“Yes, we will try. But it’s a long way, and conditions are not good. But I think we can do it. Oh, I am so glad we have found you! You don’t know how horrible it has been to look and look, and find only bodies.”
“We know,” Maya said. “We found Arkady, and Sasha was just killed today, and Alex and Edvard and Samantha, and I guess Yeli too, just now. . . .”
“Yes. Well. We will try to make sure there aren’t any more.”
The rover’s TV showed the interior of the following car, where Ann and Simon and Sax were greeted stiffly by a young stranger. Michel turned to look over his shoulder out the windshield, and hissed. They were at the head of one of the many box canyons leading down into Noctis, a rounded canyon end that dropped rapidly away. The road that descended this headwall had followed an artificial ramp that had been built to support it, but now the ramp was gone, blasted away, and the road with it.
“We will have to walk,” Michel said after a while. “We would have had to abandon these cars at the bottom anyway. It’s only about five kilometers. Are your suits fully supplied?”
They refilled their tanks from the rover, and put their helmets back on. Then it was back out through the locks.
When they were all out, they stood staring at each other: the six refugees, Michel and the younger driver. The eight of them set off on foot, in darkness, using headlamps only during the tricky climb down the broken-off section of the road ramp. Once back on the road, they turned their headlamps off and strode down the steeply sloping gravel path, falling naturally into the long lope that was the most comfortable pace in this angle of descent. The night was starless, and the wind whistled down-canyon around them, sometimes in gusts so strong that it felt like they were being shoved in the back. It felt like another dust storm was indeed beginning; Sax muttered about equatorial versus global, but it was impossible to tell what it would be. “Let’s hope it goes global,” Michel said. “We could use the cover.”
“I doubt it will,” Sax said.
“What’s our destination?” Nadia asked.
“Well, there is an emergency station in Aureum Chaos.”
So they had to thread the entire length of Valles Marineris—5,000 kilometers! “How will we do it!” Maya cried.
“We have canyon cars,” Michel said briefly. “You’ll see.”
The road was a steep one, and they kept up the fast pace, punishing their joints. Nadia’s right knee began to throb, and her ghost finger itched for the first time in years. She was thirsty, and cold in the old diamond pattern. It got so dusty and dark that they turned on their headlamps. Each bobbing cone of yellow light barely reached to the road surface, and glancing back up Nadia thought they looked like a string of deep-sea fish, their luminous spots glowing on a great ocean floor. Or like miners in some fluid smoky tunnel. Some part of her began to enjoy the situation— it was a tiny stirring, a sensation mostly physical, but still, the first positive feeling she could remember since finding Arkady. Pleasure like the ghost itching of her lost finger, faint and slightly irritating.
It was still the middle of the night when they came to the bottom of the canyon, a broad U, very common to all the Noctis Labyrinthus canyons. Michel approached a boulder, pushed its side with a finger, then lifted a hatch in the boulder’s side. “Get in,” he said.
There were two of these boulder cars, it turned out; big rovers, shelled by a thin layer of actual basalt. “What about their thermal signals?” Sax asked as he ducked into one.
“We direct all the heat into coils, and bury the coils. So there’s no signal to speak of.”
“Good idea.”
The young driver helped them into the new cars. “Let’s get out of here,” he said brusquely, almost shoving them through the outer lock doors. Light from the lock illuminated his face, framed by his helmet: Asian, perhaps twenty-five, he aided the refugees without meeting their eye, appearing disgruntled, disgusted, perhaps frightened. He said to them scornfully, “Next time you have a revolution you’d better try some other way.
Part 8
Shikata Ga Nai
When the occupants of the elevator car Bangkok Friend learned that Clarke had broken away and the cable was falling, they hurried to the foyer and the locker room and pulled on emergency spacesuits as fast as they could, and for a wonder there was no general panic, it all happened in the heart, on the surface everyone was businesslike and attentive to the small group at the lock door who were trying to determine where exactly they were, and when they should abandon the car. This steadiness amazed Peter Clayborne, whose own blood was hammering through his body in great adrenal shocks; he wasn’t sure he could have spoken if he had to. A man in the group at the front told them in level tones that they were approaching the areosynchronous point and so they all pulled into the lock together until they were jammed in like the suits had been in the storage closet, and then they locked the lock and sucked the air. The outer door slid open and there it was, a big rectangle of starry death-black space. It was daunting indeed to launch into it in an untethered spacesuit, it felt to the young man like suicide; but the ones at the front pulled out and the rest followed, like spores from an exploding seed pod.
