Mars Nation 2

by Brandon Q Morris

  Maybe it would like to just take her with it. The wind tugged on her. It was only a minor difference in pressure. It was easy for her to resist this force, but it was alluring. The dust devil had chosen her of all people as its target. No, she had actually been the one that had gotten into its path. Ewa turned and walked in the direction that the storm was dictating. She set one foot in front of the other and let the wind conduct her movements.

  The dust devil no longer seemed to be in such a hurry. Hadn’t it been wandering much faster across the Mars surface than it was now? Perhaps it, too, was happy to have found a living creature with which it could communicate? It was possible that it had been wandering around the lifeless desert for centuries, searching for a companion that its father Mars either couldn’t or wouldn’t provide. What if the dust devil wasn’t made up of grains of sand, but of living cells that surrounded its center core, creating a loose organism?

  Now my imagination is really running wild, Ewa thought. She stopped walking. She had to let the storm pull away. It gusted against her a few more times, insisting that she accompany it, but then it realized that it didn’t stand a chance. Suddenly, the air was as clean as it ever could be on Mars. The dust devil headed off northward. Ewa felt a flash of panic. What if the storm had carried her off, against her will, to a secret kingdom? Would Friday pipe up any moment with, ‘I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore?’

  Ewa spun around quickly. No, two hills were there on the horizon looking like elephants—the drill and the loader. She folded up the pole and retraced her footsteps. She was sweating by the time she reached the ladder to the cab. A light was blinking on the drill’s navigational screen. Ewa didn’t bother with it. She first wanted to examine the pole. She closed the hatch and let fresh air flow back into the cab. She then took a seat at the analysis tool at the back of the cab. This work station had obviously been built for a physicist or a geologist. It seemed obvious to Ewa that the passengers in the drill would occasionally need to examine soil samples. She had already caught sight of the microscope. She carefully removed the tape from the upper end of the pole, pulled a slide out of the drawer, and brushed some of the material stuck to the tape onto it. After pushing the slide under the microscope’s lens, she gazed carefully through the eyepiece.

  Ewa was disappointed. Of course, she had known how fanciful her idea had been, but she had still secretly hoped to be right. But what she saw didn’t include living cells. They were obviously crystals. She recognized silica with iron particles, along with a little ice that melted on the slide. What she had was perfectly ordinary Mars dust. It was significantly finer than what was typically found on the surface, but that was also normal, since the dust devil wasn’t unusually large or especially strong. She looked out the window. It was gone. Maybe it had already dissipated. Some dust devils only lasted for a few minutes. Those that covered a hundred meters or more in diameter could move for days across the Mars surface, leaving behind trails that could even be seen from Earth.

  She looked at the clock. Her excursion had lasted almost two hours. But she had the time to spare. She would probably reach the NASA base by Sol 101, a day earlier than initially anticipated. She packed the pole away neatly. Tomorrow she would more precisely measure the dust density at varying elevation levels. This would at least give her something to do. And perhaps she would find a few more interesting crystals under the microscope.

  Her eyes were drawn once more to the flashing light on the navigation console. She sat down in the driver’s seat. She had received a message. Who was trying to contact her? No one knew where she was! Her heart pounded faster, and her forehead grew warm. She played the message. It was an audio message that had been forwarded to the drill from the transport ship.

  “My name is Rick Summers,” she heard a human voice in which the owner’s sense of self-importance was quite evident. Ewa quickly realized that this was the unpleasant person who had very openly advertised for spies among her crew.

  “I am the administrator of Spaceliner 1, and am speaking in the name of Senator Rick Ballantine, who—after the probable collapse of the government of the United States—represents the highest political power on this planet.”

  As if, now that Earth had stopped communicating, any title from there meant anything at all!

  “I have been informed that you have stolen property from our expedition. An act like this can only be interpreted as an expression of aggression. You will be held accountable for this, unless you immediately return our property to where you took it from. This is no empty threat. The camera footage has enabled us to identify you as Ewa Kowalska, a member of the Mars for Everyone project. If you refuse to right your illegal actions, we will demand recourse from MfE. Since your entire ship is presumably worth less than the vehicles you have stolen, MfE will have to spend the rest of their lives working for us to pay off this debt. I possess the means and the authority to carry out this warning, and will begin doing that as soon as Spaceliner 1 lands on Mars. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

  Well, he had certainly told her! Ewa sat in the driver’s seat, her arms crossed. A giant drill that allegedly belonged to this Rick Summers now followed her wishes alone, and Summers couldn’t do a thing about it. This message was, in her opinion, primarily an expression of rage. But she could live with that. Summers didn’t have to be her enemy. His threats left her strangely cold. The man sounded like any other bureaucrat. He had to be one of those insolent bureaucrats, as otherwise he wouldn’t have taken things this far. But he still had no idea of what life was truly like out here. Mars was no walk in the park. Life on Mars was a matter of survival, especially since they could no longer expect any support from Earth.

  By what means did Summers think he could make good on his threats? He might have fifty, maybe a hundred people on board his ship. But the site the corporation had selected as the location for their base was far away from both the NASA and MfE settlements. He wouldn’t be able to quickly dispatch his mini-army to either base. Distances always entailed a risk factor on Mars—and an unnecessary waste of resources.

