A Cosmic Christmas 2 You

by Hank Davis

  The new settlements were still too impoverished to spend the time or energy to make gifts of their own, though, so I sent email to representatives at each of the older colonies, telling them that Black Peter would be reserving a little extra cargo space aboard Sinterklass’s magic dirigible for gifts to Nova America, Graceland, and Thankgod. No one objected to the deviation from standard operating procedure, and we were promised extra goodies from everyone when Miss Thuvia lifted off from Arsia on Sag. 6.

  For the past four years, the Christmas tour had been blessed with good flying weather. Our luck couldn’t last forever, though; by the time we arrived at DaVinci, Marsnet had posted nowcasts of a severe dust storm developing in the Amazonis Plantia, due west of the Tharsis Montes range. West Bank, which we had left only eighteen hours earlier, was already reporting high winds. They warned us that Miss Thuvia wouldn’t be able to handle the storm, and suggested that we deflate our craft and hunker down at DaVinci until the worst was over.

  That might be good advice at any other time, but during Christmas Week it posed a real problem. Dust storms have been known to last for days or weeks, even months on certain historic occasions. If Doc and I chose to ride out the storm in DaVinci, we might be celebrating New Year’s there. About two dozen immigrants in Thankgod were barely holding out in shelters little more sophisticated than those built by the First Landers; they were in dire need of the food, water, and medicine aboard Miss Thuvia. And we quietly regarded DaVinci as our least favorite of stopovers; we hadn’t forgotten the snubbing we’d received during our first tour, and more than a few hard-line neocommies still hadn’t warmed up to us.

  We managed to get the station manager to loan us a long-range rover. It was about six hundred and fifty klicks from DaVinci to Thankgod, but since the rover burned methane/oxygen and carbon dioxide, it was capable of manufacturing its own fuel from the atmosphere and from recaptured water vapor from the condensers, and ditto for cabin air. Using the rover would be slower than taking the blimp, but flying Miss Thuvia in this sort of weather was out of the question. The rover had a top speed of seventy klicks per hour, so the round-trip to Thankgod would take about nineteen or twenty hours. If we budgeted two hours for our appearance at Thankgod and add two more as a fudge-factor, and with luck—there’s that word again—we’d only lose a sol. Thus we figured the storm should blow itself out by the time we made it back to DaVinci; then we’d be able to reinflate the blimp and head for New Chattanooga.

  The kids at the remaining colonies on our tour might have to wait a bit for their Christmas, but there were limits to even Sinterklass’s magic. However, we had little doubt that we’d make it to Thankgod.

  That’s what we told ourselves. In hindsight, I think we were counting on miracles we hadn’t earned.

  So Doc and I loaded our stuff into the rover and set out from DaVinci near the middle of the same sol. The wind was already rising from the west as we followed the line of compacted rover tracks away from the colony into the high country northeast of the Valles Marineris. We hadn’t covered a hundred klicks before Doc had to switch on the windshield blowers.

  Well, no problem. You’ve seen one dust storm, you’ve seen a dozen. I brewed some more coffee, then sacked out in the shotgun seat. When I woke up, my first thought was that I had overslept and that night had already fallen, until Doc told me that it was only late afternoon. The road had completely disappeared behind rippling curtains of red sand; despite the rover’s lights, visibility had diminished to only a few meters ahead of the front bumper.

  We were driving into the throat of the worst winter storm in . . . well, forget the stats. It was nasty, and that’s all there was to it.

  Yet we weren’t worried. Not really. We had a clear satellite fix on our location, so there was no real danger of getting lost out here. Although our ground speed had dropped to fifty klicks, the rover’s six tandem wheels continued to move through the dense sand that scurried around us. We had air, we had hot coffee, we had Nashville music on the CD player; the howling wind buffeted the rover as if it was a boat on high seas, but it was Christmas, and we were Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet. We couldn’t be stopped, storm or no storm.

