25
Dead tired, Dana swung her pickaxe up over her head. It came down, clang, on the unyielding ground. A few sparks flew, and bits of gravel.
From starship captain to manual laborer in one week and one easy lesson.
Despite morning chill and a stiff breeze off the newly dubbed Darwin Sea, sweat ran down her face and neck and plastered her shirt to her back. Knees, hips, shoulders…was any joint in her body not in agony from the extra weight hung on her by Dark’s gravity? Certainly the damned pickaxe weighed a tonne. Taking a rest break every ten minutes and whenever she felt lightheaded, she had managed, so far, to forgo a breather mask.
Headache, dizziness, insomnia, and lack of appetite: she could be the poster child for altitude sickness. Tough. She told herself they had higher oh-two pressure than any Tibetan.
Trying to forget that Tibetans were no more.
Once again, the world spun around her. Dana laid down her pickaxe, carefully, before she hurt anyone with it. She sat on a boulder to wait out the vertigo. The blue-green sky made her queasy, too. She wished she could remember how long Mars’s red sky had taken to come to seem normal. Years, she guessed.
Blake, nearby, wielded his own pickaxe. The result so far—as in her case—was more dimple than hole. But pickaxes were easier to fabricate than jackhammers.
Among untold gaps in Marvin’s knowledge, rock blasting was the first to bite them. How much explosive would they need? How deep should they plant the explosives? How far apart?
Dropping his pickaxe, Blake wiped his forehead with a sleeve. His beard (all three men had started one, for warmth) remained scruffy. “This is a lot of work on an empty stomach.”
“Nonsense,” she said, shuddering. “We had gruel.”
He stooped to reclaim his tool. “You always could motivate me.”
Dana wished he hadn’t reminded her of breakfast. Pond scum à là Carlos. According to every test Carlos and Li had devised, the reformulated slop was safe—
And with each mouthful Dana channeled old mystery novels. Arsenic poisoning was not how she wanted to go.
Dark’s biology, what there was of it, in many ways resembled Earth’s. So, anyway, her experts told her. Both biochemistries relied on DNA and proteins. Both used twenty-two amino acids, most of them in common. And when they differed? Dana didn’t know one amino acid from another, anyway.
But she could not get past arsenic taking the role of phosphorus in terrestrial biochemistry.
With every swallow, she wondered how complete was the process of removing arsenic and inserting phosphorus in its place. Maybe only the merest trace of arsenic stayed behind. A little poison with every morsel….
With renewed vigor, she attacked the rocky ground. These excavations were the first baby step toward farming.
*
“Fire in the hole!” Dana called.
Two meters distant, behind his own hulking granite boulder, Blake covered his ears.
She flipped the toggle on the detonator.
The sharp blam! was a satisfying conclusion to a morning at hard labor. Or would be, if they’d done it right.
The patter of gravel slowed, then stopped. “Let’s have a look,” Dana said.
The synthed charges had blasted six birdbath-sized depressions in the rocky ground. Three pits showed hairline fractures; to play safe, she decided to seal all six.
While the sprayed-on glue cured, they ate an early lunch: more gruel. What little regular food remained was being kept for emergencies. After choking down a few spoonfuls, Dana stretched out on the hard ground. The midday sun was warm on her face. She closed her eyes….
*
Between feather-light nudges from her attitude jets, Dana was in free fall. No gravity? No acceleration? No matter.
Duty weighed her down.
Her hands had not left the flight controls or her eyes the console instruments for…she had no idea. Too long. Surreally long.
Shedding debris and spurting gases, spinning and weaving like a toy top about to fall over, the dying ship had her stymied. Only this gyration would never stop. And faster than she could infer any underlying pattern to the hulk’s erratic wobble, another of its compartments would rupture, spewing atmosphere, or an attitude jet would misfire.
Across the bridge, the mayday call looped endlessly. As though she needed a reminder.
She could end the madness at any time. No one would question her pronouncement that docking was impossible.
No one except her.
