"Toon, what's the range on the docking probe?" Peter asked in reference to the MAT's significantly powerful sonic range finder. Although it transmitted an energetic sonic beam, in the rare Martian atmosphere, it had a very short, almost insignificant range. It was designed for use only under controlled conditions as a docking aid inside the pressurized domes. The present conditions were well out of its intended working parameters but Peter had an idea he could make it work nonetheless. He reminded himself that, again, he was relying on the pressure of the wind to carry the sound.
Toon responded with his estimate of the range. "Thirty meters or so, under the best of conceivable conditions. Under these circumstances, I'd say half that, although what affect the dust particles may have on transmission of the sound, I can't say."
"What’s its spread at 10 meters?"
"A meter and a half, if I remember correctly."
"Good! That's all we'll need. Ashley, direct the forward echo finder at zero degrees ahead. Toon, what's the transmitter height above the ground?"
"About 2.5 meters."
"Go ahead and enter it just like that. Have it look forward and signal distances greater than 12.25 and averaging 7.75. That should cover obstacles and depressions greater than half a meter in height or depth. Cycle the alarm subroutines through three times before reporting status. Got it?"
"Cake…" Toon said, fingers already tapping out the details. As a master programmer, Peter knew it would be easy for him.
"Wake me up when you're finished," Peter jabbed him lightly.
"What's my job up here?" Ashley asked, putting her arm around Peter's shoulder.
He smiled at her and looked lovingly into her gray eyes. With his finger he wiped a smudge of red soil from the tip of her nose.
"You’re going to lock our echo finder in at 12.5 degrees, but spin it 45 degrees either side of zero degrees relative as I instruct," he replied slowly, his eyes sweeping hers again and again. "Meanwhile I'll plot our position on the map."
Her eyes silently returned his message, "I love you."
Peter was the chief staff geologist for the American base and Ashley the director of space biology. She was a handsome woman, nearly the same age as Peter, in her early thirties. After the years of education leading to their doctorates and all their training, their careers, and their partnership, had begun later in life. But their mutual, long-repressed passions more than made up for lost time.
He forced himself to look away from Ashley then back again at her with a worried, thin smile. Their eyes briefly locked again tightly.
"I can handle it," she whispered.
"I know that," his lips silently returned.
"In fact, screw it up and I'm in charge," she warned in a loud voice, then lightly rapped Toon on his head with her knuckles. "Same goes for you."
Toon simply nodded, concentrating too intently for idle banter. His brain and fingers were working furiously to reprogram the MAT's tiny mind, too busy to take in the dribble around him. Minutes later he spoke, simply, "Done. We’re ready to go."
"Super," Peter sighed, his worried eyes on the instruments before him.
Toon looked around to Peter's face. For a half-second they exchanged expressionless, male glances before Toon returned a thumb's up. His straight black hair fell in a neat row across the top of his expressive Japanese eyes.
"Life's tough when your finest hour may be your last," he quipped in his best British accent.
"Helmets on," Peter ordered with a half-smile and wary eye on Toon. He felt good about his team, but not so good about their chances either way. “Pressurize suits when ready.”
“Let's move it," he continued. "Toon, turn this pig in a tight left circle and let's back-track as best we can.
“Ashley, rotate echo 15 degrees port."
Silence befell them as the MAT turned slowly to the left. Their eyes followed the echo finder numbers and gyro compass. "Stop," Peter ordered when they were pointed toward BC1. The safety of Base Camp One was only 20 kilometers away, but between them and security lay a deadly, jumbled landscape.
As Peter looked his instruments over, the voice of Lassiter Lipton broke the silence.
"BC1 to MAT12, Lipton here. In the event you can hear this transmission, I am ordering you to stay where you are. When the redwind clears sufficiently, we will be sending a team after you, if that becomes necessary." He repeated his transmission, asking, "MAT12, can you read me? This is the Director, over."
"Who pulled his string?" Peter asked of no one in particular, clearly agitated at the interruption.
