Mars Fire - Chapter II, Sol 1
Serialized science fiction
Previous Chapters: Chapter I
Chapter II - Sol 1 - Monday
The trip back to Home One took the better part of two hours, with the temperature falling steadily as the buggy crawled and whined its way south. Burrows kept one eye on the dust trail and another on the temperature gauge, watching the numbers sink deeper into the negatives. Average temperature on Mars was around 63 degrees Celsius below zero, with nighttime levels approaching the 100 below mark. The early colonists had quickly learnt to shelter in place once the sun set, and even now, almost six decades later, the coldness of the night was still something to be feared.
Burrows knew exactly what his suit and the buggy could handle though, and their plans for the day had been scheduled around that. Their suits could self-heat for several hours, depending on the time of night, and if that got too bad they still had the emergency umbilicals from the buggy to transfer heat directly from the engine block to their suits. If the buggy engine was able to run, of course. The same thin Martian atmosphere that could not trap heat, worked in their favour - by the smallest margin - when it came to heating the suits at night.
Unless the wind came up, in which case your survival options dropped drastically.
The first sign of Home One drawing closer was the crossroad where the Stockton trail bisected one of their circular perimeter routes. The concrete fabricators had dropped off a stack of failed test prints there years ago en route to Stockton, and the misprinted statues - some missing limbs, some drooping and bulging as if crushed by gravity or obesity - now stood in a merry line down the one crossroad lane. There were seven of them in total, grey concrete streaked with red dust from years of exposure, with the last one on the south side wearing an infrared reflector headband. He was called Larry, for a reason Burrows had never learnt in all his time at Home One. Burrows gave Larry a salute as he drove past, remembering the first time that same IR headband had saved his ass as he navigated back during a storm.
Past the crossroad the trail began a gentle snaking motion, looping back and forth in gentle curves as it sped around the smaller outlying craters, and Burrows habitually counted the scattered light points around him as he deftly steered the buggy through the loops.
Three on the left, all white: Grosvenor Outpost, with the emergency shelter. Kaydee Seven, the solar tower. Botany Five, whose dome required almost daily cleaning for the radiation experiments.
Four lights on the right, one of them blue: Hawkins Tower, which carried their relays to Stockton. Gallows Zero, the empty bunker where they used to store the spare rovers. Helix One, and Helix Two - the blue light - where the edges of the solar and wind-turbine farms respectively began.
The settlement had already been sizable when he joined it seven years ago, and had crept out into the surrounding dune fields as time passed and workloads expanded. There were about fifty to seventy families total now - excluding the singles like Dixon and Pope - with numbers ranging from two to five per family. As each new family arrived, more work got started, and slowly but surely they spread their influences wider into the surroundings. Power grids, sensor stations - mostly offworld contracts like the Polytech one they had just installed, as well as a handful of local measurements - and crete-casted shelters now dotted the landscape for kilometres around the main crater. Burrows always marvelled at how industrious the settlers here were compared to the people he had left behind on Earth.
Some of them even had time for art here, even if it was of the accidental type like Larry and his other grey companions.
The buggy began to climb up a slight incline, and Burrows knew he was getting close now. The temperature gauge had dropped into the negative eighties now, inching towards the alert that was programmed in at ninety. Fifteen minutes left before that, though - a comfortable margin.
The incline ended, the track and buggy levelled off again, and the first sight of Home One swam out of the darkness in the distance. A kilometre across and with crater walls forty metres high, it was one of the millions of craters that dotted Mars, and had initially been chosen for its ability to shelter the habitats that had been raised in its centre. Now, after years of occupation and use, the crater was slowly but surely starting to show signs of human colonisation - the primary one, from the road approach, being the gate port that had been dug through the northern side of the crater rim.
