Saving Mars

by Cidney Swanson

  The pair said their goodbyes in hushed tones and Jess walked into the night, away from the boy she might have loved, if only she could have.

  “Wait,” called Pavel.

  She turned, meeting his gaze.

  “Promise me you’ll make it,” he said, closing the distance between them. “To Mars,” he whispered, pointing overhead. “Promise.”

  Jessamyn nodded, gazing at the bright spot she called home. “I promise.”

  She turned once more toward the motor pool.

  She had a planet to save.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  KILIMANJARO

  Jessamyn saw the hoverport directly in front of her but had already decided against going through the main entrance which would require her to pass security guards. Instead, she circled to the back end, running her eyes down the rows of vehicles in the transport pool. They had a few of everything on offer, from bikes to newer versions of the amphibious craft her crew had driven to a handful of craft that would fly. The vehicles weren’t guarded, so far as Jess could tell.

  The only thing separating her from getting airborne was a three-meter fence, constructed as a series of horizontal bars. It looked to Jess as though someone had placed a set of very wide ladders side by side to create a boundary. She knew she couldn’t leap over it in Earth’s heavy gravity, but ladders could be climbed. It was too easy. Reaching out one hand, she gripped a bar just above her head, preparing to ascend.

  It took a moment for the searing heat to register.

  In fact, the first sensory input—Jess’s first hint that anything bad was happening—was the scent of something burning. But then she felt it. She wrenched her hand off the bar, squelching a howl of pain. Cradling her hand to her chest, she curled to the ground, shuffling a few meters away until she found cover beside a shrub. Had she set off an alarm?

  Pain throbbed in her right hand, a steady pulse to mark the seconds and minutes as they ticked past. She drew air in through her teeth in short, shallow breaths. But there were no alarms, and no secures, and gradually Jess came to trust that no one cared that she’d touched the burning boundary.

  She opened her sling-pack, searching for her first aid folder. Seeing Pavel’s med kit, she pulled it out instead and hunted until she found something white and gooey for burns. The relief was instant, but her hand looked terrible. She found skin-heal strips in Pavel’s med kit, including one that was palm-sized. And apparently of a higher quality than the ones from home, she noted, sighing in relief.

  She looked at the barrier once more, frowning. Going through the front entrance seemed like the only option after all, but Jess didn’t like any choice that included secures.

  Tucking the med kit inside her pack, she disturbed a small creature that had hidden in the bushes. It scampered away, running under the fencing until she lost sight of it amongst the vehicles.

  “Of course,” she murmured. Why go over the fence when she could simply go under it? She grinned; her thin Marsian frame would allow her to fit where Terrans could not. The bottom rail of the fence sat at least eight centimeters farther from the ground than the gaps between the higher rails. But as she crept nearer, she began to question whether she would really be able to make it. Or rather, if her head could make it. Her head was the largest part of her as well as being one she didn’t particularly want to fry against the bar.

  A memory danced through her mind—her father’s laughter, a teasing phrase repeated at her every success: Don’t get a big head, now!

  “I need a hat,” she murmured. She’d lost her balaclava, tossing it aside before entering the hospital. She didn’t know if her hair would catch fire, but she definitely didn’t want to risk it. Earth had so much oxygen—things flamed too easily here. What did she have in her pack that would wrap round her head, preventing a loose hair from igniting the rest of her?

  She squatted, examining the space between the bar and the ground. Dragging the side of her face along the paved surface wasn’t going to be pleasant. Then she thought of something.

  She reached for Pavel’s med kit once more. She needed one of those cocoon-like casts around her head—a protective headband. It would at once secure her hair, flatten her ears, and provide protection to part of her face. Tucking the ends of her hair into her snug-fitting neckline, she used Pavel’s device to describe an oval around her skull. With a fluttering kind of magic, the device spewed fibers round and round her head. When it stopped, she reached up and felt the strange band. It was hard and smooth.

