Vikram smiled spitefully. ‘Clingy stuff, isn’t it? Natural camouflage.’
Jonno said, ‘Look, we’ll be missed in a day, two days, by your people or ours, and they will come looking for us. But we’re going to have to get through at least one night. Mars gets cold quickly. We’re already down to minus twenty-five. It’s liable to fall to minus ninety before dawn—’
‘I get the picture,’ Natalie said. Vikram grudgingly admired the way she was staying calm. ‘So what do we do?’
Vikram said, ‘We’ve got a little food and water in our packs. Some basic first aid stuff. But we’ve no shelter. We were supposed to reach our camp before nightfall.’
‘I’ve got a pressurisation bag,’ Natalie said. ‘But I’ve got nothing else, no food.’
‘So we share,’ Jonno said, and he grimly tried to get to his feet. ‘Because if we don’t share, we’ve all had it. Maybe we can use the Viking to rig up some kind of tent …’
Natalie got her pressurisation bag out of her backpack. It was a sack of silvered material that folded down to a mass smaller than her fist, but when she shook it out it opened up into a spherical bag about two metres across.
Jonno suggested they set it up on the Viking platform. When Natalie asked why, Vikram said, ‘So we don’t get chewed by the rock bugs. They come up at night, you know.’
Natalie glanced down. Everybody knew there was life deep in the rocks of Mars, native life, microbes with some kind of relationship to Earth life. There were even supposed to be scrapings of lichen on the surface, in a few spots. But she’d never heard of monster bugs rising up in the dark.
Jonno took pity on her. ‘He’s teasing you. It’s just to keep us off the cold ground, that’s all.’
Vikram laughed, and Natalie turned away fuming.
They used a bit of cable that the boys had scavenged from their wrecked flycycle to attach the sack to the Viking’s antenna pole. Then, clumsy in their suits, they all clambered onto the platform and inside the bag, and Natalie fumbled to zip it up. There was a hiss of air, and the bag inflated to a sphere, slightly distorted where it was pushed up against the old probe’s instruments. There was a faint glow from light filaments embedded in the bag walls, and the air rapidly got warmer.
Cautiously Natalie lifted her faceplate. The air was cold, and had a tang of industrial chemicals, and was so thin her lungs seemed to drag at it. But it was breathable. She pushed back her hood and unzipped the neck of her suit. She caught Vikram staring at the stubbly pink hair that coated one half of her scalp, the latest Londres fashion.
As Vikram opened his own suit, and helped Jonno with his, he kept brushing against Natalie, which they both put up with in stiff silence.
Jonno let Vikram remove his faceplate, but he kept his suit closed up, and he clutched his chest, breathing raggedly. It was obvious he’d been hurt in the crash, but he wouldn’t let Vikram see the wound. Vikram was patient with his friend, calm, reassuring, even gentle. When he behaved that way, Natalie thought reluctantly, unlike when he was snapping at her, Vikram didn’t seem so bad. Almost decent-looking, if he’d had a wash and got a sensible haircut with a shade of some modern colour like silver or electric-blue, instead of that drab natural brown.
Vikram dug food bars out of his pack and passed them around. Natalie bit into hers. It was tough, stringy stuff, faintly like meat, but she was pretty sure there were no cows or sheep on Mars. It had probably come out of a tank of seaweed. She preferred not to ask. There wasn’t much to the food, but it was filling.
At least the lack of a bathroom wasn’t a problem. All their suits had facilities for processing waste. But when Vikram offered her water she learned it was the product of his suit’s recycling system – it was, in fact, Vikram’s pee. She politely declined.
Vikram touched the wall of the shelter. ‘Nice piece of kit,’ he said grudgingly.
‘Thanks.’
‘How does it store its air, in that little packet you opened it out of? And the energy for the heat and light?’
Natalie shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’
‘Some kind of chemical reaction,’ Jonno said. ‘Probably.’ He winced with every word.
Natalie said, ‘It’s an emergency pressurisation bag. Meant for space, really. You suffer a blow-out, you zip yourself in and wait for rescue. Meant for one person, which is why it’s a bit snug. It should last twelve hours.’
Jonno grunted. ‘Then it’s no use for more than one night.’
