Red Planet Run (11 page)

There was a brief, almost ruminative silence. “Transmission is broadcasting in Morse code.”

“We know that, what’s it say?”

“Unable to comply with that command.”

“You can’t read it?”

“This unit equipped to communicate in System English and Russian only.”

I said blankly, “You can recognize Morse but you can’t translate it?”

“Affirmative.”

“I have said it thrice; what I tell you three times is true,” Sean remarked.

“Just not in Morse,” Paddy agreed.

“Thank you, Helen Ricadonna, you cheap bitch,” I said furiously, forgetting for the moment the reasons behind our hurried departure, and my audience.

“That command is not recognized. Please rephrase.”

“I miss Archy already,” Paddy said.

“Computer off,” I said. I pulled my chair down the panel to the keyboard and switched on the screen. “Crip, you still there? Okay. Our computer isn’t equipped with a translator. My code’s rusty, so send slow. What the hell happened?”

He transmitted, I tapped out the message on the keyboard, and it appeared on the screen. His fist wasn’t the cleanest I’d ever heard and it took a while to get the rhythm, but the message was short, succinct, and chilling. We’d suffered a sudden, unexplained course change—he might have said two, but I wasn’t sure. The timer on the explosive bolts had triggered prematurely. The
Pushmepullyou
had let the
Kayak
go too soon, and the command module had only just managed to insert us into the Martian atmosphere.

I exchanged glances with the twins. Neither of them looked as scared as I thought they should. “So where are we?”

On Mars, was the increasingly faint reply.

“Thank you, Crip. And not quite. Where on Mars?”

Don’t know. Gotta go. Time for course correction. Love. Bye.

“Wait! Crip! Where are we coming down? Crip? Crip, are you there?”

There was a final burst of static. Dah-dit-dah, the letter K, the standard EOT for ham operators. And then, nothing.

“Crip?”

Dead air was my reply.

Nothing echoes like an empty radio net, except maybe a train whistle, or a cathedral with no choir. From now, for the next year Martian and two years Terran, our only communication with Outpost would be on two-week delay, bounced off the beacon on Phobos. Which meant that until we reached the surface of Mars and made contact with the archaeologists at Cydonia, we were essentially mute.

This time when the
Kayak
thumped, she thumped down hard enough to make my stomach lift up into my throat and knock both twins off their feet. She rose up on one side, and for one terrible moment I was afraid she was going over. We hung there for too long, as if she were making up her mind, until with a queer sighing sound she began to fall back. It was the twins’ turn to slide across the floor, as I rode my chair with the grim determination of a bronc rider at the Calgary Stampede.

Whumpf! Down she came. She rocked once, up off the opposite side, and settled back, into a position that had her listing heavily, maybe 15 degrees off horizontal.

There was some creaking as the structure settled around us, then silence.

Releasing my death grip on the console, I took a deep breath.

The ablation panel covering the CommNav port fell off.

Just fell off, as if the air pressure caused by the rate of our descent had been the only thing holding it on in the first place.

Just fell off, as if the thump down had been the last straw.

Just fell off.

And wasn’t it lucky that the graphplex panel in the port beneath it held. The compartment was flooded with bright pink light and my eyes instinctively narrowed against it. Someone’s breath sucked in but I was already in motion, up and out of the chair and through the door into the companionway that circled the inside of the doughnut and housed the equipment lockers. The floor tilted in that direction and I tripped and started to slide, picking up speed as I went. There was nothing to grab hold of, nothing between me and the lockers except a slick floor, and I smashed into them with a crash that resounded around the ship.

“Mom? What are you doing?”

Locker doors crashed open one after another until I found the right one. “Sean! Paddy! Out here on the double and into your suits!”

The twins slid into view, their palms smacking into the lockers, eyes wide with alarm. “Mom, what—
”

“Move it! Into those suits! Hustle! NOW!”

The barked command galvanized them and they leaned up against the bulkhead and climbed into the white suits, stamping their feet into the attached boots, shoving their hands into the gauntlets, pulling the clear bubbles of the helmets forward over their heads. With rough hands I locked their helmets down, ran the zips on the front of the suits up until the twins choked on them, and sealed the zipper flaps. I spun them around one at a time, so fast they staggered and almost fell on the tilted floor, and checked the life support packs built across the shoulders of the suits. One was running a tad rich in nitrogen; I adjusted a valve on one of the tanks mounted horizontally below the pack. When the last checklight on the second pack flashed a steady green, I took my first real breath in five minutes.

I climbed into my own suit and turned so one of the twins could check my pack to see how long I was going to keep breathing. A fist knocked less than politely on my helmet and a gloved finger pointed at my ear. I chinned on the helmet’s headset, and the blast of indignant sound had me reaching hastily for the volume knob on the back of my left gauntlet.