  I had just switched off with Doc, and he was rummaging through the food locker in search of cold rations which wouldn’t taste too much like cardboard, when we received a microbeam transmission from Arsia Station. I thought it was just a courtesy call: the folks back home making sure we weren’t in trouble. The reception was bad, and I was fumbling for a headset when Doc came forward and told me to keep my hands on the yoke, he’d take care of it.

  I didn’t catch most of it; my attention was focused on avoiding boulders and craters. Doc played the keys until he got a semi-clear channel, listened for a few minutes, scribbled some stuff on a pad, murmured a few words, then clicked off and turned to me.

  “Problem.”

  “Big or small?”

  “Dunno. Phobos Station spotted a lander making atmospheric entry about a half-hour ago. Probably from a Pax freighter that made orbit earlier today. Arsia Traffic locked onto its transponder and followed it down until they lost it in the storm.”

  “Where did it come down?” Then I shook my head. “Oh, no. I can guess this one . . .”

  “Edge of the Acidalia, about a hundred and fifty klicks southeast of Thankgod.”

  “Aw, for the love of . . .”

  It figured this might happen, if only because it had happened before; the commander of a Pax refugee ship tried to drop his lander on one of the new colonies without first informing Arsia of his intentions. Pax Royal Intelligence, in an attempt to stop the hemorrhage of its best and brightest from Clarke County and the Moon, had recently begun spreading ugly rumors that we’d launch missiles at any immigrant ships arriving in aresian space. This played into the hands of freighter captains taking aboard drybacks as unlisted passengers; they’d load them aboard a lander, drop ’em near a new settlement, then swing around the planet, make a periapsis burn, and scoot for home before anyone was the wiser. The commander and his crew make out like bandits from the megalox they’ve taken from their desperate passengers; meanwhile, we’re saddled with another dozen or so immigrants who didn’t know they were being taken for a ride, both literally and figuratively.

  Only in this case, the freighter captain had deposited his human cargo in the middle of a dust storm. Perhaps he wasn’t fully aware of the ferocious nature of the Martian climate, but I couldn’t bring myself to give him to benefit of the doubt. More likely he knew that dead men don’t tell tales, let alone disclose ship registry numbers.

  I was still fuming about this while Doc played with the high-gain. “I’ve got something,” he murmured after a few moments. “Weak, but it’s there.”

  “Vox or transponder?”

  “Transponder. You think we’re going to get local vox through this shit?”

  Good point. Unless the drybacks were bouncing signals off one of the satellites, they probably couldn’t transmit anything through the storm. Landers that came down intact, though, were programmed to broadcast a shortwave distress signal as soon as they touched down, even if it was only a repeating Morse-code dit-dot-dit that could be received for hundreds of kilometers. “Mayday cast?” I asked, and Doc nodded without looking up. “Can you get a lock on it?”

  Doc dickered with the keypad a little while longer before he spoke again. “Yeah, got it. I’m feeding the coordinates to your board.”

  A topo map appeared on the flat just above the yoke. The signal source was approximately a hundred and fifty kilometers east-southeast of Thankgod, about forty klicks west of our beeline from the colony. Doc looked at me, I looked at him, and that was it. We didn’t even discuss the matter; there was no question of whether or not we’d head for the crash site. We were Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet, but before that we were meds, and this is what we did, plain and simple.

  “Pain in the ass,” I murmured as I began punching the new coordinates into the nav system.
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br />   “Yeah. Kind of screws up Christmas, don’t it?” Doc lurched out of his seat and headed aft again. “So what do you want? Cheese and tomato, ham and cheese, or turkey?”

  It was close to midnight when we located the downed lander.

  One moment, it wasn’t there; the next, it was in our high-beams, a gargantuan manta ray that had mysteriously been thrown across space and time. Its starboard landing skid had buckled during touchdown, so the craft listed sharply to one side, its right wing half-buried in the sand, the wind driving dust into its engine intakes. The cockpit faced away from us, but there was a dim glimmer of light from within the main hatch porthole.

