Hold Your Fire

by Lisa Mangum

  They left the dressing room and headed toward the common living area. The hall was a square tube about seven feet tall and wide, a tight fit for two women walking side by side, and a real tight one for the only man on the team, Kellen Talmadge. He said the passage made him feel like a beach ball trying to blow through a heater duct.

  “Shannon make it back?” asked Doria.

  “Minutes before you did. Safe in the second HVE hangar. Said the quake shook her teeth a bit, but no cave-ins.”

  “Good. There was a bit of settling in Channel 15, but for a minute I thought I’d need a pull out. I was deep in, so that would have been dodgy.”

  “I keep telling you to hook up the safety grapples, don’t I?”

  “Aye, aye. You’re right, Sheela. I’ll do it.”

  As they walked to the small meeting room that doubled as the cafeteria, Kellen waved them in to the electronics room, or the “Comm Closet,” as he called it.

  “Messages from Ares Dome Five,” he said, passing his massive hands over the control pads on the situation desk, a used communications center that looked like something from an old 2020s space film.

  A voice recording came over the speaker system, female with a slight Chinese accent. The recording sounded real and not AI-generated, interrupted by the inevitable crackling and hissing of surface-to-surface radio transmissions during Mars’s frequent storms.

  “… winds never … kilometers and rising … barriers down … all personnel inside immediately …”

  The garbled message repeated, generic statements about storm intensity and possible damage and warnings to move all personnel and equipment under protective cover.

  They listened a third time, then Doria signaled Kellen to stop it. The room seemed small enough that they could hear each other’s hearts beating.

  Doria mentally ran through her contingency plan. “We need to check the roof seals. And the solar grid. I’ll start with Channel 1.”

  Sheela said, “I’ll have Nuala inspect the west channels, but we have too many kilometers to check visually. We’ll have to rely on the sensors.”

  “I’ll keep monitoring transmissions from Ares Dome. And I’ll track the storm intensity and radar information,” Kellen added.

  “You’re a saint, Kellen,” said Doria. “Looks like we may be hunkering down for a few days, if this storm is anything like the last one.”

  Damn, more time lost in the trenching. More days behind schedule, and not from lack of planning. Mars just wouldn’t cooperate.

  Doria descended the synth-metal staircase into the green wonderland that was Channel 1, their maiden dig, the one nearest her heart. Two years after covering it, installing artificial supplemental lighting, and filling it with breathable air, it felt like a virgin Irish forest cradled in the hands of God.

  The channel was sealed and stabilized with polymer cement, and then covered with the clear polymer roof, the three-inch-thick skylight that would allow precious sunlight in and contain the even more precious air, water vapor, and mineral nutrients. Since Mars’s sunlight energy was less than half of Earth’s, UV lighting had been installed all along the walls to aid photosynthesis of the flora, powered by solar panels and windmills on the surface.

  These were all the ingredients required to turn the deep chasms into the reality of Doria’s vision, fertile green oases that would provide the basic needs for a growing colony—food, energy, oxygen, and joy. Previous failures within early lunar and Martian colonies had proven the final item on that list—joy—to be just as important as the others for the explorers’ health.

  After inspecting the half-kilometer of roof and testing the air quality with a handheld meter, Doria climbed the stairs, followed the gray passages, and joined Sheela in the Model Room, a square room little bigger than the Comm Closet, with walls painted a pleasing pale green by Nuala and Shannon. In the center of it was a scale model of their entire project, the INAC—the Irish National Ares Colony.

  The model looked so much like the place Doria had designed it from, the Burren of western Ireland. Flat gray plateaus sheltered green channels where lush vegetation flourished, protected from winds, cold, and extreme radiation. It was a network of connected, meandering emerald oases on the barren, sterile plain. A land where life thrived between the rocks of a brutal, windswept, inhospitable landscape. A beautiful duality of hardship and nurture, brilliant color and stark monochromatism, successful abundance and grim scarcity.