  No, Rick Summers, you just want to scare me. But I won’t be falling into your trap, Ewa thought. On the contrary, the spoken threats sent from distant space merely strengthened her resolve. Rick’s commentary made it quite clear that he never would have voluntarily offered the hardware and resources he had available to help the other people on the planet, neither the necessity-driven ones, such as the NASA people, or the ones faced with increasingly limited resources, like MfE.

  Ewa had simply leveled out the playing field somewhat. But that didn’t mean that she could simply ignore the threats, either. At some point, Summers would seek revenge for this humiliation. He seemed to be the kind of man whose worst nightmare was losing face in front of his subordinates, which was why sooner or later he would have to act. And so, her first suggestion to the NASA astronauts would be to use the loader to construct a defensive wall around their base. After that, she would set the autopilot to drive the vehicle to the MfE base.

  Sol 96, Mars surface

  Ewa had actually hoped that she’d reach her goal by Sol 101, the hundredth day after the NASA spaceship landed on Mars, bringing along two giant, very useful presents. But this wasn’t going to happen, because the ground had changed since this morning. The Mars surface was normally blanketed by a thin layer of dust with hard rock located only a few centimeters below it. However, now they were crossing a landscape reminiscent of one of the vast deserts on Earth.

  Ewa was not concerned at all about the drill. Its enormous weight was spread evenly over its ten individually autonomous axles. But the loader had already come very close to tipping over along the edge of a dune. The remote-control system functioned rather primitively, much along the lines of a dog leash. It would have been ideal if the loader had been able to find its own optimal path through the sand, but the program was just not that highly advanced.

  There was only one solution, Ew
a would have to take over the wheel personally. She would have to remotely guide the drill instead. Since the loader no longer had a cab, she would have to take her place on the driver’s seat wearing her spacesuit. Ewa pushed the stop button on the drill’s monitor and the vehicle came to an immediate halt. She was already wearing her suit, so only her helmet needed to be attached. But first she wiped her forehead clear of the sweat that still lingered there from her last bit of physical activity. Who knew when she’d ever have the opportunity again! Neither of the vehicles possessed maps of the Mars surface, as otherwise she would have taken another route and avoided this desert altogether. Ewa hoped that she hadn’t added any more than a day to her overall journey headed south.

  She closed her helmet. After the breathable air was pumped out of the cabin, she left her shelter through the hatch and climbed down the ladder. She jumped the last meter and landed on soft sandy ground. This will be a challenge, she thought. With each step, her boots lodged themselves deep in the ground. The reinforced joints of her suit were not made to assist with this type of movement. For the first time ever, she wished she had her old spacesuit back on—but only because the soles of its boots covered more area and thus could better distribute her weight.

  It was a mere one hundred meters to the loader, but she needed to climb up a steep dune to get there. Was there no other way around it? At home, that is, on Earth, she used to go hiking in the winter through the snowy mountains, wearing snowshoes. She needed something like them right now.

  Ewa hurried to the boxes of supplies attached to the drill. Had she packed anything that she could use as makeshift snowshoes? Her gaze fell on a wooden box. It contained all sorts of replacement parts that would not be affected by the Mars atmosphere. Could she possibly use the lid? Ewa needed very little time to think about this. The box was held together on all sides by latch fasteners. She only needed to open them, and she would have the lid in her hands.

  To ensure that the box wouldn’t lose any of its contents, she used a few strips of duct tape to roughly cover it. She had suspected that the duct tape would be one of her most valuable resources here. If they wanted to survive all of this, they would definitely need an entire factory dedicated to the production of duct tape! Not to mention, she would also need this all-purpose commodity to strap the lid to her feet, but she had to break it into two halves first. Good thing she had so much additional strength in her arms!

  Five minutes later, she was no longer sinking into the sand, but standing on top of it, albeit with her legs forced unnaturally far apart. It would have been a better idea if she had broken the lid halves into slightly smaller boards. But she only needed them for a few meters anyway. Ewa turned around and looked up at the dune. She decided to not climb straight up the dune, but to circle around it instead. Her technique worked. She ended up with large piles of sand on top of her improvised snowshoes, but she had used a lot less energy than would have been consumed in her regular boots alone.

  Then she arrived at the dune’s crest. She had unerringly singled out the highest dune in the entire area. How did she always seem to manage to do that? Ewa looked around the landscape. From up here she had a clear view far into the distance. The sandy desert extended all the way to the horizon, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. If she was smart about it, she would reach the horizon before nightfall.

  The loader stood maybe five meters away from her. It hadn’t made it to the top of the dune. It simply wasn’t meant to be, she could see that from here. The south sides of the dunes were especially steep. Again and again, the red sand was interrupted by dark stripes. What was that? Carbon dioxide ice? If it was that, then she needed to be careful because it meant that there were potential thin spots where the vehicle could break through into the cavities. The best thing to do was to avoid the dark spots. Ewa decided to let the drill spearhead the journey. She could use its cameras to locate any dangerous obstacles via the loader’s monitor. Due to its long length, the drill ought to be safe from breaking through any holes.

