Boundary

by Eric Flint

  The rover almost plummeted past the rock where the winch cable was attached, and at that point Bruce hit the winch controls again. The winch screamed protest at the abuse it was suddenly being asked to take, but the composite-metal cable held well. Thoat slowed and stopped, and then, carefully, began to make a rear-first descent down the steep slope.

  A few moments later, the rover was on level ground. "Cooo-eeee! Now that was a ride, blokes!"

  "I'm glad you enjoyed it," Madeline said dryly. "Let's hope we don't have to experience it again, however."

  "No worries, once was enough. Let's get moving, shall we?"

  "Shut her down for now. We want to load all the equipment we possibly can into her now."

  "Right."

  About two hours later, the last of the equipment that had not already been in Thoat was finally stowed. Then Rich turned to the others. "It's . . . time."

  Helen nodded. "We probably won't be coming back this way, at least not for quite a while. And there's no point in bringing him with us."

  The rocky soil was not tremendously hard-packed, and they had excavation tools already. Digging a hole did not take long.

  "Do you want to say a few words, Rich?"

  Skibow stood at the edge of the grave, looking down at the body. "Ryu Sakai was a good scientist and an even better friend. I'd known him since he was a visiting student at my university. I remember he once insisted that I try out for one of the musicals they had at the college, a production of Little Shop of Horrors. I got the part of the dentist and he got the part of Audrey II, the plant. That surprised me— all of us in the cast—because none of us had known what a good singing voice he had."

  Skibow cleared his throat. "Ryu was always that way. One minute, looking like a professor and insisting on proper protocol; then, the next, startling you with some joke or new skill you had no idea he had. He used to do sleight of hand tricks in class . . ." Rich trailed off, then continued: "But he was always focused in the end on his career. That's why he was here, because there was never any question about following any path he could get to the other worlds he'd studied by remote. Ryu Sakai would have rather lived, of course. But he would also be honored to be the first man buried on another world. And he wouldn't want to hold us back."

  He choked suddenly, then cut it off, sniffed back tears, and nodded. "He'd give us his blessing, I think."

  "He certainly would, Rich," Jane's voice came softly. She'd been following the informal service from orbit. "He'd say: 'Saa, let us waste no more time or fuel on me. I am no longer in need of it.'"

  Rich's reaction was part laugh, part sob. "Yes. Yes, Jane, he would. And thank you for reminding me. So. Rest well, Ryu Sakai, under the sky and soil of Mars."

  The others bowed their heads and waited a few moments. Then Rich picked up his shovel and began to fill in the grave. A few minutes later, it was done.

  "And he has a hell of a tombstone," A.J. pointed out. "No one's moving John Carter from where it sits."

  "No, I don't think they will," Helen said quietly. Then, shifting to a businesslike tone: "All right—everyone aboard. We're moving out."

  That command necessitated first getting someone—Madeline, as it turned out—to load Joe in. She did it herself, to everyone's surprise—and Joe's voluble protest.

  "Hey, be careful! You'll hurt yourself!"

  "Don't be silly. In this gravity, you barely weigh seventy pounds."

  The security specialist was such a small and very feminine-looking woman that people tended to forget how strong she was. The only one who didn't looked surprised was A.J.

  Helen had to stifle a smile. His memories, of course, were considerably more vivid.

  Once Joe was comfortably strapped in, the others quickly entered. To Helen's relief, Thoat's interior proved to be much less cramped than she'd feared. When she said as much, Joe shook his head.

  "Rover's probably too humdrum a term. Don't forget that Thoat was designed as a long-term Mars exploration vehicle. That means it isn't just a sort of planetary bus, but has to have living facilities aboard. It was by far the largest piece of equipment we brought with us from Earth, except for the SSTO."

  Bruce verified the pressure was back up. The others lost no time in removing their helmets and suits.

  "Cleanup is definitely the order of the day," Madeline said, moving to the rear. After a quick inspection of the sanitary facilities, she announced: "Well, it's adequate. But I miss our cabins more every minute."

  "Too right," Bruce said. "But I'm in favor of anything that'll let us get a bit cleaner after more than two days in those glorified body stockings."

  As Bruce set the rover in motion, following the path marked out clearly on the Thoat's HUD, the others took turns using the miniature minimum-water cleaning facilities, and emptying the sanitary reservoirs of their suits into Thoat's recycler.

  "God, that feels good," Helen said, coming out last. "I know these are top-notch suits, but—"

  "We're all agreed on the 'but,'" Madeline said firmly. "I also think that sentence works best unfinished."

  "Amen," Rich concurred.

