Mars Fire - Chapter I, Sol 1
Serialized science fiction
Part I: The Dust
Chapter I - Sol 1
Mars was on fire.
From atop one of the taller spires of Gambi Ridge, facing the sunset, Jack Burrows watched the dunes of Mars shimmer and coil in the rays of the setting sun. Dust swirled in the afternoon air - reds and oranges, blood and cinnamon, as the distant sunlight wove through the perpetually airborne particles - and even here, atop the ridge and through his pressure suit, he could feel the chill that the evening was going to bring.
Mars fire - bright, cold, and utterly unforgiving.
Behind him, hunkered down in a crevice amongst the topmost boulders of the spire, Dixon - full name Hank Franklin - was running the last diagnostics on the sensor package they had spent the entire afternoon installing. A ring of lights around his helmet cast a patch of sheer white on the control surface he was busy interrogating. A stubby sensor mast, truncated around three metres off the ground, was anchored to the surroundings with a clutch of taut anchor braids, solar panels dangling off its waist like shrivelled leaves. The top was a cluster of blackened orbs, a grapevine bearing electronic fruit in a wasteland that had never seen a vine. It was something from the Mumbai Polytech Institute, an atmosphere sniffer that checked the progress of the terraforming work happening to the west, and their commission had been to assemble and install the sensor according to the plans and directions provided. Burrows had his doubts about it - the terraforming work had started barely three or four years ago, and checking for signs this early felt immensely optimistic - but the Polytech had insisted, and paid, and so here they were.
“How are we looking on those diagnostics? Is it behaving this time?” They were using their local suit channel to talk up here, the atmosphere being too thin for sound to travel. Burrows was still not used to how the helmets made his voice echo. “We have about an hour of sunlight left at this rate. I don’t fancy that climb down in the dark.”
“Almost there,” came Dixon’s muffled reply. He had lost part of his throat and most of his vocal cords in a lab accident years before, and the voicebox he used always made him sound incredibly smooth even when he was upset - or angry. “The boot sequence is being difficult. Something must have shifted during the trip here, it keeps throwing out errors on the power grid.”
“Let me give it a wiggle again.” Burrows had slung his carbine when he turned to watch the sunset, and now reached with both hands to grab one of the solar panel petals. The entire assembly could rotate and adjust itself along the central spindle of the sensor mast, and if he could just rotate it like so…
There was a sigh from Dixon, and Burrows let go of the panel as a string of lights began to crawl up the sensor mast from the base. A red strobe activated atop the sensor cluster once the light string finally reached it.
“Thank the stars. I can already see a list of complaints and maintenance trips on this contract.” Dixon straightened and stepped back, and both men watched the sensor tower wake up and run through its self-diagnostic routines. “Please tell me we don’t have more orders from them?”
“Three more. Another one in the north-east, and then two south of here, on the way to Alvie Ranch.” Burrows did not find their remote contracts particularly exciting - they basically ran errands for scientists on Earth, who wanted sensor readings and samples of everything they could think of - but it brought in hard currency and helped them trade when they went out into the other Liberty Zones. Work was work. “I’ll use the new kid for those, when he arrives. Then you can watch him haul the crates instead of me.”
“Darling, I’ll watch you bend over crates any day of the week.” Dixon winked, and Burrows rolled his eyes in response. “Is he cute?”
“No clue. I’m assuming you’ll tell us once he arrives. Should be tomorrow or the day after.” Burrows unslung his carbine, propped it against one of the nearby rocks, and then knelt down to begin loading scattered tools and empty containers back into the backpack at his feet. Fine orange dust drifted off everything he touched. Dixon was going through the same motions on the other side of the sensor mast, collecting the cables and power boosters he had used to wake up the Polytech sensor.
“He’s from the Euro colony, yes? He should be open-minded about things. Hell, if he volunteered to leave that soft nest and come all the way out here…”
“Not Euro colony - he’s Earth-side Euro. Straight from the CEN.”
“A Confederation boy? We don’t see many of those out here.”
