Missing!

by Brad Strickland

  MARS HAS A MILLION DIFFERENT WAYS TO KILL YOU….

  Follow the adventures of teens living on Mars in the

  MARS YEAR ONE TRILOGY

  # 1 Marooned!

  # 2 Missing!

  # 3 Marsquake!

  Beginning Summer 04

  For Neil and Colin Butler

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First Aladdin Paperbacks edition October 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by Brad Strickland and the Estate of Thomas E. Fuller

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster

  Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Designed by Felicity Erwin

  The text of this book was set in Simoncini Garamond.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Library of Congress Control Number 2003116539

  ISBN 0-689-86401-9

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86401-8

  eISBN 13: 978-1-439-11384-4

  MARS YEAR ONE Missing!

  CHAPTER 1

  Sean Dee found two things hard to take about his new home. It was too crowded, and yet at the same time, it was too lonely. The colony on Mars was home to several thousand people, but only twenty of them were under twenty-one years old. Sean was fifteen, and sometimes he almost wished he were back on Earth.

  Not often, though, and not even when the work was the hardest and the most boring. He was sweating heavily as he worked in one of the greenhouses that provided the colonists with vegetables. The plants grew on mesh screens, their roots spread out and constantly fed with dripping water. The water, the booster lights, and the heater made the greenhouses the warmest and most humid environment on the planet.

  Sean had been setting out soybean seedlings. He paused to wipe the stinging sweat out of his eyes—in the low gravity of Mars it crept slowly, even more annoying than it would have been on Earth. The greenhouse dome was so large that he had the illusion of being the only person in it, though he knew Sam Mackenzie and Dan Cross, two of the colony’s botanists, were in here somewhere among all the plants with at least two other volunteer workers. “Hot,” Sean grunted to no one, and then resumed his job. He fleetingly wondered what was happening back—well, not home. This was home. But what was happening back on the planet where he’d been born.

  That was a mystery to everyone on Mars. Marsport had not received a beamcast from Earth for more than five months now. The colonists on Luna, Earth’s moon, kept in constant touch and reported that the collapse on Earth seemed to have come from an economic crisis, a rash of wars, outbreaks of disease, and natural disasters that had all peaked at the same time. The Lunatics, as they liked to call themselves, had decided to ride it out. They could do so without much worry—the international Luna colony was over fifty years old, sprawling, well established, and self-sufficient.

  The story on Mars was different. The Martian colonists were not quite there yet, not ready for the ties to Earth to be cut. But literally overnight they had determined to stick it out on Mars, to try to become independent. The results included food and water rationing, absolute cooperation, and work. Hard work. Grueling work. Work that left Sean and all his friends exhausted, yearning for sleep, grainy-eyed, and foggy-minded.

  A day on Mars was a little longer than an Earth day—about thirty-seven minutes longer—but that meant nothing when you considered that the twenty kids in the Asimov Project had to put in six hours a day in school and then eight hours at work. That left eight hours for sleeping and two hours for meals. The extra thirty-seven minutes, they joked, was for recreation and social life. It wasn’t enough.

  But the discomforts and the inconveniences didn’t mean much to Sean. He was where he belonged, where he’d fought to be, and he would take whatever Mars threw at him. Sean finished his planting and gasped deep lungfuls of the moist air. At first that had been a great novelty on arid Mars. Now, though, he was used to it and found the humidity more an annoyance than anything else.

  He mopped his face with a towel and looked around again at the crops growing without any soil at all: potatoes nearly as big as his head, beans, corn—American corn, maize—tomatoes, and other vegetables. The greenhouse let in the weak light of the sun, and solar and wind-powered generators supplied power to the booster lamps, so the greenhouses were about the brightest places on Mars. After a few hours in one, Sean’s eyes began to ache, itch, and burn. At least his shift was almost over.

  Sam MacKenzie, the director of Greenhouse 7, came over smiling and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good day’s work, Sean. Planting’s done now in this greenhouse. Good news—we’ve passed production already, and we have two days’ harvest left. You’ll be picking beans tomorrow.”

  “Great,” Sean said with a tired smile. Production was the minimum level for survival. Every vegetable over the production level meant a little breathing space, a little edge. No one on Mars was gaining weight, because the food rationing meant that each person received just the level of calories he or she needed to live and work. On the other hand, Mars had a low gravity, so everyone weighed only a third of Earth normal, anyway. Sean’s first weeks on Mars had been spent largely learning how to walk without bouncing up into the air or lurching into the walls.

  Sean plodded through the passageways connecting the greenhouse to his dorm. He couldn’t help yawning, his mouth opening so wide that he could hear the creak of his jaw joints. Farming was hard work, even when the plants grew dangling from nets, their roots bathed in a constant flow of nutrient-enriched water.

  Water. That was another problem for the struggling Martian colony. Sean had never really appreciated the availability of water on Earth. It took care of itself: Water vapor rose from the oceans, lakes, and rivers, formed clouds, and the clouds showered rain and snow back down. Water was just there, never in critically short supply.

