by S. J. Morden
Quite how often Yun had practiced setting up the weather station was something he didn’t ask, but he could tell by the speed and accuracy of her movements that she’d trained over and over again until she could do it blindfold. The station itself was mounted on a tripod she assured him wouldn’t blow over, and the boom held pressure and temperature sensors, as well as a laser to measure the dust-load. Powered by a palm-sized solar panel, a resin-square of electronics collected all the data and beamed it back to MBO via the whippy aerial mounted on top.
She talked to the device through her tablet, turning it on, running the diagnostics and making sure it talked to the main computer. A quarter of an hour, from start to finish. It was a good piece of kit, and she—and probably a whole team of people—had thought hard about how it went together. Of course it was designed well. Even XO had done that.
But there was such a stark contrast between the ideals of the people who’d designed the weather station and the minds of the people who’d stranded him on Mars. It was probably best that he didn’t dwell on such things.
Yun replaced the lid on the box, and they carried it back, sliding down the slope along the path made by their earlier bootprints. Yun seemed particularly keen not to walk just anywhere, as if stepping off the newly created path and leaving more marks would somehow spoil the uniqueness of that place. He didn’t really see the problem, but he followed her lead anyway.
Equipment stowed and back on the buggy, he checked his air and his fuel, reminded Yun to look at her suit too, and judged the daylight and weather conditions by leaning back and looking up. There was no good reason not to go to the summit.
The closer they got to the top, the more ragged the valley became: sharper turns, steeper sides, and evidence of waterfalls cascading down from tributaries, even islands, left high and isolated mid-stream.
Frank consulted his map and took a right fork to avoid ending up in a lake bed, and instead drove up one of the feeder rivers, which gradually eased them out onto the open slope of the volcano, near the rim of its huge, flat-bottomed crater.
They were now twenty-two thousand feet above datum, not that it felt like that at all. The volcano’s shape made seeing anything but the volcano impossible. The only feature was the far wall of the crater that was still another five and a half thousand feet higher than the one they were on. That was as tall as a mountain in its own right.
They stopped to put another weather station up and tie it in with the network, then drove right up to the edge of the crater. Yun called it a caldera, and Frank let the word glide by rather than reveal more of his ignorance.
The crater, caldera, whatever, was ten miles across, pretty much flat at the bottom, and bounded by steep, broken slopes. From the maps, the descent to the floor looked pretty much impossible, but standing on the edge of it, it seemed it might be doable in places. The gradient was greater on the far, east side, but twenty, thirty per cent where they’d parked up on the rim.
“I’m guessing that Jim will want to come out here sometime,” he said.
“I imagine Jim would probably want to live out here,” said Yun. She stared out over the bowl of rock, slowly turning from left to right to try and take it all in. “You see that patch of rougher ground in the middle?”
“Sure.” It looked like the rolling boil of water in a pan, suddenly frozen.
“That could be the top of the magma chamber. Mineral rich. What minerals, I couldn’t say. But quite probably metals. The area needs surveying, and samples taken, assayed.”
“I’ll be coming back here a lot, then.”
“We do have spare hab sections. If we could erect one here, it would mean considerably greater EVA time. It’s a shame the robots have already been sent back to Earth for evaluation.”
Frank squinted into the distance until he’d properly formed his reply. If M2 was out of the picture, then OK: it’d be safe enough to come up here without worrying about bumping into the neighbors. And technically, it wasn’t difficult to put a hab up. The problems came in keeping the atmosphere breathable and the internal temperature stable. Again, if there really wasn’t an M2 to worry about any more, there seemed no good reason for him to block this. He’d have to talk to Luisa.
“I know how to put up a hab,” he said. “I’ve been trained to do it, just in case. If all of us are willing to put in the labor, it’ll take less than a day. Inflate it with bottled oxygen to five psi and, I guess, wonder what he’s going to do for a can. There’s heat and power issues, but if he just wanted it as a daytime lifeboat so he can max out his daylight hours, then that’d be easier.”
“He could store samples and equipment here too.”
“Why not? Someone could drop him, and his buddy, off in the morning, pick them back up last thing, so we always have the two buggies at the bottom of the hill.”
“That’s an excellent suggestion, Lance. I’ll talk to Jim, and he can ask Lucy. We’ll need your input, of course.”
“I didn’t suggest it. Just, you know. It’s not a problem. We’ve got the kit, and there’s no point in it sitting around if you can use it.”
She looked back out over the crater. “Can we make the summit today?”
Frank flipped down his suit controls. “Lucy didn’t want anyone going below forty per cent, right?” His suit read fifty-one per cent.
“What’s the lowest you’ve been down to?”
Fumes, thought Frank. Fumes and nothing more. And Marcy died that day because Brack had needed to sacrifice someone to ease the food crisis. “Less than that.”
Then he did something he used to do with the other cons, turning their mics off so that Brack couldn’t overhear them. Sure, it hadn’t actually worked, because the medical monitors they all had implanted over their sternums contained microphones that could pick up every word resonating through their chests, and broadcast the information over the still-working suit antenna: but these were the good guys, and they weren’t doing that.