  I halted the rover about ten meters away, and tried one last time to raise someone on the radio. As before, there was no answer, not surprising since the ship had sustained heavy damage during landing. I went aft and found that Doc had already suited up. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to either of us to strip off all the Father Christmas stuff, but now we didn’t have time. So we switched on the holiday lights so we could see each other better in the darkness. Doc raised his hood and picked up his medical bag, then we cycled through the airlock.

  We made our way to the lander with our heads down, our arms raised to shield our faceplates against windblown silt and gravel. Glancing back, I could make out the rover only by its lamps. I doubted that anyone within the lander had heard our approach through the storm. If, indeed, there were any survivors.

  Typical of Pax spacecraft, the airlock was only large enough to accommodate one person at a time. I went first; Doc waited outside while I closed the outer hatch. The light we’d seen outside came from an emergency lamp in the ceiling, but there was sufficient power in the back-up electrical system to allow me to run the cycle-through routine. I went by the book, though, and didn’t unlatch my helmet even after the green light appeared above the inner hatch.

  For a moment, there was only darkness when I pushed open the hatch. Then a half-dozen flashlight beams swung my way, and muffled voices cascaded from the gloom:

  “. . . opening! Look, the hatch . . . !”

  “. . . the hell, where did he come . . . ?”

  “. . . it’s a man! Daddy, there’s a man in . . . !”

  “. . . everyone, stand back! Get back from the . . . !”

  “It’s okay. Everything’s all right!” I raised a hand against the sudden glare. “I’m from Arsia Station! I’m here to rescue you!”

  They couldn’t hear me, of course; they were all shouting at once, and my voice didn’t carry well through the closed helmet. Yet there were at least a dozen people in here, shadows backlit by flashlight beams. Moving awkwardly against the sloped deck, I stepped the rest of the way out of the airlock, then turned to close the hatch behind me.

  Something slammed against my shoulder, hard enough to make me lose my balance. I collapsed against the airlock hatch. It fell into place, then a hand grabbed my shoulder and twisted me around, shoving me back against the portal.

  “Don’t move!” a voice yelled at me. “Keep your hands where I can see ’em!”

  “Hey, cut it out!” I yelled back. “I’m just trying to . . . !”

  There’s nothing like having a gun shoved in your face to kill conversation. Even in the dim light, I could make out the maw of a Royal Militia blaster, a miniature particle-beam cannon capable of ending all debate over my hat size.

  The guy holding it didn’t look too pleasant, either: a large gent with a selenian helmet tan, his dark eyes narrowed with rage. His breath fogged my faceplate—it must be pretty cold in here for it to do that—but above the heavy sweater he wore was a blue uniform jacket. Its epaulets told me it was from the Pax Astra Royal Navy. I had a hunch that it wasn’t military surplus.

  “Kyle, cut it out!” A woman’s voice somewhere behind the ring of flashlights. “Can’t you see he’s . . . ?”

  “Shut up, Marcie.” Kyle let go of me and backed away a few centimeters, but kept his weapon trained on my face. “Okay, Mars boy, I.D. yourself.”

  I took a deep breath. “Look, calm down, okay? Don’t shoot. I’m not here to . . .”

  “Jeez, lieutenant, let him take off his helmet.” This from another man elsewhere in the compartment. “How can you hear him?”

  “Kyle . . .” Marcie said.

  “Everyone shut up!” Kyle braced his feet against the deck. “Okay, open up . . . slowly.”

  “Okay, all right. Take it easy.” I slowly moved my hands to my suit collar, began unlatching the ring. I heard a child crying from somewhere in the darkness.

  I was getting a bad feeling about my friend Kyle. If he was a former PARN officer, then he was doubtless a deserter. Worse, he had most likely heard the Pax agitprop that aresians are cannibals who raid dryback landers. My Christmas gear didn’t help matters much; it wasn’t your usual standard-issue skinsuit, so to him I probably looked like the Martian equivalent of a wild native wearing a grass skirt and a shrunken head. The man was desperate and afraid, and hiding his fear behind a gun.

