by Pam Uphoff
The atmospheric chamber was interesting. The thick hot air was three quarters inert nitrogen, the oxygen levels euphoric, the humidity oppressive. The simplest method of dealing with it turned out to be a rebreathing bag with a controller mixing exhalations with fresh air to produce roughly the right amount of carbon dioxide for easy breathing. The techs were fine tuning the breathing apparatus, and quickly removed Xaero's data from their calculations as she was tolerant of a greater range of both oxygen and CO2 than the rest of the team.
Even at the base T'yedh kept them marching and lifting weights. T'yedh finally gave up on rest stops ever being long enough to topple Xaero, and had her not wear her mask while marching. She managed three thousand strides in four splits before semi-collapsing.
"That's mind boggling." T'yedh was saying, as the world refocused around major league muscle cramps. "How long can you go, just walking?"
"Never pushed it to the point of collapse, before." She carefully enunciated, forcing her cold, slow mouth to sound normal. "Generally I start feeling the effects walking after two splits, running one." She pushed herself off the cold ground. "I'm surprised I could keep going so long after I first felt the effects. I must be getting in shape."
T'yedh wagged his portable med comp. "According to this your acid levels exceeded what would be fatal for a normal lizard, and your body temperature dropped fifteen full degrees, which is also sometimes fatal."
Trev growled from her other side, glaring at T'yedh.
Xaero elbowed him. "Superior genes," she said, straight faced. "Can't beat them. Well, all right, you can if you've got overwhelming numbers and better weapons. Nothing less will suffice." She staggered to her feet, and they continued the run.
"I've never hurt so bad in my entire life." She moaned later. "Why didn't I have sense enough to quit while I was flat out on the ground?"
Trev paused in rubbing her back, "I think you want to make the crew."
She turned her head so she could see him from the corner of her eye. "Yeah, how about you?"
"I don't know that I have anything special to offer the team," he admitted.
"You're working the survey equipment, the drilling rig and the mining robots," she pointed out. "All I do is spot critters."
"You're still the only one who does, even when you tell us where to look we mostly can't see anything until it moves."
Xaero grinned, "Riu sure jumped when I finally showed him that last herfit."
Trev snorted, "You should have seen Vee's reaction. I can't believe the whole group walked past it at two strides and didn't see it."
"I think it was frozen in terror, myself." Vee said from across the room. "You lot are a pretty lean and mean hunting pack."
"What do you mean, us?" Trev asked, "You're doing all the runs too."
"And you and I are the only ones armed, and that only if you count a couple of knives as 'armed.'" Xaero pointed out.
"You're carrying knives, multiple, on top of packing a bit over your own weight on those runs?" Trev asked, then answered himself. "'A Dry Scale Always has a Knife.'"
"Exactly."
"Anyhow," Vee said, "if you get selected, I'll get left behind to explain things to General S'ank. So I expect you to both behave and not go and change the past again. Think of how you'd feel, coming home and finding out your personal guard is now, oh, P'accek, say."
"Eww." Trev explained to Xaero, "Captain P'accek is a stickler for regulations and formalities. He'd probably scan you and make you hand over your knives before letting you approach me, and if you hadn't been run through a complete background check would never have allowed me to be alone in your presence."
"My, my." She turned to Vee. "Is that how you are supposed to act?"
"Nah, P'accek handles all the semi private audiences with the Empress, so he has to be a total stick. I gave it up early, what with all the Dims, and local police Trev was slumming with, and then the undercover stuff . . . Did S'ank ever talk to you about it?"
Trev snickered. "Talked? No. Ranted, yes. Erupted, yes. Spewed, yes. Threatened, yes. I ignored him, of course. We had a discussion about it just before we came here. I told him he was probably why I had been such a prick and that time changes hadn't improved him a bit." Trev smiled happily. "He was still sputtering when I left."
"He'll eat me alive, if you go off and abandon me." Vee concluded glumly.
