“Here.”
She saw him clinging to the other side of the vent, five meters away. “It’s…sneezing us out.”
The storm died quickly. The irritant oxygen was expelled into the vent, to find its way to the surface.
They followed, shaking from the aftereffects. It was a long ride up out of the swallowing dark, into a glittering sky rich in cold and stars.
PART V
MARS CITY
37
FEBRUARY 2, 2018
THE NEXT DAY CRAWLED. MARC AND JULIA SLEPT LATE IN RED ROVER, exhausted and depressed. Breakfast was a silent meditation over acidic coffee and warmed-up instant oatmeal with hard knots of raisins.
Neither felt like waxing long over comm on the events in the vent. Julia made a brief report and they didn’t answer the comm as they drove back south through the pingo hills.
When they reached the classy Airbus rocket, proud tower in the ruddy midday, there was nobody home. Or so it seemed.
Claudine saw them from the pingo two hundred meters away, where she had been hooking the hoses into the autodriller.
She came running. “I thought work was best, to keep from thinking,” she gasped over comm.
“It was…” Julia did not know what to say. “Strange. They died in some way we do not fully understand.”
“Viktor called, told me, last night. I wanted to be out in the open today.” She looked drawn through her faceplate, eyes hollow.
“At least Earthside can’t reach you while you’re in your suit,” Marc said. “Come on inside.”
Claudine walked around the rover with an awkwardness that Julia knew would go away within another week in 0.38 g. The blue-suited figure pointed toward the rocket. “Maybe I should go into the ship first. I want to shower, change—”
“Nah,” Marc said. “We’ll take you to the hab. Shower there.”
When Claudine came inside she marveled at some of the rover’s “customized” features—a scent catcher, cool water spigot, self-warming meal dispenser; all Raoul’s retrofitting.
Only then did Julia call Viktor. “Let’s have conference,” he agreed.
On the ride they spoke little, and mostly of Mars, of landscape, of the many small ways to adapt to a world that is always trying to kill you.
When they came into the hab Axelrod was on the screen.
“—hold steady there, guys. We’ve got a good horse to ride now, Airbus can’t think they’ve got much in their hand. You should see how stiff their lawyers’ faces are now! And my engineers, they figure no way can she fly that package back alone—”
Viktor cut it off and turned to them. “Welcome.” Some ritual condolences, all in tones soft and hushed. Viktor embraced Julia. They moved to where Raoul had already prepared a high tea, appropriate for late afternoon. On the wall the big screen reverted to the exterior scene, shadows stretching across the cluttered landscape that was the human signature upon the rusty plains beyond.
“He is right,” Claudine said. “I cannot fly the ship by myself.”
“Chen, he must have talked about how severely the life-support apparatus is limited,” Viktor said.
“He did,” Claudine said. “We can take only four.”
“Not five, not at all,” Viktor said. It was a question.
“Not possibly.”
“Then he was telling the truth,” Marc said. “We weren’t sure. I mean, where did he think you’d get the fuel?”
She blinked. “Why, the ice.”
Raoul pressed, “You didn’t want the methane?”
“It is yours. And we would have to move the ship to land nearby…too dangerous, such a close landing.”
“So I believed,” Viktor said mildly, quite obviously not looking at Marc and Raoul.
“So one person must stay,” Claudine said dejectedly. “Unless we all do.”
“What?!” Raoul said loudly.
“To load the ship with water will take drilling, steam cycling, pumping…and we do not have Gerda.”
“I can handle that,” Raoul said quickly.
“Sure, we’ll all pitch in,” Marc added.
