There was a burst of static, and then a snatch of voices: “. . . south of you . . . Frank would know . . .” Michael sucked in his breath. He was getting a signal!
“Hello, this is Michael Prasad,” he said over the emergency channel. “Can anyone hear me?”
There was another puff of static. “. . . hear . . . power . . . negative . . .”
Were they receiving his signal? Michael couldn’t tell. Randall had said that if the radio had line of sight, it should reach far enough. Maybe it wasn’t pointed in the right direction?
He turned the antenna a fraction of a degree, and suddenly the signal was clearer. “Say again?” a woman’s voice said. “Not reading you.”
“This is Michael Prasad,” he said. “I’m on the ice cap—”
“Prasad?” the woman asked. “Did you say Prasad? Hold on.”
A powerful tremble ran through the ice cap. The chunks of ice propping up the radio rattled against each other. Michael grabbed the antenna and tried to hold it steady.
“Yes, Prasad,” he repeated. “Michael Prasad. Please, send help. We’re stranded near the magnetic field station.”
There was no reply. Was she intentionally ignoring him? “Hello? Can you hear me?”
A new voice came over the radio, and Michael’s breath caught in his throat. “This is Manish Prasad,” his father said.
“Dad?” A dizzying rush of joy and relief and excitement flooded over him. “Dad, it’s me! It’s Michael!”
“We’re not getting a clear signal,” his father said. “Who is this? I sure hope this isn’t some—”
With a deep rumble, the ice underneath Michael’s feet shifted. The antenna turned slightly to one side, and his dad’s voice disappeared in a roar of static.
“Dad!” Frantically he tried to reorient the antenna. “Dad, can you hear me?”
More static, and garbled words: “. . . satellites down . . . northeast . . . dust . . .”
“Dad!” he screamed.
The slope he was standing on trembled violently. In the darkness to his right, he heard a loud crack. He turned his headlamp just in time to see a massive sinkhole appear in the ice.
For a moment, he was frozen in shock. How could he have been so stupid? The heat from the magnetic inducer was still melting the glacier from the bottom up, forming air pockets that put stress on the layers above. Now the equilibrium of ice and water and air had begun to shift, and it wouldn’t stop until balance had been restored.
The glacier was collapsing.
Michael jammed the radio into the bag and slung it over his shoulder. He leaped off the ridge he was standing on, landing on a flat area a few meters across. Behind him, another large chunk of ice collapsed and fell away. He found a couple of handholds and started to climb down as quickly as he could.
After a few minutes, his fingers were already cramping from the effort of clinging to the slope. This was a steeper route than the path he’d taken while climbing up, and in some places the ice was already cracked and splintered and would fall away at the barest touch. Several times he lost his grip, sliding for a few seconds before he managed to dig his toes into the ice to stop himself.
He’d barely climbed twenty meters downward when he heard a deep rumbling sound from high above. A cloud of tiny ice particles swept past him, followed by larger chunks. A piece of ice struck his shoulder, and he cried out in pain. He clung to the face of the cliff, pressing his body as close to the ice as he could.
A series of snapping and cracking sounds moved through the ice all around him. For a moment, the air was quiet and still, and then the cliff face began to move. He dug his fingers into the ice, but everything around him was sliding down the slope. He screamed as something ground against his back, digging into him like a knife. He tumbled sideways and began to fall. For a moment he was suspended in a cloud of ice and snow, and then he hit the ground hard.
Michael lay there, half buried in snow, for several seconds. Every breath hurt. He shifted his arm to try to sit up and gasped as icy-cold pain exploded in his shoulder. He reached back with his other hand and felt at the fabric of his suit, already terrified at what he would find.
His suit had a long tear running from his shoulder blades to the small of his back. The material had resealed itself, but every time he moved his arms, part of the tear would split open again, letting in the searingly cold air. He could already taste the metallic tang of the Martian atmosphere where it had mixed with the air of his suit. How long would the filter in his air unit be able to scrub out the deadly carbon dioxide that was seeping in? The leak was large enough that if the filter became saturated, he would die from air poisoning within minutes.