"You're tough, you can take it. And anyway, you'll need to be on hand for my return. So he'll have to come out here if he wants to eat you."
Vee gave him a skeptical look.
"Do you think we're actually being considered? We're late comers, and neither of us are scientists."
"I don't know." His eyes and teeth sparkled, "Wouldn't it be fantastic?"
"Yep."
Chapter Two
Ten days before departure the final team was selected. Saji L'on commanding. Vehicle crew, Pilot Albe N'rom, Engineer Jemi S'jen. Planetary Exploration Team Xaero L'svages chief, Nyxe M'kabon, Aura R'unk, Riu K'via, Zila H'stom. Mining Project Trebore M'hel chief, Fatrevi O'no, Beri T'yedh, Arto L'drawn, Neero G'adnam and Vasi R'maed.
They would be packed like salt pike, fully loaded. In theory, once they landed they would unload the mining equipment and turn the hold space into sleeping rooms, and a clinic and mess.
In the mean time they had ten days to acquainted themselves with the real thing, rather than the simulators they'd been trained on. The Dziuraweic, named after the ancient God of Meteors for some unknown reason hopefully having nothing to do with reentry, was newer than the simulators and differed in many details.
While the vehicle had an integral Space-Time drive, the energy requirements were so high that they would be sent through from a gate at the Space Base. Albe cynically noted that this had allowed their bosses to preset and lock in the coordinates for the vehicle's ST drive. "They aren't taking any chances with our getting curious about Mars' history." He shook his head sadly at the half of the controls he couldn't alter without near unanimous consent of the crew.
"How'd you like to come home to an empty planet?" Zila batted her eyelashes and smiled alluringly, "Oh, my! Aura, and I would have to pick and choose among you seven males!" She nodded to Xaero, "Pseudo or tru, you and Trev are too much of a pair for me to try to split."
Aura smirked "Oh, maybe we should both start with Riu (don't you just love Wisdoms?), then proceed to the trumales, and by the time we've worn them out, some replacements will probably have matured."
"I find it reassuring that they didn't go for strict half and half trufem and trumale," Neero answered. "I take that to mean they don't really expect us to have to repopulate Mars."
"In other words, they don't think we can destroy the Universe." Riu shook his head, "I think they may have misanalyzed a couple of you fems, though."
***
The departure chamber was huge. The Dziuraweic stood poised on a slope above an open space surrounded by a roughly circular framework with spaced assembly of some sort. The rough edges and exposed wiring seemed to indicate haste. Hopefully the haste had been moderated by the need for the whole to actually work.
"So they seal the building and lower the pressure in the whole launching bay?" Xaero glanced around the cavernous room as she climbed up to the Dzi. "Good pumps. Although I suppose just sealing the building would minimize the atmospheric loss."
"Wait till you see the mess on the return trip," L'on said. "If the predictions are correct when the Dzi's internal ST field is revved up we should take a sphere about twenty percent larger than the ship with us, and the Big Blue atmosphere will pour through it for more than a split before we depart. The astronomers say they should see us coming well ahead of time, from the sunlight reflected off the gas and ice crystals coming through the gate and expanding into a huge cloud."
"What will happen to it? We'll be moving toward Mars when we emerge, won't all that as well?" Trev asked from lower on the stairs.
Xaero paused on the ramp into the Dzi to ca
tch L'on's reply.
"Yep. The gas and ice don't matter, and we're planning on lifting off and hovering before jumping, but we can do it while on the ground. Then, depending on the density and cohesiveness of the ground we take with us, we may have to give it a nudge away from Mars so it orbits instead of impacts."
She stepped through the door and maneuvered into her seat. She had a display screen in front of her, for her input into picking the landing site. It's all about uranium, this time, but even so, I’ll be collecting more data than all the scientists on Mars can analyze in the next decade.
Nothing had changed under her section from the prep session two days ago, before the vehicle was moved to launch position. As she adjusted her seat to compensate for the ship's downward cant, she grinned.
