The Martian Race (21 page)

“Wow. So what's the bottom line?”

“The planet's not quite dead. There's probably volcanic activity still going on in that big cone, Apollinaris Patera, about two hundred klicks north of here.”

“Wait a minute, that means—”

He grinned. “Yep, your vent could be nice and warm down below, probably always has been. A comfy place for life.”

They were both grinning, like two schoolkids with a common dream.

They didn't wait for dinner to call up the satellite downloads. As usual there were routine situation analyses—“sit-als”—done Earthside, from the raw data their hab systems shipped out automatically. The satellite web above kept Mission Control in constant touch, which could be a pain. Now that they were in trouble, it was a comfort.

Marc insisted on going through the sit-als first, but there were no red flags. When every breath you take is brought to you by a complex set of overlapping functions, chemical and hydraulic and electrical, you pay attention to early warning signs.

Then Marc palmed the console to General Messages and there was Axelrod, as they had hoped. Gray trousers pressed to razor-sharp, blue yachting jacket, yellow shirt, matching gray tie; a color treat. Julia tried to read his mood and failed. Probably pointless, given the face filters.

“Hope you-all had a good day. Ever'body here's awaiting your update on the repairs. I know it's slow work, but you're the best. I've got every confidence in you.”

“Quick compliments,” Raoul said, “always a bad sign.”

“I've been negotiating hot and heavy with Airbus, just like I said I would. Offered them a lot, I got to say. If their nuke is so powerful, you'd figure they could take some of you back, right?” He blinked. “Not that I'm thinkin’ you'll need it, of course. This is just for backup. Only …”

Unusually, his eyes drifted off camera. “Uh-oh,” Marc said.

Axelrod's eyes swept back and Julia could tell he was suppressing very real anger, eyebrows pressing toward each other. “They turned me down flat. Just not interested, they said. No deal possible, this Chinese guy says to me, smooth as a swindle.”

Axelrod had enough sense to sigh, look down at the floor, give them time to absorb this. Julia could feel the rising rage around her, laced with suddenly tightened mouths, downcast eyes.

“They launched hoping we couldn't fix the ERV,” Marc said. “Damn! They must be celebrating now.”

“A calculated risk,” Raoul agreed. “Betting against me.”

“Against us,” Viktor insisted. “We are a team.”

“Vultures,” said Julia. She could feel her mind racing, searching for an angle, a new plan, a way out.

Axelrod gazed at them forlornly. “Wouldn't even
discuss
options. Like talking to a man who holds all the cards. They just smiled and ‘expressed concern’ “—here his eyebrows rose, then crashed down again—”and said they did not want to deal with us at all.
At all.”

“They just brushed us aside?” Julia asked incredulously.
All our hopes, our plans, our hard work here … what will it all add up to if we can't get home?
She felt a thin tendril of despair.

Viktor scowled. “Me, if I were Airbus, I would worry about us later. After I am on the ground.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Julia.

“They must be approaching fast,” Viktor said crisply. “They will be worrying about aerobraking. Their trajectory, if they land soon, maybe two weeks from now, it brings them in with higher delta vee than we had. Maybe seven, eight kilometers per second. That is a lot of energy to burn up.”

“It's only possible if they're a smaller ship than ours,” said Raoul.

“They can't have much room on board, then,” Julia said, groaning inwardly.

“No, this isn't coming from the Airbus crew,” Marc said. “The goddamned suits are calling these shots.”

“Do they wear suits in China?” Julia asked. “More like uniforms.”

“Meaning this is essentially decision of government?” Viktor said calmly, plainly trying to keep the discussion focused and professional.

“Airbus is a collaboration of businesses that might as well be state bureaucracies,” Julia said. “Who knows how they think?”

“Or if,” Raoul added.

“Look at it positively,” Julia said, though she certainly wasn't feeling that way. “Maybe they are just counting on Raoul's fixes working, once we get that repair kit they're delivering.”

Marc said sourly, “Yeah, the hundred-million-dollar kit.”

“Somehow I don't think that's it,” Raoul said somberly.

Axelrod had continued speaking through their discussion. The words “… your fuel?” came clearly across as Raoul stopped speaking.

“Hey,” Julia said. “What's he saying? Are we recording this?”