On the dying vessel, desperate passengers and crew awaited rescue. In Reliance’s main air lock, suited up, the rescue party stood by awaiting their chance to board.
Everyone waited for her to dock. Without crashing. Without dooming everyone aboard both ships.
Again the wreck lunged. Faster than conscious thought, Dana fired her forward thrusters. Flotsam caromed off her hull even as, by a terrifyingly small margin, the ships slid past one another without colliding.
Slowly spinning, a vacuum-bloated corpse floated past the bridge view port.
A warm, firm hand squeezed Dana’s shoulder. Captain Torrance. Though he must have felt her trembling, he did not say a word.
And so, once more, she edged toward the careening, floundering, bobbing wreck.
There was no denying duty.
*
Dana jerked awake.
“Are you okay?” Blake asked.
She shrugged. What could he do?
Pursed lips said he knew she was holding out. After a while, changing the subject, he said, “The aggravating thing is that Li’s right, in part.”
“Which part?”
“We don’t have enough supplies.” He gestured down the beach, to the plumbing monstrosity on which Carlos and Rikki had spent days fussing. Their construction had tied up a major portion of the colony’s metal reserves. “Beginning with deuterium.”
Because every workaround to their many shortages—when someone came up with a workaround—seemed to take energy. Getting more energy took energy.
In Dark’s seas, as in Earth’s, heavy water could be found as one molecule among about sixty-five hundred. To become energy self-sufficient, they had only to separate out the heavy water. And split the deuterium atoms from the heavy water. And capture the deuterium. And freeze it, near absolute zero, into fuel pellets for the fusion reactor. Simple in concept; not so simple in execution.
Witness Carlos and Rikki shouting. Again.
Peering down the beach, Dana still could not make out what they said. Not a triumphant declaration of success.
Atop the tallest distillation column, a dish antenna pointed uphill. On a mast outside the cave mouth a second dish pointed downhill. Between, invisible to the eye, blazed an intense beam of microwaves: yet another workaround. They lacked the copper to run power cable from the reactor in the cave to the distillery on the shore. They lacked enough, well, anything to build pipes to pump water from the shore up to the cave. Or a big enough pump.
And so, while Carlos tinkered, trying to master the process, their scant deuterium reserves dipped lower and lower. The not-yet-operational distillery was a power hog, made more so by the inherent inefficiency of beamed power.
Grunts wielding pickaxes didn’t use deuterium. Apart from the power to synth their daily gruel….
Blake tried again. “I’m worried about supplies.”
Et tu, Blake? “You want the ship grounded?”
“Hardly,” he said. “A tech civilization takes natural resources. It defies belief that we’ll find everything we’ll need within walking distance. That doesn’t mean I’m not worried.”
“Needing the ship to scout for and recover resources. Too bad I didn’t think to give that as a reason when Li made her pitch. It would have sounded so much better than ‘Because it’s my ship, and I say so.’”
“Yeah. And too bad I lost my samples in the snow on the first scouting trip.”
Because if they had had biological samples earli
er, they would have known Dark’s biota relied on arsenic, not its periodic-table cousin, phosphorus.
Who knew phosphorus was the sixth most important element in terrestrial biology?
Copper. Deuterium. Phosphorus. How many other critical resources did they lack? Bringing Dana to wonder how their homemade glue fared. She said, “Back to work, sailor.”
“In a minute,” Blake said. “Answer me this. I don’t believe for a minute Li’s proposal to ground the ship was spontaneous. She claimed to be worried our tech will wear out. Then wouldn’t she also have worried about raw materials for that tech?”
“You’d think.” Dana stood. “Come.” Because the basins, once the glue set, should be waterproof. A theory that could be validated only by filling the basins with water lugged from the shore in buckets, like cavemen.
She giggled. They were cavemen.
Blake raised an eyebrow at her.
Retrieving an oh-two tank and mask from a tote bag, she breathed deeply. “It sneaks up on a person,” she said.
“And that’s why you, in your wisdom, decreed a buddy system.” Grinning, he pointed across the beach. “Though those two don’t sound all that buddy-buddy.”
