by S. J. Morden
Frank had some of his lights on. The weather had made everything particularly gloomy, and they were up and out barely a quarter of an hour after sunrise. The shadows were deep and almost tangible, but each buggy had only one fuel cell, and running the lights would eat into the range. They’d brought all the spare life support packs with them, fully charged. He already knew his search patterns, and it was going to be a hell of a long day. And it was only going to go short if someone found a body.
There was no pretending this was a search party. It was recovery. Everyone, when they spoke at all, still referred to him in the present tense. They knew, though. They knew. Jim was dead. It was, perversely, only Frank who wondered if he was alive.
He didn’t know which he wanted more. He hoped there was a body to be found so he didn’t have to go against XO’s directives, and he hoped there wasn’t, because that might mean Jim had been picked up by M2. For good reasons? To force someone to go over, and offer help? Would XO double-down on their threats to the NASA team? Or threaten his family? He didn’t know.
A body would be closure at least. Fan would examine Jim. Someone else—Lucy?—would give the suit a postmortem. They’d conclude that this was death by natural causes, and Frank could sleep again. He hadn’t asked what the protocol was for dealing with a dead astronaut. He presumed it didn’t involve them being flown into the sun.
He broached the top of the river valley, driving out onto the broad summit, and caught the stuttering light from the risen sun slanting through dust-laden skies: it was like approaching the gates of Hell. Twilight rather than daylight, and they weren’t there for any good purpose, either. Frank wondered if traipsing around in weather he’d never seen the like of before was going to represent an unacceptable risk to NASA, considering all they were supposed to be looking for was a corpse.
But Jim had been their friend. They’d trained with him, traveled with him, laughed and argued and, who knew, maybe even slept with him. Of course they wanted to know what had happened to him, and wanted to do this one last thing for him. Frank would have put his responsibility to the living over that to the dead, though Lucy clearly weighed these things differently. She was in charge: not of him, but still definably in charge all the same.
The volcano-top… it was like it was shrouded in fog. Foggish. Pink Mars fog. It came in bands like rain, as if curtains of material were being dragged over the landscape. One moment it was clear enough to see to the next crater, the nearest scarp, and then the next wall of dust advanced. Continuous, discrete, a conveyor belt of occlusions.
What was most unnerving was the sound. Mars was usually silent. All noise was man-made. Except this. It was like the planet was gently breathing on him.
They parked up next to the outpost and, aware that every moment was a moment they weren’t looking for Jim, Lucy kept it mercifully short.
“I’m going in to check,” she said.
Was he inside? If he was, had he survived the night?
The answer came quickly.
“He’s not here. Put the LS packs in the airlock. I’ll transfer them, and then we start.” Her voice was controlled, the carrier wave less so. “Let’s bring him home, OK?”
“So say we all.” Leland? It was Leland.
They piled up the spare life supports in the airlock, and Fan squeezed in with them, helping Lucy move them quickly into the hab. Then they were out again, and ready to go.
Lucy had nixed descending into the caldera. No one had done it yet, and she wasn’t going to have anyone try. Sure, Jim could have been buried by a rockfall, standing too close to the edge when it collapsed, bringing a ton of debris down on him, but that became just another reason why they weren’t going to attempt it. They had climbing rope, and they had the buggies’ cables and winches, but Frank had managed to convince her he hadn’t seen anything at the bottom.
That left two sectors, one north and east, one south and west, beyond the immediate area that Frank had already searched. Lucy had taken the north, given the south to Fan, and the doctor seemed content to let Frank do the driving. It was going to take them beyond the ridge where Jim had said he was heading, and down towards a big-ass crater marked on their maps as CT-B, where the pitted ground spoke, according to Jim’s own reports, of subsurface collapse of empty lava tubes.
It was maybe a place he might go exploring. It was maybe a place where he could have ended up trapped. And Frank, Fan and Isla were going to have to go there and look. The search area was nine miles out from the outpost, roughly six miles across, centered on the second seismometer. About thirty square miles. It was unlikely that Jim would have gone so far, just on a whim, when he could have waited for a buggy and backup to make the trip properly, safely.
That could be said for whatever he had actually done. He’d ignored that. Now he was missing.
Frank drove to the edge of the designated search area, and Isla and Fan both hopped off. They walked out some hundred yards to either side of the buggy, then turned to face the direction of travel.
“We ready?” asked Fan. He came across choppy, lo-fi.
Frank adjusted the lights on the front of the buggy, so that they shone out not just in front but to the left and right, and climbed back into the driver’s seat. “Ready.”
The buggy rolled forward, as slowly as walking pace, which was hard to achieve, and harder still because Frank had to keep on twisting in his seat to even see his outriders, who were outside his ten o’clock to two o’clock field of vision. They swept to the river channel that ran down the west side of the volcano, moved three hundred yards down the slope, and swept back.
What had seemed like a good idea back at base was now shown for what it was: ludicrously inadequate. And they were still going to do it because there was literally nothing else they could do. They were looking for a body, in a spacesuit, while wearing spacesuits themselves, on a nearly thirty-thousand-foot mountain in the middle of the worst dust-storm for a year. They had no satellite backup and their radios were starting to get flaky because of the static.
