Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever

by Phoenix Sullivan

  West activated the hack and gave a few places some imaginative names. When there was nothing more he could do to stuff things up for the politicians back home, he checked the clock and made his way to the galley.

  “Did everybody get hungry and ignore the schedule?”

  The galley was crowded most times, an unavoidable consequence of the breakdown of Buggy A and the transfer of her crew to Buggy B. It meant there were fourteen people in a place designed for seven that could officially sustain only twelve. Everybody was on everybody else’s nerves, and the crew was dealing with a lot of unforeseen stress.

  “Casey said there was a bug-hole in the numbers,” said Barry Schmidt. “True?”

  “Chemical profiles of some samples have spikes we didn’t expect. Like the gold find, maybe we need to follow that up.”

  “But it’s not gold, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Then we should move on to the next site and see if there’s something there that might make more money.” With that, Schmidt crossed his hairy arms over his hairy chest like the decision had been made.

  “First of all, Schmidt,” West said, “you haven’t made dinner yet. Hop to it. Second of all — all of you — we’re scheduled to be here, testing and digging, for four more days. This is one of the big scientific digs. So there’s to be no talk of moving or staying until that four days is up. Now, those of you scheduled for rest, go get some sleep. Those of you with duties, get to them. And those of you scheduled to eat, stay seated.”

  Of the ten, only four remained behind. Unfortunately, one of them was Schmidt. And another was Casey. “So I have four days—”

  “To run any tests that protocols require, plus any additional tests protocols allow and for which you have the time and resources – without shortchanging any of the other test sites we’re scheduled to visit.”

  “Can I have an extra assistant?”

  “No, Casey, you work with what you’ve got. I’m not diverting any additional resources to you.”

  Schmidt gave a condescending grunt. “Four days here, we could try to reopen Buggy A. Use it for something more than a mechanical pack mule.”

  “So what do you plan to do? Replace the damaged solar panels with God-knows-what or repair the heating coils God-knows-how?”

  Schmidt took a deep breath and put microwaved meals before the crew. “No one makes solar panels that big as a single unit. They’re actually a series of panels screwed onto a frame as part of a closed circuit. From reports and photos, I think there are at least two panels that can be brought online. That will at least provide light and run the scrubbers for a couple of people.”

  “What about heat? The coils are gone.”

  “We leave the shielding around the reactor but take the insulation off the drive engine. Instead of venting the engine’s heat to Mars’ atmosphere, we shunt it to the cabins. With the insulation gone, we should get to temperate conditions within a few hundred kilometers. At worst, we wear our thermal underwear 24/7.”

  “How much power did you use to work that out?”

  “One screen, twenty minutes, all on my personal ration.”

  West looked down at his unappetizing meal. The air might be safe, but the smell of bodies eventually tainted everything. “What resources would you need?”

  “I’ll cannibalize my down time; I can unscrew the panels by myself and hold them on the rails. I’ll need somebody to help put them in their new places. We’ll both need suits.”

  “Start working on the panels. Use Buggy A’s power as needed. We’ll cable power or, if the cable won’t reach, beam power to the dig site from some other source. Give this project your full attention. And Schmidt … this better work.”

  “Commander, you can’t—”

  “Shut up, Casey,” said West.

  The rest of the meal was eaten in uncomfortable silence. The place still smelled like a gym with the air conditioning off. Getting even two people to Buggy A would be a boon, but they’d have to do something really good to be sent over there.

  West finished his meal and went to his office. He passed Aoki standing in front of a vent, inhaling the least tainted air in the general access section. The crew had been chosen based on people with needed skills who could handle difficult situations. Even when there were standouts, the testing procedures had been kept long and arduous, so being selected still made them feel special. But no one had calculated on months of pressure like this. They were packed too tight, always tripping over one another, always feeling each other’s sweat and smelling each other’s bad moods. It wasn’t a day-by-day as much as a minute-by-minute grind.

  Little wonder that West let people do things in their own way and blow off steam as needed. It took the cocooned Earth politicians to think reality out here naturally conformed to whatever was written on letterhead emails.

  West opened the door to his office. Susan Green sat on the floor, legs outstretched, back to the wall, sound asleep. It was a rare place to be alone. West closed the door and tried to decide how to occupy the time before his sleep cycle.

  “Schmidt’s suiting up,” he said to no one. He thought he could help, but when he got to the airlock’s antechamber, there was already a crew doing that.

  “Commander, I have to talk with you now.” Casey’s urgent tone drew West’s attention.

  “Get me some results, Casey.”

  “I’ve got them, Commander. That’s why I have to talk with you.”

  “Well, then, Science Lieutenant Anne Casey should—”

  “In private.”

  As if that wouldn’t feed the rumor mill. He glanced at the six men and women suiting up. Some of them were skipping sleep to do this. West watched as they put on the thermal underwear embedded with hoses that carried fluids and circuits that carried information. The suit was armor over that, and it was designed to be put on fast. That had saved lives in the Buggy A disaster. Put on the boots, stand in the template and interlocking rings linked up around the body, using thread and screw to tighten to fit.