"Now that's real Caucasian of him, granting us permission to stay here and suffer a touch of anoxia, don't you think?" Toon inquired.
"Respectfully request permission to crank on the squelch till the clown disappears," Ashley asked of Peter.
With just a second's hesitation, he replied, "Granted. Straighten us out, Toon, and slow ahead, 25 meters."
Ashley reached up to the overhead console and eliminated all communications from BC1. Peter rationalized that they would need the silence to navigate and grope through the deadly darkness. The fact that Lipton's voice made him nauseated probably had something to do with the decision, as well.
"I'm at 25 meters and stopped."
"Turn to 40 true for 135 meters. Ashley, rotate echo dead ahead."
Two minutes later, their warning beeper sounded.
"Stopping," Toon cautioned, "Obstacle."
"Estimated distance?" Peter queried.
"Five meters."
"Backtrack three, turn to pass on your port, then ahead slow. Ashley, track it with your beam."
This relentless pattern continued for nearly two hours as they successfully maneuvered through the desert. As the MAT reached the outskirts of the most perilous part of their trek they were finally poised to run a more straightforward 12 kilometers back to BC1. The storm showed no signs of letting up.
"I was hoping we could get some slack from the weather for this phase," Peter noted, straining to see out of the opaque forward view shield.
"You mean we've come through the worst part and you'd give the contest to Lipton?" Toon asked.
"Yeah, you're right," Peter admitted. But he could not bring himself to actually hope that the redwind continued.
"So what's next?" Ashley asked. "How about a land speed record, or, how about..."
”..rolling off the next cliff," Peter finished drolly as he looked at the map. He felt he had an excellent idea where they were within 10 meters or so. The chief worry on this leg of the journey would be dodging boulders or rolling down a dune or other embankment. "250 meters at 45 degrees, and let's pick up the speed a little."
At the higher speed, the ride became noticeably rougher, even with the MAT's independently suspended wheels and balloon tires. Their echo finder could only warn them of rocks larger than half a meter in diameter, so, their movements were violent and lurching.
"Let's slow it down," Peter finally said, holding himself away from the forward panel with both hands and feeling his seat harness cut into his shoulders.
"Not too much slower, Peter," Toon offered. "We've only got two hours of life support remaining and at least two hours of distance left."
Peter nodded and resisted the urge to change the speed control lever. The darkness was devouring the MAT's batteries, the heaters struggling to keep up with the bitterly cold wind outside. But Peter also worried about the incredible beating the vehicle was taking and its constant lurching. They would not survive a breakdown.
An hour later, the lurchings became less severe as they moved away from the chaotic Fossae. These features were long and narrow depressions that lay across the desert preventing them from making a straight line path across them, even though they were now on the somewhat less bolder-strewn sands and dunes of the vast Elysium desert. The storm itself had not abated. Peter thought, optimistically, winning this one now appeared to only be a matter of surviving the trip home.
Peter eyed the radi
o and moved his hand to the squelch control. Ashley and Toon both gave him homicidal stares. He spread his palms apart and nodded his helmet in understanding. Then he increased their speed. They maneuvered silently for about ten more minutes. The now infrequent alarms, stopping, and turning tactic were affected wordlessly.
"Toon, bring up the life support summary on monitor three," Peter ordered.
Toon momentarily took his eyes off the echo finder to bring up the life support system data and the rest happened too fast to manage.
The warning beeper sounded as the MAT's left front tire struck a large boulder. The MAT lurched to a half stop as its gears caught the rock and rolled over it, which caused the whole vehicle to jerk, unbalanced, to the right. The right wheels caught on the edge of a crater wall, then slid down a steep embankment. There was nothing to stop the vehicle's backward slide down the sandy slope. Seconds later the rear wheels struck another bolder and the vehicle began to roll end over end until it reached the bottom of the crater where it came to rest on its top. As it finally crunched to a stop, its pressure hull breached with a slam, a groan and a penetrating hiss.
