The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  They all snorted when the usual question came in from Janet. She looked embarrassed, but what could she do? "And how are you feeling, with Airbus getting nearer and your own launch-"

  Marc started before Janet was finished. "We'll wave to them as we head home."

  Everybody laughed, but there was a forced quality to it.

  After the usual updating on Ann's foray, Janet wished Piotr a speedy recovery, transmitted some bland medical advice, and then turned to quasi-technical details about the upcoming liftoff test. Piotr's accident was one more mishap to be overcome. Janet didn't fail to mention the obvious: The broken ankle meant their captain would be less effective if anything went wrong with the liftoff of the Return Vehicle. What should have been a routine test in this part of the mission was looming as a potential crisis.

  On arrival they had discovered that it was damaged. A failure in the aerobraking maneuver made the Return Vehicle come in a shade too fast, crushing fuel pipes and valves around the engines. None of the diagnostics had detected this, since the lines were not pressured. In some instances the damage went beyond mere repair and Raoul had been forced to refashion and build from scratch several of the more delicate parts. Working with Earthside engineers, he had been steadily making repairs.

  In this he drew upon not only his technical training, but his family's tradition of Mexican make-do. His father and uncle ran a prosperous garage in Tecate, just below the U.S. border. He'd grown up in greasy T-shirts with a wrench in his hand. Coming from a country with a chronic shortage of hard goods meant that "recycle and reuse" was not just a slogan but a necessity. Raoul was good at creative reuse, making novel pieces fit, but never before had he worked under this kind of pressure. Their return, and quite possibly their lives, depended on his repairs.

  They ended the transmission on an edgy note. It was 13 days and counting to launch.

  There was plenty of grunt labor to get ready for the liftoff test. Gear they had used on the repairs, supplies dumped months ago while in a hurry, scrap parts all had to be hauled away from the Return Vehicle. On the long glide back to Earth, every kilogram extra they carried made their fuel margin that much slimmer, and it wasn't that fat to begin with.

  Ann didn't mind the heavy labor. The low gravity helped but the laws of inertia still governed. Man-handling gear into the unpressured rovers to stow it for the next expedition at least gave her a chance to think; simple jobs didn't absorb all her concentration. That was when all her frustrations surfaced and she decided to do some pushing of her own.

  After the usual heavy-carbo lunch she found Marc in the hab's geology lab, packing a core for transport.

  What do we do now?" she asked. "Just you and me?"

  Their last, long expedition in the rover was out-that much was clear. Safety protocols demanded two in the rover, and both mechanics, Raoul and Piotr, had to be working on the Return Vehicle. Marc was the backup pilot, so he would be needed to help Piotr, at least through the liftoff trial.

  "You're going to tell me, right?" He grinned.

  "I'm not going to sit around twiddling my thumbs on my last two weeks on Mars." Marc said crisply, "You can't go out for a week by yourself, Ann."

  "I know. Come with me, Marc. There's just enough time left for a vent trip."

  The extensive Return Vehicle repairs had cut into all their schedules. For the week-long rover trips, mission protocol decreed that one of the pair be a mechanic-Raoul or Piotr. When the two of them were tied up with Return Vehicle repairs, Ann and Marc were restricted to day trips in the rover. Marc had filled his time setting off lots of small seismic blasts, and was surprised to discover extensive subterranean caverns several hundreds of meters down. So far they hadn't found a way in to any of them, and Ann knew Marc was itching to get down there.

  Marc looked doubtful. "You did that already. I thought we agreed it was a bust. No life or fossils."

  "Yes, but we picked a vent that was outgassing remnants of atmosphere-it had oxygen in the mix."

  "So? We were looking in the most likely place for life."

  "For Earth life, and ancient Mars life, but not modern Mars life. Oxygen is most likely poisonous to the organisms we're looking for."

  Marc frowned, distracted by his chore. "Why so?"