But that wasn’t his only problem. The thermal insulation of his suit had been compromised. The skin on his back and shoulders was already numb, and a crackling, icy pain was spreading through his arms and legs. It wouldn’t be long before hypothermia set in. If he didn’t get back inside the homestead soon, he would freeze to death.
Quickly, he started to climb downward. He didn’t have time to be careful; already he could feel his fingers stiffening as the cold spread through his hands. He slid from foothold to foothold, almost skidding down the slope. His fingers missed a handhold, and he fell several meters before scrabbling to a halt. How far had he come? He squinted downward into the darkness, but the base of the ice cap was nowhere in sight.
His body shivered uncontrollably. “Lilith!” he called hoarsely over the emergency band on his suit radio. “Randall! Can you hear me?”
There was no response. They had no idea he was out here, because he’d broken the one cardinal rule of the Martian surface: don’t go anywhere alone. By the time they realized he wasn’t inside the homestead, he’d be nothing more than an ice-covered corpse.
He took a long, deep breath, and then another. A pleasant warmth settled over him. Had the suit managed to repair itself? Maybe his situation wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. He could just rest here for a little while and then keep going when he’d regained his strength. All he needed was few minutes, and he’d be ready to go.
He shook his head and snapped awake. The dreamlike warmth disappeared. He swallowed hard as he realized how close he’d come to freezing to death. His suit hadn’t repaired itself—that pleasant feeling had just been the beginnings of hypothermia. He stood up and flexed his arms and legs, trying to get the blood to circulate. He had to keep moving, no matter what. If he stopped again, he would die.
He started to half run, half jump down the slope, using his headlamp to pick out any spot that seemed flat enough to stand on. Carbon dioxide snow, scattered in a thin layer on top of the rock and ice, flashed into vapor from the warmth of his boots. He ran faster, hardly paying attention to where he landed. Faster. He had to move faster.
Suddenly he was on a wide, flat trail. He’d reached the base of the slope. He took a few steps and fell to his knees, breathing hard. Every muscle and fiber in his body wanted desperately to lie down and sleep. He crawled forward along the path, barely managing to put one hand in front of the other.
That way. Keep going that way.
But the homestead was almost a kilometer away. He wasn’t going to make it. His body was shutting down. At any moment he would collapse and never get up again.
“Michael!” a voice shouted.
Lights appeared in front of him. Two suited figured ran up the path. One of them was Lilith, he realized. The other one he couldn’t recognize. “Dad?” he croaked.
“It’s me,” Randall said, crouching down next to him. Hands probed his back and arms and the two voices talked quickly back and forth.
“In shock,” Michael muttered. “Hy-po-therm-ia.”
“Michael, you have to walk,” Lilith said. “Do you hear me? You have to stand up and walk.”
“Walk,” Michael agreed, but he didn’t move. Moving was too difficult.
Randall and Lilith dragged him to his feet. He moaned in protest and stumbled along with the
m toward the homestead. His head lolled to one side and rested on Lilith’s shoulder.
“Keep going,” she said. “Just keep going.”
Bright lights. The hiss of an airlock. Warm air flooding over his skin as someone pulled off his helmet. They sat him down in a chair, and Randall pressed an injector against his arm. After a few seconds, the numb, cadaverous feeling in his body started to fade, as if he had crossed some invisible line between half dead and half alive.
A cup of hot liquid was pressed against Michael’s lips. He drank and gasped in pain as the heat made its way down his throat. They applied a patch to his suit and then wrapped him in blankets with his arms tight across his chest, taking turns forcing him to drink something—hot chocolate, he finally realized—until he sputtered and turned his head away.
“How do you feel?” Randall asked, watching him intently.