Their air rushed nearly instantaneously out of the fractured vehicle and as it did so, the moisture inside immediately condensed into a frozen fog, coating their faceplates with a sheen of red dust and ice. The three of them had slammed about their seats and into each other as the MAT rolled and now they hung upside down, blinded by the ice on their helmets.
"Ashley, Toon...okay?" Peter asked in a series of grunts, his breath knocked out of him.
No reply.
With the ensuing silence and darkness, Peter succumbed to a momentary onslaught of vertigo as he hung upside down, swinging from his seat restraints. He clawed and jabbed at his quick release mechanism, then dropped the 15 or so centimeters onto his head against the inverted ceiling of the MAT. He fought to regain his balance, frantically seeking his orientation and vision. In near panic, he scratched the ice off his faceplate with his gloved hands. Then he rose up on his knees to find the inverted figure of Ashley in front of him. She hung motionless, her hands across her chest, gripping her harness tightly.
Peter scratched the ice off her faceplate and peered inside. With the dim lights of her helmet instruments, Peter could see her staring back at him, unmoving. He feared she must be dead. He grasped her helmet and forcefully shook it.
"Ashley! Ashley!"
She looked back at him, upside down, and smiled an inverted grin. Then she moved her lips. He shook his head. There was no power. The MAT was dead. There were no communications. They could not talk…
She moved her hands along the breast of his suit and toggled a switch. "If I'm not mistaken, we're basically outside now, ace," she said, her voice now ringing clearly through his helmet.
His head clearing from the near panic of the moment, Peter realized that he was disconnected from the MAT's power and he had to rely on his suit's power pack now. As Ashley had informed him, with the MAT's pressure gone, they were, in effect, outside.
"Toon!" both cried together as one, Ashley simultaneously releasing herself from her harness.
Toon, still hanging inverted, had already scraped the ice from his visor and was struggling to turn on his suit communicator. Ashley reached through his harness and toggled the switch.
"Toon, you okay?" Peter asked.
"This is great, just great," Toon complained with wide eyes and a crazed smile on his face. "….upside down on a Martian desert in a full blown, freakin’ hurricane, ... unemployed, no less, and we’ll probably freeze to death before Lipton actually gets to pull the plug himself!"
Peter slapped Toon's harness quick release causing him to fall with a thump down onto the MAT's inverted roof. "Now you can scratch 'upside down' off your list,” Peter said with the most arid amusement he could muster.
The three of them sat in silence for a full five seconds looking blankly at one another.
"In case anyone was wondering, this vehicle is totally screwed up," Toon observed first, and then Peter saw it too, eyeing the sand and dust drifting through the fractured canopy's three centimeter crack.
"How badly? Can we turn it over, patch the hole and repressurize?" Peter asked in an artificially brisk voice, desperately trying to assess their situation.
"No way," Toon began, waving his hands, embellishing the obvious in a toothy grin. "She's too heavy to invert, the breech is too wide to patch, and then what? What if we did actually manage to flip her over; then what? I know! We could rig the odometer and claim it was ready to turn in for a new one!"
"In case you haven't been paying attention," Peter shot back angrily, sick of Toon's out of place humor, "we've got 30 minutes of air left, at best, on the suit packs and 25 minutes heat. If we could turn the pig back over, at least we could have another 20 minutes on MAT air and power."
"Oh, boys," Ashley whined mockingly, "let’s be friends here. There may not be time for apologies later."
"You're right... Toon," Peter replied, as calmly as he could manage, placing his hands to either side of his helmet as if to force himself into logical thought, "what do we have to work with?"
Peter looked directly at Toon just as his face abruptly flashed into absolute astonishment; his features arrested, open mouthed. Peter continued to look at him, straining to comprehend his problem. Then he turned to look behind him at Ashley only to see her legs disappear backward through the open hatch of the MAT.
Toon lunged toward the hatch. "Somebody pulled her out," he said following.
"Toon, wait; Toon!" Peter shouted after him. All they needed was the three of them lost together or one at a time on the Elysium plain in a redwind. But after only a second and a half of looking around the MAT and finding himself all alone, he too quickly crawled out after them.