Vikram studied her. ‘So you’re a space traveller, are you?’
‘I’m here on a school trip,’ Natalie said, refusing to be riled again. ‘But I’ve been to the moon and on a Venus flyby cruise, and I’m here, of course. I suppose you’ve travelled all over.’
Jonno laughed, though it clearly hurt him. ‘Earthworms always think Martians spend their time whizzing through space. We’ve got too much to do down here.’
‘I’ve been to Phobos,’ Vikram said defensively. ‘One of Mars’s moons.’
‘When you were two years old!’ Jonno said.
Vikram, embarrassed, turned on Natalie. ‘And you never set foot down here before today, did you? I could tell by the way you were stumbling around in the gravity.’
She shrugged. ‘Landing wasn’t in our itinerary at all for this trip. Mars is so pricey. Even the wilderness areas, now that the whole place is a planetary park.’
‘What about the cities?’
‘The dome towns? I know people who’ve been there. Expensive again. And, you know, small. Even Hellas, the big Chinese town. Compared to home …’ Stuck in this bag for the night with these two boys, she didn’t want to give any more offence. ‘Look, you have to see it from my point of view. I grew up in Londres! You don’t want to come all the way to Mars and stay in some poky little village in a bubble.’
‘No,’ Jonno said. ‘So you don’t spend your dollars in our shops and inns, you just muck about in the upper atmosphere and then you go home again. No wonder you’re so popular.’
‘Euros, actually. Well, it’s not my fault,’ she said, feeling defensive. ‘Look, my family have connections to Mars. My grandfather was a trader here for a while. He’s the reason I’m called Natalie. I was named after the heroine of some old book that was published a hundred years before I was born. The first human on Mars, in the book … Anyway, where were you going, cycling across Mars?’
Vikram began to say something about community duties, performing maintenance on weather stations around the north pole water-ice cap.
But Jonno cut in, ‘I’ll tell you where Vikram was going. Anywhere but Hellas.’
‘Jonno—’
Natalie asked quickly. ‘What’s in Hellas?’
Jonno said, ‘The question is, who is in Hellas. And the answer is, a lovely lady called Hiroe.’
Natalie felt her face redden, and she was glad the lighting was dim. ‘Your girlfriend.’
‘No!’ Vikram said. ‘Not my girlfriend. I’ve never even met her—’
‘His fiancée,’ Jonno said slyly. ‘His wife-to-be.’
‘Shut up.’
Natalie was discovering she knew even less about these Martians than she had imagined. ‘You’re engaged? How old are you?’
‘Fifteen,’ Vikram said. ‘How old are you?’
‘Not much younger.’
‘It’s an arranged marriage,’ Jonno said. ‘Their fathers are business partners. Hellas is Chinese, but Hiroe’s family are in a Japanese community there. The fathers sorted out the arrangement, and had it cleared with the genetic health people. All Vikram’s got to do is marry her. Oh, and produce lots of healthy little dust-diggers.’
Vikram didn’t look happy about this deal at all.
‘And he’s never even met her? Ee-eww. That’s so weird. We don’t have arranged marriages on Earth. Well, we don’t, in Angleterre. Maybe they s
till do in some cultures. Why do it on Mars? It seems … old-fashioned.’
‘There aren’t enough of us,’ Vikram said. ‘Simple as that. Still only a few thousand on the whole planet, UN and Chinese. We have to avoid inbreeding. So we have systems to ensure that doesn’t happen.’
‘Inbreeding? Ee-eww! And you’ll go through with this?’
Jonno answered for Vikram. ‘Unless he finds a better option before his sixteenth birthday, yes. And a better option means somebody else he likes more, but who has at least the same degree of genetic difference from him as the lovely Hiroe.’
‘It’s the law,’ Vikram said miserably. ‘It’s my responsibility – everybody’s responsibility to the future. Oh, shut up, Jonno. Let’s get some sleep. Because unless we have a good day tomorrow, it’s not going to make any difference anyhow, is it?’
‘That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said all day,’ Jonno said. ‘Good night.’