  On top of that went each person’s customized helmet. A standard pack then latched itself onto the armor and connected itself for air, power, recycling, and sensors. All-in-all, it took maybe two minutes from boots to airlock. The suited-up crew all waved as they went out the hatch, and the people in the antechamber moved off.

  Waiting for the crew to clear out, West wondered, not for the first time, why this room out of all of them had been left battleship gray.

  “All right, Casey, the audience is gone. Now, what do you have to say?”

  She pursed her lips. It was more like a pout than anything else. It seemed she was trying to not say something, which would make sense only if she was going to tell him less than the full story.

  “The original anomaly was found in sand outside the main Secchi Crater. Instead of just repeating samples —”

  “You broke protocol,” said West.

  “Commander, if you get an anomaly in statistics you need to check with an absolutely fresh sample. If you include the original sample in the new one, you will still get the same anomaly because you polluted it—”

  “Did you break protocol, yes or no?”

  “I got a new sample that had an increased level of anomaly. Greatly increased. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  West didn’t answer. Outside, through the viewing port, it was night and the stars were abundantly clear. In the dark, the crew repairing Buggy A were merely bouncing bobble lights. Buggy A itself sat in the shade of a hill. With no starlight to outline its position and no power of its own to put on any lights, it was invisible.

  “Did you break protocol or not, Lt. Casey? If you don’t answer the question, I will have to suspend you without pay and conduct an investigation.”

  “I’ll take it to Earth—”

  “Go ahead, Casey, but if you do, you give your enemies in Congress leverage in the next election. Investigations there aren’t conducted to solve a problem or
to get an answer but to affect an election outcome.”

  There was a pause. Outside the bobble lights were bobbling in unison.

  “I took a sample prior to surface tests — a bore of about two feet,” said Casey.

  “About?”

  “Twenty-two inches.”

  “The von Erich Coefficient.” West was secretly pleased at the look of surprise that crossed Casey’s face.

  “Her work was —”

  “I might have done the same. But —”

  “I found … I found calcium carbonate and magnesium sulfate.”

  “Ordinary constituents of Martian soil,” said West.

  “Not in these concentrations. And not associated physically but not chemically. Naturally I broke protocol. Protocol is just Earth’s buzz word meaning obey me. By protocol, sand is taken, mixed, ground and then tested to get its chemical composition. Solid stone, like in a core sample, can be taken and cut into layers and the chemicals examined to see which ones are in some kind of association. We do that all the time to assay sediment soil to check how valuable a mine is likely to be. In this case, the calcium is next to the magnesium sulfate, and between those two deposits is phosphorus. The deposits are next to each other, but they aren’t mixed up together.”

  She took out her tablet, the ones that under protocol only the lieutenants and the commander could have. Onscreen was a slide of core matter. There were several deposits of calcium carbonate, which were near phosphorus — but always physically separate. Likewise, on the far side of the phosphorus was nearly always a distinct deposit of magnesium sulfate.

  West flipped through over fifty screens of core samples. They certainly didn’t seem random when looked at in that light, but Casey had just framed the whole thing for him. Having been told there was a pattern, he would look for it and possibly find it even if it wasn’t there. Hell, after decades of refutation, the images of scenery they sent back to Earth were still being analyzed for remnants of canals.

  “Were all these slides from one core sample?” asked West.

  Casey hung her head.

  “That’s an awfully small sample to draw a conclusion from.”

  “The only conclusion I’ve drawn, is that there is an anomaly.”

  There was a clanking and a whirr as people entered the airlock. The bobbles had come home.

  “From now on, Lieutenant Casey, you’re under direct management, and that means you will be micromanaged. I can get the reference to the protocol, if you like, but believe me, my order will hold.”

  Airlocks were still a slow process, though they’d sped up considerably since the early days of Lunar colonization. What used to take hours now took twenty minutes. But sometimes it was a very long twenty minutes. And while West waited, the crowd gathered again.

  The antechamber to the airlock was not built as a piazza. It couldn’t hold audiences for speeches, especially with six occupants in suits. West decided to simply rely on the pressure of numbers to drive out those near the door; that way he didn’t have to decide who was worthy and who was not to stay. In the end, he didn’t even have to rely on that.

  Only one person came in, clad in armor. The helmeted head turned to take in the crowd. The camera lenses gave the impression of the eyes of a nocturnal creature. In fact, the lenses just cast what they saw onto a screen on the inside of the helmet. That way there was one less opening in the suit that could rupture.

  Clamps released and the helmet came off revealing the face of Aoki.

  “Couple of capacitors are gone. We can rig an ammonia battery, but it would be better if we could do phosphorus-neon. With that we’d have a closed system with only energy for input-output. If we use ammonia we’ll need a constant supply of it and we’ll use a lot of energy just maintaining the system.”

  There was a low rumble and hiss as voices around the room played Chinese whispers and American mutterings.

  “Given the phosphorus-neon batteries, we can bypass most of the problems with the capacitors. As an estimate — but I’m pretty confident about it — we’d be able to sustain four people, maybe five.”

