Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  “You’re not going down today,” said Maguire.

  “There is no question of it,” said Jensen. “I will not clear Dr Holland for activity in the caves until he has passed his emergency drill and suit operation tests and a further medical from Dr Vance.”

  “I passed all those already,” said Holland.

  “I make everyone do them again here, under Martian conditions. You passed these tests on Earth.”

  “Well yes, I did them again here, the medical twice...”

  “Then you must undergo them here under my supervision. Please understand, Dr Holland, that the caves are exceptionally dangerous. There is no environment like them on Earth. Acid rains down from the organisms in the cave roofs periodically, and even at those times of the year when the methanogens are the least active, the atmosphere is poisonous, and explosive. We have problems with corrosive fog, and there are issues with rockfalls.”

  “The area’s geologically stable, isn’t it?” said Holland.

  “Strictly speaking, yes. Mars is very nearly geologically inert. But the ground here is a little shaky, partly because of the troglobite remnant activity – they’ve eaten the place hollow – and the Chinese...” began Maguire.

  “They are blasting on the far side of the mountain,” said Jensen. “I co-ordinate with their safety officer. They are reasonable, scientists like us, but they have their orders as we have ours, and no matter what they say the People’s Dynasty Government is attempting to interfere with the TF project, however tangentially. They don’t agree with the UN charter. Their ‘seismic tests’ are sabotage. It can and does lead to rockfall.” He checked a screen. “But that really is the least of your worries.”

  “Jensen...” Maguire jerked his head toward the window.

  “What are you... oh. Yes. Seeing as you are not going into the caves for a while, you can at least have a look... Dr Vance?”

  The woman looked up, eyes still surprised. She stroked a gelscreen and the shield over the window retracted, letting in a wide slot of white light to mix with the blue.

  They stood in silence as the shutter clacked up into its housing.

  “Dr Holland,” said Jensen. “I give you the caves of Mars.”

  Holland walked to the window. He was looking into a large cavern, roughly spherical. Eaten out of the rock by the actions of millions of years of acid-producing organisms, it breached the lava tube, its walls and floors fractally pocked with further spheres that gave the rock surface the appearance of bad foamcrete. The lava tube past the airlock veered right and carried off into the dark, but the path turned left, through the tube’s broken wall, down a set of metal steps and on to the floor of the cavern. A string of lights on poles and power cables followed it.

  Maguire joined him.

  “Incredible,” said Holland.

  “It’s quite something, isn’t it? And this is just the uppermost cavern; they get bigger as they go down. This one is practically dead now, just a few organisms up here, a remnant of the remnant if you like. It’s too cold here for the range of life we see lower down.” Maguire pointed out a number of small stalactites. “Ossified snottites. I don’t think there were ever many, and certainly none of the more complex forms. And fairy castles, not very old, which is a bit of mystery to be honest, what with everything else being so ancient. You can tell from the size of the mineral deposits they leave behind. But you’re here for that, aren’t you now?”

  “Silicon shells, deposited like coral,” said Holland. He’d only ever seen pictures before. There were little stacks of them all over the cavern, half a metre tall and cupped at the top, sparkling in the light from the path. Each one built up by the actions of microbes over untold aeons. Whole orders of life had risen and died on the evolutionarily volatile Earth, while on cold Mars life had patiently built tiny castles, crystal by crystal.

  “This is the highest point at which they’re found. They struggle up here, nothing compared with the richness you’ll find down there, like magic grottoes, they are. I’ll bet you can’t wait to get down there and see it, eh? Eh?” Maguire gave Holland a push on the shoulder.

  “Wow,” he said. He felt his sense of disconnection return. The experience was unreal.

  “Don’t use up your ‘wows’ now, you hear? You’re going to need them when you go into the lower caverns.”

  “If I may,” said Jensen. He held forefinger and middle finger up together and indicated the lines and cables running alongside the path. “I will point out some of the safety features in the caverns. Power is delivered to EM relay points around the caverns by those cables. Microwave power transmission is too dangerous, but you will always be able to recharge your equipment remotely, barring a catastrophe. Lines” – he indicated spun carbon cables hanging slackly from the walls – “to clip yourself to. They are steel where there are large concentrations of carbon-hungry methanogens. The stairs are safe, but there are many sheer drops in the caverns. While descending, it is mandatory to attach yourself to the line. Detachment from the line is permitted only after confirmation from the observation team. You will work in pairs within each expedition. It is absolutely imperative you do not lose sight of your party while you are in the chamber. Radio contact is at a short range in the cavern system; relay points, however, allow you to communicate with Deep Two and Ascraeus Base, and so to the larger Martian Grid, which allows us to send remote units down also, including the AI. You will be expected to leave your augmentation active while within the caverns at all times. Dr Vance?” Jensen called behind him. “If you please.”

  Lights flickered on, along with the whine of machinery coming online. “The centre is now at mission active status.”

  “Dr Jensen?” A voice. The AI. Holland felt his good humour crumple in on itself. “Are Panther Team proceeding ahead of schedule?”