  Jess set her pack on the ground and gave it a small kick under the barrier. It skidded across the pavement, stopping well out of her reach on the far side of the fencing. I’m committed now, she thought.

  She sighed and began snaking her way under the bar, feet and legs first, until the only thing remaining on the wrong side of the fence was her head. Hearing voices nearby, she froze. Then she realized that the voices were coming from inside her head. From the earpiece. From beside Ethan, as he lay in stasis. She understood only bits and pieces of the conversation. But one thing was certain. Her brother’s mind was about to be parted from his body.

  “You have a job to do,” Jess murmured to herself. That was all that mattered now. She couldn’t think about Ethan. She flattened her head against the pavement in preparation to slip the rest of the way inside.

  Focus on what you are doing, she told herself. As she slid her head along the pavement, she felt the “cast” bump briefly against the bottom rail of the fence and then she was free. An unpleasant charred smell permeated the air. The cast, she realized. It reeked, smoking where it had touched the barrier, but it had prevented her hair from catching fire.

  She stood, forcing herself to think about what kind of transport to choose. Reaching down, she grabbed her sling-pack and threw it over one shoulder.

  From her earpiece, a voice asked, “Is the viceroy ready for transfer?”

  “Ready, doctor,” came the response.

  Jessamyn’s eyes stung from smoke. She blinked and raced toward a row of ships she recognized could reach high orbit. Something in her heart reached out toward the escape the spacecraft promised, even though she knew no ship could carry her from her grief. Stopping beside a mid-size craft with thrust rockets and jet engines, she checked to make sure it had hover boosters.

  “Do we have confirmed availability of next-body for the prisoner?” asked a distant voice.

  “Confirmed,” replied a low voice.

  “Begin transfer protocol.”

  Jess’s breath hitched and she felt for a moment like a Marsian stuck outside their habitat with a busted helmet. Do this, she ordered herself. Squaring her shoulders, she swiped Pavel’s motor pool stick beside the hatch of a low-orbit aircraft. A set of shallow stairs extended before her, and she ordered herself forward. You’ve got a planet to save. She pressed a large button to seal the hatch and seated herself inside.

  “Doctor, I’m picking up a signal from inside the patient’s … er, prisoner’s body.”

  “Shizer! Could it be a delayed explosive?”

  “Negative, doctor. My scanner indicates a transmitting device. For communications only.”

  Jess told herself to concentrate on the dash before her. A screen bloomed to life, glowing softly in the dark. The ship’s nav-com asked Jessamyn if she was ready to launch. She punched the systems-go indicator.

  A message flashing in red told her to secure her harness.

  “Ares and Aphrodite!” she swore, snapping the harness in place. But as she did so, something inside her locked into place, settled irrevocably. She was a pilot. This was what she did best.

  “Doctor, shall I alert security regarding the transmitting device?”

  A third voice, deep and resonant, spoke out. “When you have removed the device, I will take it directly to Chancellor Brezhnaya. Red Squadron Forces will wish to evaluate it.”

  Jessamyn eased the craft out of its berth and onto a short runway. Another message flashed across her screen,
requesting a flight plan. She tapped ‘Cape of Good Hope’ into the insistent monitor, and her itinerary was instantly approved.

  As she pulled the craft up into the still-dark sky, she heard hospital personnel congratulating one another on their success. Don’t listen, she told herself. The doctor’s voice, detached and cool during surgery, had a gloating quality to it now.

  “He’ll have a hard time blowing up hospitals from inside this body.”

  Jess flinched at the answering laughter.

  “It seems wrong to give the prisoner’s new-body an anti-arthritic,” said a quieter voice.

  “First, do no harm,” said the doctor. “Let’s get that audio transmitter removed.”

  The craft climbed past three thousand meters, and Jessamyn slammed the ship into autopilot. Jolting her head three times to the side in quick succession, she waited for her own audio earpiece to spiral itself outward and into her waiting hand. She had no wish to hear more. The earpiece no longer linked her to Ethan, only to her loss of him. Small hairs in her outer ear tickled as the device fell loose, reminding her of the day three weeks ago that Ethan had asked her to remove it so he could clean and test it.