Leaning out into the open central strip down the middle of the craft she spotted Albe looking over his controls. "Hey, N'rom? I thought space was that way?" she pointed up, grinning at his indignant glare.
The crew had their control stations forward, with good visibility in all directions except straight back. The rest of them had stations along both sides of the first section. The remainder of the vehicle was cargo, engines and fuel.
She and Trebore each had several lizards under them, but once Xaero's team had checked out the environment sufficiently for the uranium hunt to start, Zila and Aura would be donning their geologist hats and working for Trebore. If a sufficient concentration of ore was found and heavy mining operations started, they'd return to exploring the biota.
Which left her managing Doctor Riu K'viag and Nyx full time. Riu was easy, quiet and competent. Nyx . . . Well, it wasn't actually him that was worrying her, was it? She just had to make sure they didn't get eaten by the local plants and animals and everything would be . . . she broke out in a huge grin. Utterly and totally fantastic. She turned her head and caught Trev's matching grin. His selection for the crew had been a bit of a surprise to all but Trebore. That wily old lizard had done just about everything in the course of his long and wandering life, and had apparently liked the way Trev operated his machines. Or maybe he just liked having an Imperial Prince as an underling.
She settled back into the acceleration couch. The back support was split to accommodate their spinal ridges and spines, all flattened by the elasticized suits they worn. The head pieces were a pain to put on. She ran her hands over the close fitting wrap that kept her spines flattened. At least they had finally decided to not clip them all, which had been the first suggestion of the suit design group. The medical group had fortunately pointed out that this would result in more than a dozen lizards suddenly starting a total molt all at once, both stressing the air machinery, and causing massive itching inside the suits.
She ran her station through its paces, monitored that her team was doing likewise, that she had feed from the outside sensors and Trebore's geological station. If all went according to plan, they would scan the target continent from space, locating the highest probability region, and if necessary switching to another continent. On their descent through the atmosphere they would swoop like the folded paper darts children played with, enabling them to survey a long strip of the region, then turn back and land. Which was where her part of the landing came in. The brief probe data had shown very thick plant growth over pools of liquid water. She needed to very quickly find a safe place to land, as close as possible to Trebore's equally quickly chosen prime site. She'd done thousands of simulations. All based on "We calculate that this is what liquid water will look like through vegetation." She hoped they were right. The brighter, nearer sunlight should help, reflecting off the water surface. Some clever use of reflecting radio waves would give distance to ground measurements to a high degree of accuracy, and in combination with spectrum analysis of the vegetation might be useful for determining tall growth from short. Too many uncertainties for a peaceful state of mind. The planetary orbital mapper had shown plenty of bare rock, but they really didn't want to land on a mountain. They needed flat and dry with short vegetation, as the vehicle was going to be descending at an angle and would be landing on wheels to accommodate the forward movement, as well as move on the ground if needed or strongly desired.
After two hours of painstaking checks, the huge room was sealed and the air pumped out. Another series of checks confirmed that the vehicle was still airtight and the oxygen exchangers working.
The huge gate lit slowly, the bright white light swirling slowly like mist, then filling the whole circle like a solid bank of fog off one of the ice caps.
"Vacuum on the other side." The voice of the sole tech that was authorized to speak to the craft came over the speakers. "Cleared to start engines."
Xaero's vid view of the gate was suddenly obscured by the smoke whipping around the vehicle and out through the gate.
"Cleared to roll."
"Affirmative to roll." Albe responded. "Release clamps."
"Clamps are released," the tech informed them. Xaero could hear and feel the movement of the vehicle against the brakes.
"Releasing brakes." Albe informed them.
They rolled. With the engines on they accelerated quickly toward the gate. And the wall beyond, which they'd been assured would collapse easily if something went wrong and they failed to pass through the gate.