  The Chinese whispers stopped. The American mutterings continued. It didn’t take long for the noise to swell. West thought of shouting them down but then came up with a better plan.

  “Aoki,” he said loud enough for everyone to hear but too softly for anyone to hear comfortably. Then he lowered his voice a little more. “When will the buggy be ready for occupation?”

  Aoki gave his answer, put on his helmet, and went back into the airlock. Behind him the antechamber grew quiet.

  “When will the buggy be ready?”

  “Should have listened instead of talked, shouldn’t you?”

  Commander Howard West walked out of the antechamber. It wasn’t exactly a piazza, but it could be just as useful. He’d remember that if he ever ran for a place in Government.

  In his quarters, Susan Green was still sleeping. Overpopulating the buggy had people looking for a quiet place — and sometimes just another place. Three cramped levels, all with low ceilings, gave everyone a wanderlust that couldn’t really be filled. He wouldn’t wake Green, so he decided to head to Console.

  Console was called Command Deck by Earth Headquarters, though Earth’s terminology was being steadily replaced as the mission went on. With its large view ports forward and to the sides, Console was where the buggy was driven. The windows, of course, were redundant. Readouts and ground sonar did more to find hazards than mere eyes ever could. Since they weren’t moving at the moment, West figured the driver’s seat should be free.

  Should be.

  As soon as Commander West walked in, the room fell silent. There were five in the room, two more than standard on a stationary night watch.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping, Commander?” asked Lieutenant Commander Bruno Laurer.

  “Green is borrowing my bunk. I didn’t want to wake her.”

  “So that’s where she goes. She’s not been in her assigned bunk since she and Ellison had a dust-up weeks ago. Hazard of sharing bunks, I guess. Still, Ellison holds grudges.”

  “If you knew about that, you should have taken it in hand. There are protocols to handle this sort of thing,” said West. “I’ll not have bullying in my command. I’ll talk to the two of them, but you should do better than some Earth manager covering his own ass.”

  “Ellison will take it out on you.”

  “Then she wears a suit and walks to the next site,” said West.

  “Can I do something wrong? I could use the alone time.”

  “Shut up, Reesman. You and Yorkston shouldn’t even be here; active duty isn’t time for socializing.”

  The two left sheepishly.

  “I need a console,” West told Laurer. “Why don’t you go relax or sleep.”

  Laurer slid out of his seat and West slid in. Face recognition let him log on.

  He accessed Casey’s core samples, overriding her lock and no doubt triggering any number of warnings for her that someone hacked into the system. This time he didn’t want to just look at slides, he wanted to know how she’d generated the samples in the first place.

  The slides did indeed all come from one core sample because she drilled only once. But if it had been ground, as protocol required, the quantities of elements would still have been an anomaly.

  West double-checked the figures. The anomaly was present in both the core sample and the surrounding sand. But it was more extreme in the core. West checked weather patterns, which on Mars were still not well understood. What readings had been taken could be interpreted to mean the south polar winds were isolated. Sands made here largely stayed here. Of course, there would be some mixture of sand from elsewhere — that couldn’t be stopped entirely. So if contamination reduced the amount of anomaly in the sand, then finding more of it in intact stone meant one thing. They had found some kind of singular deposit.

  West hadn’t realized how long he had been working until the console pinge
d him that Earth Headquarters had sent him a message. It was plain text, which was always a bad sign. If the news were good, or at least exciting, someone would want their face on camera in case the media picked up on it. West read the file:

  The following names are unsuitable for features of Mars.

  These names will be deleted.

  Please amend and reply immediately.

  Commander West replied that he confirmed all fourteen names and reminded Earth Headquarters he had the unilateral authority to name all features. He had to compose a hack on the fly, but he managed to contact several news sites for whom the text would confirm prejudices one way or the other. If they made a meal of it, they’d use up all their space exploration news on names and not anomalies in sand and core samples — at least for a few days.

  West turned around to find Schmidt standing behind him. He wondered how long he’d been there.

  “Buggy A is not restored, but we have enough extra power that we can run scrubbers and sustain two, maybe three, people who don’t mind being alternately sweaty and freezing cold.”

  “Is that during travel or when stationary?”

  Schmidt thought. “Keep it two and it can handle both without problem.”

  “Is it going to stink as much as this place?”

  “No.”

  And that concluded all the important details.

  “OK, give me the calculations and I’ll send them to Earth.”

  “You don’t trust my calculations?”

  “Even if we don’t like protocols, we have to obey them for now.”

  Technically, West knew he should put Schmidt over on Buggy A; he’d repaired it, after all. But Schmidt tended to run his own agenda and needed outside direction to keep him focused.

  Schmidt left, perhaps sensing West’s thoughts. West looked at the console. Pings were still coming through. Once, the only indication of an incoming message was a little icon of an envelope, but that wasn’t annoying enough for Earth Headquarters, which wanted immediate replies to messages that would take over half an hour to travel between Earth and Mars.