  “Look,” I said once I had removed my helmet, “you’re not in any danger, I promise you. We’re a med team from Arsia Station. Our rover’s just outside. We picked up your transponder signal and . . .”

  “There’s more than one of you?” His eyes flickered to the hatch behind me. “How many are out there?”

  Great. Now he thought he was surrounded. “Just one other guy. I promise you, we’re not armed. Please, just put down the gun and we can see about getting you out of this jam, okay?”

  “Kyle, would you listen to him?” The woman who had spoken before, Marcie, stepped a little closer. Now I saw that her neck was wrapped in thick swatches of torn fabric. A crude neck brace; she probably suffered whiplash during the crash. “He doesn’t mean us any harm, and we’re . . .”

  “Dammit, Marcie, did you hear what he just said? Nobody drives from Arsia Station in a rover. If there was going to be rescue mission, why didn’t it come from Thankgod?” Kyle’s gun didn’t budge an millimeter. “I’m not about to take this guy at his word. He’s just going to have to . . .”

  Whatever Kyle was about to propose that I do—I suspect it wasn’t pleasant—it was forgotten when the hatch suddenly clunked.

  Everyone heard the sound. They froze, staring past me. I felt the hatch nudge my back, and I automatically moved aside before I realized what I was doing.

  “Doc,” I yelled, “don’t come in!”

  “Shut up!” Kyle shifted his gun first to cover me, then aimed it at the hatch. “You there, listen up! I’ve got a gun on your pal, so you’d better stop right . . . !”

  “Ho, ho, ho! Mer-r-r-ry Christmas! Mer-r-r-r-r-r-ry Christmas!”

  Then the hatch was pushed fully open, and in walked Sinterklass.

  Doc had removed his helmet and had lowered his hood. In the darkness of the cabin, the lights of his suit glowed like a childhood fantasy. Motes of dust swirled from his red cape and caught in his long white beard like flakes of fresh-fallen snow.

  “Mer-r-r-r-r-ry Christmas!” he bellowed again, and gave another jolly laugh.

  In that instant, he was no longer Doc Spanjaard. He had become every holiday legend. Sinterklass, St. Nicholas, Father Christmas . . .

  “Santa!”

  The little girl I had heard earlier bolted from the gloom. Before Kyle or Marcie or anyone else could grab her, she rushed across the dark cabin.

  “It’s Santa Claus!” she screamed. “Santa’s on Mars! Mama, you were right! There’s a Santa Claus on Mars!”

  As Doc bent to catch her in his arms, I heard another child call out, then another, and suddenly two more kids darted past the legs of the bewildered adults surrounding us. They were all over Doc before anyone could stop them, least of all Kyle, who suddenly didn’t seem to know what to do with the gun in his hands, and Doc was laughing so hard that I thought he was going to lose his balance and fall back into the airlock with three children on top of him, and everyone else was yelling in relieved sur
prise . . .

  Then Marcie turned to Kyle, who stood in gape-jawed confusion, his blaster now half-raised toward the ceiling so that it wasn’t pointed at any of the kids.

  “So what are you going to do?” she murmured. “Be the guy who shot Santa Claus?”

  He stared at Doc, then at me. “But it isn’t Christmas yet.”

  “Welcome to Mars,” I said quietly. “We do things a little different here.”

  He nodded, then put the gun away.

  And that was our Christmas miracle.

  We dispensed some food from the lander; the three children were handed toys from Doc’s sack and the adults were given two bottles of wine. Doc spent a couple of hours treating injuries while I went back to the rover and radioed both Thankgod and Arsia to tell them that we had located the lander. Arsia informed me that the storm was ebbing in our region and that DaVinci had already volunteered to send out a couple of rovers to pick up the new arrivals. I relayed the news to Kyle, whom I learned was their leader; he couldn’t look me straight in the eye when he tendered an apology for his behavior, but I accepted it anyway.