  “If you’re lookin’ for the best design to enter in that Mars contest, Doria,” Grandpa Vaughan had said, looking out over the gray rolling hills of the Burren one day after they’d spent the better part of a windy wet Saturday hiking to get there, “then think about this place ’ere, blessed by God. Lash her with rain, torture her with wind, freeze her with bitter cold, or parch her with sun-searing drought. And she just keeps goin’. The miles and miles of green crevasses between the hard rocks, the lovely green springing up every year like it don’t care what goes on around, like magic is in the ground. Aye, the world is changing too fast for us old folks to keep up with, with the climate change they call it, the ocean risin’. But through it all, the Burren endures. She endures, lass. Think about that.”

  Her grandfather had died less than a year later of a respiratory ailment, but his last words to her had been about how proud he was of her going off to the New World, to Mars, and taking a bit of Ireland with her. It meant so much to him. His green eyes had lit up in his ruddy face when she’d showed him her designs.

  A wee bit of Ireland to stand against the God of War.

  But the vision was half-complete. Only fifty percent of the proposed channels had been trenched to the depth of forty meters and covered, and only half of that pressured with breathable air. The going had been tougher than they’d expected, trenching through areas of volcanic rock, then crossing pits of sand and dust so fine and light that the HVEs would sink up to their roofs.

  The rapid movement of Sheela’s hands on the controls drew Doria from her reverie.

  “So far, the pressure readin’s are all green,” Sheela said. “But we are seeing a bit of surface loss on some of the sky barrier.”

  “More than the expected slough rates?”

  Sheela shook her head. “Less. The polymer is doing well, despite the higher than expected radiation exposure.”

  I’m dancing around the real issue here, Doria thought. She said, “The land subsidence, the cave-ins. We’re running into them more and more often. Like the whole valley is falling underneath us.”

  Sheela said nothing at first, but her eyebrows curved downward. “We’ve expected delays and problems,” she said. “We’ve built these things into the schedule.”

  “Aye, but the spare resources are goin’ down faster as we go. We should be moving quicker now, not slower.”

  Sheela was about to reply when Kellen leaned into the room, his face knotted with worry.

  “The message from the dome,” he said. “It’s now a distress signal and call for assistance.”

  Sheela spoke Doria’s thoughts. “A breach?” A worst-case scenario for the dome designs, but what else could have happened?

  Kellen shook his head. “Not yet. From what I gather, the wind’s digging the foundation from under the structure, undermining it.”

  Sheela sighed. “We always thought their design was too weak. The pilings were not deep enough, and not nearly enough of ’em.”

  “Did they formally request our assistance?” Doria asked.

  Kellen nodded. “They’ve sent requests to all the nationals in the area.”

  “The Europeans have enough of their own problems,” Sheela said.

  “And the South Koreans are too far away to respond quickly,” added Kellen. “They may not have even captured the transmission.”

  “Call Shannon and Nuala to the conference room,” Doria ordered Kellen. “We need to plan our response.”

  Kellen nodded and left. Sheela headed down the hall, and Doria followed.
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  When everyone had gathered, Sheela started with the most obvious problem. “If they have a breach, we’re in no shape to bring them here. We’d need at least two months before we can start moving in more colonists.”

  “We don’t have it. The fool Domies brought too many people in before they were ready,” said Nuala. “Pressure from their investors to win this race. Get here and get set up first. Their arrogance is going to cost them.”

  Doria held up her hand. “We must respond to this request, and immediately. We have two excavators and one track-crawler to transport dome citizens. That’s only twenty passengers per transit.”

  “What about their transports?” asked Kellen.

  Sheela answered. “From what we know, they have only a few two-man, heavy-duty pods, used for scientific research. They’d planned to stay in the dome during sandstorms.”

  “Another serious error in judgment,” said Kellen.

  “Yes, but not unreasonable,” said Doria. “Their assumption was that all crises would have to be handled at their facility, since there would be nowhere else to go. Leaving was never going to be an option.”