Here, with the road coming down from the northern highlands, a canyon had been bulldozed and blasted through the crater wall, replacing the original track that had looped over the top. It had been years before Burrows’ time, but apparently there had been an incident during a storm where one of the rovers got stuck on the crater incline on the outside, and the six inhabitants froze to death within sight of the main habitat airlocks simply because their rover no longer had the juice to surmount the remaining incline. After that, the decision to blast the northern canyon, and lower the road level, had been unanimous. Now a set of crete slabs, stacked at increasing angles, held the surrounding regolith at bay as the buggy sped past. Burrows gave a silent nod to the copper plaque that held the names of the unfortunate Port Six. It might have been before his time, but their deaths had left a mark, and deserved respect.
Past the port was the breakwater, a jagged tumble of concrete cuboids that served to deaden the wind that got funnelled into the port, and beyond that was the settlement proper. Countless lights dotted the inside of the crater, competing with the starlit expanse above, and Burrows deftly guided the buggy the last few hundreds of metres into the main vehicle park just south of the gate. The park was a series of bays strung out in a parking-lot arrangement, with concrete slabs stacked to form basic hangar bays which could each accept two to four of the buggies, or a single rover. Sealing and pressurising a small structure was always easier than a large one here, and allowed them to minimise their use of costly airlocks.
Burrows picked his usual bay and drove the buggy up to the closed door. A touch to the control panel sent the signal for the doors to roll open, and the buggy lights threw long shadows up the interior walls as the shutters rolled up. There were two other buggies there - Dixon’s one, and the spare white one from Maintenance - and the walls of the bay were covered in cabinets and tool benches. Everything was stowed away though, to reduce their exposure to the merciless abrasion of the Martian dust that inevitably billowed in whenever the bay was opened or closed. On the rear wall, next to the small airlock that led to the settlement tunnels, a poster of Blue Mars - a popular vid-series showing a future terraformed Mars with oceans and jungles - was the only pop of colour in an otherwise drab and grey interior.
Nudging the power pedal one last time, Burrows rolled inside just as the bay lights flickered on, aiming for the open area behind the white Maintenance rover. The concrete floor whispered smoothly underneath the fat wheels as they coasted to a stop, and the bay door was already closing even as Burrows locked the wheels in place and started cycling down the engine. There was a hardline keypad hanging from the roof right above him, and once the door was down he reached up and keyed the scuffed blue button on it to trigger the pressurisation cycle.
There was a click on the suit channel, and Dixon’s smooth voice filtered out from where he was still lying in the sensor crate.
“Are we there yet?”
“No, I stopped to have a swim.” Burrows finished the last of the shutdown cycle on the buggy before clambering off. He could faintly hear the slowly increasing noise of the air pumps in the bay, which meant that the atmosphere was starting to build. “Come join me, the water looks amazing.”
“Ooh, funny Earth man with his funny Earth ways.” Dixon sat up in the crate, visor already cleared, and Burrows saw him suppress a yawn as he started untying himself. “Any issues on the way?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. The northern fields looked fine, I didn’t see anything unusual there.” Above them the vents were audibly rattling now, the plastic streamers tied into their grates shivering and twisting as the incoming hot air blew over them. Burrows checked his wrist compad and saw the temperature was climbing into the human-viable range. Another few minutes and they could finally have their helmets off. “Did you see anything unusual in your dreamland?”
Dixon scoffed in return.
“I swear I don’t understand how you found a wife. Your jokes are terrible.”
“Must be that folksy Earther charm, eh?” Burrows grinned back, and began working on the crate straps once Dixon had extricated himself from inside the crate. “Besides, if you ask Tilda, she’ll tell you the sense of humour was the best part of the package.”
“I hate it when you use the P word,” Dixon pouted, and handed his carbine down to Burrows, who stacked it against the closest wheel before offering the other man a hand down. “Not all of us are as lucky in love as you are, Earth man.”
