Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (8 page)

“Can you give me a line between my position and his last call so I’ll have a direction
?
”

“Sure,” she said. The static was worsening.

If Jack didn’t want to be found, he would have changed course immediately after his call, but it was a starting place. If I could get close enough, maybe he would hear my call. Staying here and waiting wasn’t a real option.

“I just sent the coordinates from Jack’s last call and his last five transponder pings. I had no idea he’d covered so much ground on his walkabouts.”

“How do you know that
?
” I asked.

“I’m looking at a map of his ping locations for all of his excursions. I have one for everyone who—”

“Can you send me that map
?
” If I could see where Jack had been, I might get an idea where he could hide.

Courtney paused. “Sure. It might take several tries with this bad connection, but it’s on the way.”

“Thanks,” I said and started to sign off.

“Malcolm
?
Why did Jack leave you there
?
”

“I pissed him off.”

“He’s lost it,” she said, with obvious anger in her voice. “Well, if he wasn’t already going home, he would be now. Stay put. The ground trucks are moving again, but slowly. We’re also rigging a flier to bring you some O2 canisters.”

The robotic fliers were more like powered gliders with long fragile wings. They wouldn’t get one even close to me in this wind.

“Don’t waste the flier, Courtney. I’m going to try and find Jack. Malcolm out.”

I broke the connection and pulled up the ping map on my helmet’s HUD screen. Thousands of random dots covered a topographical map with location numbers on a grid. The widely scattered dots made my eyes hurt, but I could see some patterns. Many dots were arranged in snaky lines, obviously sent while he was on the move, but there were also heavy clumps representing locations where he’d spent time.

I zoomed the view out and as the dots converged, I saw it. Most were in clumps that formed a pattern. I added in a red dot for my location and it appeared atop one of the heavy traffic clusters.

The wind buffeted me, some gusts threatening to knock me down, and dust had drifted around my feet, but I ignored it as my pulse raced and my heart thudded. I instructed my suit’s computer to ignore the noise data and only chart those points where twenty or more appeared in close proximity. Seventeen clumps appeared, evenly dispersed along a broad arc. I told the computer to consider each cluster a single point and extrapolate the pattern based on the existing group.

The new pattern formed a ring nearly forty miles across and contained thirty-five points. The ring of pillars Jack had marked in the crater contained thirty-five with one in the middle. The center of the large ring fell in the canyon where we’d seen the basalt formations earlier that morning.

Even though his actions might kill me, I had to appreciate Jack’s devious mind this time. He’d shown me these ice pillars as bait, to get me excited and keep me and the base off his back while he explored the real find. And this was his last trip before being sent home, so it had to be now. I fixed the canyon location on my map, pulled the patching tape from my repair kit and wrapped my helmet seal for extra protection, then started walking.

I carried the ladder with me, using it both as antenna and a pole to feel out terrain made invisible by the thick whirling dust. I also kept broadcasting directly to Jack. “I know you’re in the center with your Martian friends and I’m on my way to meet you. I need oxygen.” As an added incentive, I also said, “This is encrypted, but my transponder is still broadcasting.”

An hour into my trek, Courtney called to tell me their specially rigged flier had crashed. With a voice strained by grief, she rattled off the standard oxygen conservation litany and again begged me to stay put. I told her I could find Jack, then signed off and kept walking.

When the one-hour oxygen warning dinged, I checked my position and realized I couldn’t make it to the basalt formations, even if I’d guessed Jack’s location correctly. The wide plain between canyon and crater would have been safe enough to allow running, with only a slight chance of falling, but my slow, cautious advance through the storm had killed me. I tossed the ladder aside and started running.

Less than a minute later, my radio crackled to life with Jack’s voice. “Turn on your emergency strobe and stop moving, Malcolm. According to your transponder blip on my map, I should be right on you.”

I stopped and fumbled for the strobe switch on my helmet, but before I could flip it, Nellie materialized out of the dust and nearly ran over me as she shot past. I turned as she skidded to a halt amid scattered sand and gravel.

