Girl on Mars

by Jack McDonald Burnett

  After a few moments of silence, Conn heard the groaning of metal, the sound muffled by her breathing bubble and the thinness of the atmosphere. Then she heard thumps. Daniels, trying to force the door open. With some effort the door came apart from the broken frame. Daniels leaned in to open the door as far as he could, while Ryan pulled. It opened more than halfway.

  Daniels then retreated and re-emerged carrying Izzy De Maria, her body enveloped in her own pressure field.

  “She lost consciousness right after she turned her pressure field on,” Daniels explained. They had already had their tanks and breathing bubbles on. Daniels put Izzy down gingerly on the Martian ground. Izzy had about seven and a half months’ growth of rich, dark chocolate hair, not quite down to her shoulders; and she had a narrow face, pale likely from being knocked unconscious, that made her longish narrow nose and prominent cheeks more striking. “I think she got whiplashed and her head hit the inside of her bubble. Yep, look: there’s a lump.”

  Daniels was tall and wide-shouldered, African-American, handsome, confident, a real poster child for The Right Stuff. He looked worried, but Conn doubted it was about Izzy De Maria. Her suspicion was confirmed when Daniels looked to his lander and said, “the parts for the portal. If they’re not all intact after the crash, we could be in huge trouble.”

  “Same here,” Ryan said, and Conn threw him a look. Daniels looked at Conn.

  “We can’t really get back into orbit,” Conn told Daniels. “We have to use your portals to get home.”

  “You have trouble, too?”

  “No,” Conn said. “That was the plan all along.”

  Daniels understood. “That’s how you got here so fast,” he said. “Pretty ballsy, even for you, Conn. What if we didn’t let you use them?”

  “And strand us here to die instead? Come on, Daniels, what is this, the moon?” Daniels turned away. He re-entered his lander, and started toting equipment outside. Conn and Ryan helped.

  Daniels wore a pained expression as the carried one handful of equipment to the pile. Conn raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t know if I can fix this,” he said.

  “Sure you can,” Conn said.

  “We’ll see,” Daniels said.

  “If you can’t, we’re all screwed,” Conn said.

  “It’s no wonder you landed so hard,” Ryan said. “There must be a seventy, seventy-five kilograms of equipment here. So what’s that, like, two hundred on Earth?”

  “Our soft-landing engines firing late had something to do with it, too.”

  Izzy stirred. Conn went to her. She tried talking to her, and Izzy tried talking to Conn, but it wouldn’t work.

  “I switched to your frequency,” Daniels explained. “She hasn’t.” Sergei Dzagoev from orbit told Izzy what frequency to change to, and she did.

  “All the equipment make it?” she asked. Her tongue sounded thick.

  “Most,” Daniels said. “We’ll need to fix some of it.”

  “Can we?”

  “We have to. Right, Conn?”

  Conn said nothing, other than to make sure Izzy was alright and didn’t need anything.

  “Harmonia base, Adventure,” Ginny said. “Be advised, I am in communication with Sergei on the—er, Dyna-Tech spacecraft. If you need anything from him, ping me.”

  “We’re about two klicks from where they want us to build the portal.” Daniels addressed Ginny in orbit: “Adventure, find out please if building the portal right here will give us the line-of-sight we need.” Ginny asked, and the answer was no, the present location would not work. They had a margin of error on the location of about half a kilometer radius, and the mountain to the east would be an obstruction.

  “Well, I’m sorry about that,” Daniels said. “Thanks for helping me unload and examine the equipment, but it all has to go back aboard the lander/rover, now.”

  “Do we have anything you can use to fix what’s broken?” Conn asked.

  “With any luck, all I’ll need is some duct tape, which I have.”

  Daniels and Izzy inspected the Harmonia to determine if they should bother attaching its wheels to make it into a surface rover. An axle was bent and part of the bottom of the lander was pushed into the ground. It wasn’t going to work.