Dana and Blake took turns, one toting pails, and the other dribbling seawater through a molecular sieve. What passed into the pools, in theory, was pure water. They had built the test ponds near the beach, but hauling water was still exhausting. With each bucketful, the way uphill to the cave looked steeper.
They rested while waiting to see if the ponds held water. All but one did. Dana hoped the sealant also meant no arsenic would leach from the ground into the ponds.
She added to the water-tight ponds, in precise ratios, sulfur, phosphorus and other trace elements from their limited stores. Nutrients whose inventory became more depleted each day they relied upon, and had to alter chemically, the native biomass….
In Petri dishes, beneath sunlamps, Carlos and Li had proven they could grow photosynthetic earthly bacteria. To feed themselves until crops came in—and no one had a theory yet how long before they could even plant crops—they needed biomass in much larger quantities. Once they got bacteria to prosper in these test ponds, they would scale up the process.
And she and Blake would fly off, to no one yet had a clue where, in search of phosphates and other nutrients. Take that, Li.
Dana was exhausted well before they finished. The sun hung low in the sky, the wind off the sea had picked up, and the temperature had plummeted. That morning, she had sweated from exertion; now, she shivered.
Pond by pond, she distributed bacterial samples. “Eat hearty,” she commanded her fellow Earthlings. You do your duty and I’ll do mine.
26
Rikki traced circles with her spoon in an otherwise untouched bowl of gummy stew: lunch, such as it was. Her back was to Blake, but she sensed his worried look. Between her foul mood and her broken arm, he hadn’t gotten much of a homecoming.
She tried to care.
“Are you all right, hon?” Blake asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, setting down the spoon. In the glow of lighting strips, the glop clinging to the utensil looked as insipid as it tasted.
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m a bit tired,” she admitted. Dog tired. Drained. Exhausted.
Whereas Blake had fallen asleep last night within minutes, oblivious to her tossing and turning.
“Uh-huh,” he said doubtfully. He gestured at the curtained opening of their little private alcove. “It’s almost time. If you’re done with lunch, maybe we should wander over.”
The last place she wanted to be was in another meeting, particularly a mysterious one. But if she stayed behind it would only bring attention, from Blake most of all. She didn’t want the attention. And so, she nodded.
He led the way, their footsteps echoing, to the soaring, stone-columned chamber that everyone called the cathedral. The two of them were the first to arrive. As they sat waiting, Rikki wished, or wished it mattered enough to her to wish, her sadness would go away.
Either way, the despair ignored her. As always.
From the corner of an eye Rikki caught Blake chewing on his lip, brow furrowed, debating with himself. No, Blake, I do not want to talk about it. She said, before he made up his mind, “At least here”—unlike aboard ship, crammed in among the coffin-like cold-sleep pods—“we have room to spread out.”
It wasn’t that she wanted to be far from Blake, returned the night before from a prospecting run. She just didn’t want to talk with him. And that was problematical because he had not let her out of his sight, annoyingly solicitous of her mood and her arm.
The latter was nothing: a clean break. Over the space of two days, industrious nanites already had the bone half knit. Also, it was her own stupid fault. A Martian weakling on Dark had no business levering boulders to help clear a more convenient landing field. Not, at least, till she’d given exercise and a whole different batch of nanites enough time to bulk her up.
The despair was different, whatever the hell had brought it on. Besides…everything.
Inside the cast her arm itched like mad. She almost welcomed the distraction.
“Seriously, are you sure you’re okay?” Blake asked her again as she scratched beneath the plaster cast with the tip of a pen.
“Suspense aside, yeah,” Rikki lied.
Li had requested the meeting. There was never any predicting what that woman had on her mind. Other than trouble.
“Just rest and enjoy the moment,” Blake told Rikki.
She tried. The soft breeze that ever sighed through the caves. The air that, if a bit thin, was eminently breathable. The sunlight that streamed through the sinkhole high overhead.
It only made her mourn for the generations who had labored in vain to make such a world of Mars. Survivor’s guilt and depression, Marvin surmised, when she had consulted the AI. She was not about to open up to Li.
