He looked up. The damage to the wall was superficial. The outer layer of ice hadn’t been penetrated. For an average climber, it would still be impossible to scale the five meters. Even if you drove a rover right up to the wall and climbed on the roof, you would still be short by about a meter. However, if the enemy brought along a crane... but that was unlikely, at least on their first attempt.
Sharon walked to the left. She obviously wanted to circle the base. He followed her. They soon ran into the boulder that he had accidentally caused to crash down. Half of it was buried in the ground. Here, too, the wall was undamaged. What luck! They kept going. It was strange to be down here. He felt like he was in some sort of primitive maze since he couldn’t see any of their surroundings. Fortunately, they would eventually reach the bridge. Otherwise, they would just keep circling the base forever. At a diameter of 500 meters, the ring ditch was more than one and a half kilometers long. They needed about 15 minutes to complete the circuit.
“You want to take down the panels? I’ll get the rover,” Lance said.
Sharon nodded and began to remove the sand-covered panels from the bridge. He walked toward the airlock. The unenclosed, lightweight rover would have to be enough to pull out the steel girders. He walked around to the other side of the rover. The ignition key was sitting in the tool box. He stooped down and was taken aback to see someone messing around with the enclosed rover next to the one he was going to use. He only saw the person from behind. It had to be either Mike or Ewa.
“Mike, is that you?” he asked over the helmet radio.
The person turned around. He recognized Ewa.
“Ah, Lance,” she said. She seemed slightly breathless.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I just need a tool. The air conditioner in my room isn’t working right.”
“We could have brought it to you if you’d just said something.”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Makes sense. I need to get back to the bridge now.”
“Good luck, Lance.”
The sentence sounded like a goodbye, but he had to be mistaken about that. Or was Ewa up to something? If so, what could it be? He leaned over the control panel on the lightweight rover and activated the vehicle. He then climbed into the driver’s seat and drove to the bridge where Sharon was already waiting for him.
“Do you have the tow rope?” she asked.
“In the toolbox on the left.”
She walked over to the right side of the rover and hunted for it.
“On the other side,” he said.
“So on the right side after all,” she replied.
“No, my left.”
“Portside then,” Sharon said.
“Exactly.”
“Just say that next time!” With a chuckle, she walked around the rover and extracted the rope from the toolbox. She tied it to the rear of the rover and carried the other end toward the bridge. “It doesn’t reach,” she said.
He drove the rover closer to the bridge.
“That’s far enough,” Sharon said, bending down and attaching the rope’s carabiner to one of the openings in the first girder. “Ready.”
“Okay,” he replied.
He sat down in the driver’s seat and steered the rover toward the airlock. He pressed the accelerator, first a little, then more. The vehicle started moving. He looked back. The girder broke free, and its back end crashed down into the ditch. The rover wobbled, but it was appreciably heavier than the girder. Lance steered it straight forward until the beam lay flat on the base’s surrounding area.
“When the time comes to rebuild the bridge, we’ll have to be creative about it,” Sharon said.
She was right. They hadn’t considered that. When they had constructed the ditch, they had first installed the girders and then hewn away the stone underneath it. That approach wouldn’t be an option the next time around. But, who ever thinks they’re about to be invaded?
“We can talk about this later on,” Lance said.
“Okay,” Sharon replied. She leaned across the girder and loosened the rope. “Your turn,” she said.
He drove the rover back to the bridge, and she attached the rope to the second girder. Two minutes later, there was nothing left of the bridge. They now lived on an island. Would that help them? Lance wanted to believe it would, but they wouldn’t be able to withstand a long siege. Their enemy would only need a long ladder to infiltrate their base. The first altercation might end in their favor, but the second one most likely wouldn’t. Nonetheless, it still felt right to not surrender their base immediately.
They drove the rover back to the airlock. Ewa was gone. She must have gone back inside the base to repair her air conditioner. Perhaps he should go check on her in case she needed help but didn’t want to ask for it. He wouldn’t put it past her. She was probably still struggling with a guilty conscience. If he were in her shoes, he would probably feel the same.
“You go first,” he said to Sharon. “I need another minute out here.”
She nodded and vanished into the airlock. He turned around and thought back to what it had felt like the day they had landed on Mars. The panorama was breathtaking—a completely sterile, even life-threatening environment stretching all the way to the horizon, which still seemed frighteningly close to him. And yet they had been living here for almost a year. Humans had been an astonishing invention on the part of Mother Earth.
Sol 318, NASA Base
They were sitting at breakfast. Lance yawned loudly. The night had been stressful. In order to provide Sarah with a peaceful night’s rest, he had taken over Michael’s feedings with her pumped milk.
“I just spoke with Ellen,” Mike said, his eyes rimmed with red. He was probably really worried right now. Sharon had told Lance at some point that Mike and Ellen were in a relationship. The news still wasn’t official.
Lance scratched his right temple.
“And how is she doing?” Sharon asked.
“They haven’t heard from the men for two days now,” Mike said. “Other than that, it’s life as normal. Summers notified them that a transporter will arrive at their base shortly in order to collect all the resources they won’t be requiring over the next month.”