  Conn and Ryan made their way back to Yars’ Revenge, and attached its wheels to turn it into a rover. After the two astronauts cleared some boulders to get them moving, they drove to where the Harmonia had crashed.

  The four astronauts loaded the machinery on board the lander. Conn wasn’t at all sure the lander/rover could bear the weight of the machinery plus two extra astronauts, but it worked out. She didn’t bother repressurizing the lander, they all just wore their pressure fields and breathing bubbles. The four drove to the coordinates where Dyna-Tech wanted the portal assembled.

  Daniels began duct-taping the mangled machinery parts. “The problem is,” he said, “that this needs to fit inside this, and this part needs to connect to this one. The contacts look like they’re in OK shape, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to fit the part inside the frame.”

  “What if you use some foil from your hull?” Conn suggested. “Wrap it in foil, tape it down with one layer of tape. Shouldn’t make it that much thicker, the the wrapping will be conductive. The duct tape will insulate it.”

  “That just might work,” Daniels said. “But we’ll have to go all the way back to the Harmonia for the foil.”

  “We can use yours, right, guys?” Izzy De Maria said. Like the Harmonia, parts of Conn’s lander’s shell were tough but lightweight foil. “If you’re not trying to lift off later.”

  “But we have a few days of air on board,” Conn said. “We need to pressurize and fill the vehicle with air for when we need to recharge our O2 tanks.” She realized then that Daniels and Izzy didn’t have any air that wasn’t in their tanks. They would need to get the portal built and use it to go home much sooner than they anticipated. As it was, they would have to use Yars’ Revenge’s air when their tanks ran out.

  “Got patch?” Daniels said.

  They did, and Daniels cut some foil from the outer shell of Yars’ Revenge. Ryan dug out the hull patch and epoxy and set to patching the hole.

  “What does that even mean?” Izzy said. “Yars’ Revenge?”

  “Yars’ Revenge and Adventure were both early Atari video games,” Ryan said. “They called the spacecraft Adventure, and we just followed their obvious lead.” He seemed engaged and alert patching the hole and answering questions, much better than he was when they first landed.

  “I don’t know my sixty-year-old video games,” Izzy said. “I’m just excited Half Life 3 is coming out next year.” If Conn didn’t know better, she would swear Ryan and Izzy were flirting. She expected to feel proprietary, if not a pang of jealousy, but she wasn’t Ryan’s biggest fan at the moment, not after his shenanigans in the lander.

  Conn stood atop a small, flat boulder, and regarded the scene in front of her. Daniels was wrapping his equipment in foil, Ryan patching the hole in the lander, and Izzy was in-between, putting together parts of the portal that were intact. Conn surveyed the landscape. It no longer looked to her like it had been waiting for eons for life to come around. It looked almost lived-in. It looked to her like New Mexico, or Colorado. Just redder. It was a strange sensation, like they had traveled months and wound up not that far from home. She supposed that once the portals were operational, it really would seem like it was not far from home.

  To her left, Conn saw a gully—what looked to her like a gully, though the water that had carved it had evaporated long ago. There was something strange about the gully, though. If she wasn’t seeing things, it looked like there was dust being kicked up from the bottom of it.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  “Conn!” Izzy called. “Look out!”

  Conn felt something strike her breathing bubble hard, and her knees buckled. She dropped, hearing the awful hiss of escaping air.

  PART TWO
/>   Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

  —Horace, Epistles

  (You too are in danger when your neighbor’s house is on fire.)

  EIGHTEEN

  Martians

  July 5, 2039

  The Pelorians had given the secret of nitrogen power to the Chinese, in exchange (almost everyone agreed now) for China invading Russia, which China would turn over to the Pelorians. The Pelorians would then use Russia’s nuclear arsenal against the US. Conn had never known for sure whether the last part was true. She doubted anyone but Pelorian and Chinese officials at the highest levels knew for sure what the bargain was. Her Pelorian friend Persisting and Yongpo had been the ones to initiate negotiations, but talks had moved up the ladder quickly, beyond those two.