  "About four billion years ago, Earth's atmosphere was a byproduct of the early photosynthetic microbes ... precursors of plants. They succeeded by learning how to make their own food, and by poisoning the competition, the anaerobes, with their wastes."

  "Oxygen?"

  "Right!" Ann nodded vigorously, caught up in her vision. "On Earth, anaerobes went underground or underwater to get away from the poisonous oxygen atmosphere. Here on Mars, oxygen-using forms would have been eliminated when the planet lost its atmosphere. Maybe it's their descendants under the soil, living off the peroxides. But the anaerobes only had to fight the cold and drought. They must have followed the heat and gone underground."

  "Where d'you want to look?"

  "The big vent about 55 klicks to the north is the closest." Marc said, "We could maybe manage a few days in the rover, no more."

  "Good enough. I'll start packing."

  "Not so fast. We've all got to agree."

  Raoul shook his shaggy head. All the men were letting their hair grow out to the max, then would shear it down to stubble just before liftoff, including beards. The "Mars Bald" look, as Earthside media put it, went for Ann, too. In the cramped hab of the return vehicle, shedding hair was just another irritant. If it got into their gear, especially the electronics, it could be dangerous. He gestured at the injured Piotr. "Without him, we'll take longer to complete checkout. Marc, I know it's not your job, but I'll need both you and Ann to help. I want to eyeball every valve and servo in the undercarriage."

  "Okay, I can see why you need all of us for that. But once it's done-"

  "Until we've done the liftoff, planning is pointless," Piotr said in a voice that reminded them all that he was, broken ankle or not, the commander. So far he had not needed to throw such weight around. Ann shot him a look and saw in his face the man who was the commander/mechanic first and her husband second. Which was as it should be at this moment, she knew, even if a part of her did not like such facts right now. She said slowly, "I have a quick run we could do."

  Piotr called from his bunk, "For jewels, I hope."

  She grimaced. Piotr was deeply marked by the bad years in Russian space science following the collapse of the Communist economy. She recalled his saying, "In those dark years, the lucky ones were driving taxicabs, and building spaceships on the side. The others just starved." Not only research suffered. Some years there had been no money, period. Faced with no salaries, staff members in some science institutes found new ways to raise money, sometimes by selling off scientific gear, or museum collections. It was like her grandparents, who had grown up during the Great Depression; they couldn't get money far from mind. So Piotr made a fetish of following Consortium orders about possible valuable items: he scrounged every outcropping for "nuggets,"

  "Mars jade," and anything halfway presentable. They all got a quarter of the profits, so nobody griped. Still, Piotr's weight allowance on the flight back was nearly all rocks, some she thought, quite ugly.

  "No, for science."

  Piotr gave her a satirical scowl.

  "Your vent idea." Raoul eyed her skeptically.

  "There are three thermal vents within a hundred kilometers. I want to try the closest one, to the north."

  "We've studied their outgassing, the whole area around them," Marc said. The Consortium wanted information on water and oxygen-, they could use it on later expeditions, or sell the maps to anyone coming afterward.

  Raoul shook his head, scowling. "We've already got one injury. And we've looked in one vent already. Crawling down more holes isn't in the mission profile."

  "True, but irrelevant," she said evenly. Raoul was the tough one, she saw. Piotr would support her automatically, though grumpily, if she could
fit her plan into mission guidelines. Marc, as a geologist, had a bias toward anything that would give him more data and samples.

  "It's too damned dangerous!" Raoul suddenly said.

  "True," Marc said. "We could use our seismic sensors to feel if there are signs of a venting about to occur, though, and-"

  "Nonsense," Raoul waved away this point. "Have you ever measured a venting?"

  "Well, no, but it cannot differ greatly from the usual signs on Earth-"

  "We do not know enough to say that."

  She bad to admit that Raoul was right in principle; Mars had plenty of nasty tricks. It certainly had shown them enough already, from the pesky peroxides getting in everywhere-even her underwear!-to the alarming way seals on the chem factory kept getting eaten away by mysterious agents, probably a collaboration between the peroxide dust and the extreme temperature cycles of day and night. "But our remote sensing showed that venting events are pretty rare, a few times a year."