Tears formed, blurring my vision, and warm relief flowed through me like very old Scotch. Jack jumped down from Nellie’s back and started detaching oxygen canisters from her side.

“This whole
Jack arriving like the cavalry to save Malcolm
thing is getting kinda old,” he said as he turned me around, opened my pack and switched out my tanks.

I swallowed, trying to clear the lump in my throat. “Thanks,” I said. “Did you hear my calls to you
?
”

“Yeah, but I started back as soon as I realized your MarsCorp friends were going to let you die.”

“So I was right
?
The basalt formations are at the center of a larger pattern
?
”

“Yeah,” he said with a grim expression. “How’d you know
?
”

After I explained, he shook his head and sighed. “I knew I should’ve disconnected that damned transponder a long time ago. Not that it matters now. I had my chance and I blew it.”

Jack had come back for me, risking his opportunity to be the first person to see the big find. He wanted a chance to solve the puzzle, to discern the message he perceived in those formations. Helping him still do that was the least I could do in thanks.

“What’s down there
?
” I said. “In the canyon
?
”

“I don’t know yet, but Nellie says it’s nearly thirty feet square and the part I’ve uncovered so far is flat, smooth basalt. Those weird shapes you saw are attached to it like sprues to an injection molded part.”

“Like it was molded or formed in place
?
”

He nodded.

Huge and square, I thought and tried to dampen my new excitement. “Amazing. So you haven’t exposed anything that will melt
?
”

He laughed, for the first time since learning he was going home. “No, basalt doesn’t melt
easily
. But there’s something else.”

I waited and could see him smiling through the visor. “Well
?
”

“There’s a pattern in the face I uncovered. Thirty-five cylindrical pockets arranged in a ring, with one in the center. According to Nellie’s analysis, the translucent material at the bottom of each hole is diamond.”

“What could that mean
?
”

“I have no idea. I had to stop and come rescue you.”

It was my turn to smile. I held up a finger and called base.

“Sorry for the scare, Courtney,” I said. “But I found Jack. Nellie is working fine, so we have plenty of air and are not in any danger now.”

“Thank God, Malcolm. Meteorology says this storm could last another two or three days. Are you sure you have enough supplies for that long
?
”

Jack cut in on the conversation, reassuring her we were going to be fine.

“You’re in a heap of trouble, Jack! And I still don’t have a transponder signal for you.”

He opened his mouth, but I cut him off. “Actually, Courtney, I may be losing my transponder signal too. We’re about to go into an area that seems to play hell with most of our communications gear. So don’t worry if you don’t hear from us for a few days.”

“I don’t think—”

“We’ll meet up with the investigation team at the dig site in two or three days, or whenever this storm lets up.”

“But—”

“Malcolm and Jack signing off,” I said and killed the connection.

Jack looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “If you could find that pattern, they can too. Besides, they have enough information to know what direction you were going.”

“Yeah, but we could head north for a few hours and cut off my transponder, then enter the canyon from the north end. That should mess them up for awhile. It may only give us a few days. Probably only until the storm ends. Will that be enough time
?
”

He shrugged, always a strange gesture in an excursion suit. “Maybe, but if you do this, there is a good chance you’ll be sent home too.”

“I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” I said and started running.

W
e dug in for the night near the canyon’s north end and awoke to a sickly yellowish-pink dawn. The weak sun struggled to break through the haze, but the storm had abated and the winds died, so the timer was running. If our luck ran out, our fellow explorers could find us within a matter of hours.

Ninety minutes after breaking camp, we stood atop the basalt block. Using Nellie’s vacuum system, we removed the dust accumulated from the storm revealing a smooth polished surface, with the now-familiar pattern of holes in the center of the top surface.

“How odd that they’d make this finely polished cube, yet have these weird, gnarly sprues marring its perfection,” I said.

“It does look to be part of the formation process,” Jack said. “Maybe they just didn’t care about the sprues.”