  But the nitrogen formula couldn’t be contained in China. America had learned it in the spring of 2039, some six months after Russia had got hold of it, and both countries were busy overhauling their energy infrastructures as a result. The combination of the promise of cheap power, and a great deal of work to be done, pushed wars to the back burners of the world—including the war between Russia and China.

  America was still at war with the Pelorians, but it hadn’t been a shooting war in some time. The Pelorian fortress on the far side of the moon was massive, a forty-kilometer-by-forty-kilometer area with a mountain at the center covered in a kind of force field. The Pelorians lived underneath the mountain, inside an enormous lava tube. There they had presumably built a home, with all the necessities, that seemed as though it could withstand any assault. It certainly withstood the Americans’ feeble attempts to bomb it from orbit.

  No one had heard from the Pelorians for at least two years. As far as anyone knew. But the aliens could still create avatars. The Pelorians had at first claimed each avatar was remotely controlled, because, as the Aphelial Conn met while rescuing Grant told her, creating a life form and uploading one’s consciousness into it was a violation of the moral norms of advanced technological civilizations. But that was exactly what the Pelorians did, creating an army of autonomous spies and agents.

  Their secret revealed, the Pelorians, supposedly, made all their avatars go away. They remained silent, ignoring America’s provocations, keeping to themselves on the moon. No Aphelials appeared, as the Pelorians had suggested might happen. Humankind was functionally as alone as it had been before the Pelorians’ arrival.

  Until it went to Mars.

  # # #

  Conn woke, disoriented. She felt like she couldn’t get enough air. She lay on a smooth surface, but the walls were craggy and rocky. Daniels was watching her, in a chair next to her. Izzy De Maria was standing next to Daniels.

  “Where are we?” Conn gasped.

  “Under the surface of Mars,” Daniels said.

  “How are we breathing?”

  “They have a whole ecosystem down here. The air is thin, but breathable.”

  “They. OK.” Conn pulled herself up to a seated position. “What happened?”

  “I gather that they weren’t supposed to hit anybody in the head, but they hit you in the head,” Izzy said. “You’ve got a pretty good gash there.” Conn felt it and winced. “Put a dent in your breathing bubble and a small crack. I duct taped it.”

  “And they seemed really apologetic,” Daniels added, “like they thought the one who did it was an asshole.”

  “And who is this?”

  “Another alien race,” Daniels said. “Humanoid, like your Aphelials. Not as big.”

  “Indigenous?”

  “Doubtful,” Daniels said. “But we can’t talk to them. I tried Basalese, it didn’t work.”

  “Where’s Ryan?”

  “Got us,” Izzy said. “Somehow we got separated. They wanted to leave you in here and bring us somewhere else, but we insisted on staying with you. By then, Ryan was already gone.”

  “Thanks, you guys. Really.” Conn swung her legs down off the table. She spotted an old-time pressure suit hanging on the wall and a helmet on the shelf next to it. “Wait,” Conn said. “Is that Cole Heist’s pressure suit?” She realized it was a dumb question. It said HEIST on the left breast, and there was an American flag on the right. And now that Conn looked closer, parts of it were charred and/or melted.

  “Apparently,” Daniels said.

  “Don’t tell me he’s here,” Conn said.

  “Who? Heist? No. He’s dead. Everybody saw him die.”

  “They must have scavenged his suit,” Izzy added.

  “Had to,” Conn agreed. She looked around. They were in some kind of hollow, a hole in the rock off a corridor. It opened directly out into the hall, no door. There was a gritty stone floor, but worn almost smooth. The room was bare except for a table, a chair, and a space suit.

  “Well. No one seems to be keeping us here.”

  “Nope.”

  “Shall we go find Ryan?”

  “Let’s.”

  # # #

  The corridor floors were stone as well, but worn smoother than the floor of the hollow. Rock formed the walls and ceiling, as though they were in a cave. It appeared to be some sort of natural network which the aliens had extended. Lava tubes, like the Pelorians’ beneath the moon, possibly. Soft, artificial light was somehow built into the ceiling, though they couldn't determine what it was made of.