“Then you need to make a plan to get out more. If you try to fish in this tiny pond, you are never going to catch that one worth frying.” Burrows handed the loose straps to Dixon once he was beside him, and hauled on the plastic crate to pull it off the buggy chassis. The rasp of cargo straps over the grip-studded crate exterior was loud and clear by now. “Stockton is close, New Hopetown is a day away. You need to make a plan, my man.”
“I know, I know, but… people,” Dixon gave a dramatic sigh, and grabbed the end of the crate as Burrows passed it to him. “People are so… people.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” Burrows replied, deadpan, and this time it was Dixon who rolled his eyes in return.
“Oh get lost, you insufferable man. You came out to the Liberty Zone of your own free will, you know exactly what I mean.” Dixon twisted at the waist and expertly swung the crate to the side, sending it sailing in the low gravity. It plunked down on a distant pile of similar crates with a hollow clatter.
Burrows leaned up to pull his own carbine from beside the driver seat, and then both men started towards the airlock door in the rear of the bay. There was a gun rack next to the Blue Mars poster, with empty hooks on the outside and a sealed cabinet next to it where the clean weapons were kept in a dust-free environment. Dixon dropped his carbine onto one of the empty hook sets, while Burrows went straight for the anti-static wipes and began to work down the dust that had accumulated on his carbine.
“I’ll clean it tomorrow first thing, I promise,” Dixon pouted when Burrows raised an eyebrow at the dusty weapon on the rack. “I’m not in the mood for it now, and I have coding checks I want to finish before the next upload cycle. You know how they get if we are late with the data for the Clarkes.”
“I know that the Clarkes won’t save you if your gun jams on your next assignment.” Burrows himself never took chances on gun maintenance. He had too many memories of what lay down that path. “I’ll give it a quick wipe-down when I’m done with mine, but you better get into it tomorrow.”
“You’re a star, Earth man. A strange, hairy star - but a star regardless.” Dixon blew a kiss through his helmet, and then followed it with an exaggerated sigh once the atmosphere lights over the airlock finally cycled from amber to blue. “Finally! I swear this takes longer every week.”
“Ever heard the saying about watching a boiling kettle?”
“Please don’t start with more of your Earth nonsense now, it is way past my bedtime already.” Dixon unlatched and twisted off his helmet, and Burrows stopped with his cleaning work to do the same. The bay air was a crisp five degrees Celsius, and both of them blew out heavy plumes of vapour as their breath hit the chilled air.
Dixon was one of the few Martians who actually had long hair, which he shook out once he pulled off his helmet cap as well. Thick black curls spilled over his ears and down his neck, sweeping along the outside of his suit collar. His skin was the olive of Mediterranean descent, and his nose was hooked - like a pharaoh, he always joked, or like a can-opener, as Pope inevitably replied.
Burrows himself was in the buzzcut camp, and his helmet cap revealed brown stubble pulling back from a widow’s peak. His old Earth complexion had faded over the years, and now only the hard lines of radiation exposure here on Mars remained around the corners of his eyes and mouth. Tilda always said he looked manly, and batted her eyelashes at him whenever the topic came up; Burrows saw himself as rather nondescript, and never gave it much thought.
Dixon, with a last wink, activated the airlock door and stepped in the moment it hissed open. The airlock itself was large enough for only two people, and led to the access tunnels at the rear of the vehicle bay, which in turn connected to the main dome in the centre of the crater. Suit hooks and anti-dust sleeves lined the walls, and Dixon was already stripping out of his pressure suit even as the bay-side airlock door swung shut again.
Burrows propped his suit helmet atop the sealed gun cabinet, and continued with the cleaning process. It was a routine of pure muscle memory at this point, after years and years of endless repetition, and while his hands moved - deft even through the suit gloves - his mind wandered.
What was it about people?
