A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “Yup,” Marco said. “I like it.”

  He swung the lander in an arc over the settlement, bringing it back toward the pad. Nineteen years of work, people devoting their lives to establishing a human foothold on Mars, and now it was up in smoke because Earth was pulling the plug. It was sad, the way people were withdrawing. Steuby always wanted to think of human civilization like it was an eagle, but maybe it was more like a turtle. Now it was pulling its head in. Someday maybe it would start peering out again, but all this stuff on Mars would be junk by then. Everything would have to start over.

  Or humanity would stay on Earth, and in a hundred years no one living would have ever set foot on Mars or the Moon or an asteroid.

  “Shame,” Bridget said. “All that work for nothing.”

  “I hate quitters,” Marco said.

  Steuby didn’t mind quitters. He kind of admired people who knew when to quit. Maybe that was a function of age. He was older than both Bridget and Marco by a good twenty years. The older you got, the less interested you were in fighting battles you knew you couldn’t win.

  But to be agreeable, he said, “Me, too.”

  “They’re not quitting,” Bridget pointed out. “Earth quit on them.”

  “Then I hate Earth,” Marco said. “Just kidding. That’s where I’ll end up, when I’m old.”

  Nobody knew they were there, since what they were doing was technically illegal. The sun was going down, washing the landscape in that weird Martian blue dusk that made Steuby think he’d had a stroke or something every time he saw it.

  “Time to see what the Lift left,” Marco said, for maybe the hundredth time since they’d taken off from PM. Steuby was ready to kill him.

  Their collective guess was that the Lift had left all kinds of useful things. People always did when they had to get out in a hurry. In the thirty days since the Mid-System Planning Authority announced it was ending logistical support for all human activity beyond the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, everyone on Mars had started lining up to get off-planet and back under the MSPA umbrella. Even the asteroid miners, as antisocial and hardy a group as had existed since Vinland, were pulling back. Things on Earth were bad—refugee crises, regional wars over water and oil and room to breathe. When things on Earth got bad, everyone not on Earth was on their own. That wasn’t a big deal for the Moon settlements, which were more or less self-sufficient. Much different story for Mars.

  “Are we sure nobody’s here?” Steuby wondered out loud. It would be kind of a drag to get arrested in the middle of a planet-wide evacuation.

  “I listened to the MSPA comm all night,” Marco said. “Last people out of here were on their way to Pavonis before midnight.”

  Since the easiest way off-planet was the space elevator at Pavonis Mons, that’s where the remaining colonists were, hiding out in the caldera until it was their turn to go up. The Hellas Basin settlement, over which they were now circling, was completely deserted. It was newer than PM, so the pickings would probably be better here anyway. Steuby looked out the window. Mars looked different around here. The PM caldera felt like it was already halfway to space because it was so high and you could see so far from the rim, when the storms let you go out on the rim. The Hellas Basin settlement, built just a couple of years ago to take advantage of a huge water supply locked in glaciers on the basin’s eastern slope, was about as far from Pavonis Mons as you could get both geographically and environmentally. Practically antipodal. Where Pavonis was high, dry, and cold, Hellas was low, waterrich, and comparatively warm. Stormy during the summers, when the planet neared perihelion.

  Which was now. There were dust devils everywhere, the atmosphere in the area was completely scrambled by magnetic auroras, PM was sucking itself up the space elevator as fast as it could get there, and here were Steuby, Marco, and Bridget thousands of kicks away at HB exploring. Well, prospecting. Okay, looting.

  “We’re just here to plunder the mysteries, Ma’am,” Marco said to an imaginary cop, even though the auroras meant they couldn’t talk to any authorities whether they wanted to or not. He put the lander into its final descent and ninety seconds later they were parked on the surface of Mars. There was a sharp crack from below as the ship touched down.

  “Nice going,” Steuby said. “You broke the pad.”

  Marco shrugged. “Who’s gonna know? You find me a concrete slab on Mars that doesn’t have a crack in it. Steuby, what was it, ten years since we were here before?”