They went backwards and forwards for two hours, covering the area between the outpost and the river. Frank swapped over with Isla. She swapped with Fan. When Frank was out on the left, he could see the buggy, but the other walker on the far side was reduced to the glow of their suit lights.
Mostly, he kept his gaze forward. Scanning the ground, not for footprints any longer, just a pale spacesuit, banked with blown dust.
The air was beginning to resemble a brown soup. Even with full lights, visibility was atrocious. Frank was having to wipe his faceplate every few steps, and the damn stuff was sticking to everything. Then they moved beyond the river, into new territory, now going downhill on the river’s far bank.
Something like a flashbulb went off. He stopped and looked around. Then what sounded like atmospheric entry rumbled overhead.
“What the hell was that?”
“Lightning,” said Fan.
“You mean, like actual lightning? Storm lightning?”
“It’s the dust.”
“We’re on top of a fucking mountain. We have no cover.”
“We have to keep looking. We need to—” Fan’s voice broke. “We need to find Jim.”
Frank looked across to the buggy. The figure on top was high up, compared to everything else. Only the top of the roll bar was taller than Isla’s helmet.
“Isla?”
“We keep looking,” she said.
Did she sound scared? Did he? There was plenty to be scared about.
“OK. Let’s do it.”
They approached the westernmost end of the sweep, then Isla pointed the buggy southwards to block off the end of their search area. The lightning played above them, lighting up the clouds of drifting dust, revealing their many layers and bands for a snapshot second before everything went dark again, and the mountainside grumbled as if clearing its throat.
Everything that was happening outside of Frank’s faceplate told him he was out in hu
rricane-force winds. The air was granular, and moving, thrashing at his suit with a sound that made him think of the very distant whine of jet engines. Yet he felt no motion. No buffeting. Nothing. It was disconcerting, as strange as when he’d got caught up in the twisters out on the plain.
There, right in front of him, was a tire mark, in the dust that had caught in the lee of a small crater. It was eroded away, was disappearing before his eyes even, as the wind tore at it and stripped away the distinctive ridges and troughs made by the treads.
He stared at it. Had he made this? Had Jim? From what was left—a print barely a couple of feet long, only a foot wide—it seemed to have been heading north at the time.
“Lance? Lance, you’ve stopped.”
Had Jim ever used a buggy out this way? Frank wasn’t sure that he had, not recently. And he himself hadn’t passed this way, even yesterday: that was closer to the main caldera, and not this far downslope.
Was this what he was looking for? Proof that M2 had been up here? Could they have found Jim? Taken him back to M2?
“Lance?”
He suddenly realized that Isla was talking to him.
“I’m OK. I’m OK.”
“Have you found something?”
“No,” he said. “No. I thought I might have, but it’s just… nothing.”
He was going to have to go over to M2, wasn’t he? He was going to have to check, or he was going to fall apart under the strain. Unless they found something today, he was going to have to take a buggy and drive it all the way over to the other side of Ceraunius and see what state they were in. With XO’s permission or not.
The tracks were crumbling, eroding away, even while he stared at them. He deliberately scuffed at them with his boot, and walked on.
Lightning washed above, in flashes and sheets. Intense and bright. Electric.
The buggy was glowing, a flickering blue-green fire clinging to its metal latticework.
“Isla?”
“Lance?”
“What the hell is that?”
She rolled to a stop, and killed her lights. It was obvious now. Startlingly obvious.
“OK, I’ve had enough,” she said. “Fan, Jim was our friend. He was special to all of us. But we can’t stay out here in this. Come back to the buggy. We’ll drive down into the river where there’s some shelter.”
She started up again, turned the vehicle around, the pale moons of the headlights washing over Frank. He walked steadily towards it, reaching up to its dust-caked frame and pulling himself up. Fan approached from the other side, climbing up and staring straight ahead, not looking at Frank, not engaging with Isla.
She found, more by luck than judgment, the banks of the river, and slowly rolled down the steep sides to the river bed. The air was barely clearer, but they were below the level of the surrounding ground. There was another flashbulb moment, and a few seconds later a stuttering, growling boom.
Frank habitually checked his air. He had just over half a tank left. They had spares in the outpost, but that was no longer the limiting factor.
“Have we any idea how long this is going to go on for?”
He got no response. In fact, he could see Fan’s mouth moving, and he was getting nothing. The storm, the high-sided valley, was wiping out his comms completely. But only his comms, because Fan was clearly in a conversation with Isla.
Frank tapped Fan on the shoulder, and then, when he had his attention, double-tapped the side of his own helmet: the universal sign for deaf.
Fan frowned and leaned in so Frank could hear the to-and-fro. It looked like NASA comms were more sophisticated than Frank’s own.
“—get this far north,” Isla was saying. “We don’t know enough about Martian weather to predict it. It could go on for days, weeks even. What we do know is that we’re at the extreme edge of the storm: if it shifts even slightly southwards, then we’ll get clear air, quickly.”