  “So they should stay there and handle it, right?” said Shannon.

  “And many of the leaders will, if it comes to that,” said Doria. “But they’ll want to evacuate all the children and as many of the others that can’t help their efforts. Twenty children, roughly, and another hundred not directly involved in the repairs, just using up air and resources.”

  Grumbles and headshaking.

  “If they come here, they’ll just be using our air and resources.” Kellen muttered.

  Doria said, “So we help them fix their balloon so they don’t have to evacuate. But if we fail in that …”

  Like we’ve failed too many times here …

  “We have enough air generation to handle it,” Sheela said. “But they’ll have to bring their own food and as much water as they can.”

  “Kellen, help us load as much of the concrete as we can carry,” said Doria.

  “We’ve only enough to finish lining Channels 11 through 15, Doria.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I think we’re going to need it. And the UV lamps.”

  “Veer ten degrees right, Sheela. You’re getting a bit close to Channel 12 on your left.”

  Kellen’s emotionless voice in Doria’s earbuds was torn by static and grew worse as they crept closer to the dome facility of the International Martian Exploration Project. That was expected but, in the blindness of the storm, unsettling.

  Sheela, being the better operator of the two, led the convoy of two HVEs along the convoluted surface of the Elysium Planitia, with Kellen tracking and guiding them by radio from the Comm Closet. The winds were over ninety miles per hour, well over the sixty miles per hour maximum winds they’d registered before human terraforming.

  They’d chosen the low-elevation plains area to build their project to benefit from the denser atmosphere, but it worked against them now, the wind rocking their machines and filling the sky with a wash of billowing, relentless red. Sheela’s HVE was barely visible just fifty meters ahead of Doria.

  “I see the channel,” Sheela responded. There was a pause. “Or what’s left of it. It’s nearly filled in with dust.”

  Doria’s heart ached. All that work to dig it out totally undone in a few hours. They’d made a point to cover the trenches as they’d gone, but there were still several miles of channels in various stages of digging. If they weren’t heading to repair the dome—and evacuate it, if necessary—they could be installing temporary covers over their channels.

  All of it would fill in. All the man-hours and fuel used, with no results.

  That would be it, really, wouldn’t it? Their sponsors would see this as a weakness in the plan, a failure, and withdraw funding.

  Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Maybe it was a misguided vision after all, and she was just another hardheaded Irish woman who wasn’t willing to wake up and smell the bangers and fried tomatoes.

  She imagined her grandfather standing on a ridge overlooking the Burren, and in this daydream, her parents were there also, and her sisters and brother, all preteens bouncing from stone to stone, like giants leaping across the tiny green microcosms that flourished between the glacier-wiped granite. She’d wanted nothing more than for her siblings to join her on Mars, nurturing the green spaces just like the ones they loved in Ireland, making this a place for all people, not just her Irish kin, to live in beauty instead of the prison of a metal bubble.

  And then she remembered something else her grandfather had said to her that day when the whole family was there.

  “You’re just like this place, lassie. You’re tough as the rocks, and you endure, just like she does.” He’d always thought of the land as a woman. She didn’t know why.

  She raised her hands from the HVE’s control pads and stretched the tension out of them, then keyed the radio.

  “Speed it up, Sheela. We gotta get this metal bubble fixed so we can get back and protect our Burren.”

  Sheela’s HVE accelerated in front of her, pulling away and almost out of sight in the red haze. Kellen’s broken voice sounded in her ears.

  “Meters … straight in …”

  And then Sheela’s voice cut in. “I see it! Just a little right. Follow me, sister.”

  Within fifty meters, the glow of intense floodlights cut through the murk in front of Sheela’s HVE, and a dark gray wall rose up from the red ground. The outer bell of the elliptical dome rose straight up from the foundation before curving over to meet the ground in a near-perfect circle.

  Workers in blue pressure suits labored within the circles of light, like cartoon characters bounding in great leaps in the light gravity. One of them waved them to the left with two hand lights.