  But Mars had no water cycle. The surface had no available water at all, except at the Poles, and that was in the form of ice. All the water on Mars had seeped down far below the surface eons ago. Much of it had combined with minerals, including iron, and was locked up in rust, which had given Mars its famous red coloring. Some water remained as permafrost, and when Marsport had been founded to the south of the great volcano Olympus Mons, one reason for the site had been that deep pockets of permafrost had been discovered there. But deep wells had drained the accessible supply, and now no more remained.

  The water the colony had was endlessly recycled. However, nothing could prevent a slow, steady loss as water vapor escaped whenever a work crew went onto the surface or through slow oxidation of materials within Marsport itself.

  At the rate they were going, Dr. Simak said, the colony was more likely to die of thirst than to starve. Dr. Amanda Simak was the executive director of Marsport and also Sean’s legal guardian—if Earth legality meant anything anymore. She was a sternfaced woman who never showed favoritism, and Sean didn’t see nearly as much of her as he would have liked. She was also the one who made the hardest decisions on the planet. And she had just made one that Sean knew would cause a lot of argument.

  He was right. Jennifer Laslo, an active, intense blonde girl about Sean’s age, was pacing the common room of Sean’s dorm wing, waving her arms and sputtering. Two of
Scan’s friends, eighteen-year-old Patrick Nakoma and fourteen-year-old Alex Benford, were sitting at the table. Alex rolled his eyes as Sean came in. “We know, we know,” he said to Jenny as Sean sank into a chair. “But what can we do?”

  “There’s got to be something,” Jenny insisted. “Tighter rationing, or speeding up the pipeline, or something! I mean, Lake Ares is sacred. It’s the only body of water on the whole planet ! And it’s full of fish!”

  “It isn’t full,” Patrick objected. “There aren’t enough fish to harvest any for food.”

  “But they have a right to live, to establish themselves!” Jenny said, red-faced. “Sean, you tell them!”

  Sean held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa. I came in late. Are you talking about using the water from Lake Ares for drinking?”

  “Of course I am!” Jenny said. “And not just for drinking, but for hydroponics and washing and—it isn’t time! We were supposed to do that in three or four years, after we’d created more lakes. Look, Lake Ares is a stable environment right now, but if we draw it down, we’re throwing everything off balance. We could kill all twenty species of fish, and if they go, there’ll never be any more. Sean, you’ve got to persuade Dr. Simak to hold off—”

  “I can’t persuade her to do anything,” Sean said. “But aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? I heard the announcement a few hours ago, while I was working. The council has said that if the pipeline can’t be completed in a month, we’ll start taking some water from Lake Ares, that’s all. There’s still a chance.”

  “So you’re taking her side!” Jenny raged. “How can the pipeline be finished in a month? There are all the warming and pumping stations to bring online, and there are kilometers and kilometers of pipe to get into place, and … and … it’s just not going to happen!”

  Alex, a muscular, cheerful young man of African descent, shook his head. “You can’t say that. Look, I’ve flown over a lot of the pipeline. It’s more complete than you think. I’d say there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance.”

  “And besides,” Patrick put in, “even if the pipeline can’t be finished for, oh, six months, we won’t make that much of a difference in Lake Ares. We may lower it by a few meters, but there’s a lot of water in there.”

  “That’s what they used to think on Earth,” Jenny said, her voice shaking with anger. “And where are all the elephants now, huh? And the mountain gorillas, and the giraffes? Extinct in the wild, every one of them! I thought Marsport was supposed to be a new beginning, a way of living with the planet instead of living off it like some kind of parasite!”

  Alex had taken out his belt computer and unfolded it. He tapped away at the keyboard. The room darkened as he entered a command, and above the table a holographic display glowed into life: the globe of Mars. It hung there, translucent, as a yellow line sketched itself southward from the base of Olympus Mons, zigzagging its way across plains and hills. It split into four branches. Three of them snaked their way toward ancient volcanoes lying south and east of the colony: Ascraeus, Pavoni, and Arsai. South of Arsai, a lonely thread wound its way across the plain of Daedalia and the uplands of Aonia and Argentium, terminating near the southern polar cap.

  “Look,” Alex said, working at his keyboard. “There’s permafrost at the bases of the three volcanoes. If we can tap into just one deposit, that will buy us time. And if we can get the Schmidt station working, we don’t have to worry for hundreds of years. There’s plenty of ice there, and more comes in every day!”

  “I know about the Bradbury Project, thank you,” Jenny said. “But the Schmidt station is a long way from here, and anything could happen. An ice meteorite from Ganymede could smash into the pipeline, or—”

  “Not possible,” Patrick cut in. “The trajectory is so flat that ninety-nine percent of the incoming meteorites flash into vapor high in the atmosphere. A few falling chunks of ice won’t destroy the whole station.”

  “But it isn’t working yet!” Jenny yelled. “And what if we get along so well by using water from Lake Ares that the council decides we have plenty of time? Things go wrong! You know that things always go wrong!”