The NASA suits were of a very similar design to his: the controls certainly were, and he was able to tab through Yun’s commands to knock her microphone out too. He touched his helmet against hers.
“Can you still hear me?”
“Yes. Lance, why are we doing this?”
“Because if we’re going to talk about breaking the rules, we don’t want to be discussing it over an open channel, which might only have us on it, but might just be overheard by everyone.”
“Are we talking about breaking the rules?”
“We will be if we go for the top. I’m on fifty, you’re on less, and we’re going to have to take the long way round to the south: the map tells me we can’t go around to the north, there’s some big rock ledges in the way. So we’ve got a sixty-mile round trip, which is probably four hours, and then we’ve got another thirty-five back down the Santa Clara. Call that an hour and a half. We’ll be lucky to be on ten per cent by the time we get back to base.”
“Oh.”
“Now, Lucy’s not my boss. She shouts at me, I can tell her to whistle. But you? You’ve been here a week and this is your first long trip out. If you want my advice, I’d play nice, and we can go out again tomorrow, or the next day, to plant the summit.”
“But won’t we have the same distance to travel as we do now?”
“I know a short cut, straight up the north slope. Probably thirty-five miles to the top. We can be there and back in a morning.”
From where they stood, the summit was only ten miles away, straight across the yawning crater. But while Frank was pretty certain he could get down there, he didn’t fancy his chances getting up the other side. It looked formidable, steeper than Long Beach and almost five times taller.
“You want me to drive you around, we’ll do that. We probably won’t get much further before Lucy’s going to be wondering what the hell we’re up to. Or we can head back, which will take us to close to forty per cent, if not past it. It’s your call.”
“No, you’re right. Tomorro
w will be soon enough.”
“Good choice.” Frank showed her how to turn on her mic again, then did it for himself. “Let’s get back.”
If M2 had got to the top at any point, they’d have come at it from the south. Their tracks would still be there, and Frank wanted to check that out first, and put some of his own down if he had to. By taking Yun the northern route, he’d avoid any unnecessary complications. He had plenty of those for real.
He waited until she was behind his seat again, and he swung the buggy around in a wide circle. As he faced south, he peered into the distance. Rust-red rock was all he could see, and he was relieved.
The moment went by like a point on the compass, and he was driving back to the entry point to the river bed. This was fine. It could stay like this, and it’d be fine.
15
[Transcript of private phone call between Diego Ferrar (XO Legal, NYC) and Bruno Tiller 2/18/2049 0951MT]
BT: How much does she want?
DF: That’s the problem. What she wants, is to know where her daughter has gone.
BT: People disappear all the time, Diego. We don’t want her looked for.
DF: This is undoubtedly true. But if you were able to furnish us with evidence, from a PI, or a police report, that your employee had a troubled work or private life, had got involved in drugs, or perhaps was contemplating suicide, we could arrange to pass it on with our sincerest regrets that nothing was known sooner.
BT: Tell me that will work.
DF: Mothers are strange creatures, sir. Very tenacious. I’m sure whatever I receive will be of such compelling quality as to lead her away from our door.
BT: I’ll get someone on it.
[transcript ends]
“Spot for me, Lance.”
Frank stopped on his way through the yard. Jim—James the geologist—was climbing off the exercise bike and wiping down the seat with a microfiber towel. An actual towel, not a torn-up sheet made from parachute canopy.
The weights, a metal bar with a set of semi-rigid water-filled drums, paired into different sizes, were a part of the NASA-specific gear that hadn’t been available to the cons. It meant that Frank, even though he’d assembled all the gym equipment himself, had a strange disregard for everything in the yard. On the one hand, he felt it wasn’t for the likes of him, and he wasn’t good enough to use it. On the other, it only reminded him of both prison and the physical tests XO had put him through at Gold Hill. He’d never used a gym in the free world. His work had kept him mostly fit.
“I got stuff to do,” he said. “A schedule to keep.”
Spotting was a social thing as well as a safety thing. Certainly in prison: it was another way of establishing mutual bonds and determining power structures.
“You’re always running from one thing to another. It’s OK to slack off, kick it into park for five minutes, then pull out into the fast lane again. C’mon. We don’t have to talk.”
Frank tucked his nut runner into his belt. Maybe this would be OK. “Five minutes then.”
Jim selected the weights he wanted. The largest pair were huge. On Earth, the most dedicated muscle-guy would have struggled with more than a couple of reps. On Mars, where they weighed a third less? The numbers were moot. Two forties went on the bar, secured by a couple of twist-lock cuffs.
Frank assumed the position at the head-end of the bench, and Jim laid himself down on the bench. Frank hefted the bar, back straight and knees bent—he knew what he was doing—and placed it on the hanger. It wasn’t that heavy. He’d certainly pressed more in his time, in bags of cement, in scaffolding and tools.