“Wanderlust.” Burrows slung the backpack across his shoulders once he was done, feeling the weight shift and press against the eOX pads belted over his kidneys. He did not miss the old oxygen backpacks that he had trained and familiarised on years ago. “He left Earth after finishing his studies, came up here to Nouveau Toulouse six months ago. He did his internship there on the aquaponics circuits, and now he wants to see the rest of Mars.”
“He knows he’s coming to the literal furthest place from the Euro colony he could possibly choose, right?” Dixon also had his backpack up and on, and the two men began the ritual of checking their suits for integrity. A moment of inattention here was a death sentence. “Past us he ends up in Union territory, and then they’ll never see him again.”
“You know the expression about jumping into the deep end?”
“One of your folksy Earth-side sayings, yes. I know what swimming is.” Dixon gave an exaggerated scowl, and Burrow gave him a one-finger salute in return. “You reckon he’s trying to see how quickly he can learn to swim?”
“I reckon he has the same bug that got under my skin. He’s just leaving a lot sooner than I did.”
“You Earthers are a strange bunch. Paying money to come to this forsaken dustball, just because you can, and want to.”
“Some of us are not meant to live in a cage. You know how that goes.” Burrows did not press further. He knew why Dixon had left the Euro colony himself. “Besides, speaking of soft nests: how often did they let you climb up a cliff face?”
“Never, because we had these things called staircases,” Dixon replied archly, and Burrows felt himself snorting out a laugh in response. “Cliffs are for keeping rocks up, and the Union out.”
“And for a great deal of fun once gravity is actually on your side. Come, let’s head down before we lose the last light.”
Both men slung their carbines around their necks, leaving their hands free, and strode back to where they had scaled the spire hours before. The spire was a flat-topped, mesa-like finger that stood a double handful of metres above the other rough, similarly-shaped spires of the Gambi Ridge, and as the highest spire in this area, it had been the natural choice to get the sensor mast up as high as possible. It gave them an unobstructed view of the dune fields here, and the brown-black wall of the Gambi Ridge stretching off to the west and east. Sensor sniffers lower down rarely gave useful readings, being choked with dust and starved of sunlight most of the time. They had learnt that lesson the hard way, in the early years.
Getting up had been half the fight: even with Mars gravity at roughly 38% of Earth norm, the spires were still a nightmare to climb. Doing so freestyle, on Earth, could have been fun; doing so here, in a pressure suit, was out of the question.
Burrows was first to the edge of the ledge, and went down on one knee to inspect the anchor spear. They had fired it up from their buggy a week ago, five of them, and then tested it with a set of weights and shocks before finally doing the ascent themselves that morning. Fine dust already covered most of the spear haft, wedged as it was into a crevice between two of the rock slabs.
From the rear of the spear ran a finger-thick cable of carbon wire, heading straight down the cliff face towards where another spear was wedged into the rock some ten metres below them. Below that, the line continued down to the next spear and the next, until eventually it reached the bottom of the spire where it was anchored to the one tow hook of their buggy. Burrows gave this descent line an experimental tug, feeling the tautness even through his gloves, and then turned to give Dixon the okay signal.
“Looks good. I’ll take point.” Burrows unclipped the carabiners from his waist belt, looped himself onto the descent line, and then attached the brake-grips to the line as well. On the way up, the brake-grips had helped them climb and stay in place - now, on the way down, the grips would help them fight gravity and not accelerate straight down to crater into the rocks below.
Stepping off the cliff gave Burrows a momentary sense of vertigo - and then the lines snapped taut and pulled him onto the cliff face, where, with boots kicking and knees bent, he slowly bounced his way down the spire. Long shadows from the setting sun trailed him, casting disfigured shapes that rippled and twisted across the cliffs to his right. At one point his boots dislodged a small cloud of dust and pebbles that went streaking down below him, and he winced at the thought of what they could do to the buggy below. Something to be mindful of for next time.
The trip down took a fraction of the time that their ascent had taken that morning, and Burrows soon found himself stepping off the cliff and onto the rocky carpet where the dunes started. He gave Dixon the go-ahead through the suit channel, then walked to the top of the nearest dune to watch the last of the sunset.