He had never been the social type. Most of the social niceties of human interactions made little sense to him, and the act of dealing with people - and he knew it was an act, because it rarely came natural to him - left him feeling drained and irritable. Tilda could read him well by now, and knew to give him space when he was in that headspace - but with most of the others, he had to focus and control himself to stay friendly, to stay polite, to stay… human, in a sense. There were so many things that his mind wanted to deal with, at any given point in time, and the idea of wasting that precious energy on niceties and fluffy words just rankled.
The Guys - in his head, he had no other way of thinking of them - were different, though. Them he could handle a little better, for a little longer. Dixon was as queer as they came, Pope was a bear, Reyn was intense and full of self-doubt at the same time - but to him, they were brothers now. The survival here on Mars, and specifically at Home One, had drawn them all closer over the years, and with the periodic Ranger training, it felt like their shared struggles and suffering was something that had smoothed over their differences to the point where it no longer mattered. With them, he could relax, share his mind, speak freely.
And then still get socially worn out, despite that.
The carbine’s coating of dust methodically disappeared as he worked, and by the time he got to the barrel mechanisms it was finally warm enough in the bay to take his gloves off. Touching metal right after the re-pressurization was how he managed to lose most of the fingerprints on his right hand - which was the type of mistake you only made once. His first years on Mars had come with a steep learning curve.
He detached the bottom-mounted magazine strip, toggled the muzzle plug to open itself and lock in place, and then quickly ran a cleaning rod up and down the barrel a few times. The oil-soaked jag came out red-pink with dust, despite the plug mechanism’s presence. Burrows shook his head. This place was never going to be an easy ally - at least not in his time.
With his own rifle cleaned, Burrows racked it and turned to the one Dixon had left behind. His hands ran through the same procedure, and his thoughts turned into pleasant nothingness. He would never let Dixon know it, but cleaning the weapons was something he actually enjoyed. There was something soothing about the smell and feel of gun-oil under your fingers, and the scent of oils as you cleaned. Burrows had childhood memories of his father explaining firearm maintenance to him, using a pistol as example - in his memories, the pistol was a giant thing to his pre-teen perspective - and the smell that accompanied that memory was the same smell here, millions of kilometres and many years later.
He sometimes wondered how his parents were doing, but that thought never went far. The gun-oil memory was more pleasant, watching his father strip the weapon and patiently explaining each component as he took it apart and cleaned it.
He was done with the second carbine before he realised it, and racked it beside the first before dragging one of the anti-static covers across both weapons. Only once they had been fully stripped and cleaned, could they go back into the hermetic cabinet.
With the guns sorted, he gave a last look at the bay behind him - the outer doors now sealed, the buggies lurking like steel insects in their allotted parking spaces - before opening and stepping into the airlock himself. From inside he toggled the bay depressurisation, and listened to the rumble of the air vents as they began to suck the precious atmosphere back out of the bay while he undressed in the tiny space. There was no sense in leaving the vehicle bay pressurised when it was empty, and each depressurised area was also one less risk for an explosive decompression should one of the near-continuous rain of meteorites and other orbital debris come down on the bay.
Finally down to his khaki singlesuit layer, Burrows bundled his pressure suit into one of the anti-dust sleeves, sealed it up, and slung it over one of the wall hooks while waiting for the steam cycle to douse him. Taking a dusty pressure suit in the living areas was strictly against cleaning protocols. The airborne moisture - precious here on Mars where it had to be hauled in from the poles, or slow-gated in from one of the orbital stations - help to discharge the near-eternal electrical charges on the Martian dust, and Burrows breathed deep, with eyes shut, when the white clouds puffed over him. The steam always reminded him of summer in Africa, when the thunderstorms had cooked the air and burnt the standing water into a dancing fog.
There was a chime from the tunnel door, and Burrows opened his eyes again. Grabbing the suit bag, he slung it over his shoulder and pushed out into the tunnels that led to the main dome.
Next chapter: Chapter III, Sol 1
I feel like a lot of ominous nuggets are tucked into the sentences here… seems like ‘Larry’ is going to be an important character in future chapters!