Antonio and Carlos arrived and took seats on separate concrete benches. Local concrete, mixed from local materials. As time and more urgent projects allowed, the men planned to experiment with concrete construction on a larger scale.
Huh. Maybe the six of them were making progress. Rikki still couldn’t imagine ever calling this place home.
At last Dana and Li emerged from a side tunnel to join the rest. Somewhere down that twisty passage was the cavern’s most recently discovered entrance, this doorway opening onto the backside of the ridge. A view onto an endless, barren, rocky plain? Rikki hadn’t seen any point in checking it out.
Dana looked relaxed. No, happy.
It was hard to fault Dana. She and Blake had brought Endeavour home with its holds filled. They had mined enough asteroid ores, rich in sulfates and phosphates, to expand the bacterial farms a hundred times over. They could jaunt back anytime for more.
The mineral lode assured the six of them all the arsenic-free biomass they could eat. No matter that the slime-coated birdbath-sized test ponds reminded Rikki of aquaria gone very, very bad. At every single meal….
And while Dana and Blake had been away prospecting, Carlos had tweaked his seaside deuterium distillery past breakeven. They had begun filling their tanks, not depleting them.
Yes, it was hard to fault Dana’s good spirits.
Rikki still managed.
Dana sauntered toward the unoccupied end of Antonio’s bench. At the soft pad of her footsteps, Antonio, rather than avert his gaze, looked up. Rikki, from where she sat, couldn’t be certain, but just maybe Antonio had made fleeting eye contact with Dana. Was something happening between those two? If so, it was long overdue. Someone should be happy.
In principle, anyway.
Li had noticed their silent exchange, too, and her smile broadened.
That smirk made Rikki’s jaws clench and her teeth grate. Almost nonstop since landing day, Li had flitted about, blathering, full of vacuous good cheer. Blake called it Li playing cruise director. To judge by the funk Rikki tried to c
are that she couldn’t shake, Li was terrible at cruise directing.
Rikki slipped her good arm around Blake’s waist, shrugging when he looked at her questioningly. She knew a shoe was about to drop. Why?
Still smirking, Li went to stand in a shaft of brilliant sunlight.
Li was why. Rikki bent down and whispered, “A bit theatrical?”
“I’d say political,” Blake whispered back. And he detested politics.
“If I could have everyone’s attention, please.” Li, beaming, one by one caught the eye of everyone but Antonio. (And in the process, didn’t her gaze linger on Blake?) Li said, “I asked Dana to call us together, to give us the opportunity to celebrate our achievements.”
“Let’s all raise a glass of slime,” Antonio said.
For Antonio to joke, this was a special moment.
Li chuckled. “I have it on good authority, as it happens, that our farmed biomass is fermentable.”
“It’s true,” Carlos called out, grinning. “And Tuesday’s vintage is not undrinkable.”
“Then we have even more to celebrate,” Li said, again laughing. “Seriously, who could have imagined it? Who among us would even have dared to hope it? No one, I’m sure, and yet see what we have accomplished. A month after we first reached an unknown planet, we have not only survived, we’ve made a home for ourselves. We’ve…”
A month. Set at thirty days, after yet another inane discussion. A measure of time carried over from a world on which Rikki had never set foot. On which she never would. Billions, surely, had died on Earth. On Mars, everyone would have died. Recoiling from sudden gaping emptiness, Rikki tried to concentrate on Li’s words.
“…even feeding ourselves with locally grown food. I am so proud of us. We all should be proud of ourselves. Above all, I—and I believe I can speak for everyone—am grateful to our esteemed captain.” Li began clapping, and after a moment everyone joined in.
Rikki glanced over her shoulder. More than surprised, Dana looked…pleased. Maybe this get-together was mere cruise directing—
And maybe Li meant to blind-side Dana.
Li helped everyone with their tasks, but except for cruise director—and seeing to the occasional broken bone—she had no responsibility to call her own. Nothing to distract her from scheming.
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