There was something about the Martian sunsets that never grew old to Burrows. Something about the way the light would blend into the perpetual dust haze that lined the horizon, making the distant meeting of dune and sky glow. It sometimes reminded him of the smog that had turned the sun bloody red on Earth, out amongst those Pacific and African states he had spent his younger years in - Inhaca especially, watching the smog over Maputo from all the Asian Prosperity Union factories as the sun set over what had once been a capital city. Not that he wanted to be back there - Maputo was an industrial wasteland now, and he did not have the implants to pass in Union territory anyway - but the memories still flared in his mind, bright and clear, and sometimes just a little too sharp for comfort.
Burrows turned when Dixon reached the bottom of the descent line as well, and joined him at the buggy. They shucked their packs into the cargo panniers on the back of the buggy, before unclipping the descent line from the nose of the vehicle and securing it to one of the nearby boulders. If the sensor mast gave trouble - and Burrows suspected it would - they would have to repeat this whole process again sometime in the future, and there was little sense now in taking down the entire line.
The buggy was a simple model, with four poly-rubber wheels and an open frame with four passenger seats in the front, a driver seat in the middle on a pedestal, and the engine block and cargo panniers in the rear. The standard models were bone white for visibility, but this particular one had been painted in swirls of orange and pink years ago. Two of the seats had been removed back at Home One to allow for the sensor mast and its bulk to fit aboard, and now only its grey plastic packing crate remained lashed in their place. Burrows was still busy clambering up onto the driving pedestal when Dixon swung himself into the large, open-topped crate and settled down cat-like inside. He flashed Burrows a grin and a thumbs-up when Burrows finally assumed his seat.
“Really? You’re going to ride back like a damn corpse?”
“On the contrary, my dear Jack - you are going to drive back with the lovely wind in your face, and I am going to take a nap in this convenient container that we just so happen to have aboard.” Dixon stowed his carbine next to him in the crate, and started tying himself down with the loose ends of the cargo straps. “I trust you will drive accordingly.”
“Oh I will. You can count on that.” Burrows stowed his carbine in the leg sheath next to the pedestal, and began to toggle through the wake-up sequence for the buggy. They had reached a high of only -25 Celsius that day, according to his wrist compad, and the buggy would need a minute or two to heat up. “I’ll make sure you can count every rock and pebble we pass.”
“Funny man. Don’t make me pee in your water reclaimer.” Dixon gave a yawn, stretched out in the container, and then settled back down. His helmet visor tinted down to black after a couple of seconds. “Wake me when we get there.”
There was a click as the channel closed, and Burrows allowed himself a smile.
Finally. Alone on Mars, again.
The buggy’s control panel ticked over from ambers to greens, and when the engine temperature entered the optimal range, Burrows flicked the controls into reverse and rolled the vehicle back down the dune. It was one of the older ammonia-powered models, and vibrated and hummed to itself as it trundled over the red sands around them. You could only hear it when you were touching it though, thanks to the Mars atmosphere being around 0.1% the density of Earth at sea level, and Burrows had often wondered if the people born on Mars realised how quiet their world was.
Quiet, and cold.
Darkness fell quickly as they left the Gambi Ridge behind, and Burrows soon had the headlights and the spotlight next to his head on full power to illuminate the track they were wending their way along. The dunes were dark outlines around them now, only revealing themselves in flashes of colour as the lights passed them before fading into obscurity again, and the rocks that littered the surroundings cast sharp, dancing shadows as the lights swept past them and threw their black-lined shapes out into the light. Burrows remembered other night-time trips, on the back of a technical swerving along a narrow jungle track, and he snorted to himself when he saw where his thoughts were heading.
Damn that sunset, and damn those memories of Inhaca.
Next chapter: Chapter II, Sol 1
I like it I've just started it and it's fun..
Very nice! Reminded me of the movie The Martian—not just for obvious reasons, but because your vivid descriptions of the Martian terrain remind me of that lovely scene where Mark Watney crosses the rugged landscape in his buggy, dwarfed by the scale of it all.