  A voice crackled in Doria’s headset. “Welcome, friends. Follow the lights, please. Thanks for coming.”

  They didn’t know this was costing Doria and her team everything they’d worked toward for three years.

  “Roger,” said Sheela, who had slowed and turned her HVE to the left.

  About a hundred feet around, the dome’s curve reached the trouble spot. The ground had fallen away from the dome’s lip. Wind whipped around and under it, eroding the sub-base. Eventually, all the fill dirt and rock would be gone, leaving the vertical pilings exposed, like a house on stilts. And those stilts were not designed to carry the entire load. The section of the dome would collapse, which would breach the shell, causing an explosive release of breathable air, damaging the dome further and injuring people inside and all the workers nearby outside.

  Doria keyed her mic.

  “This is Doria Vaughan. Who’s in charge?”

  A male voice responded immediately. “This is Assistant Director Warren. I’m handling this situation.”

  “We’re here. What do you need us to do, Mr. Warren?”

  “The quakes loosened the rock around the pilings and shifted the subsurface plates. We need you to help backfill where the foundation has blown out.”

  The quakes. Another unexpected by-product of the terraformers extracting water, ice, and CO2 from medium-depth deposits.

  Doria called back, “It will just blow out again, sir. You need to stabilize the pilings until we can backfill with quick-set concrete and rock support.”

  “Listen to her, Mr. Warren,” Sheela chimed in. “She’s a hardheaded structural engineer.”

  Sheela and Doria backed their vehicles up to the network of pilings, metal piers that plunged tens of meters into the ground. At Sheela’s direction, the workers linked the HVEs to the pilings via heavy cables. Sheela and Doria inched the machines forward until they applied stabilizing tension on the pilings, keeping them from tilting down into the expanding pit where the fill material had eroded away.

  Then Sheela and Doria used the HVE’s snorkels to excavate massive, mushroom-shaped holes at the base of the pilings to form stabilizing footers. The holes were filled with th
eir concrete, nearly all of it.

  And then they waited. The concrete was miraculous, but it still required four hours to harden while technicians bathed it in intense UV radiation. Four hours of waiting, in which Doria and Sheela could do nothing while their newly trenched channels filled, all their work lost.

  Meals and water were brought for the two women along with the dome workers’ thanks and a personal visit by the director, Frank Herzig. Doria tried to be gracious. She may have succeeded.

  The storm blocked most of Kellen’s radio transmissions, except for snatches that sounded like reassurance. “… well … all green … okay …” There was consolation there. At least her design was proving itself. Maybe someday, another strong woman with a vision would be able to start the work again, even if Doria was not around to see it.

  At last, the technicians announced the concrete was set, and the two women spent the next two hours using the HVEs to backfill around the pilings with large rocks and then progressively smaller fill material. At Sheela’s suggestion, they supplemented this with mushroom-shaped pools of the remaining quick-setting concrete to ensure the increasing winds of the transition atmosphere wouldn’t erode the area again. Since Doria’s team would likely be living here soon, improving the installation was a good idea.

  After the repair work was complete, the assistant director offered Doria and Sheela accommodations for the night, but the women declined. The storm carried on. Perhaps it was the thing most likely to endure on Mars as humans increased the atmospheric pressure. The thought of a planet-covering hurricane was ominous. But on the drive back to the Burren, they would at least be traveling downwind, so the noise and battering would not be as strong.

  Kellen’s transmissions grew stronger for a time and then seemed to fade, leaving only frustrating snatches of words and phrases. About halfway back to the Burren facility, Sheela signaled a stop and pulled her HVE to a halt.

  “I’m concerned, Doria. Not sure if we’re on the right path. What do you think?”

  Doria checked her GPS readings for the tenth time, but they remained useless. She wished again that Mars held a real magnetic field, so they could at least guide by compass. It was like trying to navigate through a planet-sized bowl of runny tomato soup.