The car and the elevator dwindled eastward and quickly disappeared. The cloud of spacesuits began to disperse. Many of them stabilized with their feet toward Mars, which lay below them like a dirty basketball. When steady, they ignited their main rockets and lofted upward. The group doing the calculations was still on the common band, talking it over as if it were a chess problem. They were near the areosynchronous orbit, but with a downward velocity of several hundred kilometers an hour; burning half their main packs’ fuel would counteract most of that, and then they would be in an orbit much more stable than would be strictly necessary, given their air supplies. In other words they would die later of asphyxiation rather than sooner of reentry heat. But then that had been the whole point of bailing out in the first place. It was possible rescuers might appear in the grace period, one never knew. Clearly most people were willing to give it a try.
The young man pulled his rocket-control rods out of his wrist consoles and put his fingers and thumbs on the buttons and got the world between his boots, and shot away from it for a while. Some of the others were trying to stay together, but he judged it impossible and a waste of fuel, and let them drift off above him until they were just more stars. He wasn’t as frightened as he had been in the locker, but he was angry and sad: he didn’t want to die. A spasm of grief for his lost future shook through him and he cried aloud, and wept. After a while the physical manifestations went away, even though he felt just as miserable as before. He stared dully at the stars. Occasional gusts of fright or despair shuddered through him, but they became less frequent as the minutes dragged on and then the hours. He tried to slow his metabolism but the effort had the opposite effect to that intended, and he decided to forget about it, although first he did call up his pulse rate on his wrist console: 108 beats a minute. Lucky he hadn’t checked when they were suiting up and bailing out. He grimaced and tried identifying constellations. Time dragged by.
He woke up, and when he realized he had fallen asleep he was both appalled and amused, and promptly fell back asleep. Then after a time he was awake again, this time for good. The other refugees from the car were out of sight, though some stars seemed to move against the backdrop, and could have been them. No sign of the elevator, in space or down on the planet’s surface.
It was an odd way to go. Something like the night before a date with the firing squad, perhaps, spent in a dream of space. Death would be like space, except without the stars or the thinking. It was a tedious wait in some ways; it made him impatient, and he considered turning off his heating system and having done with it. Knowing he could do that made the wait easier, and he figured he would do it when the air supply was about to run out. The thought put his pulse up to 130, and he tried to concentrate on the planet below. Home sweet home. He was still in almost areosynchronous or
bit, it had been hours and Tharsis was still below, though a bit farther west. He was over Marineris.
Hours passed and without intending to, he fell asleep again. When he woke there was a small silver spacecraft hanging before him like a UFO and he shouted with surprise, and started tumbling helplessly. He worked the rockets feverishly to bring himself under control, and when he managed it the craft was still there. There was a woman’s face in a side-window port, talking to him and pointing to her ear. He turned on the common band but she wasn’t on it; he couldn’t find her. He rocketed over toward the craft and scared the woman by nearly crashing into it. He managed to arrest and draw back a bit. The woman was gesturing; did he want in? He made a clumsy circle with gloved forefinger and thumb, nodding so vigorously that he started tumbling again. As he spun he saw a bay door open behind the window, on top of the craft. He got the suit stabilized and puffed toward the bay, wondering if it would be real when he got to it. He touched the open doorway and tears sprang to his eyes; he blinked and the teardrop spheres floated into his faceplate as he flattened against the bottom of the bay. He had an hour of air left.
When the bay was closed and pumped he unsealed his helmet and lifted it off. The air was thin and oxygen-rich, and cool. The bay lock door opened and he pushed through.
Women were laughing. There were two of them aboard, and they were in high spirits. “What were you going to do, land in that?” one asked.