So they scrunched around in the bag, the three of them curled up like foetuses, head to toe, and tried to sleep. Knobbly bits of the old Viking stuck into Natalie’s sides. Even in the low gravity it was uncomfortable. She thought she could hear Jonno sobbing softly under his breath, sobbing at the pain of the injury he wouldn’t let the others see. But she was aware of Vikram’s presence, strong and warm and calm.
And she heard the thin wind of Mars, just millimetres away from her head, a thin hiss as sand sifted against the bag’s fabric. She wondered if that was normal. She kept thinking about Vikram’s Martian rock bugs, a whole world of bacterial communities kilometres deep beneath her.
Under all this was the fear, the fundamental gnawing fear that she’d tried to distract herself from since the moment the clamshell went down. The fear that she wasn’t going to live through this, that this desolate Martian plain was where she would die. She’d never been so alone in her life. She wished she could talk to Benedicte, or her parents. She wished she could hold somebody’s hand. Even Vikram’s.
She didn’t sleep well.
And when they woke, things looked even worse.
It started with Jonno. He still wouldn’t let Vikram look at his injury. He had weakened, his face pale from loss of blood.
At least Natalie continued to look calm and composed under that silly pink hairstyle. Vikram supposed all this was even stranger, more scary, for her than it was for the two of them.
They sealed up their suits, and zipped open Natalie’s shelter bag. The dimming lights of the bag’s power supply were overwhelmed by the thin Martian dawn, and a sifting of crimson dust caught the light.
They pushed out of the collapsing bag and found that everything, the bag, the old Viking, was covered with a fine layer of dust, blown by the wind.
‘They can’t see us under this,’ Natalie said, fretfully shaking the dust off the bag.
‘Could have been worse,’ Jonno wheezed. He was sitting on a corner of the Viking. ‘Mars has dust storms all the time. We could have been hidden altogether, under a storm kilometres high.’
‘She’s right, though,’ Vikram said. ‘Even if they’re looking, they won’t have seen us. The bag isn’t going to get us through another night, is it?’ And then there was the food. They had half a ration bar left each. He was already hungry. ‘We can’t just stand here waiting to be rescued. We’re going to have to do something.’
Jonno snorted, despairing. ‘Like what?’
Natalie said, ‘What about the Viking?’
Vikram stood back and looked at the yellowed old craft. ‘It’s just a relic.’
‘But it’s also a big heavy chunk of engineering. There must be something we can do with it. The trouble is, I don’t know how it works, what all these bits on top of it do.’ She looked up at the empty sky. ‘If only I could get online and do some searching!’
Jonno tapped at his wrist. ‘No need. Give me a minute.’
She frowned. ‘What’s that?’
‘Wristmate,’ Vikram said. ‘Multiple functions – including a wide database. He can look up the Viking in there.’
She stared. ‘You carry a database around on your wrist?’
‘When Mars is as crowded as Earth and there’s a wireless node under every rock,’ Vikram said acidly, ‘maybe we won’t need to.’
Referring to his wristmate, Jonno pointed at the equipment on the Viking’s upper surface. ‘This canister here is a mass spectrometer. This is a seismometer. These pillar-like things are cameras. Stereoscopic.’
To Vikram, everything looked big and clumsy and clunky. ‘I never saw cameras like that.’
‘Maybe there’s something we can use …’ Jonno started to tap at his wristmate, muttering.
Natalie walked around the lander. ‘I suppose some of it is obvious. This arm, for instance, must be for taking samples from the soil. Maybe there’s some kind of automated lab inside.’
Vikram bent down to see. ‘Look, you can see the trench it dug.’
‘After all these years?’
He shrugged. ‘The dust blows about, but Mars doesn’t change much. Look at this.’ He found a faded painted flag, and the words UNITED STATES. ‘What’s this, the company that built it?’
‘No. The nation that sent it. America. You’ve heard of America. Here’s its flag, sitting on Mars. My grandfather said the Americans landed this thing to celebrate a hundred years of independence. Or maybe it was two hundred.’
Vikram laughed. ‘How can any part of Earth be independent from anywhere else? And anyhow, independence from what?’
She shrugged. ‘Canada, I think.’
Jonno coughed and staggered. He had to hang onto the Viking to avoid falling.