  The technology necessary to come to Mars in the first place, and to carve out a network of tunnels and hollows, was not in evidence. Conn wondered if they even had a forger—a machine the Pelorians used to convert the metals and minerals in the moon’s soil into structures and machinery.

  The aliens in the corridors and inside the various hollows along the way avoided them. They were humanoid, as Daniels had said, and slightly taller than the average man. Conn supposed if they had been born and lived on Earth, with three times the gravity they were used to on Mars, they would be five or six inches shorter, which would make them smaller than humans. Other than her.

  They had a red skin tone with dark, almost black, blotches. Like the Aphelials, the blotches seemed to appear, shift, and disappear as perspective changed. They were clothed from armpits to knees in earth-toned garments that looked like they might be made out of burlap, something tough and uncomfortable. Black, coarse, short hair sat atop each of their heads.

  Many aliens they might have encountered turned in another direction to avoid them. Many ducked into narrower offshoots of the corridor they were walking as the four approached. Sensible enough, though Conn wondered why more of them weren’t freaking out—there was no commotion, no buzz of anxiety, or dread, or even curiosity.

  They came to a common area the size of a large hotel ballroom. Around the perimeter, at least two dozen adult aliens, and a couple of what looked like children, walked, talked, and kept an eye on the humans. In the center of the room, water dripped from the ceiling, and below, several hardy plants grew.

  “Ice melt, looks like,” Izzy said, gesturing toward the plants. “The aliens must need oxygen, or create carbon dioxide as a waste product.”

  “That assumes the plants are like terrestrial ones,” Conn said. None of them recognized the plants, which had long, thin, curled leaves that made a carpet of them look like spikes on the ground.

  “Does anyone here speak Basalese?” Daniels called out in Basalese. “Can anyone help us?” No reaction, besides what would be expected if someone came into a room and shouted something in a language they didn’t understand.

  Conn figured she should try. “Does anybody here speak Aphelial?” Daniels squinted at her. Aphelial sounded as alien to him as Basalese did to most humans. “Anyone at all?”

  One alien did a double-take, and Conn approached him.

  “You speak Aphelial, don’t you?” she asked. He brought up his hands and waggled his palms at her. Conn wasn't sure what the gesture meant—I speak a little? Keep away from me?

  “We need help, and nobody understands us. If you can speak Aphelial, please, please help us.” The alie
n’s shoulders sagged. Conn knew what that meant. She motioned Izzy and Daniels over.

  Conn introduced everybody. There was no word for the alien’s name in Aphelial, nor in English. “Call him Stu,” Conn told Izzy and Daniels. Conn had no idea why he seemed like a Stu. But she could tell he didn’t want to deal with them, and she was grateful he'd agreed to do so.

  NINETEEN

  Take Us To Your Leader

  July 5 - 6, 2039

  Stu needed to return home before he escorted the three humans anywhere, so they followed him down one of the corridors radiating from the common area. Each of the seven or eight such corridors was marked with a foreign symbol. Numbers? Letters?

  The three waited outside while Stu went inside the hollow that was his home. A corridor that had seen a fair amount of traffic up to that point became deserted.

  “Maybe he ditched us.”

  “Did you two get a message out before we got underground?” Comm wasn’t working, but that was to be expected underground.

  “I was talking the whole time we were walking here,” Izzy said. “Including telling them that we were going underground. They’ll get worried after too long, though.”

  “We find Ryan, the four of us get out of here,” Conn said, hoping it was that easy. “Give ‘em a call.”

  Stu re-emerged. He bade the three follow him back to the common area and down another corridor from there.

  “What do we call your kind, Stu?” Conn asked. “We are humans.” Stu’s answer sounded like Sidereals. “Thank you. Do many Sidereals speak the Aphelial language?”

  “Almost none,” Stu said. “Two others from my generation, three from the next. Our history with the Aphelials is… complicated. It is prudent to have someone who can speak their language.”

  “Does anyone speak Basalese?”