  Joe had presented a problem, since his suit was also his splint. However, Madeline had been able to improvise a temporary splint; Joe held his leg carefully still while A.J. released the suit, Madeline applied the temporary, and then helped him remove the suit.

  "A.J., maybe I should just leave that on?"

  "Can't hurt. We'll probably have to be getting you in and out of your suit quite a few times over the next few weeks."

  Madeline nodded. "I agree. We'll just have to make sure it fits right, and keep a close eye on it for a while."

  Independent, wide, tall tires made Thoat a relatively smooth ride, given the rocky terrain they had to cross. The lesser gravity helped also, of course. Still, jolts were inevitable, and Joe was heard to curse more than once.

  "Sorry, mate," Bruce apologized, after one especially big jolt. "Even with the best route there's still a bloody awful lot of rocks around."

  "I'm going to put in a protest to the Martian Department of Transportation. The roads here are just terrible."

  "Hey, they kept shooting us down before," A.J. pointed out wisely. "What makes you think they care?"

  "Well, they better get used to it. It's payback for what they did to England back in the 1890s."

  Ignoring the byplay, Helen sat down near Bruce. "How long until we get to Pirate?"

  "Rate we're going? Say around ten in the morning tomorrow, local time. I'm not pushing the girl over five KPH, even now while I can see well. It's going to be pitch dark out there when the sun sets, which is looking to be in a couple of hours."

  "Now that you've had a bit of experience with the terrain, do you think we'll make it before the fuel runs out?"

  Bruce shrugged, the motion visible though muted by the suit. "It's dicey. We're going to be right on the edge of our range. All we can do is hope."

  Chapter 44

  Thoat grumbled its way over a large set of boulders, causing Joe to grumble in turn. Then the massive Martian rover crested the small ridge. A.J., who was currently sitting up front with Bruce, gave a whoop that almost deafened them.

  "Yeah! Ahoy, me hearties, here be pirates!"

  Helen moved up to take a look. In the distance, a kilometer or less away, squatted a blocky silhouette which she recognized from long-ago discussions with Joe and A.J. It was reassuringly familiar and, so to speak, very down to Earth in appearance. Pirate was a modification of the so-called "tuna can on a platform" design. It was neither elegant nor awe-inspiring, but looked exactly like what it was: a machine designed to do a job as efficiently and simply as possible.

  She was flooded with relief. They were going to make it.

  Joe voiced her thought. "Looks like we're going to make it, after all."

  At that precise moment, Thoat's engine gave a hiccup, and then died. The huge vehicle continued on for some distance, slowing all the while, its momentum only grudgingly yi
elding to the inevitable. It was assisted in this quixotic attempt by the gentle downward incline they were on.

  Despite Bruce's best efforts, however, Thoat finally came to rest about half a kilometer from Pirate.

  "I can't believe it," A.J. muttered. "Dammit, Joe, you had to go open your mouth!"

  "Forget the superstitions," Helen said, though a small part of her had the same blame Joe thought. "It was physics we were up against. Not quite enough fuel."

  "Now what do we do?" Rich asked. "I absolutely refuse to believe there's nothing we can do. Not when we could get out of this thing and walk over to Pirate in a few minutes."

  Captain Hathaway's voice came over the ship-to-surface band. "Thoat, we see you have stopped short of the objective. What is the problem?"

  "A day late and a dollar short on the fuel situation, Captain," Bruce replied. "We're trying to figure out what we can do at this juncture. I haven't got a clue, myself."

  Helen's mind was a blank, also. But she noticed that Madeline was sitting perfectly still, her eyes closed. It looked almost as though she were asleep, but the faint wrinkle on her otherwise smooth forehead showed she was thinking.

  "Bruce, how much cable is on the winch?" she asked.

  "About a hundred meters, Madeline. Why?"

  Joe understood immediately, with A.J. just half a second behind.

  "Might work!"

  "If we have enough juice," A.J. cautioned.

  "Oh, right, there's a beauty of an idea!" Bruce said. "We haul ourselves towards Pirate, like the dying man crawling through the desert."

  "Your simile is not particularly cheering, Bruce."

  "Sorry, wasn't thinking."

  "That's still a hell of a distance," Joe mused, his earlier enthusiasm fraying at the edges. "Will the batteries take it?"

  A.J. was already checking. "I don't know. I'm calling up the data we had on power drain while we were using the winch to help lower Thoat. Practical data's always helpful. Hmm. Watts . . . battery capacity . . ."

  A.J. ran the simulation several times. "Shit," he finally concluded.

  "I take it the answer is 'no.'"