“Ah, he wants to make them dependent on Mars City,” Sharon said.
“I think so,” Mike declared.
“You’re fairly quiet, Lance,” Sharon remarked.
He glanced at her in surprise. He usually didn’t say much at breakfast. It was too early to chat, and his powers of concentration barely sufficed to open and close his mouth for eating.
“Not awake yet,” he said.
“The baby’s doing well?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“By the way, where’s Ewa?” Mike asked.
“Probably still asleep,” Sharon replied.
Lance paused. He hadn’t seen her since early yesterday afternoon up on the surface. She hadn’t joined them for supper. He had assumed she had lost track of time while repairing her air conditioner. He had decided to offer her his help that evening, but then Sarah had brought the baby over. “She was having trouble with her air conditioner yesterday,” he said.
“That can’t be true,” Mike replied. “I would’ve been aware of that. It’s connected to the central control system.”
“Maybe I misunderstood,” Lance said. But that wasn’t true. She had expressed herself quite clearly yesterday at the rover. His suspicions arose. Is she up to something? he wondered. She had tried once before to kill her crew. Was she back to being manipulated by the AI inside her head? “Maybe we should go check on her. She might be sick,” he said.
“I’ll take care of that,” Sharon volunteered. “Right after breakfast.”
“Thanks,” Mike said.
They spent the rest of their meal in silence. Something’s going to happen today, Lance thought. His appetite disappeared. With difficulty, he choked down his last spoonful of muesli an
d took a sip of coffee, which tasted like dishwater. They had run out of real coffee a long time ago. Sarah had roasted some kind of plant remains as a replacement. He preferred not to know what the ground-up plant matter was.
Lance set his coffee cup down on the table. He felt nauseous. Standing up, he poured the remaining coffee away and got some water instead. The liquid was clear and didn’t smell like anything, but he still couldn’t help thinking that his cup might be holding purified urine. This was how the base’s life support system functioned, despite the fact that they now had an external water source.
He deposited his cup on the table. “I’m going to wash up and get to work in the garden,” he said. He didn’t mind tending to the plants. It would keep him from thinking too much, from wondering when Summers’ men might show up, or what Ewa had been doing up on the surface yesterday.
Lance scooted through the dirt on his knees, but he didn’t care. The greenhouse ceiling was low, which meant he couldn’t stand up in here. The air smelled like fecal matter. It was damp and warm—just the way the plants liked it. Besides that, the carbon dioxide content of the air was five times as high as on Earth, which was why the air pressure was maintained at half the normal level. None of this bothered Lance, who was totally absorbed in his work. Each of the little lettuce plants had to be examined. Did they have enough space and fertilizer? Were they developing well, or were there signs of an impending illness?
The ecosystem had been set up to produce the greatest amount of biomass in the shortest amount of time. In the same period, it could quickly careen out of control. The sheer variety of microflora was significantly lower than on Earth, where many thousands of species struggled for dominance. They had only relatively few species here. They had either been unintentionally brought here by the humans, or had been deliberately selected by the astrobiologists for their ability to promote plant growth. For example, they might promote the recycling of dead plant parts into nutrients.
However, there were still some functions that humans had to handle, including pollination. This wasn’t necessary for the lettuce plants, though. A mature plant was growing at the end of the bed. It was already almost a meter tall. Its inflorescences were pollinating themselves, and Lance would soon be able to harvest the seeds that they would need for the next generation of plants. Lots of little miracles were taking place in front of his eyes. Lance could understand why Sarah had volunteered to take care of all the gardening work.
He scooted forward a little. What the soil didn’t contain were any organisms that could aerate it. This was why he had accepted the role of earthworm and was digging around in the dirt with a garden fork. Good topsoil was much more valuable here than it was on Earth. The soil they brought inside was sterile at first, so it needed preparation. Lance regularly sprinkled it across the existing topsoil and then turned the Mars dust under.
“Lance, can you hear me?”
What does Mike want now? He already quizzed me earlier about the ditch. “What’s going on?”
“I think we have a problem.”
“You… think?”
“Ewa’s missing,” Mike said. “Sharon went to check on her in her quarters, but she wasn’t there.”
“Is she maybe in the storeroom or the workshop?”
“I wouldn’t have interrupted your work if she was. She isn’t in the base.”
“But where else could she be?”
“No clue. According to the airlock’s log, nobody has left the base today.”
“Then she has to be here,” Lance said.
“Or she left yesterday.”
“What does the airlock log say about that?”
“Yesterday, there were several exits. The two of you were outside. The strange thing is that the hatch opened five times to allow for exits, but only four times to let people back in.”
“Shit.”
“You got that right,” Mike agreed. “She must have been the fifth exit, must have followed you outside.”
“Now what?”
“I’ve sent Sharon outside to look around.”
“Good idea. Maybe Ewa fell asleep in the rover,” Lance said.
“Maybe. I doubt it.”
“Me, too. Can I do anything?”
“No, Lance, just keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll call you whenever I hear something from Sharon.”