“Sure thing,” said Marc, sitting down again. “In fact, this
is
a recording. The squirt came in while we were doing sit-als.”

“Back it up. Let's hear what he said about fuel.”

“Keying search on words ‘at all,’ okay.”

A brief pause. Axelrod again stared at them from the screen, eyebrows lowered. “At all,” he said. He shook his head in disbelief. “I'd even put the fuel in the ERV on the table to get the discussion going.” His voice lowered. Quietly he said, “Bottom line is, they don't think they need us to win. Now, my info is that their nuke is too small to be carrying fuel for the round-trip. Maybe you have some ideas about what they could use, besides our methane/oxy? I'd love to hear them.” He suddenly looked squarely into the vid pickup. “I have no idea what they're planning, but just to make sure, have you thought about protecting your fuel?”

A shocked silence descended on the crew.

Axelrod looked apologetic as he continued. “Now, my lawyers tell me the Law of the Sea defines a derelict as an unmanned vessel, so as long as someone is aboard the ERV it can't be salvaged by someone else.”

“What's he talking about?” Julia yelled. “Airbus is going to
steal
our fuel? Oh, God, the man's mad.”

“Maybe not,” said Viktor amiably. “Why pay when can just take?”

“That's a ridiculous idea,” said Julia. “What kind of mind would dream up something like that? This isn't ‘Terry and the Pirates,’ this is real life. We know the Airbus crew. They're like us. Astronauts! Civilized people! They don't act like that.”

“Do, and did,” said Viktor. “Mutinies aboard ships not uncommon in ‘civilized’ British Navy.”

“I take his point,” said Raoul. “Thirty billion dollars is a lot of money. People have killed for a lot less.”

Julia looked around. “Marc? Do you agree, too? Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?”

Marc shrugged. “I dunno. It seems far-fetched, but there's no harm being prepared. Maybe one of us
should
sleep in the ERV.”

He looked at Viktor.

Viktor shrugged. “We wait until Airbus arrives, or until we get better information about situation.”

“My repair shop's already there. I can go,” said Raoul.

“Good. Is settled.” Viktor stood up. “I go cook dinner.”

That's all it takes,
thought Julia sourly.
They're blithely preparing for an invasion from Earth! From planetary mission to action film in the space of a few minutes.

She felt her anger welling up. Out there, just a few tens of meters below the ground, was Mars's greatest secret, and she would never get there at this rate. Not while her crewmates played their ridiculous little boys’ games.

She stomped her way back to her cabin.

15

JANUARY 17, 2018

T
HE NEXT DAY SHE GOFERED AGAIN, BUT THERE WASN'T MUCH BUSINESS
.

Raoul spent most of his time in his ERV workshop, carefully fashioning collars around the plumbing he had repaired. A lot of the wrecked metal he had to melt, recast, and rework on a lathe or hot-press foundry. These tools were little miracles of lightweight design, hauled from Earth at his insistence.

His judgment had paid off in spades. Without these beautifully engineered instruments they would have been doomed from their first day here, unable even to begin repairing the damage the ERV had suffered on its landing. But now Raoul complained, when he was tired and down at the end of every day, about how little he had brought. Every evening he found a new variant on “If I'd just brought a …”

So Julia gave him—and Viktor, who with his bum ankle labored as well as he could at detail work in the ERV shop—all the help she could. But a machinist she wasn't. After a few mistakes Raoul discouraged them from even coming into the ERV bay where he worked.

Getting in and out of anything—ERV, habitat, the pressured rover—was so laborious, they kept the “lock-pass-throughs” (a NASA term) to a minimum. And with every one they brought red dust fines into the ERV, even with the two-shower system designed to wash them away.

So by midmorning she was out of work. She was getting away with a nonprotocol method, running errands for Raoul and Viktor in a skin-suit instead of the bulky, full-pressure lobster shell she should have used. The skinsuits were highly elastic jobs that sealed the wearer up at high enough pressure to work, without using the pressure joints and elaborate infrastructure of the big suits. Of course, even with a battery pack and electrical wiring to heat it, the skinsuit demanded an outer layer of arctic-style jacket and leggings. She felt like the Pillsbury dough boy, but better off than she would in the full pressure, tin can suit.