Hot. Cold. Numb. In agony. Nothing Michael could say would describe the conflicting sensations coming from his body right now, so he just shook his head.
“Where did you go?” Lilith asked. “What were you thinking?”
“Radio,” Michael mumbled. “Wanted t’ get a signal.”
“In the middle of the night?” Lilith fumed. Randall put his hand on her shoulder, but she shook him away. “You’ve done a lot of dumb things in your short life, but this has to be the most boneheaded, thick-skulled, immensely stupid thing I’ve ever heard of.”
“You’re lucky Lilith woke up,” Randall said. “She was ready to run out there alone—I barely managed to persuade her to put on a helmet.”
Lilith muttered something unintelligible in response, though Michael was pretty sure he caught the words “idiotic” and “reckless” and a few choice bits of profanity.
“Did you reach anyone?” Randall asked. “Do they know we’re here?”
Michael tried to remember. “I’m not sure. There was a lot of interference.”
“Where is the radio now?”
“I can answer that one,” Lilith said. “The radio is right here.”
She emptied out the bag Michael had been carrying. Inside was a collection of circuit boards, wires, and processing chips. It looked less like a radio and more like a collection of parts from an electronics store.
“Or at least what used to be the radio.”
13
“SO LET ME make sure I’ve got this straight.” Lilith kicked a chair, sending it spinning into a corner of the kitchen. “Not only did you go outside on your own and nearly get yourself killed, but you also managed to destroy our only way of contacting anyone.”
She was right. His trip up to the top of the ice cap had cost them their only long-distance radio. And what had he gotten out of it? A ten-second conversation with his dad. Not even a conversation, really, since as far as he could tell, it had been completely one-sided. His dad hadn’t even known who he was talking to.
At least now he knew his father was safe. That was something. But right now wasn’t the time to argue over the details. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“Oh, you’re sorry?” Lilith said, throwing up her hands. “I didn’t realize that. I don’t suppose sorry is going to fix this radio?”
“Leave him be,” Randall said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Randall reached out and checked Michael’s pulse. He nodded and glanced at Lilith. “The patch is clean and the injection I gave him seems to be working, but one of us needs to stay awake to keep an eye on him. Do you want the first shift, or the second?”
“I’m not sleeping anytime soon,” Lilith said. “I’ll take the first shift.”
Michael didn’t think he was going to be able to sleep either, but he wasn’t going to argue with getting some rest. He lay down on the floor of their room and stared up at the ceiling. Lilith sat in the corner, watching him with her arms folded.
“I shouldn’t have gone up there by myself,” he said.
“Nope,” Lilith replied. “So what you need to do now is apply that brain of yours to getting us home safely.”
He nodded, though he had no idea how he was going to manage that. The three of them were stuck here until someone found them. After what had happened at the station, they were lucky to be alive. And now, on top of everything else, they had a freak dust storm to worry about.
Randall was right—it was unusual to have a storm like this so late in the year. Was there some explanation, or was it just a random occurrence? The weather on Mars was usually simple and easy to forecast, thanks to the dry, thin air. It was nothing like Earth, where the massive oceans and constant evaporation made the weather almost impossible to predict far in advance.
He was just drifting off to sleep when a thought went through his head. Evaporation.
What would happen on Mars if a million tons of water vapor were suddenly added to the atmosphere?
“Michael,” Lilith said, rocking him gently by the shoulder. “Michael, wake up.”
Michael opened his eyes and looked around. Everything was pitch-black except for a faint glow from down the hallway. He reached out and felt Lilith kneeling next to him.
“What’s going on?” he asked blearily.
“The lights went out about a half hour ago,” she said. “Randall said the power system wasn’t working well, so I wasn’t too worried at first. But now the air seems to be going bad.”
Michael took a deep breath. She was right—the air tasted stale and tinny. Was he already a little lightheaded, or was that just an aftereffect of the hypothermia? He fumbled around until he found his helmet and snapped it into place. He took a few deep breaths to clear his lungs. You’re okay, he told himself. Just stay relaxed. Hopefully Randall could figure out what was wrong with the air in the homestead and they’d be able to take off their helmets again.
