No Way

14

[Message file #139697 2/15/2049 1708 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]

Yun sat next to him as Frank was finishing breakfast, clutching her tablet and looking expectantly at him. Frank took the hint, rested his coffee mug on the table, and without turning to her, said: “Something you want me to do?”

“You know the rules,” she said.

“I know your rules.”

“Everyone else is busy for the next four sols, but I want to get the weather stations set up as soon as I can. The more data I can collect, the more we’ll know.”

“Sure,” said Frank.

“I need to show they work in the field. They are, partly, my own design.”

“Sure. OK. I’m saying yes.” He waggled his mug. “Just let me finish this and go and press some buttons. You’ve cleared this with Lucy?”

“I will.”

She slid her tablet across towards him, and Frank pulled it closer. The annotated photograph showed the volcano, Ceraunius Tholus, and markers marching up the line of the Santa Clara, all the way to, and around, the vast crater at the summit.

Right up on the summit. M2 were down on the far side to the south, but the top of the volcano would be very much within their range. Even if they couldn’t get that far any more—even if they were all dead by now, and Frank didn’t know how to react to that possibility as his emotions were still swinging between rage and fear—then there might be evidence that they had been up there.

Perhaps he should change his mind, and go up on his own to scout it out. But it was too late.

“You think that’s too much?”

Frank circled his finger around the crater. “You’ve done the training. You know how much hard work it is just to be in the suit. We can give it a go, but I’m guessing we’ll need to do more than one trip out.”

That might give him time to check out the upper slopes on his own.

“Much is expected of me,” she said.

“It’s expected that you get back in one piece.”

She frowned, as if Frank didn’t understand. “A lot of money was spent getting me here.”

Frank looked around. No one else was within earshot. “We’ll do what we can, but we’re not pushing it, OK? Mars is waiting to kill you.”

She nodded, taking the tablet with her when she left. He watched her go. She had nothing to prove: to him, to her government, to anyone. And yet that, apparently, brought its own pressures.

The rule was—Lucy’s rule, NASA’s rule—no expeditions without a buddy. The immediate area around the base was fine, but someone still needed to sit in Comms and listen, just in case they needed to answer an alarm. That made perfect sense. Proper safety procedures, observed at all times.

Then there was Frank, who didn’t work under that rule. Lucy didn’t like it, but she wasn’t his boss, and she had no authority over him. He could go outside whenever and wherever he wanted. He didn’t even have to tell her, though he did because he didn’t want to shit the bed. And he liked her. She was efficient. She got stuff done. She cared very much about the safety of her crew, and by extension Frank, which frustrated them both but they’d probably work it out eventually.

What she did do was trust him enough to double up with her people. That… that didn’t sit well with him. He was a fraud, an impostor, and he wasn’t telling her things that she really ought to know.

If she did find out, what would she do? Leave him here? It was a certainty. Rather than spend the eight months with a murderer, on a spaceship that wasn’t quite big enough for six, she’d maroon him. Hell, it’s what he would do. It was the only sensible decision.

So he wasn’t going to tell her. Do the job, go home, find Mike. Nothing beyond that. Nothing outside of that. Keep it zipped up, wrapped tight. He finished his coffee, which was more cold than hot, then went to the can.

Yun was already outside, loading up the trailer, by the time he suited up. She was carrying the weather stations—they were more than that, but that was the name she called them—from the supply rocket in the boneyard to the trailer, fifty yards away. They weren’t heavy, but they were bulky, and the longer they spent packing for the journey, the less time they could spend setting up the experiments.

So, Frank backed the trailer up to the rocket. He even managed to make it took easy, which wasn’t his intention at all: it was just practice. Marcy had been a good teacher.

Frank strapped the load down, gave them all a shake and tightened the ratchets one more click. They were good to go, and with one last check with Lucy in Comms, they were heading for the entrance to the Santa Clara.

There was no sea level to take as zero—Yun called it “datum”—but the numbers meant that Ceraunius was close to thirty thousand feet high. Because they were in spacesuits, the altitude didn’t mean anything as such, just wear-and-tear on the batteries. Still, it was the longest journey he’d made since his encounter with the M2 crew member, and he was heading in their direction.

He felt a tightness in his chest. The Santa Clara river bed was sinuous, with broad, sweeping curves and high arching banks that obscured both the way ahead and the view to either side. Every turn that they took, each new vista that opened up, could reveal a figure in a spacesuit, a buggy.

And every time it didn’t happen, Frank would feel a surge of relief that would slowly fade as his anxiety built again. He started to realize exactly what keeping secrets for XO meant. It wasn’t that he couldn’t manage the lying, the misdirection, the pretending to be someone else: it was the sheer physical toll it was going to take on him.

He’d survived worse. He’d just have to grit his teeth and do it.

It helped that Yun liked to talk. That was fine. Frank didn’t mind it so much because she seemed to be in the habit of pointing things out to herself, so she could remember them later, rather than expecting a conversation: there appeared to be no requirement that he listen, let alone respond. If she mentioned his name—Brack’s name—he knew to tune back in.