  “You should have made them for everyone,” Jess had said, that day.

  “It is too late now,” Ethan had replied.

  Too late now, repeated Jessamyn’s splintered heart.

  The memory brought a fresh flow of tears, spilling upon her cheeks as she caught the audio device in the palm of her hand. The stolen aircraft stopped climbing, and Jess pulled free of the safety harness, drying her eyes on her dark shirtsleeve. She threw the transmitter onto the cockpit floor. Her foot crushed it and she heard a satisfying series of cracking noises. Retrieving the broken thing from the floor, she stretched out her arm to deposit it in the ship’s refuse.

  But something made her hesitate; she remembered how the smashed bit of technology owed its existence to Ethan, and she couldn’t throw it out. The device slipped from her fingers onto the ground, and Jessamyn gave way to gulping, gasping sobs, sliding onto the hard flooring of the craft.

  The Indian Ocean flashed beneath her—day had broken and early light reflected off a vast expanse of water, turning it silvery-grey, like the carbon dioxide snows of Mars.

  Snow.

  She thought of Ethan’s beloved Snows of Kilimanjaro. The great mountain itself lay just to the west of her current position; a broader sweep on her return north would take her past Kilimanjaro—its white snows and golden plains. Wiping her eyes, Jess nodded to herself, taking the pilot’s seat once more. She made corrections to her altitude to swing in close for a vid that would serve as a kind of tribute to her brother. Something she could bring home to her family when she walked into their dwelling without Ethan at her side. Her throat spasmed closed at the idea of this homecoming.

  Her craft sank lower, running before the sun. Soon she could make out two of Kilimanjaro’s volcanic cones. A third came into view as she brushed away the newest tears. She fumbled in her pack for her brother’s wafer-computer and snapped a few quick vids. It was a gesture, a small something, a piece of Ethan to carry back home.

  But when she looked at the pictures she’d captured, she felt a swell of disappointment. The great mountain’s height flattened out from on high. Jessamyn knew she didn’t have time to land her craft—she was borrowing time from the people of Mars even now. She hesitated but then decided to descend a couple thousand meters for a better picture.

  Kilimanjaro rewarded her—from this altitude, it dominated everything. And even the ground astonished her, mottled with distinct greens and yellows so different from Mars’s rusty-browns. She used her brother’s wafer to snatch image after image as she made a lazy circle around the mountain. She still thought the pictures didn’t do justice to Kilimanjaro’s sprawling bulk. As Jess dropped a last thousand meters, the mountain became suddenly a large and majestic being that dwarfed her, and her craft, and even the needs of her far-away planet for food. She felt thinned out, ghost-like, as if Kilimanjaro were the living creature and she a mere breath, dissipating in a blink of the great mount’s ancient existence.

  And then something caught her eye. An undulant river, brown, sinuous, flecked with white. She marveled at how swiftly it flowed, saw with wonder how it pressed against its banks, spilling along the sides and then returning.

  But as she watched, she realized it wasn’t a river at all. The vast and swiftly- snaking flow was a procession of animals, all charging together, making adjustments for one another’s movements that pressed them right or left.

  “Ohhh,” Jessamyn sighed and the flat-smashed heart inside her expanded.

  She strained her eyes to find the beginning of the herd, but it moved far onward, beyond what she could see. Jessamyn felt her heart beating faster and a part of her yearned to dive and join the herd on its pell-mell journey. Who could resist such a call? She adjusted her craft when it began to drift away from the herd’s migratory path. And still, she was nowhere near the front of the line. The creatures must be fast, but not in comparison to her vehicle, which meant she’d flown past thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, already.

  She circled back to take it in again, knowing she was using precious time. Back home, Jessamyn had considered the planetary dog as something to amuse children. But these wild creatures? Driving forward like a mighty river swelling its banks, they made Jess want to laugh and dance and cry all at the same time.