  Steuby nodded. “Give or take.” He and Marco had worked a pipeline project on the lower slopes of Pavonis. Then he’d gone back in-system. He preferred the Moon. Real Martians wanted to get away from Earth. Steuby preferred to keep the Earth close by in case he needed it. “Bridget, you’ve been here before, right?”

  “I built some of the solar arrays on the edge of the Pavonis caldera,” she said. “Long time ago. But this is my first time coming out to Hellas. And last, looks like.”

  They suited up and popped the hatch. Bridget went first, Steuby right behind her, and Marco appeared in the hatchway a minute later, after doing a quick post-flight check on the lander’s engines. “Good morning, Barsoom!” he sang out.

  Marco was three steps down the ladder when they all heard a grinding rumble from under the ground. Steuby felt the pad shift and scrambled backward. The lander started to tip as the concrete pad cracked and collapsed into a sinkhole that opened up right at Steuby’s feet. Marco lost his balance and grabbed at the ladder railing. The sinkhole kept opening up and the lander kept tipping. “Marco!” Bridget shouted. “Jump!”

  He tried, but he couldn’t get his feet under him and instead he slipped, pitching off the ladder and falling into the sinkhole as the lander tipped right over on top of him. The whole scene unfolded in the strange slow motion of falling objects in Martian gravity, dreamlike and all the more frightening because even slowed down, the lander tipped too quickly for Marco to get out of the way. He disappeared beneath it as its hull scraped along the broken concrete slabs.

  Before it had completely come to rest, Steuby and Bridget were clambering around the edge of the sinkhole, where large pieces of the concrete pad angled under the toppled lander. Steuby spotted him first, face down and not moving. He slid into the dust-filled space underneath the bulk of the lander, Bridget right next to him. Together they grabbed Marco’s legs and tried to drag him out, but he was caught on something. They could pivot him around but not pull him free. “Marco,” Bridget said. “Talk to me.”

  The dust started to clear and Steuby saw why Marco wasn’t answering.

  The ladder railing had broken off and part of it impaled Marco just inside his right shoulder blade. Blood welled up around the hole in his suit and ran out from under his body down the tilted concrete slab. Now Marco turned his head toward them. Dust covered his faceplate. He was moving his left arm and trying to talk, but his comm was out. His voice was a thin hum and they couldn’t understand what he was saying. A minute later it didn’t matter anymore because he was dead.

  “Marco,” Steuby said. He paused, feeling like he ought to say something but not sure what. After a while he added, “Hope it didn’t hurt too much when we pulled on you. We were trying to help.”

  Bridget had been sitting silently since Marco stopped moving. Now she stood up. “Don’t talk to him, Jesus, he’s dead! Don’t talk to him!”

  Steuby didn’t say anything.

  All he could figure was that there had been some kind of gas pocket under the landing pad, frozen hydrates or something. They’d sublimated away gradually from the sporadic heat of a hundred or a thousand landings, creating a soft spot, and when Marco set down their lander, that last little bit of heat had weakened the pad. Crack, tip, disaster.

  “What are we going to do?” Bridget asked in a calmer tone. It was a reasonable question to which Steuby had no good answer. He looked around. They were at the edge of a deserted settlement on Mars. The only other people on Mars were thousands of kilometers away, and
had neither the resources nor the inclination to help, was Steuby’s guess.

  He shrugged. “Probably we’re going to die.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But let’s say we didn’t want to die. What would we do then?”

  COMPARED TO THE Moon, everything on Mars was easy. It had water, it had lots of usable minerals that were easy to get to, synthesizing fuels was no problem, solar power was efficient because the thin atmosphere compensated for the distance to the Sun. . . as colonizing projects went, it was a piece of cake. In theory.

  In reality, Mars was very good at killing people. Steuby looked at the horizon. The sun was coming up. If he and Bridget couldn’t figure something out real soon, Mars would probably add two more people to its tally. Steuby wasn’t ready to be a statistic. Marco, well, Marco already was.

  Now the question wasn’t what the Lift had left, but whether they were going to be able to lift themselves or be left behind for good.