“Randall?” Lilith said, standing in the doorway of the room across the hall. “Are you awake? The power’s gone completely out.”
Randall lifted his head and blinked in the glare of her headlamp. He stared at her for a moment, and then looked around. “Dammit,” he said. “Dammit.”
“Sorry to wake you up,” Lilith said. “But the air—”
“You did the right thing.” Randall stood up and rubbed his jaw. “I’m an idiot for not making sure the air-quality alarms were still working. If it wasn’t for you, we might have never woken up.”
He put on his own helmet, and they followed him into an equipment room next to the hangar. A large barrel-shaped battery sat next to racks of ancient-looking computer hardware. Everything was covered in dust except for a small workstation perched on a plastic cart. Randall pulled a chair over to the workstation and turned the screen on. He scanned over a few pages’ worth of diagnostic data, and then he let out a long sigh.
“It’s the dust storm,” he said. “The solar panels aren’t getting enough sunlight, and these batteries are barely holding a charge.”
“Is that bad?” Lilith asked.
“It’s not good,” Randall said. “It means we’ll have to sleep with our helmets on.”
Lilith looked at Michael with concern. “You going to be okay with that?”
“Wearing a helmet all night long, in a pitch-black, underground room the size of a large closet?” he said with a weak smile. “Sure? Who wouldn’t be?”
But panic attacks weren’t the only thing on his mind. The more they used their suits’ air units, the more saturated their CO2 filters would get. Their air vests had less than an hour of reserve oxygen left. When the scrubbers finally gave out . . .
“We’ll be okay as long as this dust storm doesn’t get any worse,” Randall said. But he had a worried look in his eye that told Michael he was thinking about their air filters too.
Michael suddenly remembered what had been going through his head right before he fell asleep. “I don’t think we can count on that. I think I know what’s causing this storm.”
“You do?” Randall asked, cocking his head.
“The heat from t
he magnetic inducer was melting that glacier, right? I’ll bet it was enough to cause a lot of the water to evaporate into the atmosphere.”
“Like how storms form on Earth?” Lilith said.
“Exactly,” Michael said. “Check the humidity and pressure outside. I’ll bet they’re both off the charts.”
Randall tapped at the screen. “You’re right,” he said, frowning. “I’ve never seen readings like this.”
“Hurricanes get their energy from the sun heating the water,” Lilith said. “I studied this back in third grade. Once they move over land, there’s no more evaporation to power them, and they die out. But if this one is getting its heat from the magnetic inducer, and the inducer is getting its energy from the flare . . .”
“The storm won’t stop until the flare dies out,” Randall finished in a quiet voice. Now even his pretense that everything was going to be okay had disappeared.
“How long is that going to be?” Michael asked.
“I don’t know,” Randall said. “We’ve never had a flare like this. From the way it’s still going, I’d guess a few more days at least. Maybe longer.”
“Oh,” Lilith said, looking a little pale.
“For the moment, we’re safe in here,” Randall said. “As long as the batteries can charge up enough to last most of the night, we’ll be okay.”
“But what if the storm gets worse?” Lilith said.
“If the storm gets worse, we’ll figure out something else. Till then, we just sit tight.”
Michael lay back down on the floor of their bedroom, but between his anxiety about the helmet and his worry about their situation overall, it was impossible for him to sleep. Out of boredom he started to go over some of the calculations for a jumpship trajectory. He checked the map on his wrist screen. Milankovic was three hundred thirty kilometers away, south-southwest. If the jumpship had a thrust-to-weight ratio of six to one . . .
He was double-checking his calculations when Lilith sat up abruptly and pulled at her collar. “I’m starting to understand why you hate these things so much.”
“You can’t sleep either?”
In the Red Page 12