Vikram ran to him and helped him settle down in the dust. ‘What’s wrong, buddy?’
‘It’s not working.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Look, the lander’s got a comms system. Obviously. The big dish antenna is for speaking directly to Earth, and the little spoke thing over there is an ultra-high-frequency antenna for talking to an orbiter. I tried to interface my suit’s systems to the lander’s. But the electronics is shot to pieces by a hundred and fifty years of Martian winters. And, look at this …’ He showed Vikram an image on his wristmate. ‘Transistors! They used transistors! They may as well have brought up a blanket and sent smoke signals with that robot arm.’
Natalie said, ‘So we can’t use its comms system to send a signal?’
‘Not without a museum full of old electronic parts, no … Oww.’ He slumped over, clutching his chest.
Vikram lay Jonno down in the dust, by one of the Viking’s footpads. Natalie hurried over with her decompression bag. ‘Here. I’ll blow this up a little way. We can use it as a sleeping bag, a pillow.’
‘I’m not going to make it,’ Jonno whispered.
‘Just save your strength,’ Vikram said.
‘What for? I let you down, man. If I could have figured out some way of using the Viking to get us out of here –’
‘I might still work something out.’
‘You?’ Jonno laughed, and something gurgled in his throat.
They pulled the bag around Jonno’s body. Wordless, Natalie pointed at Jonno’s neck, the inner seal of his suit. There was a line of red there. Blood. His suit was filling up with blood.
Natalie said, ‘I’ll go and take a look at the Viking. Can I use your watch? I mean your—’
‘Wristmate?’ Vikram said. ‘Sure.’
‘Give her mine,’ Jonno whispered. ‘No use to me now.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
Natalie took Jonno’s wristmate and backed away, poking at its screen to access its functions.
Jonno’s voice was a rasp now. ‘I’m just sorry I won’t meet the lovely Hiroe in person.’
‘Shut up.’
‘But let me tell you something �
� Listen …’
Natalie saw Vikram bending over his friend, listening to some snippet of private conversation. He had to touch faceplates to hear.
Natalie didn’t want to know what they were saying. And besides, it made no difference. Unless they figured a way out of here, she and Vikram were likely to follow Jonno into some shallow Martian grave, taking any secrets with them.
But she wasn’t prepared to accept that. Not yet. Not with this Viking sitting here on Chryse Plain like a gift from the gods. There had to be some way of using it to get out of here.
She suspected the Martian boys weren’t thinking the right way about the probe. Vikram and Jonno lived on an inhabited Mars, a human Mars. But there had been nobody on Mars when the Viking arrived. Nobody had brought the probe here in a truck and set it up. It was a robot that had sailed, unmanned, across the solar system, and landed here by itself.
How had it landed? She checked the wristmate again. She learned that the Viking had come down from orbit, using a combination of heatshield, parachute – and landing rockets. Rockets!
She got down on her hands and knees so she could see underneath the main body. She found rocket nozzles – a whole bunch of them, eighteen.
What if she started the rocket system up again?
She sat back on her heels and tried to think. She knew very little about liquid rockets, but she knew you needed a propellant, a fuel, something like liquid hydrogen, and an oxidiser, a chemical containing oxygen to make the fuel burn. And if there was fuel, there must be fuel tanks. She got to her feet and searched.
She quickly found a big spherical tank on one side of the lander. She rapped it, and thought it felt like it still contained some liquid. But there had to be a second tank …
She spent long minutes hunting for the other tank, feeling increasingly stupid. Then she looked up Viking on Jonno’s wristmate again. And she discovered that the rockets had been powered by a ‘monopropellant’ called hydrazine. A bit more searching told her how that had worked.
It was a system you’d use if you needed extremely reliable engines, such as on a robot spacecraft a hundred million kilometres away from the nearest engineer. Hydrazine was like fuel and propellant all in one chemical. It didn’t even need an ignition system, a spark. You just squirted it over a catalyst, a special kind of metal. That made the hydrazine break down into other chemicals: ammonia, nitrogen and hydrogen. And it released a huge amount of heat too. Suddenly you had a bunch of hot, expanding gases – and if you fired the gases out of your nozzles, you had your rocket.
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