  "Those were the big outgassings, no?"

  "Well, yes. But even so, they are low density. It's not like a volcano on Earth."

  "Low density, but hot. Our pressure suits do not provide good enough insulation. I believe we all agree on that."

  This provoked rueful nods. The biggest day-today irritant was not the peroxides, but the sheer penetrating cold of Mars. Raoul's style was to hedgehog on the technicals, then leap to a grand conclusion. She got ahead of him by not responding to the insulation problem at all, but going to her real point. "The vents must be key to the biology."

  "We have done enough on biology," Raoul said adamantly.

  "Look-"

  "No," he cut her off with a chop of his hand, the practical mechanic's band with grime under the fingernails. "Enough."

  And they all had to agree. In Raoul's set jaw she saw the end of her dreams.

  The liftoff test came after two days of hard labor. They had been burning methane with oxygen in the rovers for more than five hundred days, but that was with carbon dioxide to keep the reaction heat down, acting like an inert buffer much as nitrogen did in the air of Earth. But the Return Vehicle boosters would burn at far higher temperature. The many engineering tests said the system would withstand that, but those were all done in comfortable labs on Earth.

  And they did not use a system that had ruptured oil landing and that Raoul had labored month after month to repair.

  A warning call from Raoul made her crouch down. They had decided that this test liftoff, just to see if anything blew a pipe, would have only Raoul and Piotr aboard. Piotr could run the subsystems fine from his couch. She and Marc took shelter a few hundred meters away, ready to help if something horrible happened. The stubby Return Vehicle stood with its chem systems detached and gear dragged away, looking a bit naked against pink soil as thoroughly trod as Central Park in Manhattan, and with more litter.

  She and Marc had nothing to do but pace to discharge all their adrenaline. The damned cold came through her boots as always and she stamped them to keep the circulation going. Even the best of insulation couldn't keep the cold from penetrating through the soles of the boots. It was early morning, so they would have a full day of sunlight to make repairs. She seldom came out this early into the biting hard cold left over from the night. Quickly enough they had learned the pains of even standing in shadow, much less of Martian nightskin stuck to boot tabs, frostbite straight through the insulation. Raoul's limp resulted from severely frostbitten toes after hours of making repairs in the shadow of the Return Vehicle.

  She closed her eyes, trying to relax. They were about to land on Mars for the second and last time; think of it that way. Such odd ways of taking each moment, relieving it of its obvious heart-thudding qualities, had sustained her through the launch from Earth and their aerobraking. Months of tedious mission protocols and psychological seminars had given her such oblique skills.

  "Ready," she heard Raoul through the suit com. "Starting the pumps."

  Piotr responded with pressure readings, flow rates. She saw a thin fog form beneath the rocket nozzle, like the vapors that sometimes leaked from the soil as the sun first struck it.

  More cross-talk between the pilots. Their close camaraderie had been so intensive the past few days that she and Marc felt like invisible nonentities, mere "field science" witnesses to the unblinking concentration of the "mission techs," as the terminology went. Then Raoul said, almost in a whisper, "Let's lift."

  A fog blossomed at the Return Vehicle base. No gantry here, nothing to restrain it. The conical ship teetered a bit, then rose.

  "Nice throttling!" Marc called.

  "Wheeeee!" Ann cheered.

  The ship rose 20 meters, hung-then started failing. A big plume rushed out the side of the ship. Crump! came to her through the thin atmosphere. A panel blew away, tumbling. The ship fell, caught itself, fell another few meters-and smacked down.

  "All off!" Raoul called.

  "Pressures down," Piotr answered, voice as mild as ever.

  "My God, what-?"

  Then she started running. Not that there was anything she could do, really.

  At least the damage was clear. The panel had peeled off about a meter above the reaction chamber. Inside they could see a mass of popped valves.

  "Damn, I built those to take three times the demand load," Raoul said.