As soon as his body cleared the hatch, he felt the welcome grasp of hands on his shoulders and heard the voice of Francis Linde through his helmet, even though he could not see him.
"Peter!"
"Francis!" he bellowed. "I can't believe it..."
Francis grasped Peter’s helmet and pulled him face to face. "Good God Almighty, son, I thought we lost you over the edge. We watched you go right over and tumble down the side. Scared the living hell right out of me.”
Peter could barely make out Francis’ profile through the diffuse dust. "You got Ashley and Toon?"
"Yeah; they’re sitting safe in MAT1 as we speak."
"We're okay," Ashley's voice replied over the suit speakers.
"Let's get on back to BC1," Francis continued. "Lipton's already torqued to the max. You wrecked MAT12, I ripped his vehicle off to come get you, and if that's not enough, this redwind is going away even as we speak."
Peter felt a sinking feeling like he had never felt before. It would appear that Lipton had made the right decision. Had they followed his orders and sat it out, they could have made it safely back to BC1. Now firing them was just a matter of processing the documents. Their careers were over. The flight back to earth was only a matter of waiting for the next sunrise.
"Move it, pal," Francis prodded, pulling Peter's arm. If nothing else, Peter felt a surge of hope at the thought of escaping the redwind and at hearing the cool, intelligent voice of Francis Linde. Seconds later, he had stumbled up the steep incline of the crater wall clinging to a nylon line attached to MAT1.
"MAT1!" Peter cried, realizing it was Lipton's personal vehicle. And Francis had stolen it to come and get them. But how did Francis manage to maneuver about in the storm and find them wrecked over the side of a crater? How could Francis actually watch them drive over the edge?
Just as he saw the insulated wall of the MAT, a hand reached out for him. "Steady, Peter; you okay?" It was the voice of Geoff Hammond.
"Geoff, what...?" Peter began.
"Somebody had to come and get you guys," Geoff began. "We've been trying to reach you by radio for over an hour, telling you to stay put." Geoff's hands directed Peter toward the hatch of the MAT.
"Now, open it and get in quickly. I'll close it after you. I have to stay and recover the line."
Peter felt an instant twinge of indignation at being treated like a refugee, but it quickly passed as he bolted into the already crowded MAT. He, Toon and Ashley were jammed into the two back seats.
Peter watched Francis turn around as far as he could and speak to them from the driver's console. "By the time we get back, this storm will be a bad memory. Unfortunately, Lipton will probably be leading the welcoming committee. For the first time in his idiotic life, he's called one right. And it's not like we don’t have egg on our faces...."
"More like the whole chicken," Ashley added.
"We've been on the radio calling you for nearly an hour," Francis continued as they waited for Geoff to return. "When we couldn't raise you, we figured you'd either turned it off to keep from listening to King Tutt or... worse."
Peter felt stupid as he nodded and looked away from Francis. He was beginning to feel as though he had not done much of anything right. Turning off the radio for any reason, particularly in an emergency, was strictly against procedure and in hind-sight, mostly shy of common sense.
"Who can blame you?" Francis continued. "After the first ten minutes of his speech I finally got annoyed enough to come and get you. It was obvious to everyone and his cat that Lipton was going to trade you for the vehicle so his Washington buddies would have a little less to joke about at cocktail parties."
"So how did you manage to… appropriate his personal MAT?" Toon asked fighting back a smile.
"How do you think? I nearly had to drive over his silly deputy Hernandez to get it into the airlock. Now why steal Lipton's MAT, you may ask? Good question for which I have a good answer. Not having any suicidal tendencies to draw on, I rigged this up for our little joyride because it has high resolution terrain radar, better known as HRT!"
"What?" Peter howled, the rest of the party shaking their heads from the ear piercing volume in their helmets. Overwhelmed, he stammered, "Then he was going to let us die when he had the means to come and get us?"
Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium Page 3