  Ewa found her balance. The front tips of the two pieces of wood attached to her feet pointed upward. Back on Earth, she had been an accomplished skier. The temptation was incredibly appealing. Wouldn’t sand be nearly as good as snow for a downhill jaunt? And, wouldn’t these improvised snowshoes work sort of like skis? She had read somewhere that sand was almost impossible to distinguish from deep, wet snow. But if she spent her time with such follies, the NASA people would be forced to wait another day for her arrival. No, that doesn’t matter, she thought. No one was waiting for her. She didn’t even know whether they would welcome her. She was determined not to pass up a chance to have a little fun.

  Ewa closed her eyes and concentrated. Then she moved her body a little, much like the motion one uses to start a playground swing. It was just enough to make her lose her balance and she leaned forward to keep from falling. She shifted her hips slightly back so that the tips of her ‘skis’ wouldn’t end up digging themselves into the sand. Then she was on her way. Since the material of her skis was far from ideal for this activity, she didn’t even try to steer herself down the dune, but let herself be pulled downhill by gravity. The sand sprayed up and hit her helmet. It was magnificent. Ewa was breathing heavily once she reached the foot of the dune only a few seconds later. She had made it to the bottom without falling even once.

  Her success at this maneuver stoked her desire to do it again, this time with an overwhelming sense of obligation. She had just managed to become the first person ever to ski on Mars. It would go down in the history books. But they still needed to be written, she chided herself. Books that would only be written after mankind managed to survive its first years of exile.

  Inside the formerly-enclosed cab of the loader, she first needed to use a shovel and a broom to clear away the mounds of sand that had accumulated on board. Then she planted herself on the driver’s seat and checked the status of both vehicles on the console. It registered no defects. Utilizing the life support feature on her spacesuit, she was even able to increase the levels of breathable air inside her helmet, as well as her power and food supplies. But for as long as she was in the loader, she could only take in food through the feeding tube and would not be able to use the toilet. Ewa shivered at the thought. She reminded herself that it had only been a very short time ago that she had withstood the exact same tortures. She hoped the desert wasn’t as vast as it seemed!

  Her best bet was not to wait too long before heading off. Ewa started both engines using the console. Then she pulled the steering lever back toward herself. The loader maneuvered just like a spaceship. The engineers likely assumed that astronauts made better pilots than Formula 1 drivers. The lever on her right made the wheels on the vehicle’s right side accelerate and decelerate, the left one controlled the left side. The autopilot normally supervised the wheels’ movements, but she was also able to override the system’s commands as needed. Ewa hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.

  The next step was to let the vehicle roll backwards. The autopilot had tried to make it climb up the steep dune. The software could precisely read the engine’s capacity data, but it obviously wasn’t programmed for such soft ground. Ewa decided to take a gentle approach to the slope. This side of the dune wasn’t so steep that the loader was at risk of tipping over. Nonetheless, when it started to pitch, a cold-hot sweat seized her. The software’s green light indicating that the vehicle was perfectly fine helped to soothe her nerves.

  Ewa had to alter her strategy at the crest of the dune when she saw that its southern face was much steeper. Trying to maneuver her way by snaking down would be a suicide mission. She would need to descend the dune the same way she had done it with her skis, nose first and at breakneck speed straight to the bottom.

  Ewa stood up to see where her landing spot would be. She saw no obstacles in the way. She briefly calculated the potential result. Considering Mars’s gravitational pull, as well as the height and weight of the loader which was stuck
deep in and slowed down by the sand, she came up with a maximum speed that she was confident would not harm the vehicle’s mechanics. She gently pressed the accelerator and was subsequently at the mercy of the situation. She would only be able to use the brake once the loader had landed at the foot of the dune.

  The sand sprayed much more than during her ski run. Inside the open cabin she was hurled back and forth. She struggled to keep from being ejected, but in the end she arrived safe and sound at the bottom. Ewa breathed a sigh of relief, even though she was aware that she might need to repeat this maneuver a few more times along the way. Wouldn’t it be better if she programmed this strategy into the automated system? No, Ewa thought, this is the best part of the journey. It’s so much fun. She looked out. The drill had also made it down without any trouble.

  Once again, Ewa found herself aboard the loader at the crest of another dune. Her arm and leg muscles ached. Every time she needed to descend a steep slope she had to use all her strength to keep herself from being slammed against the walls of the cab or being ejected from the vehicle. Why hadn’t the people who built this thing thought to put in seat belts or safety harnesses? The answer was clear—because the loader usually moved at a snail’s pace. Since her first downhill adventure, Ewa had even attempted to attach herself to the seat with the duct tape, but that severely limited her field of vision, and she simply couldn’t work like that.

  But she had hope. About a half an hour ago, she discovered that the desert had some sympathy for her. Today, she only covered one-third of the usual stretch, but tomorrow she’d be able to really step it up, especially once she switched back to the drill’s climate-controlled cabin in three or four hours. These fast-paced descents weren’t fun anymore, mainly because of the unpleasant sensation caused by the unrelenting pressure against the driver’s seat. Add to that her full diaper and the feeling of excrement slowly covering her lower back.