“I was on the elevator,” he said, voice cracking. “We had to jump off. Have you picked up anyone else?”
“You’re the only one we’ve seen. Want a ride down?”
He could only gulp. They laughed at him.
“We’re amazed to run into anyone out here, boy! How many gs are you comfortable with?”
“I don’t know— three?”
They laughed again.
“Why, how many can you take?”
“A lot more than that,” said the woman who had looked out at him.
“A lot more,” he scoffed. “How many more can a person take?”
“We’ll find out,” the other woman said, and laughed. The little craft began to accelerate down toward Mars. The youth lay exhausted in a g chair behind the two women, asking questions and sucking down water and cheddar cheese from a tube. They had been on one of the mirror complexes and had hijacked this emergency descender after sending the mirrors tumbling in a tangle of molecule-thin sheets. They were complicating their descent by shifting into a polar orbit; they were going to land near the south polar cap.
Peter absorbed this in silence. Then they were bouncing wildly and the windows went white, then yellow, then a deep angry orange. Gravity forces jammed him back in his chair, his vision blurred and his neck hurt. “What a lightweight,” one of the women said, and he didn’t know if she meant him or the descender.
Then the g forces let off and the window cleared. He looked out and saw that they were dropping toward the planet in a steep dive, and were only a few thousand meters above the surface. He couldn’t believe it. The women kept the craft in its radical stoop until it seemed they were going to spear the sand, and then at the last minute they flattened out and again he was shoved back into his chair. “Sweet,” one of the women commented, and then boom, they were down and running over the layered terrain.
Gravity again. Peter clambered out of the descender after the two women, down a walktube and into a big rover, feeling stunned and ready to cry. There were two men in the rover, shouting greetings and hugging the women. “Who’s this?” they cried. “Oh, we picked him up up there, he jumped off the elevator. He’s still a bit spaced. Hey,” she said to him with a smile, “we’re down, it’s okay.”
Some mistakes you can never make good.
Ann Clayborne sat in the back of Michel’s rover, sprawled across three seats, feeling the wheels rise and fall over the rocks. Her mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy.
Outside the rover, the planet was being changed forever. Inside, the main room was lit by floor-level windows, which gave a snake’s-eye view out under the skirt of the rover’s stone roof. Rough gravel road, scattered rockfall in the way. They were on the Noctis Highway, but a lot of rock had fallen on it. Michel wasn’t bothering to drive around the smaller samples; they rolled along at about sixty kph, and when they hit a big one they all jounced in their seats. “Sorry,” Michel said. “We have to get out of the Chandelier as soon as possible.”
“The Chandelier?”
“Noctis Labyrinthus.”
The original name, Ann knew, given to it by the Terran geologists staring at Mariner photos. But she didn’t speak. The will to speech had left her.
Michel talked on, his voice low and conversational, reassuring. “There’s several places where if the road were cut it would be impossible to get the cars down. Transverse scarps that run from wall to wall, giant boulder fields, that kind of thing. Once we get into Marineris we’ll be okay, there’s all kinds of cross-country routes there.”
“Are these cars supplied for a drive down the whole canyon?” Sax asked.
“No. We’ve got caches all over the place, though.” Apparently the great canyons had been some of the principal transport corridors for the hidden colony. When the official Canyon Highway was built it had caused them problems, cutting off a lot of their routes.
From her corner Ann listened to Michel as attentively as the rest; she couldn’t help being curious about the hidden colony. Their use of the canyons was ingenious. Rovers designed to stay down in them were disguised to look like one of the millions of boulders that lay in great talus piles sloping out from the cliffs. The roofs of the cars actually were boulders, hollowed out from below. Heavy insulation kept the rock roof of the car from heating up, so there was no IR signal, “especially since there’s still any number of Sax’s windmills scattered around down here, and they confuse the picture.” The rover was insulated on its underside as well, so that it left no snail’s track of heat to reveal its passing. The heat from the hydrazine motor was used to warm the living quarters, and any excess was directed into coils for later use; if they built up too much while moving, the coils were dropped into holes dug under the car, and buried with regolith. By the time the ground over the coil warmed up, the rover was long gone. So they left no heat signal, never used the radio, and moved only at night. During the day they sat in place among other boulders, “and even if they compared daily photos and saw we were new in the area, we would just be one in a thousand new boulders that had fallen off the cliffs that night. Mass wasting has really accelerated since you started the terraforming, because it’s freezing and thawing every day. In the mornings and evenings there’s something coming down every few minutes.”