“Yeah, but why these holes
?
Why their fascination with this particular pattern
?
”

He knelt down and aimed his helmet light into the holes. They were the diameter of a golf ball and about a foot deep, and, as he’d earlier reported, their bottoms were glassy and clear. “I don’t know, but I’d sure as hell like to find out.”

“Looks like we need some kind of key,” I said. “And if we had a key, I wonder what it would do
?
”

Jack stared at the holes, occasionally poking his gloved finger in one. “Maybe we could make a key.”

“You know,” I said, pausing, not sure if I should voice my latest thought. “The other holes are filled with water ice. Maybe . . .”

Jack almost leapt to his feet. “It couldn’t hurt to try!”

Of course, that comment left me feeling more than a little uneasy, but there was no stopping him once he got started. Forty minutes later I dubiously examined Jack’s kludge work. He’d originally wanted to build a manifold of tubes to feed water into each hole evenly, but I had stopped him when I realized he’d have to cannibalize most of Nellie’s internal plumbing to realize the contraption.

We instead covered the pattern with a shallow tent made from extra sheet plastic, precariously sealed to the surrounding surface with our entire stock of suit repair putty. A hole in the center was cinched up tight around a tube attached to Nellie’s tanks. Jack assured me that if we pumped water in fast enough, it would fill the holes and freeze before evaporating. I wasn’t convinced, but we had nothing to lose, except of course most of our water.

“What if we do open the lock
?
Or activate something
?
What if we break it
?
”

Jack looked up at me, his exasperation obvious even through the dusty visor. “Make up your mind, Malcolm. We’re never going to get another shot at this. It’s us—right now—or we forget about it. They are going to be pissed enough to ship us back home and instead of us figuring this out, some Martian Mickey Mouse will build an enchanted castle around it.”

He was right. I had made my decision and sealed my allegiance. “Let’s try it.”

We stood on a pile of excavated dirt at the cube’s edge and pumped the water in under pressure. Wispy vapor curls immediately revealed the gaps in our crude seal. The tent filled and tightened rapidly, to the point we feared it would burst the seal.

“Stop!” I yelled.

Jack killed the flow and the plastic almost immediately started to deflate.

“Crap,” he said. “We’d better look quick.”

Before we could pull the cover off and check our handiwork, a series of reports—loud enough in the weak Martian air to hear through our helmets—made us both step backward. Fissures appeared in the basalt, radiating outward from under the plastic cover in an oddly uniform pattern.

“You were right,” Jack muttered. “We broke it.”

“Maybe not. The lines are all straight and equally spaced, like pie wedges. They don’t look like natural fractures.”

Before I could say another word, he jumped down onto the surface, tested it with a couple of bounces, then dropped to his knees, shining his helmet light into the cracks. He motioned for me to come down.

“The basalt is only about a foot thick,” he said. “And it looks like more diamond under it. Holy crap. Do you think this stuff just covers a big block of diamond
?
”

“Well, it would sure be durable,” I said and joined him. I removed the cover to look at the pattern. It had nearly disappeared, but I could tell by the fragment arrangement that the cracks had each started at a hole, then run across the top and disappeared down the sides into the dirt.

“Looks like our ice expanded and started the breaks,” I said.

“No way. One or two cracks maybe, to relieve pressure, but not—” He paused and ran a hand along the edge of several sections, then started pulling on them.

“Unless of course,” he grunted, “it was designed to break this way.”

The wedge moved nearly an inch. He stood up and looked at me. “I bet if the whole block had been uncovered, this shell would have fallen away. I think it was
meant
to fall away.”

W
e used Nellie to dig all morning, but by mid-afternoon had to send her out in search of ice to replenish our air and water supply. So we dug by hand, using our climbing axes. Once we’d totally cleared the second side, Jack slipped his axe blade behind one of the loose basalt sections and started gently rocking it. With an audible pop, the strip collapsed into large chunks that tumbled down on him like stacked blocks pushed over by a petulant child. I heard him grunt and curse over the comm link as he disappeared in a pile of stone and dust.