The ship slipped down into the thicker parts of the Martian atmosphere. It started to shudder and wobble with the heat getting worse. They had stopped the tumble when they hit the thin atmo of Mars, but it was still coming in at the wrong angle to survive. He pulled at the controls, trying to re-align the angle of attack of Junker. The heat of the atmosphere built up steadily; the friction causing the shielding to warm up brighter into a cherry red. Marcus looked over and saw Lash was not doing well. Her movements were sluggish, as her injuries starting to take their toll on her.
“Lash, get to the—”
“I’m fine. Leave it, Marcus,” she sent.
Marcus nodded and continued to pull hard at the emergency controls, holding the Junker at such an angle that it wouldn’t break up in atmo. There was then a sudden jolt, and Marcus slammed his head backwards. He could almost feel his brain slam into his skull. Woozy, he tried to hold the Junker at the right angle as it continued to streak towards the surface.
There was another slam that rattled Marcus’ head again, harder, and he felt himself black out.
“Wake up dammit, I need your help to get out of here!” Lash sent, her mental voice reverberating in Marcus’ brain.
Lash? He thought. Marcus started to come to consciousness with a sluggish speed. He tried to move and found he couldn’t. What is—
“Open your damned eyes!”
His eyes opened. He realized he’d blacked out from either a concussion or from slamming into Mars. He didn’t know. Half of his vision was obscured by a hardened foam, which was cracking in places as he wiggled his body around. We landed?
“Crashed. We are alive, for the moment. Get out of the foam. I need help,” Lash sent.
Marcus tried to turn his head, but the foam retarded his movement.
Pushing his hand through the foam, he searched for the right button on the pilot chair. The ball of foam was held tight by the restraints. With a few scrapes back and forth, he was able to turn his eyes to see Lash. The Ilas was in the co-pilot chair which had activated its own crash foam, surrounding her in a larger ball than Marcus. He tried three times to get at his straps before he finally was able to loosen one of them. Then he realized he needed to hit the chemical to rapidly dissolve the cocoon of foam.
“Marcus, hurry,” Lash sent.
I’ll be right there, he thought. Finally finding the button, a spray of an astringent hit the foam, and it started to drip and melt like hot wax. After the slurry was mostly off, Marcus pulled the release off the last of the straps that held him. He dropped, though he was prepared for it and hit the deck plating. Even then, he almost pitched over, since he landed a little wrong and underestimated the cant of the deck. Looks like Junker is really canted to one side. Dammit.
Steadying himself as best he could, he used the bent and twisted instrument panel, along with broken bits of deck plating like a warped jungle gym set to get to the thick ball of crash foam that held Lash. He gave it a smirk, “Comfy in there?”
He was then assaulted by an image of her lanky form in a fetal position that was still a little too big for the ball. “No, I’m not. Get me the slaggin’ Hells out of here!” She screamed in his head.
He was rocked backwards by the assault. Turning, he went to a bracket holding the foam release spray. It should have gone off after the crash but hadn’t for some reason. He realized he’d been lucky, since his own crash-foam cocoon was only a partial sphere because of the shape of the pilot’s half-sphere design. He plucked the small canister of foam retardant to spray it over the one-and-a-half-meter ball of foam. A strong astringent smell hit the air, making him gag. Marcus kept his finger on the top of the aerosol-like dispenser, since the ball would need most of the retardant to free Lash.
The foam started to melt away into runny, watery ooze dripping onto the deck plating. Some of it even hissed as it dripped onto exposed wires of the ruined consoles and conduits. He saw Lash’s thin elbows and knees as the ball continued to disintegrate. At a certain point, when the foam was weak enough, she pushed herself free, like a bug emerging from a chrysalis.
“That’s not specist or anything,” Lash sent as she finished emerging, sloughing off the last of the crash foam that clung to her pale skin.
“Out of my head, Spider. You can speak now,” he said, eyes looking at the new vox box she still wore.