  "Something surged," Piotr said. "The readout shows that."

  "Still, the system should have held," Raoul insisted, face dark.

  "Over pressure was probably from that double line we made," Piotr said mildly.

  "Ummm." Raoul bit his lip; she could see his pale face through his helmet viewer and wondered if he felt defeated. Then he nodded briskly. "Probably right. We should check with the desk guys, but I'll bet you're right."

  "The double line was their idea."

  "Right, Piotr. We'll go back to the original design."

  Somehow this buoyed them. It had to, she reflected. Either they get the system working or they wouldn't dare lift. The Airbus crew would rescue them, maybe, getting the glory and the 30 billion dollars.

  "Should I contact Ground Control now, or wait until you get back to the hab?" Marc asked.

  "They control nothing," Raoul said. "We're in control."

  "Is damned right," Piotr said, laughing in a dry way.

  "Okay." She grinned uncertainly and Marc followed suit.

  "I suppose we should wait, talk to Earthside before we pull anything out and start refitting," Raoul said.

  Piotr's voice crackled in the radio, his accent more noticeable. "Nyet, nyet, no waiting. You do it. And Marc, tell them, the Airbus-we may need their vessel to get home."

  She brought up the unthinkable as a way of edging her way around to her own agenda. What the hell, they were all exhausted from laboring on the repairs, and it had been three days. They were nearly done. Time to think the unthinkable again.

  Ann turned to Marc. "Okay, suppose we can't get off at all. We've got months until Airbus gets here. What do you think we could do with the highest impact?"

  Marc looked surprised. Nobody answered for a very long time. She could see in their faces a vast reluctance to face this issue. But they had to. Finally Marc said slowly, "Geology, maybe."

  Piotr laughed sourly. "Scratch scientist, find fanatic. Geology we have plenty. A cold dry desert with red rocks and ancient water erosion. Not much better than the Viking pictures." Raoul said reasonably, "Ann, this is an old argument. Of course the Viking landing spots were purposely picked to be flat and boring and dry. Not the best places to look for life, but the safest to land. Now we know Viking could never, anywhere on Mars, have found your microbes that retreated to their little layer when the seas and lakes dried up."

  "Over a billion years ago, I estimate," Marc put in.

  "We don't know that the microbe retreat model is the only one," she said.

  Piotr called, "Ah, your new version of the old Sagan argument. While Viking was kicking dust into the biology experimen
ts, an undetected Martian giraffe walked by on the other side of the lander."

  Ann bristled but did not show it. Sometimes she wondered if Piotr had to occasionally show that he was not just her husband, and thus an automatically. "I'm not really expecting Earth-type animals, but I'm keeping an open mind about other possibilities."

  Marc blinked. "You really think we'll find more than microbial life in a vent?"

  "I certainly think we should look. We're probably never going to be here again, any of us." She looked around at them. "Right?"

  This they had never discussed. In some ways the surface mission was the least risky part of the expedition, the first four-fifths in days spent but not in danger. Their coming launch was risky, and the aerobraking into Earth's atmosphere would be more tricky than their rattling deceleration in the comparatively soft Martian atmosphere. Still, the sheer wearing-down of their labors in the harsh cold dryness of Mars had sobered them all somewhat. When they returned home-or if-they would be wealthy, famous. Would they do this again?

  "I might come back," Marc said. "I, too," Raoul said, though without the conviction he had before.

  "I am honest enough to say that I will not," Piotr said, grinning at them. "I will have a wealthy wife, remember."

  They all laughed, maybe more than the joke deserved. The laughter, after a filling meal, served to remind them that they were a team, closer than any contracts could bring them. This was a highly public, commercial enterprise, of course, but none of it would work without a degree of cooperation and intuitive synchronization seldom demanded anywhere.

  Ann looked at the others, their clothes emblazoned with the logos of mission sponsors, all quite soiled. Through the Consortium's endless marketing they had endorsed a staggering array of products. They were destined to be a team forever, no matter what happened in the future.