  “We’ll see,” Steuby said.

  Bridget looked up. “See what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re talking to Marco.”

  “No, I’m not,” Steuby lied.

  “Here’s a question, since you’re thinking about him anyway. What should we do with him?”

  “What do you mean, what should we do? It’s not like we can strap him to the roof.”

  She let it go. They started walking toward the main cluster of buildings and domes that made up the Hellas Basin settlement.

  PHOBOS WAS RISING, big and bright. Sometimes sunlight hit Phobos a certain way and the big impact crater on its planet-facing side caught the shadows just right, and for an hour or so there was a giant number 9 in the Martian sky. Steuby wasn’t superstitious, but when he saw that, he understood how people got that way.

  Number Nine Moon was his favorite thing about Mars. He hoped, if he was going to die in the next few days—and due to recent developments, that seemed more than likely—he would die looking at it.

  From behind him Bridget said, “Steuby. Stop looking at the moon.” Marco was the one who had pointed out Number Nine Moon to him, when they’d been on Mars before. “I knew him for a long time, Bridget,” Steuby said. “Just give me a minute.”

  “We don’t really have any extra minutes.”

  This was true. Steuby climbed up out of the sinkhole. “Come on, then,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “We can’t walk back to PM,” Steuby said. “Can’t drive. So we’re going to have to fly.”

  “Fly what?”

  Steuby didn’t want to tell her what he was thinking until he had a little more than moonshine to go on. “Let’s head to the garage over there. I’ll show you.”

  THEY SEALED THE garage doors after they went inside. It was warm. Condensation appeared on their faceplates. “Hey,” Steuby said. “There’s still air in here.”

  He popped his faceplate and smelled dirt and plants. A passive oxygen system in the garage circulated air from a nearby greenhouse. The plants hadn’t had time to freeze and die yet.

  With the dirty faceplate off, he could see better in the dim interior. He found a light switch and flicked it on, just in case. “Hey, lights too.”

  Now for the real test. Along one wall of the garage were a series of spigots and vents, spaced out over underground tanks. Steuby walked along them, saying silent prayers to the gods of chemistry that one of the spigots would be tagged with a particular series of letters.

  He stopped at the fourth and pointed out the letters. “MMH,” Bridget read. “Monomethylhydrazine, right?”

  “Yup,” Steuby said. “Also known as jackpot. They must have made it down here for impulse thrusters. Landers would need to tank up on it before they took off again. You know what this means?”

  “That we have a whole lot of a fuel that doesn’t work in our ship, which is crashed anyway.”

  “No, it means we have half of a hypergolic fuel combination designed to work in engines just exactly like the one built into that rocket out there.” Steuby pointed toward the garage’s bank of south-facing windows. Bridget followed the direction of his finger.

  “You’re kidding,” she said. “That thing is a toy.”

  “Au contraire, Mademoiselle,” Steuby said. “I’ve seen those fly.”

  WHEN HE’D GOTTEN out of the construction business after Walter Navarro’s death and spent his next years fleecing tourists, Steuby had briefly worked on an amusement park project. A woman named Veronica Liu wanted to create an homage to classic visions of the Moon from the days before the Space Age. Lots of pointy rockets and gleaming domes. She’d built it over the course of a year, with rides specifically designed for the Moon’s gravity, and then at the opening ceremony she had put on a big show of landing a fleet of rockets specifically designed to recall the covers of pulp magazines from the 1940s. They were pointy, finned, gleaming—and when the amusement park went under five years after Liu built it, they were sold off to other concerns. One of them was still on the Moon as far as Steuby knew, because she hadn’t been able to sell it for a price that made the deal worth doing.

  Another was now standing on a small pad a kilometer from the garage. Steuby had spotted it on their first flyover. He didn’t know how it had gotten there, and he didn’t care. All he cared about was finding out whether it would fly.