She tried to speak through her vox box, but it didn’t seem to work. She tapped it a few times and looked annoyed when it squawked a few times before it crackled and started to work. “Yes, I can see that.”
Marcus cocked an eye. “You know—”
“We need to get out of here. I am sure the Ministry has already sent a patrol towards us.”
He was about to argue when he stopped, a slight smell catching his attention. What is that? He pulled out the handheld, hoping that it wasn’t what he thought it was. “Slag it!”
“What?” Lash asked, spinning around to look down at him. We need—"
Marcus then took a long sniff of the air around them and shook his head. “No, they aren’t.”
Lash arched an eyebrow ridge. “Why do you say that?”
“Can’t you smell it? Even in here?” Marcus asked before looking at his device to confirm it. He started to feel a cold chill run down his back.
“No, what?” Lash asked. “Marcus, what—"
The stink of ozone and the electrical tang in the air wasn’t from the crash. The device in his hand showed a large blotch of darkness sweeping towards the wreckage site. “There won’t be a patrol. Not for some time. There is a sandstorm coming. Big one too. The Ministry will let it to scour our ship and us! Then, some patrol will stroll by and see the bones and chalk it up to pilot error.”
“So, what do we do now?” Lash asked.
“We can’t shelter in place. Junker is going to get scoured to the base metal. And there’s no way there will be power to use the environmentals. We have to find a better shelter. His eyes and fingers were already moving along the screen of the handheld. C’mon, there has to be something out here. Anything… I know you are— He looked at her and beamed. “Found it.”
“Found what?”
“An old pre-Crawl sandstorm bunker. Four klicks from here. Lucky, I’d say.”
“Oh, only four klicks from here?” Lash asked, her chest moving a little faster.
Marcus looked at her. “Lash, what’s—”
“How far is the storm?” She asked, her eyes flicked from his handheld to Marcus’ eyes, flicking back and forth. “How far?”
“Two-point-seven, so move your pale butt.”
She took one step, grunted, and fell to one knee. “That might be an issue.”
Chapter Twelve
After crawling through the broken bulkheads and corridors of Junker, Marcus and Lash got to their suits, donning them as quickly as possible. The cold had started to permeate the broken hull of Junker. Marcus felt the air getting thinner and harder to breathe. As he finished latching the helmet on and closing the suit, he realized that Lash was having difficulty. He went to help her, and she tried to slap him away. He could see that her right arm was covered in discolored bruises, and when she moved it, there was a rictus of pain on her wide pale face.
“Is that broken?”
“No, but damn near enough. The wounds from the troopers broke open in the crash. That’s the real problem.” She pointed at her leg. She hadn’t been able to get her leg into the suit, and there was a thin crust of greenish blood clinging to her flesh.
Marcus grabbed a small bottle of adhesive spray from the open med kit, hitting the deeper gash with as much of the instant bandage that was left in the well-used bottle. He then helped her into the suit as best he could. It was awkward and took longer than he wanted. The sandstorm coming hurried their movements and was wasting the air in Marcus’ suit. One thing he knew was that there was a sandstorm coming, and they needed to get to that old bunker soon, or they would get hit by the brunt of the storm. Soon, they’d be nothi
ng but sand-scoured bones in the vast plains of Tharsis. Hazon is going to be pissed. Not that he could do anything about it now.
When he opened the hatch and saw the angry, dark-brown of the sky roiling from the North, he knew that they were in trouble.
Lash said “We have no transport. We aren’t going to survive this,” she said with a grunt.
The line-of-sight helmet mics worked, for Marcus turned to look at her. “So?” He asked. He pulled out his cracked tablet that he’d saved from his quarters, along with an injector and a small vial of stuff to stave off the nanites, and he showed it to Lash. “There is a bunker out there, about four klicks from here.”
“Yes, you said that before, Marcus,” Lash said, hoisting the probe from the Shelby onto her back with makeshift straps. “We can’t possibly—”
“You can’t go two klicks, let alone ten.”