  “No, no, I am merely demonstrating the station at full operation.” He tilted his face upwards, speaking to an indeterminate space on the ceiling, as people often did when conversing with AIs. “The advantage of having an AI here,” he said to Holland, “is that it can remotely operate the android shell and maintain a sensing presence within the observation suite. We send the carriage down with all the expeditions. She has proved quite indispensible. I am sorry, Cybele, you may go if you wish.”

  It has a name? thought Holland. First Stulynow, now Jensen, talking to the damn thing as if it were a real person.

  “Dr Holland? Cybele is asking you a question.”

  “What?”

  “I am sorry,” said the machine’s voice, too smooth, too perfect. “I wished to know if you are of Dutch extraction.”

  “No. Why on Earth would you think so?” This was too much.

  “Your nationality is stated as dual EU/ USNA, but your name is Holland.”

  “Up here, our Grid is limited,” said Jensen. “It takes an AI sixteen minutes to retrieve, from Earth, the kind of information that is instantaneously available back home. There’s a curiosity in all AI you only really see in remote outposts like this, because they have to ask questions of us rather than looking it up on the Grid. It makes them charmingly naïve. You will grow used to it.”

  Holland doubted that very much.

  “You also realise how little they actually know,” said Maguire, sotto voce, to Holland. “Lots of people are called Holland,” explained Maguire to the AI. “Maybe one of his ancestors came from there.”

  “I see. I apologise,” said Cybele.

  “We have a Dutch couple on staff,” said Maguire. “I’ll bet that’s where that came from.”

  “The Van Houdts,” said Holland, who’d read the personnel files along with everything else about the base.

  “Are you sure I am not required?” asked the AI.

  “No, no, Cybele, you can go,” said Jensen. The machine did not speak again, Although of course it hasn’t really gone anywhere, thought Holland. It is still there, recording everything, ready to appear like a bloody genie at the mention of its name. Even thinki
ng about it would probably be enough to have it pop up. He regretted the implant.

  “Each expedition contains two commanders, a leader on the team, and an overall commander here. I am responsible for overseeing the function of your equipment. Dr Vance or, if she is on the mission, Maguire or Mrs Van Houdt, will monitor your biosigns. Any one of us has the authority to call you back.”

  “We have a lot of safeguards,” said Maguire.

  “And we need them. Just brushing against a snottite down there can lead to a suit breach if unnoticed.”

  “Snottite,” repeated Jensen with distaste. “I always thought science should have more dignity to it.”

  “It did, before the geeks stopped being eccentrics and allowed their own juvenile subculture to take over the world,” said Maguire. “Linnaeus would have had a fit.”

  “Well, that’s all we have time for.” Jensen gestured to Vance, and the shutter came down, blocking off Holland’s first glimpse of the Martian remnant ecosystem. “If you’ll come with me, we should be able to take a quick look at the hard shells we use in the cavern system before Panther Team arrive to make their descent. There’s direct access from the suiting to the lava chamber, via the rolling door you saw outside.”

  “‘Panther Team’?” mouthed Holland as they followed Jensen back through the station to the entrance store.

  “Jaguar, Tiger, Panther, the three expedition designations. And why not?” said Maguire. “It’s less boring than Team One and Team Two, isn’t it now?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Silver Locusts

  2194 AD

  THE OLD ROADS up out from Canyon City were rough, and Jonah Van Houdt was flooded with adrenaline as he wrestled his quad up them. The highway that ran along the bottom of the Valles Marineris was paved, cut into the rock high off the flood plain. Trucks thundered along it, guided at ridiculous speeds by near-I. A few private groundcars swept along among the trucks: large-wheeled offroaders in the main, homesteaders coming into the city for supplies. The cars’ own systems slaved themselves to the lorries, making the most of the larger vehicles’ slipstreams. With no need to drive themselves on the road, their occupants were probably asleep; it was damn early.

  That was down there. The lights of Martian Highway 1 were way below Jonah. His quad rattled up the sloping road, a pioneer trail, blasted a century back, a quick way out of the Marineris onto the Tharsis highlands. It was dangerous as hell, and Jonah’s grandma did not like him going up it. It twisted back and forward on itself, in places running through tunnels or into natural caverns rudely opened to the sky with nGel. The road dipped up and down the uncountable subsidiary valleys and peaks of the canyon wall as it worked its way up the switchback to Tharsis, the road edge sometimes folded safely in rock, other times dropping exhilaratingly to the canyon floor miles below.

  It was Jonah’s idea of fun.

  “How high are we up, Cybele?” he shouted into his mask. His brown skin was caked in red dust. The quad’s electric engine was quiet, but its knobbled tires made a racket on the loose rock. The trail wasn’t much used, now the main Tharsis road was open, and it had been left to crumble.

  “You do not need to shout, Jonah,” came the machine’s reply. Her voice was warm. He liked that voice a lot. “I can hear you perfectly well. We are four kilometres from the valley floor.”

  “How far to go?” He had to ask; there was no signal on his implant in this part of the canyon. There was enough room in the quad’s onboard system for the family AI, so he’d borrowed her for the day, it had seemed sensible to have some back-up. He’d copied her over and deactivated the original. Even up here on Mars, the laws banning AI-splitting and copying were in force.