  “THAT’S A RIDICULOUS idea. This whole thing was a ridiculous idea. You had to come up with a stupid scheme to get rich and now Marco’s dead because you couldn’t just get off Mars like everyone else.” Bridget was working herself up into a full-on rage. Steuby thought he should do something about it but he didn’t know what. His way of dealing with trauma was to pretend he wasn’t dealing with it. Hers was apparently to blow off some steam a short time after the traumatic event. “You wanted to come see HB and loot the mysteries! You said we’d be out and back in no time flat, no problem! Now we’re going to die because of what you said!”

  This was the wrong time to remind her that the whole thing had been Marco’s plan, Steuby thought. He wasn’t good at dealing with people, or emotions, but since Bridget was the one with the expertise in battery systems and flight control, he needed her help. Maybe a useful task would help her cope and also keep them alive.

  “Let’s find out if it’s ridiculous,” he said. “Come with me and we’ll do a preflight check.” He dropped his faceplate and went to the door.

  After a pause, she said, “Why not. If we’re going to die anyway.”

  Bridget didn’t really believe him, but given no other option she went along while Steuby climbed up the ladder and poked around in the rocket. From the hiss when he opened the access door he could tell it had been sealed against the Martian dust—as much as anything could be sealed against Martian dust.

  She looked at clusters of cables and wires, followed connections, popped open recessed coves in the floor, and eventually said, “We’re still going to die, but electronically all of this looks intact.”

  “Perfect,” Steuby said.

  “For certain values of perfect,” Bridget said. They climbed back down and Steuby checked the thruster assembly, feeling a surge of optimism as he opened panel after panel and found that the rocket had been staged and left. Nobody had stripped it for parts. Probably they’d looked at it and—like Bridget—thought it was just a toy.

  But Steuby knew better. All this rocket needed was juice in its batteries to run the control systems, and fuel in its tanks to fire the engine.

  “You watch,” he said. “We’re going to get out of here yet.”

  Bridget regarded the rocket with open scorn. “If by out of here you mean out of our bodies into the afterlife, I completely agree.”

  “I will be willing to accept your apology when we reach orbit,” Steuby said. “Come on. We need charged batteries and a few tons of dinitrogen tetroxide.” He headed for the garage, and she went with him.

  They had ammonia, all they wanted, held in another of the underground tanks. It was u
seful enough that the base had kept a supply. Steuby was willing to bet that one of the machines in the garage either was designed to oxidate ammonia or could be configured to do so. NTO was a standard liquid fuel for all kinds of rocket models. All they had to do was find the right machine.

  “We used to do this on the Moon,” Steuby said. “You mix the ammonia with regular old air, and as nitrogen oxides form you add nitric acid to catalyze more nitrogen oxides. After that, you cool the mixture down and compress it, and the oxides combine to make NTO. It’s just shuffling atoms around. Doesn’t even need heat. All you need is compression at the right time and a way to siphon off the NTO. I would bet Marco’s last dollar there’s an NTO synthesizer somewhere around here.”

  They went looking for it and found it within ten minutes. There was even a generator, and the generator even still had power left in its fuel cells. For the first time since Marco’s death, Steuby started to recover his natural state of irrational optimism.

  They ran a hose from the ammonia tank over to the synthesizer, fed it a fair bit, and fired it up. Then they wheeled over a smaller tank of nitric acid and pumped some of it in, Steuby doing the figures in his head. They didn’t have to be exact. The reaction, once it got going, just needed continual adjustment of ammonia, air, and nitric acid at the right pressures, and the holding tank on the other end of the synthesizer would fill up with nasty, corrosive, carcinogenic, and in this case life-saving NTO.

  The synthesizer rattled to life. Steuby waited for it to explode or fall apart, but it didn’t. It appeared to work. He watched the capacity readout on the tank. It stayed at 00 for a very long time. . . and then it ticked over to 01. Bridget looked on, and the readout ticked to 02. . . 03. . . “Keep this up and I’ll start to believe you know what you’re doing.”

  “Love it,” Steuby said. “This is my favorite machine. Now all we need to do is make sure we can fuel up and take off before the storm gets bad and keep the rocket going straight up and escape the gravity well and make the rendezvous and convince the freighter to slow down and take us on board.”