But Jim seemed to think it was a big deal. He gripped the bar, his face a model of concentration. When he took the strain, Frank instinctively reached out with his builder’s hands.
“You OK with that?”
Jim nodded. “I’m fine.”
“Because it seems like a lot.”
Jim straightened his arms, holding the bar over his chest. He lowered it, and slowly pushed it back up again.
“It’s my regular weight,” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”
He lowered it and raised it again, smoothly. The muscles on his forearms were well defined, almost sharp. There was no fat on the man. He was lean, marionette thin, yet there was clearly strength in his frame. There was nothing about the man’s demeanor that resembled Brack, but they both had that same sparse sculpting.
Was that what this was about? Had Jim sensed Frank’s wariness around him, and was trying to do something normal, non-threatening with him?
Jim did another rep.
“How’re you finding it, Lance?”
“Finding it?”
“Us invading your space.”
“It’s OK.”
“Just OK, or are you being diplomatic?”
“It’s OK,” repeated Frank. “I thought we weren’t talking.”
Jim lowered the weight almost to his chest, then pushed it up again, locking his elbows. They trembled slightly. “Eight months is a long time to get used to being on your own. I hope we’re not crowding you.”
“You’ve been very respectful.”
“But you’d rather we weren’t here.”
Frank would rather they took him straight home. He was done with Mars. But he couldn’t tell anyone why because he had secrets to keep.
So instead he said: “You’re why I’m here.”
“Do you resent that?”
What was this? Was he trying to get a rise out of him?
“No,” said Frank. “It’s different. That’s all.”
Jim did another couple of reps, and said, “OK.”
Frank took the bar from him and deposited it on the hanger. He felt his own muscles flex, but it wasn’t a strain.
“Could you manage that, Lance?”
“Sure.”
“But you’ve got nothing to prove, right?”
“I’ve got my chores. They keep me moving.” Definitely trying to get a rise. “If I need to lift, I’ll swap out the buggy wheels.”
“Don’t you want to see how high you can go? Fan’s got a league table. Balanced for power-to-weight ratio.”
“You want me to join your league, is that it? You could have just asked me straight.”
“Just trying to see how competitive you are, Lance. You not interested in how you measure up against us?”
“I don’t do pissing contests,” said Frank.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Neither did I.” Frank lifted the bar out of the hanger and lowered it to the floor. “Your group have been together for a year with nothing much to do but play off against each other. Me? I’ve been frozen, shipped, defrosted and put to work. I guess I was about ready for you, though there was probably more I could have done. I had to concentrate on building the base, keeping it running and, I guess, not dying. Games? League tables? Maybe one day, but right now I don’t have time for that.”
Jim sat up on the bench and swung his leg over to sit sideways on it. “Well, I poked a hornet’s nest there. Most you’ve said to me since we got here.”
It was getting too close to personal, and Frank wasn’t going there. “Unless you need me to spot for you again, I got work to do.”
“Lance, I didn’t mean anything by this. It was just talk, shooting the breeze.”
Frank looked at the man, tried to read his expression. “Sure.”
“I’ve offended you. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not offended. Just,” and Frank shrugged, “confused. I don’t understand what it is you want from me.”
“I’m just trying to get to know you. I know I’m not Leland, but there’s no harm in trying to work out what makes you tick.” Jim gave a half-grin. “Unless that’s commercially sensitive information.”
“Do you find my personal details funny?”
“It’s kind of funny,” said Jim. “It’s kind of frustrating. It’s what we’re saying to each other when we want to tell them to butt o
ut of our business.”
“Do you ever take the hint?”
“I’ve already apologized, Lance.”
“That’s OK. Accepted.” Should Frank just go now? Was this painful, difficult conversation finally over? He didn’t know. Just how far did he need to go to accommodate the NASA crew, given that he wasn’t actually Lance Brack?
“As to whether I can take a hint? Not as often as I should. When they picked us as a team, they made sure that we could all work together. And we’re all very different people, so that took some juggling of rosters. We’ve got some brilliant astronauts kicking their heels Earthside because they get pissed too easily.”
“You’re saying that’s me?” Frank suddenly became aware that he had an audience, and that Jim hadn’t noticed his commander leaning on the wall at the far end of the yard, down by the cross-hab connector.
“I’m explaining this all wrong,” said Jim. “You were selected because you were resilient, because you could cope with being on your own for an extended period, that you didn’t need other people. What qualifies you for that part of the mission is exactly why you think I’m a jerk now.”
“We all think you’re a jerk, Jim.” Lucy levered herself upright and wandered casually through the gym equipment. “Leastways, we all do sometimes. Lance doesn’t have to take part in any crew activities, he doesn’t have to answer any non-mission-related questions, he doesn’t even answer to me on non-mission-critical activities. So you poking him like a hornet’s nest—I was here for that, yes—is off-limits. I’m just hoping Lance isn’t reconsidering his generous offer to teach us how to build a module up on the summit of Ceraunius, which will benefit you most of all, and which I’m just coming to tell him we kindly accept.”