One csplit they were racing toward the opaque white circle, the next solid blackness. No, not solid. Mushy. Swirling. Twisting. She was shoved back against her seat. Then the twisting stopped abruptly. The black remained, but it was filled with brilliant stars. Xaero turned from the screen to a small porthole beside her. Yes! We're really there. She gulped suddenly, as the engine's rumble faded to a whisper and her stomach's message got past her excitement.
"Target acquisition." Captain L'on's voice drew her eyes back to the vid. A spectacular blue and white sphere was centered there now, filling the screen. We're close! It's beautiful!
Telling her stomach it was empty so the falling feeling didn't matter, and anyway it was more like floating didn't help much. She just hardened all her resolve and gorge, and feeling some sideway movement, looked out the porthole to see the stars shifting as they maneuvered.
"We're way below orbital velocity." Albe said. "we'll circle the planet three times, dropping steadily, then slow down further before reaching the dense atmosphere." It was a recital of the number one plan, so apparently they were exactly where they were supposed to be.
He turned the Dzi so the stern faced the direction of travel, and the engine hiss increased a bit. Her stomach roiled, then quit as she was lightly pressed into the seat.
She couldn't see Big Blue through the porthole—the ship's sensors were concentrated on the lower surface so they could be used during landing, so the bottom now faced the planet. She brought up the known surface maps on her screen and raced the computer to match them with the vid coming in. She matched several of the brown/green shapes quickly, but frowned at the mismatches. "Those things don't move around do they?" she asked.
Trebore answered with a growl, "Looks like it, doesn't it? The initial survey must have been misinterpreted."
"This is definitely, that." Xaero tapped on her screen and sent it to him, "but it's slid way down here. Our target continent is much less centered on the southern pole now, and looks to be much closer, maybe connected under those clouds, to this highland that's further south than it was . . . umm, will be in nineteen million years."
"That's . . . really unexpected." Trebore sounded considerably taken aback. "I knew we'd be getting a lot of new details, but I didn't think the maps would be so wrong."
"No ice caps, either," she suddenly realized, switching to infrared. "Most of it is considerably warmer than we'd expected. Our target still looks like it has the most reasonable temperature. I swear, the land masses have moved, though."
The Dzi swept around the other side of the planet and they gawked over the sheer mind blowing expanse of liquid water.
"Lots of lightening in those clouds." Aura pointed o
ut. "That's apparently a lot more common here than on Mars as well."
"These big stretches of dry land on the map, I think they're this big highland, I think the ice caps that'll be there in nineteen million years will drop the water level so these middle elevations will be dry." Trebore sent her his display.
"Yeah. I see the match. The surface of this place is incredibly dynamic. All these highlands are closer together than they were, or rather will be in nineteen million years. I wonder what they'd look like if we'd gone nineteen million years into the future?" Xaero shook her head in amazement. "I wonder how deep the water is? On Mars, going from the Great Plateau, the plains are five kstrides lower, and the depths of the Great Canyon are another six kstrides down from the surface in several places. If the same relief holds here, the water could be several kstrides deep."
They swept around and over their target again, appreciatively lower.
"The mountain are definitely granitic." Trebore muttered. "Drainage channels both sides."
"There are more sediments to the south." Vasi told him. "Those winding rivers show that the land is pretty flat, lots of vegetation, good chance of getting anoxic conditions."
"Yeah the northern edge goes pretty sharply down to the water," Trebore agreed reluctantly. "I'd have liked a reason to land by all that water." He sketched in a line running east to west along the southern boundary between mountainous terrain and flatter sediments. "There you go Albe, our requested flight path."
"Right. I'll go right over it at a hundred kstrides on the last pass, then we'll enter the atmosphere and find out how this baby glides. If it performs up to specs, we may get you a pass at fifty strides up."
Xaero's stomach protested as Albe altered the vehicle's path. They crossed the large water again, then back over the land, getting very low, this time. Trebore nodded satisfaction. "No changes, that's where I want to be. Got that Xaero?"