“We can wait an hour,” said Fan. “Then start again.”
“OK,” said Frank, “I’m very sorry about your friend, but there’s nothing we can do about that right now. What I’m now worried about is us getting killed out here. We’re in the middle of a dust-storm. We can’t see shit. We’re in spacesuits that rely on complicated electrical equipment to keep us alive. One bolt of lightning and any one of us will stop breathing. Now, we’ve got enough buffer at the outpost to bank what we’ve got left in our tanks. We get out of this dust. We can get something to eat and drink. We don’t run the risk of getting fried by Odin.”
“Thor,” said Isla. “Thor is the god of thunder.”
“Whatever. Fan, you’re supposed to be in charge of this outing, and I’m not going to just walk off and leave you, but goddammit this is crazy and you have to see that.”
Fan pulled away and leaned back to take in the slot of sky. Another flashbulb moment, illuminating the dry river bed and the sand cascading down over the banks like living water, followed by, a few seconds later and in the darkness, the gut-rumbling of the sky, seemed to galvanize him into action.
He leaned in again, banging his helmet against Frank’s, and the sound was mediated by the dust and grit between the two surfaces.
“I’ll talk to Lucy. No. I’ll tell Lucy, in my position as senior medical officer, that we’re suspending operations.”
As far as they knew, Jim was gone: they were abandoning their search for him, and they weren’t going to find him any time soon. If he was still on the volcano, maybe a satellite could pick up where the body was, but only when the weather had cleared. If so, they could retrieve him. When it was safe to do so.
If. If he was still on the volcano. What if he wasn’t? How could Frank possibly explain any of this?
Isla turned the buggy around and tracked back up to the top of the valley, emerging into weather that had, if anything, deteriorated. She turned her own suit lights to maximum, just to be able to see the screen so she could switch the buggy lights back on.
She headed left, and crawled, barely at walking pace, across the exposed shoulder of volcanic rock that was shrugging itself into the path of the storm. The distance to the outpost shouldn’t have been great, but it felt interminable. They couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see anything except that which was right in front of them. There was more than an element of guesswork governing the direction they were heading in.
Frank started to sweat. The top of the volcano was all but flat, and the drop into the caldera sharp and fatal. Upslope and downslope didn’t mean much. His tablet was losing its connection more than it was finding it again, much like his suit, even out of the valley. But it was all they had. He opened it up and held it so that dust would blow against its back, not its screen.
Bear left. A hundred yards, was all.
He held it out in front of Isla’s faceplate. “We’re almost there,” he said. Then repeated it because he’d dropped out again.
“Copy that.” She turned the controls and slowly, through the shifting brown haze, another set of lights began to resolve.
The lights dimmed, then grew again. They were signaling.
“We see you,” said Fan.
The outpost was just a pale ghost, barely visible, and even with the suit lights on, it was difficult to navigate the steps. They cycled the airlock two at a time, trying to save power. Frank stayed outside with Lucy. He caught her staring out into the void, thinking she’d failed, knowing she’d endangered her crew in trying to succeed, realizing that she’d let emotions get in the way of practical decisions.
He nudged her arm and pointed to the airlock, and she seemed to just look through him for a moment. He’d been there too, and it wasn’t a good place to be. Then she recovered, shaking herself like a wet dog would. She swiveled round and walked into the empty airlock. Frank followed her, closed the door, and waited for the pumps to kick in.
21
[Transcript of briefing given by NASA press secretary, Houston TX 3/5/2049 21:00CT]
It is with profound r
egret that I have to announce that Dr. James “Jim” Zamudio, geologist and crew member of the Ares IV mission to Mars Base One, is missing. The window of time in which Jim could have been found alive has now closed. We mourn with the surviving crew at this most profound and unwelcome loss.
[transcript ends]
Lucy finally gave the order to abandon the outpost just before sunset. The wind, as insubstantial as it was, was throwing material against the taut skin of the hab and making it thrum like a bass. The sound resonated in their guts, to the point where some of the astronauts started complaining of nausea.
Fan examined those affected, but there was nothing he could do to stop the noise. That it was also stupidly hot inside didn’t help either. That was very much against Frank’s expectations, as he thought they’d be freezing their asses off as nightfall approached. Yun explained that the dust transferred energy in the form of heat when it hit the hab walls: the more dust, the more heat.
Those weren’t the only two factors persuading Lucy down. Even though they’d parked the buggies on the sheltered side, they’d still taken the brunt of six hours in a storm. If grit was going to get into the wheel hubs, or the controls, or abrade cables and weaken joints, today was going to be the day.
There was the lack of air, water, sanitation, and food too. The situation was impossible. She hung on for as long as she could, then pulled them out.
The floor of the hab was red with dust from where it had fallen off their suits. They knocked more off climbing back into them: it would all need cleaning out before it could function as a scientific station again.
Lucy instructed them all to swap out their life supports for fresh ones for the descent. Just in case they had to walk some of the way. It was sensible, but it also underlined the state they’d let themselves get into. They shouldn’t have been there. If it hadn’t been for Jim, they wouldn’t have been.
