning gas.”
“Sorry. I thought you said dawn.”
“The sun’s been up five minutes, Mycroft. Work on your timing.”
“Okay, sure.”
She threw the levers and the treads began to roll.
The road out of the shuttleport was the longest highway on Mars. Fifteen minutes after setting out upon it, the last sign of human life–save for the rutted dusty tracks themselves–had disappeared behind them in the thin light of the Martian dawn. The desert crossed by this often-invisible web of ruts was the biggest and driest and deadest in the solar system. Except for the wrecks of other vehicles abandoned along the way, there would be no other sign of life until they reached the camp at the pipeline head, 3,000 kilometers to the northeast.
Blake looked through the bubble glass, fascinated. Nothing lived here. Not so much as a blackened ocotillo was rooted in the powdery soil; not so much as a horned lizard or a vinegaroon crouched under the desiccated rocks. Everywhere the landforms, down to the smallest rill, were covered with fine dust deposited by the global windstorms that cloaked the entire planet every few years. There was a reason Mars was called the dirtiest planet in the solar system.
As the small bright sun rose higher on his right and the woman doing the driving indicated that she was determined to keep her eyes on the road and her mouth shut, Blake began to face the superlatives: driest, deadest, dirtiest, widest. A dirt road long enough to cross Australia.
Better to be stranded in the Sahel in midsummer, better to be abandoned in Antarctica in midwinter, than to be lost on Mars.
The marstruck bounded over the sand like a running cat, legs stretched, belly to the earth. Wonderful how the human mind adjusts; what was terrifying becomes routine, what was ecstatic becomes dull. The truck’s speed at first astonished Blake, but he soon grew to think of it as normal.