  How she wanted this great swell of wild creatures for her own grandchildren’s children! And for her brother—yes, she desperately wished it might have been for him—but this feeling went beyond her own personhood, her own losses. And suddenly it mattered to her—mattered terribly—that she return homeward. So that the next generation on Mars would survive and someday make her world into a place where wild things ran free. So that humans on Mars could have the breath knocked clean out of them by this kind of beauty, so full of dread and wonder that you wanted to laugh and dance and cry.

  Jess swept one last time alongside the great herd. Then she set a course west that would swing her along the equator and out to the Atlantic Ocean. Slipping the wafer back into her sling-pack, Jessamyn saw an incoming message flash upon the screen before her.

  “Deviation from flight plan detected. Please correct your course immediately to ensure your safety and the safety of others.”

  Jess turned the screen off, grimacing at the irony. By changing her course to return to the Red Galleon, she was ensuring the safety of others. Abruptly, she heard an audio signal. Not from her earpiece, which lay smashed upon the floor, but from the ship itself.

  “This is Central African Air Control requesting to speak with the pilot of Skylight Orbiter Alpha-Zero-Niner,” said a crackly voice.

  Jessamyn was not in the mood for speaking with anyone right now. She had a several hours flight ahead of her. Ignoring the message, she aimed her vessel north-west to Scotland. The audio messages continued, annoying and frequent, and Jess wished she could find an “off” switch for audio relay in the unfamiliar craft. But after hearing the same messages for a steady quarter hour, they became for her a kind of white noise.

  The messages ceased, finally, and for a full five blissful minutes, Jessamyn enjoyed peace as she flew onward. But then she saw a small approaching craft on her starboard side. Moments later, its twin appeared on her port side. Both sported flashy Central African Air Control logos. The pilot in the craft to her left tapped a headset as he contacted her by audio, ordering her to return to her logged route or face immediate penalties. She took a few sharp turns, curious how determined her escorts were to stick with her.

  Maddeningly determined, she observed, scowling.

  Her refusal to cooperate earned her an additional escort as well—a third craft dropped into position just ahead of her.

  “Holy Ares,” she swore, throwing the ship into a steep climb designed to make accompanying her craft less convenient. She managed to shake off her starboard and port e
scorts, but the one that had dropped down in front of her looped over backward and tailed her with a disturbing resolve. She received several additional messages, which became increasingly threatening and promised aerial intervention, whatever that might mean.

  And then the craft that had dogged her for an annoyingly intense three minutes was simply gone. Gone, too, were the threatening messages. Jess turned her craft back toward Skye. Relieved, she spent the next several minutes trying to figure out if she could use anything aboard her ship as a means of communicating with Wallace and Crusty, so as to let them know the Galleon had better be ready to lift off.

  Unfortunately, Jess had never paid much attention to her brother’s attempts to teach her more than rudimentary communications skills aboard ships back home. The Terran ship’s communications system baffled her, absorbing more of her attention than turned out to be good under the circumstances: Jess had company again.

  When the four ships representing “aerial intervention” showed as blips on Jessamyn’s radar, she felt resolve like a cool band encircling her core.

  “Intervene this,” she murmured, hurtling her ship through a series of drops and turns that her nav-screen warned her were inadvisable at current speed. The stiff language of the message brought a grin to Jessamyn’s mouth.

  “Inadvisable?” she said aloud. “Really? You want to see inadvisable?” She examined her nav-com and punched out a string of commands. Ethan’s lesson on disabling safety protocols had been something Jess had paid careful attention to. Grinning at her success, Jess pulled the ship into another steep climb, then looped over into a winding corkscrew. The extra g’s felt good, she thought to herself as she checked onscreen to see who was still with her. It took a moment to locate her own screen-blip, blinking bright blue like the blips of her pursuers. She thought of how her brother would have designed a more practical screen display with differently colored blips.