“Try me, human,” Lash said, looking through Marcus’ helm. She added in his head, “I’m not the one who said we could make it.”
“You are going to get ten klicks on—”
“Marcus, I told you I know about pain and how to deal with it.”
Marcus stopped talking for a moment. He did remember her saying something like that. “Alright. I am just concerned.”
“I know,” Lash said. “I’ll be able to make it.” She was already getting out a few pieces of gear from the destroyed medbay, looked more like a handful of stimpaks.
“You think we’ll need—”
Before he finished, she jabbed one into her side. “I’m going to need something to keep me going. Even if it’s just adrenaline to get me going, I’m going to get to that bunker.” She gave him a grin that looked dulled. “What about you?”
“What about—”
“You think I’m somehow working for someone?”
“Well, considering that Junker is now a wreck and the only thing standing between us and death is a ten-klick hike, yet.”
“Marcus, I was worried that the message was some kind of worm, and it was. You aren’t the only one with training.”
“So,” Marcus said as he continued to look through the ruins of the ship, “You trained with that squad?”
“What squad?”
“Ghost?”
“No idea what you mean,” Lash said, a small smirk on her face that dissolved into pain as she moved.
Marcus glared. “Always heard a rumor that the MDF had a Spider squad, with a human commander. Mostly missions that humans couldn’t pull off. Like infiltration of Spider nests and—”
“You want to lay off the Spider stuff,” Lash snarled.
“Infiltrate Ilas ghettos and places that served their kind more than humans,” Marcus finished getting the few things he could. His copy of Treasure Island had survived the crash, and half of his chemistry set. He had three doses left for the tattoo. He hoped the sale of the probe would net him enough for another set and a ship, or at least a shuttle off Mars.
“I wasn’t trained by any force. I picked up my training through survival, Marcus. And, sometimes that means having to sound deceptive, even when you aren’t,” she said. “I’m ready to go. You?”
Marcus gave one last long look at the wreckage of his home for years and his one-time pride and joy. “Yeah...You good carrying the probe?” He asked, trying to keep the tightness from his voice.
“Don’t see why we should bring it,” she muttered. “Seems like we may—"
Marcus turned back to look her square in the face. “I didn’t come back to this dust-ball to leave the one reason for being here in the hold.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said. She reached up to touch it and look back at the ruins of Junker. “Could leave it here. pre-Crawl metals—”
“I said, take the probe. That is an order,” Marcus said, slapping her hand away from the probe.
She balked at being touched. “Yes, sir!” Her more human-like synth voice dripped with sarcasm.
Trudging through the sands on Mars reminded Marcus of his early training in the MDF. One thing he hated was the hissing of the sand on his helmet and the quiet that surrounded him as they moved. More than once, he looked back to make sure that Lash was still following. One thing he remembered that helped was to talk to the rest of his team when he could. If there wasn’t a silence order, moving along went by faster. When he spoke to Lash, she gave a grunt.
“Aren’t you a lovely conversationalist?”
“How sure are about this bunker?” Lash asked after a few grunts and heavy breaths that came through the mic link.
Marcus looked down at the tablet as Lash fidgeted and tugged on the probe straps a little more. “Seventy-thirty?” He finally said.
Lash nodded. “Better odds than not. Let’s go.”
“When was the last time you were on Mars, Lash?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You always say that,” Marcus said. He stopped a second, checking their direction and making a slight course correction. “You always avoid it, why?”
“Bad memories.”
They walked in silence for a time after that, and the sand was starting to pick up. It started to rattle a little harder on Marcus’ helmet, and he knew without looking that the roiling was coming faster.
Marcus opened his mouth to say something when Lash asked, “Why did humans come to such a hostile planet in the first place?”
“Old stories of Heinlein or Kim Stanley Robinson probably inspired most of those reaching for Mars,” Marcus said. “Yet, I always wanted to believe that it was thanks to Bradbury.”