  Sean felt goose bumps on his arms. He had begun life as one of the few survivors of a terrible biological terrorist act. He had later spent years as a wild kid roaming the streets and underground tunnels of old New York. Somewhere along the line he had picked up a talent. Sean could almost instinctively estimate the chances of something going wrong. A sense of doom had led him to beg Dr. Simak to make room for him in the Mars colony, and that sense had been proved right when Earth suddenly fell out of touch with the colonists. Sean had looked at the pipeline proposals too—and he had to side with Jenny.

  Every instinct in him told him that, yes, something was bound to go wrong.

  Still, the argument was not something Sean could settle then and there. He was bone-weary, and when Jenny continued to rage about boys and their stupidity, he just went into his room, closed the door, and collapsed onto his bed.

  Another thing that was rationed on Mars was space. The materials that made up most of the colony had been prefabricated on Luna and sent to Mars years ago. That meant that all the bedrooms were built exactly alike, small but packed with hidden essentials. The bed folded down from one wall. An electronic center in the opposite wall could show movies or television—though the colonists now had only their own homegrown programs, since Earth was off-line—or could play music, become a computer console, or serve a dozen other functions. The room was so small that, lying in bed, Sean was able to reach out with his foot and touch the screen.

  Still, it was his, a room of his own. It had been bare and sterile when he’d first moved in, but little by little Sean had been putting his stamp on it. One wall now had photos of himself and Amanda when they lived back on Earth, along with an interactive map of Mars, pictures of Alex at the controls of a Martian airplane, and a picture of Jenny laughing. And the room had fallen into the normal disorder that Sean lived in. His clothes weren’t stored neatly in a closet, but spread out across the floor so he could dress efficiently.

  Sean sniffed. The room even smelled like him.

  Showers were rationed too. You got two showers a week, and if you couldn’t soap up and rinse off in two minutes, you had to scrape suds from your hide with a towel and spend the next few days feeling itchy. All Marsport was beginning to smell of human sweat.

  Sean drifted into a deep sleep. He usually dreamed, often bad dreams of the old days on Earth when he’d stalked, killed, and eaten rats, or elusive dreams of his parents, who had died before he’d really known them. In recent weeks, though, he had always fallen into bed so tired that he couldn’t remember any dreams at all.

  His stomach woke him after some hours. He hadn’t bothered to eat, and in the dead of night he woke up hungry. He looked at the screen at the foot of his bed, his eyes bleary. Three hours until he had to get up and get ready for school.

  He rolled out of bed and went barefoot out into the common room. No one was there at this time of night. He went to the mess unit—a room identical to his dorm room, except that it was taken up with food storage and a heating unit. He pulled a tray from a dwindling reserve of Earth food. It was flat and loosely sealed in a special foil. Sean didn’t even read the label, just popped it into the heating unit.

  While the food was cooking, he got a glass and slid it into the drink dispenser. He hesitated, then selected plain water. Two hundred and fifty milliliters poured into the glass. That was the full allotment for one meal.

  The tray popped out looking puffier. The food had been rehydrated and heated, and when Sean peeled the foil off, he discovered he was eating pizza, with a dessert of hot apples. The aromas of cinnamon and tomato sauce drifted up. They smelled better than he did, anyway.

  As Sean munched the pizza, he reflected that it was probably about the last Earth food he would eat. The last supply ship from Earth had given the colony six months of supplies, but some of those had been placed into long
-term storage in case of emergencies, and the growing self-sufficiency of the colony meant that for six days out of the week, the colonists could eat homegrown foods. Soon they would be doing that seven days a week.

  Just as well, Sean thought. The pizza was too chewy, and it tasted less like pizza than like a pizza box—cardboard-y, bland, without any real zest. Still, he ate every bite. You didn’t waste food in Marsport.

  The apple dessert was better, though the rehydrated apples had the consistency of mush. Sean saved about half his water for the end of the meal, and he sat sipping it thoughtfully. There were so many things he had always taken for granted back on Earth. Water, of course, but also basic things like, well, like air. The Martian atmosphere was too thin to support life, except perhaps at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Mariner Valley. Even there, you’d gasp like someone at the top of one of Earth’s highest mountains. And of course you’d freeze—Mars was cold, and only very gradually getting warmer.

  The Bradbury Project was part of the effort to terraform Mars, to make it more like Earth. Far away on Ganymede, one of the larger moons of Jupiter, a giant robotic machine tirelessly scooped up water ice, shaped it into projectiles, and fired it with a mass-driver into space. The ice bullets whipped around Jupiter and spiraled inward toward the sun on a long orbit that took years. At the end, they were captured by the gravity of Mars and entered into orbit around the planet—orbits designed to break down so that after a few passes, the masses of ice came whipping through the air, the heat of entering the atmosphere stripping them into vapor and ice crystals.

  The ice meteors did two things. First, they made the air of Mars thicker and richer, allowing it to trap more heat from the sun and to warm the surface. One day, if the plan went as it should, the air of Mars would be thick enough to breathe.

  The other thing, of course, was to supply more water to a very dry planet.

  Sean finished his drink. He used the table’s built-in computer to recall the hologram Alex had displayed.