  "'Fraid so, Madeline. Best-case gives us about two hundred and fifty meters before the batteries die or the winch does."

  "The winch?" Joe protested. "That thing was designed to be good for months of expeditions!"

  "Some of my sensors are giving nasty readings. I think when Thoat did that drop-and-stop trick, it might have damaged part of the winch."

  "And I don't suppose we have two hundred and fifty meters of refueling hose," Helen sighed.

  "Less than a tenth of that, actually," Bruce answered. "We're off by an order of magnitude."

  Helen stared in frustration at the familiar shape of the lander, so tantalizingly close yet impossibly far away. The situation was ludicrous. They'd crossed a hundred million miles in a few months, and now couldn't reach another ship that was not even a third of a mile away.

  She suddenly realized what she'd been thinking. Another ship . . .

  "Joe," she said quietly, almost afraid to voice a question which might simply result in another punctured hope. "Pirate is a rocket ship itself, right?"

  "Yes, of course. How else would it—"

  Suddenly he and A.J. looked at each other. "If Mohammed cannot come to the mountain—"

  "—then the mountain can damn well come to Mohammed!" A.J. finished. He chewed on his lower lip. "Theoretically, of course. Still, that is a landing and takeoff vehicle over there. If we reprogram the systems . . ."

  "Going to be one hell of a little jump. Fine-tuning will be the problem."

  "That'll be my job. We'll need the whole area instrumented so we can watch performance, get her running right. We'll only have one shot at this."

  "Don't bring her down too close," Bruce cautioned.

  "A hundred meters, I'd say," Joe responded, nodding. "Well within range for the winch-crawling maneuver, but far enough that if we're off by a bit we won't roast ourselves to death. Or drop Pirate right on top of us."

  "Less than a four-hundred-meter hop." A.J. shook his head, bemused. "Who'd have thought that the hardest job we'd have to program on an interplanetary spacecraft is getting it to go about one four-hundred-millionth of its prior distance farther?"

  He started checking his suit again before going out. "Madeline, Rich, you guys come with me. We have to adjust some linkages on board Pirate and I have to play Tinkerbell all through the engines. Bring the tool kit."

  "Don't need my help, A.J.? I turn a mean wrench."

  "I know you do, Helen, but there's only so much room in Pirate. I only need two people, anyway. Next time you can take a turn doing my dirty work."

  "She does that alread—"

  "Kick him, Helen. On the broken leg."

  The airlock cycled. After a moment, Helen could see the three figures making their way across the red-pink-orange sands.

  Rich stopped at one point to examine a particularly light patch. "Poor Ryu. This is just what he would've been going nuts over. I think this is some kind of deposition, an evaporite, maybe a salt or something. Just one of the kinds of minerals colonists would need, and a hell of a clue to conditions here."

  "He won't be forgotten, and the work won't be neglected," Helen said quietly. "Take a sample for the labs later, Rich. Let's get this job done first."

  Back in his seat in the rover, A.J. watched the telltales climbing slowly. They'd done what they'd needed to do at Pirate and had returned a few minutes earlier.

  "Navigation systems are up. We're not going to have all jets free, though; two years of crud blowing around seems to have fouled one. I've got compensation in the program for that. By the way, this work allows me to give a definite 'no frigging way' to the question of whether we could've gotten away using Pirate. She's deteriorated a fair amount. Takeoff-level thrusts just aren't in the picture. For that matter, I don't think she'd even hold together for a full-scale takeoff. Something critical would go in the middle of the burn."

  "But you still think you can pull this off?" Madeline asked.

  "Pretty sure. Not like we have much choice, anyway."

  "You'll do it, mate," Bruce said, a bit too heartily. "It's just a little hop."

  "True. But this ain't no kangaroo, either. 'Hops' are not really what it does." After checking a few more things, he said: "Bruce, I know you didn't have any direct training in this, but I'd feel real good about it if you'd stand by on controls to override. Just in case something blows."

  "No worries, mate, I'm right here. Been running your little simulator the past couple of hours. Doubt I'll be needed, though."

  Joe checked the readings also and recalculated the trajectory they would need. Then had Jackie and Gupta check it all again from Nike.

  "You are cutting it fine indeed, very fine," Gupta pronounced. "But, as you say, you have no choice. Jackie and I both check you, and Nike herself concurs. Good luck."

  "Thanks." A.J. took a deep breath. It was more than a little ironic, he thought, that the most critical mission Pirate had ever been given required only a fraction of the capabilities it had originally been designed for—and it still might not make it, because that specific task hadn't been anticipated. You really couldn't ask for a better demonstration of the inherent limits of unmanned spacecraft.