What had happened with Ewa? Had she been terrified about Summers’ people because she had broken into the Spaceliner and stolen their drill? The administrator had tried to force them to hand her over to him. He would have probably put her on trial. Lance twisted the garden fork back and forth. Under circumstances similar to hers, he might have chosen to flee as well.
But why hadn’t she told someone? They would have tried to help her! Had she been worried that she would run into a lack of sympathy? Or did she want to protect them? She might have expected a different reaction. They could have all run away together, all five of them. It would have been preferable to living under the administrator’s thumb. Lance would have suggested this course of action under normal circumstances. But the baby now shut the door to that option. He could never put Michael at risk, even if that meant that eventually they had to wave a white flag.
“Lance, Sharon is now outside. I’ll switch you over to our channel.”
“Thanks, Mike.”
“There’s no trace of Ewa up here,” Sharon said. “More than that, our heavy rover is missing, too.”
“She took off with that?” Sarah asked. “I never would have thought she’d do that.”
“Looks that way,” Sharon said.
“But we took down the bridge yesterday. I saw Ewa around that time,” Lance said.
“Just a second,” Sharon said.
All they could hear for a few moments was the sound of her breathing.
“I’m now at the ditch at the end of the bridge,” Sharon said. “The former bridge,” she corrected herself.
“And?” Mike said.
“Ewa must be insane. She apparently drove the rover right down the perpendicular wall.”
“Did she smash it?” Mike asked.
“Surprisingly, no,” Sharon declared. “The ground at the bottom looks all churned up, and I think I can see a piece of sheet metal, but the rover must have survived the fall.”
Lance recalled Ewa’s story about stealing the crane from the Spaceliner. She had simply driven it straight down to the ground.
“That would be just like her,” he said. “She’s crazy.”
“Or simply resolute,” Sarah offered, “once she has gotten something in her head. But what does she want to do out there? We have to try to reach her by radio.”
“Already did,” Mike said. “No reply.”
“Could this have something to do with the software inside her brain?” Sharon asked.
“Hard to say. I don’t think so,” Mike said. “This is just how she is. Nobody would have to force her to do something like this. Just think about the hole she smashed into the mountain by making the drill tower tip over.”
Lance remembered that all too well. One of the drones Mike had flown to the site had filmed Ewa doing that. “I have an idea,” he said.
“Spit it out,” Sharon demanded.
“Couldn’t we use one of our drones to search for her?”
“I could send it out,” Mike said. “If we’re lucky, she’s left a trail behind her in the dusty terrain. However, the drone’s range is limited. We would actually need to drive out ourselves. Do you want to take the open rover and crash it down the slope of the ditch?”
“No, thank you,” Lance said.
“Thanks, Sharon. You can come back inside,” Mike said. “By the way, I’ve been going through our inventory.”
“And?” Sarah asked.
“Considering the quantity of provisions she took along, she must be planning to spend the rest of her life out there. She could live just fine for the next six months on the quantity of food, oxygen, and water she took w
ith her.”
“Good for her,” Lance said.
“But how did she manage that without any of us noticing?” Sharon asked.
“Were you paying attention to what she did with her days? I wasn’t,” Lance said.
“You think that she prepared all this under our noses?”
“Yes, Sharon,” Mike said. “That’s exactly what it looks like. She didn’t even attempt to conceal her forays into our supplies.”
“Because we trusted her,” Sarah declared.
“Exactly,” Mike said. “And I’m still not sure if our decision to do that was unbelievably stupid or surprisingly shrewd on our part.”
Sol 319, NASA Base
Five steps to the left, turn around slowly, five steps to the right. Lance was watching Michael’s face. The baby’s eyes seemed to be closing, but he couldn’t stop pacing yet. He slowly turned to the left and walked as far as the cabin allowed him. About-face, and then five steps back. Michael breathed calmly and evenly. His nostrils flared a little as he exhaled. That looked so sweet! He wanted to cuddle him, but that would wake him up. Lance had to keep walking. His son slept his deepest when he carried him and walked around. If Lance stopped for more than 30 seconds, Michael would open first his eyes, then his mouth—almost always to start crying.
A ringing sound disturbed the silence. It was the bridge. Shit! Michael is going to wake up now. He had told Mike not to bother him!
As expected, it was Mike. “Lance, can you hear me?”
“Man, you woke him up now.” Lance gazed at Michael. His son was asleep, as astonishing as that might seem. To be on the safe side, he kept pacing.
“Sorry about that, but one of the drones has reported movement. They’re coming from the north.”
“How long do we have?”
“They’ll be here in two hours.”
“Alright. I’ll try to lay Michael down.”
“See you in a minute,” Mike said.
Lance looked down at his son. Michael was still asleep. Amazing. Hopefully, he could put him in his crib without waking him up. That wouldn’t be easy. Lance walked to the crib at the foot of the bed. He cautiously leaned over, holding his breath as he set Michael down. The baby moved his arms a little, and then his legs twitched.
Mars Nation: The Complete Trilogy Page 59