She described the river bed’s snake-like track up the slope of the volcano, how the sand had collected at the well-defined edges of the valley and especially in the outer bends of its path, and how the material was still traveling downhill under wind-power, as evidenced by the tear-drop shapes around the craters that had subsequently been carved into the dry soil.

If she had noticed the earlier tracks he’d made, she didn’t say: but time had smudged them, showing that the processes that were giving the sand surface ripples were still ongoing.

They kept on climbing. Frank had one eye on the direction of travel, and the other on the battery stats: they’d use less juice coming down, but he still wasn’t going to go under fifty per cent. It was sixty or so miles to the very top, obviously the same going back. Easily doable on paper, but getting them stranded wasn’t such a great idea.

“Lance, can you stop?”

He relaxed his grip on the controls, and the buggy coasted to a halt. Yun extricated herself from the latticework behind him and jumped down onto the ground. She reached for the still camera that was attached to her waist—two cameras side by side, with a supporting frame and a dust-free enclosure that made it deliberately two-handed—and advanced towards the valley wall. She had, inexplicably, gone quiet, and she walked like she was stalking prey.

She raised her camera, framed her shot and took several pictures.

“Have you seen this before, Lance?” She pointed at the ground, at the darker patch of soil that seemed to leak out of the top of the sand bank and spread out downhill.

“I guess I must have done. What is it?” Sure, they were there, most times he’d driven up the valley.

“It’s a recurring slope linea. Can you get the ranging pole from the trailer?”

Frank clambered down and retrieved the telescopic pole, locking the sections together as he walked to her.

“So what causes it?”

“Water,” she said.

“But water boils away.” He turned so he could look into her helmet, at her intent, focused expression.

“When the water is super-saturated with salts, it can exist in liquid form at these temperatures and pressures. The evaporation rate will still be high, but it’s believed that being entrained in a matrix of small grain-sized particles will permit the water to flow subsurface. This is water, Lance, melting from the ground. At night it should refreeze, and the dark patch disappear, but once temperatures rise again during the day, it’ll restart.”

She told him to approach the flow from the side, and lay the striped pole down near, but not on, the stain. Frank did as he was asked. The boundary between light and dark wasn’t distinct, close up, and neither did it appear to be visibly spreading.

Yun took more photographs, moving slowly around its base in an arc, then marked the place on her tablet with a touch and some quick one-fingered typing. “When you collected material for the water maker, what did you use?”

“We—me and the robots, that is—just shoveled soil from near the base into the machine. I suppose I assumed that it cooked the rock and drove out water. Not that there was actual water just below the surface.”

“It’s not everywhere on Mars,” she said. “But this is one reason why MBO is situated where it is. It’s a resource-rich site, one where it doesn’t take much energy to liberate volatiles. Mapping the extent of the resources will help determine the viability of future missions.”

“Colonization, you mean. Living here permanently.”

“Yes. Do you have an opinion on that, Lance?” She picked the ranging pole up herself, and twisted it back down to its transportable size.

“My opinion?” He clicked his tongue. “I don’t think it’s for me, somehow.”

“You miss Earth?”

“Something like that,” he said.

“You may change your mind.”

“Would you? Seriously? This planet has tried to kill me so often.”

“The Chinese government is enthusiastic about the possibilities for Mars colonization and seeks to establish its own permanent presence before the end of the century,” she said.

It was as if she was reading a script. And he recognized that, because it was exactly like he sounded when he had to parrot the XO line. So he laughed: an involuntary response which he stopped as soon as he saw her expression.

“I’m not being mean,” he said. “But I understand. I really do.”

He climbed back up onto the buggy, and Yun resumed both her position behind him, and her commentary. She pointed out that the further up the volcano they drove, the tighter the turns in the valley became, so that they were almost like overlapping, interlinked C-shapes, with sharp, cliff-like projections into the bed of the river, followed by lazy left- or right-hand turns.

Frank had never been up so high, and they had further to go. At the five thousand meter mark—he had to work out what that actually was, sixteen thousand feet or so—they stopped and carried a box of instruments off the trailer and up the side of the valley, the crate slung between them, each holding one of the straps. The material underfoot was loose, and it was steep. Frank, who was much more used to being outside, plotted the route up to the top of the bank.

They then walked another hundred or so yards away across the stepped volcanic surface, and put the box down. There wasn’t anything left for Frank to do now but admire the view while Yun set up. They were on the north-western flank of Ceraunius, and he could just about make out the wildly broken ground that was, what, sixty miles away due west? Uranius was off to his right. The haze level was, he guessed, about average. Certainly not as fuzzy as he’d seen it before, and some days were unexpectedly clear like glass.

There was little chance of spotting actual features near the base of the volcano: he couldn’t even see where it joined the sand sea. Such was the size of the broad shoulder of rock he was standing on, most of what he could see was just slope, up to his left and down in every other direction. M2, whatever state it was in, was going to stay hidden for now. Just as long as there weren’t any unexplained debris or bodies up on the top, he’d be fine.

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. Tomorrow 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.