  Grandma Sue would be mad, but he needed the company, and the help, and Jonah was glad to spend time with the machine. She was an old model, a little slow and not very good at being human, but she never judged him or got angry, and she even flirted a little with him. He liked that.

  “You are sixteen hundred metres from the canyon rim in terms of elevation. You still have seventy kilometres of road to traverse, however.”

  It was a damn long way up that road! That was why he had set out so early, while it was still dark. Landfall was due late in the day, in the evening. He had twelve hours or so to get to the best vantage point, nearly two hundred kilometres of rough, switchy road to travel.

  Ah, he was due an adventure. His homework could wait, and as they kept telling him at school, this was history in the making. If he was living through it, he should really see at least some of it rather than sitting in a windowless classroom listening to someone else describe it. It wouldn’t wash as an excuse, but it justified the jaunt to him.

  He whooped as his quad slewed around a cone of scree. His grandma would not like the way he was driving, not one bit, but she worried too much, she’d been so protective since his mum and dad had died, suffocating Jonah with her concern. He wasn’t stupid. Life up here made people grow up fast. Grandma Sue smothered him because she loved him, and because she was sad, but it made him itchy mad. He chafed under it. He was proud of his mother and father. They were all pioneers here, life was dangerous. They’d died. That was that.

  He was smart enough and old enough to know that this was his way of grieving, and that he took risks to prove to himself that he was still alive. Knowing that meant he was at least a little bit careful. He wasn’t going to go totally off the rails.

  Just a little bit, maybe.

  The road was twenty metres wide in most places, and provided he kept wallside, he was unlikely to come to any mischief if he did come off the quad. And he hardly ever came off his quad. He kept a firm eye on his radar map, which should give him a few seconds of warning should the road be blocked anywhere.

  “Jonah, you really should return home. Your grandmother will be worried.”

  “I left her a note, didn’t I?”

  “I hardly think that will make her feel better.”

  “I’m not doing anything wrong. Besides, I told her exactly where I am going.”

  “She offered to take you with everyone else. The safe way.”

  “Cybele, this is fun! Do you understand?”

  There was a pause. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I do.”

  And she must have been enjoying the ride too, because she shut up.

  Half an hour later, they stopped for a break. Jonah took in the view, captured it on his implant. The sky was split into bars of pink, blue, and violet. The river was a braid of glittering strands, worming their way out of the Noctis Labyrinth to the west. Plantations of genegineered pines were laid out like chess squares around it. The highway was a hair-thin streak, the headlamps of cars candle flames crawling along it. Spurs of rock and outcrops on the canyon walls made the Valles a geometric puzzle of blacks and pinks. The opposite side was lost in the haze of Mars’ ever-present dust. The view was something else; not what he was going up for, but a great bonus. Best of all, the suns were coming up.

  He told his implant to film. “Cybele, could you compensate for me? I don’t want any camera wobble on this.”

  “Compensating,” said the AI.

  The sun crept over the lip of the canyon, little more than a bloated star. He filmed it and panned his head round slowly, until he was facing away from it. In the sky opposite the sun, a pulsed twinkle flashed strongly as the mirror-sat twitched its reflectors into position. Jonah was particularly pleased with the lens flare, an effect he had the implant exaggerate. A beam of concentrated sunlight swept across the landscape like a sword stroke, bringing brief light and swift shadow. The mirror satellite oriented itself, focussing a slanting ray of sunshine back down the canyon. Jonah followed the light. It ended in a broad oval, glittering off the roofs and panels of Canyon City thirty kilometres away, turning the twin lakes bracketing the settlement into brilliant white coins.

  It was hardly a sprawling metropolis, not like the places Jonah had seen in holos of Earth. “But it’s home,” he said, mimickin
g the tones of his teachers.

  He grinned. Today he felt happy. The last few years had been rough, but he was coming into himself, beginning to feel comfortable in his skin. He was growing up. It was hard to deny.

  He shut the camera in his head off.

  Up here, they were back in signal, but he ignored the multiple messages from his grandmother, sending her one back saying he’d be back in the morning, and not to worry.

  No chance of that, he thought.

  She wouldn’t be happy about this trip. Neither would the city marshal, but what was the point of one-man shelters if you never got to use them? He was packing it all into this trip – dangerous ride and overnight bivouac – because he was going to be grounded for, like, years when he got back down.

  He ate, taking quick little bites in between breaths of air from his mask. The air was so thin he felt like there was nothing going into his lungs, no matter how hard he sucked it in, and the dearth of oxygen made his head giddy and filled his vision with flashing spots. Down there, in the Valles, in the caves and buildings of Canyon City, there was just about enough oxygen, and both pressure and O-content struggled up a little higher every year. But up on the very lip of the wide open spaces of Mars, the TF programme had made so little difference yet as to be negligible.

  “I wish I didn’t have to wear this stupid mask,” he said.

  “In about a hundred years time, you will not have to,” said Cybele.

  “That’s not much use to me now.” He scratched around the seal where grit had gathered. His face sweated under it, even though it was freezing cold. His finger came away red with dust.

  “I wonder if it will be as pretty, the sunrise, when there’s hundreds of mirror-sats up there?” he said.