“So there’s no way they can see us,” Sax said, sounding surprised.
“That’s right. No visual signal, no electronic signal, no heat signal.”
“A stealth rover,” Frank said over the intercom from the other car, and laughed his harsh bray.
“That’s right. The real danger down here is the very rockfall that’s hiding us.” A red light on the dash went off, and Michel laughed. “We’re going so well we’ll have to stop and bury a coil.”
“Won’t it take a while to dig a hole?” Sax said.
“There’s one already dug, if we can get to it. Another four kilometers. I think we’ll make it.”
“You have quite a system here.”
“Well, we’ve been living underground for fourteen years now, fourteen Martian years I mean. Thermal-disposal engineering is a big thing for us.”
“But how do you do it for your permanent habitats, assuming you have any?”
“We pipe it down into the deep regolith, and melt ice for our water. Or else we pipe it out to vents disguised as your little windmill heaters. Among other methods.”
“Those were a bad idea,” Sax said. From the next car Frank laughed at him.
Only thirty years late with that realization, Ann would have said if she were speaking.
“But no, an excellent idea!” Michel said. “They must have added millions of kilocalories to the atmosphere by now.”
“About an hour from any of the moholes,” Sax said primly.
He and Michel began to discuss the terraforming projects. Ann let their voices drift into glossolalia; it was amazingly easy, conversations these days were always right on the edge of meaninglessness for her, she had to exert herself to understand rather than the reverse. She relaxed away from them, and felt Mars bounce and jumble under her. They stopped briefly to bury a heating coil. The road got smoother when they started again. They were deep in the labyrinth now, and in a normal rover she would have been looking through the skylights at tight steep canyon walls. Rift valleys, enlarged by slumping; there had been ice in this ground, once upon a time, now all migrated down to the Compton aquifer at the bottom of Noctis, presumably.
Ann thought of Peter and shuddered helplessly. One couldn’t assume things, but the fear gnawed at her. Simon watched her surreptitiously, the worry plain on his face, and suddenly she hated his doggy loyalty, his doggy love. She didn’t want anyone to care for her like that, it was an unbearable burden, an imposition.
At dawn they stopped. The two boulder rovers parked at the edge of a patch of similar boulders. All day they sat in one of the cars together, lingering over small rehydrated or microwaved meals, trying to find TV or radio transmissions. There weren’t any to speak of, only the occasional burst in a number of languages and encryptions. An ether junkyard, adding up to an incoherent mash. Harsh blasts of static seemed to indicate electromagnetic pulses. But the rover’s electronics were hardened, Michel said. He sat in a chair as if meditating. A new calm for Michel Duval, Ann thought. As if he were used to waiting out his days in hiding. His companion, the youth driving the other car, was named Kasei. Kasei’s voice had a permanent tone of grim disapproval. Well, they deserved it. In the afternoon Michel showed Sax and Frank where they were, on a topo map he clicked onto both cars’ screens. Their route through Noctis was to run a course southwest to northeast, along one of the biggest canyons of the labyrinth. Emerging from that it zigzagged eastward, dropping steeply until they were at the big area between Noctis and the heads of Ius and Tithonium Chasmas. Michel called this area the Compton Break. It was chaotic terrain, and until they had crossed it, and gotten down into Ius Chasma, Michel would not feel comfortable. For without their rough road, he said, the area was basically impassable. “And if they figure we went this way out of Cairo, they may bomb the route.” They had traveled nearly 500 kilometers the previous night, almost the whole length of Noctis; another good night and they would be down into Ius, and beyond their complete reliance on a single route.
Red Mars Page 60