And nobody had ever mastered the cycle in a lobster suit, either. She pedaled the tricycle around on her errands, the movements far easier in her skinsuit, and relished the almost nostalgic feel of it.

Biking on Mars!
Even with three balloon tires to keep her gliding over the sand, it
felt
like a bike ride. Cruising along summer avenues, or cross-country, had been a childhood pleasure. She could not help but cast her mind a mere half year ahead, when she would be biking down to the shimmering beach with her parents, a warm wind sending her hair streaming, Viktor laughing beside her …

Maybe
, she reminded herself sternly.

After two years, the crew functioned smoothly together, anticipating one another's needs wordlessly. The efficiency of true teamwork bore fruit: now they were ahead of schedule for the next engine test.

Still, she could not let go of her own itchy ideas. The night before, she had lain beside Viktor in the cool darkness and let her thoughts run. Or rather, spin pointlessly, with no traction to guide them.

She needed a good, solid talk, but sensed that Viktor was too distracted to really hear her. Time to have a session with Erika, her Earth-side counselor. She was trying to think of a way to work it in when Marc came inside with another task.

As biologist, she managed the hab's life support. The air scrubbers needed adjustment and filter changes. It was her turn to do the housekeeping, too. They fought a steady battle to keep dust down. Their suit shower plus self-shower converted the virulent peroxides on the dust surface to oxygen, a useful gain, and left her with watery soil for the greenhouse. They used a toilet that neatly separated solid and liquid waste, and the urine got recycled.

The one trick the bioengineers had not managed was converting the solids to anything useful or even nonsickening. Let the next expedition “realize existing in situ resources,” as the NASA manuals had put it, by composting.

The biological protocols demanded that they bury their waste here. Now their third capsule of wonderful waste was ready. “Let's do it now,” Marc said. “One less item on the list for the final checkout.”

It took two hours for her and Marc to get the awkward plastic liner out of the hab underskirting and onto the hauling deck of the dune buggy. Amazing, how large half a year of four people's shit was! A big, brown mass inside a mercifully opaque plastic sack, compacted and frozen solid. They had to do this—in full pressure suits, of course. Marc had already dug the pit for it a few klicks away, using Rover Boy's back-hoe. The peroxide dust would probably eat through the plastic within a few years, but then it would also neutralize the biological elements of the mess. Here was the bizarre surface chemistry's sole advantage—it made the risk of contamination tiny. No isolation lab on Earth was remotely as hostile to organic chemistry.

Mars taught hard lessons. How much Mother Earth did for humans without their noticing, for one. Recycling air, water, and food was an intricate dance of chemistry and physics, still poorly understood. She had to tinker with their systems constantly. Let the CO
₂
rise and they could all be dead before anyone noticed anything wrong. Watch the moisture content of the hab's air or they would all get “suit throat”— drying out of the throat until voices rasped.

Humans were walking litterbugs. The four of them shed human dander, duly vacuumed up and used in the greenhouse for valuable proteins and microorganisms. Early on, she had set out a sample—“a dish of dander,” she had called it in a published Letter to
Nature
—and Mars had killed every single cell within an hour. This surface was the most virulent clean room in the solar system.

Finally she could distract herself no longer from her inner conflict. She told the others she needed a break and went into the hab. “Good, rest,” Viktor sent on comm.

First, she showered twice and had a tiny glass of cognac—a minor breach of rules—to put the dung job behind her.

As soon as she had water on for tea, she turned on some piano pieces by Chopin. They all had divergent musical tastes. Viktor liked awful, moody Tschaikovsky and Mahler, Raoul some skippy South American steel-drum bands, Marc syrupy string gloop. Seldom could they agree on music over the hab speakers for long. Instead, they listened to their headphones. Safety dictated that they not play music while in their suits, because sound was a useful warning.

Chopin's brilliant, fast runs were soothing as she sat herself before the vid camera, needing a talk session. The real-time link was open, as it should have been, so she unloaded all her pent-up pressures on her counselor Earthside—Erika the Eager, Julia's private name for her. Julia had gone for days without sending anything to Erika, and now, alone in the hab, she found all sorts of largely unsorted emotions gushing out.