“He was a poet, not a—”
“He wrote about a new Western Civilization and clearing America, and the disappearing Native Americans, I know. Still, it was a great book.”
He heard Lash give a small chuckle. “I always preferred the Barsoom series myself.”
“Didn’t see you as a Burroughs fan.”
Lash gave another laugh, a bit darker without humor. “Maybe if we talked a bit more like this, and you didn’t treat me like a mechanic and antiquities expert, you’d be surprised, human.”
Marcus stopped and turned. “I—”
He stopped when he saw that Lash had gone to one knee, her chest heaving. He could see it even through her suit and from the gasping coming from the suit mic. But the thing that made his jaw drop and his blood freeze was looking back behind her to see the dark horizon of the sandstorm creeping closer and closer, looking to be only a kilometer away.
“Lash, I’m sorry, but you have to get up.”
“What are you, talking about?” She started to look behind her. “I need a—”
She stood up, and Marcus could see the panic start to bloom on her face. “Come one, we need to move.”
Sand started pelting Marcus’ suit harder, and the sensors on his suit flashed a yellow warning light in his heads-up display. With the wind starting to pick up, he and Lash were still a klick from the bunker. They wouldn’t have time if they didn’t hurry. Lash limped along more and more. The wounds on her legs and from the crash opened up again, she’d said. She tried not to show it, but it was plain it hurt her to move, Marcus was sure.
“You could just leave me,” Lash sent.
“You know you shouldn’t be in my head,” Marcus said through the comms. “Focus on putting one foot in front of the other.” He told himself that as well. He was feeling the fatigue and the multiple injuries from the crash and the short-but-violent scuffle before the crash slow him down as well.
“I know, but it’d be more prudent,” her synth voice mumbled in his comms.
“And I said we will both get to the bunker. You aren’t getting rid of me that easily,” Marcus said with a short bark of a laugh. He spotted a small standing group of rocks, a little over waist-high for Lash. Could work. “Come on, let’s rest in the lee of those stones for a moment.”
He stopped to take a small sip from the nipple at his cheek and already felt the dregs of it starting to come up. Great. “How’s
your water?”
“So, you do trust me?” She asked, an eyebrow ridge barely visible through her faceplate. When he stopped to ask, she paused a second. “I’m out.”
Marcus glared at her, the visor of her helm obscuring her face and his own, but he needed to look at her when he said this. “We made a deal. You’d help me, and I’d help you. That is how things go. Deal with it, Spider. The suit will replenish itself in time. I’m sure we’ve worked up enough of a sweat. It’s just taking its time.”
“I hate that name,” she mumbled again while limping towards the outcropping Marcus was leading them towards.
He ignored her as they moved behind the small outcropping of rocks, settling for a moment. “We can take a small break here, if you need,” Marcus said. He looked down at his tablet and slapped it when it blanked out for a second. C’mon, work dammit.
“I can push past…” She then crumpled into a heap next to Marcus when she tried to move.
“Slagging Hells, Lashiel!” Marcus half-pulled her, half-dragged her closer to the rocks. “Stop being so damn stubborn.” He then spotted the green on her suit leg and saw that her eyes weren’t focusing on him fully.
“It’s my go-to, human,” she said with a small smile, though her eyes couldn’t focus completely on Marcus.
“Alright, Spider. I’m just telling you, you can be a bit more like your human half, ya know.”
With the shadows of the outcropping, he could see her face in the helm. She gritted her teeth as she shifted her legs, ignoring him. “This is too much, Marcus, you have to leave me behind.”
“Not happening,” he said. “We can rest here for a minute or three.” Marcus was thankful for the break as well. He was exhausted, walking against the ever-increasing wind and sand. His own suit was damaged, and he was sure that Lash’s was as well. He looked over her suit, seeing that the older suit was more sand-scoured than his own.
Junker Blues: Mars: Junker Blues series Page 9