“What’s going on, Mom? Why did we suit up? Are we going outside?”

“Pipe down, I’m not deaf. What’s going on is the ablation shield fell off the CommNav port. The
Kayak
appears to be disintegrating around our ears. We suited up in case she does. And, yes, we’re going outside, to see if there’s any other damage.”

A ruminative silence. One of the twins said slowly, “I thought the shields were supposed to come off.”

“Come off, yes. Fall off, no.”

The suit locker faced the hatch. In spite of all the time I’d spent practicing on it back at Outpost, the tilting floor made leverage difficult, to say the least. I was wishing for a crowbar when it finally popped.

I wedged myself inside, retaining just enough ease of motion to hit the switch that rotated me to the exterior of the hull. I broke seal and grabbed a handhold to haul myself out again, dangling feet downward in the center of the craft. That there was a hole told me that the telltales on the CommNav panel weren’t lying and that the envelopes had deployed, but hanging from the hatch I couldn’t get my head back far enough in my helmet to see. Enough light came through the material of the envelopes to observe that the inside of the hole looked solid enough. The hull’s ablative shield was still in place, stretched across the bottom so that the ground wasn’t visible.

“Mom! Can we come out?”

I activated the lock, and while it was rotating back, felt around for the locker that held the rope ladder. By the time the lock had rotated a second time, I had the locker open. One swift tug and the ladder was unrolling swiftly, to fall with a sullen thud against the shield. Two white-suited figures emerged from the lock to cling to handholds.

They looked at me, waiting. “The hell with it,” I muttered, and jumped.

I’m 193 centimeters tall and built sturdy. Back on Terra, back about a hundred years, I would have weighed 170 pounds. On Terranova, I would have weighed the same, but in kays. On Luna, I weighed a sixth that. On Outpost, half. On Mars, a third.

On Mars, a third was enough. The shield gave with a smart snap; I had a split second to feel it fall out from under me and a nanosecond to enjoy weightlessness before my heels hit and the rest of me followed, hard, smack down on my butt.

“Oooff.”
My breath expelled on a startled whoof.

Something hit my helmet with a slithery thunk and I yelped and dove out of the way. It was only the rope ladder, which rolled out a good twenty-five centimeters short of the surface of the shield, now lying flat on the ground in several crisped pieces.

Someone giggled.

I got to my feet and felt gingerly for broken bones. The only apparent injury was to my matronly dignity, which couldn’t afford it.

“Can we come down now?” someone demanded.

“Stand by one.”

“Mom!”

“Stand by one,” I repeated, and walked over to the
Kayak
’s nearest leg. The pink glow of the Martian horizon was enticing. Something about its shape bothered me, but it would have to wait while I focused on the essentials. The
Kayak
hunched over one leg like a dog lifting hers, but all three legs were fully extended into landing position and firmly imbedded in the surface, the crossbars down and locked. For all her rakish tilt, she wasn’t going anywhere.

When I was sure the ship wasn’t going to fall on the twins the instant they stepped foot on the ground, I went back to the rope ladder and laid hold of it with both hands. “Okay, one at a time.” I bent backward and watched one white-suit launch itself from the side of the doughnut hole to the ladder. “Careful, dammit!”

Paddy jumped down next to me, bouncing once before catching her balance. Sean positively scampered down the ladder, landing between us. I turned them around to check their readouts one more time before they wriggled free to dash out onto the surface of a new world.

They were brought up short just beyond the edge of the
Kayak
’s hull, no less short than myself, a step behind them.

The sky was a hazy salmon pink. The ground was rust-red, but there all expectation ended.

“Holy cow, Mom,” one of the twins whispered.

“We’re in a lot of trouble,” the other agreed.

Our scheduled landing site had been Callirrhoes Sinus, a nice boring piece of flat real estate to the north and west of Cydonia, and from concentrated perusal of all the pictures transmitted over the years by various Terran, Lunar, and Terranovan probes, I was pretty sure this wasn’t it.

The surrounding landscape wasn’t boring and it sure as hell wasn’t flat. We had come down in what appeared to be the exact center of a narrow canyon. Its head was lost behind the
Kayak
in a supple twist of ridge. We were facing its mouth, a gaping grin of canyon walls a hundred kilometers in front of us. Beyond that grin, an edge dropped off into another, larger canyon, a canyon running perpendicular to ours whose distant opposite wall shelved abruptly into a mesa just touching a pink horizon.

Everywhere I looked were surfaces even less flat and boring than that. On our right, less than a meter away, a series of slender spires stood grouped together and yet separately, carved into a set of colossal chessmen from a sheer, vertical face of layered stone that thrust straight up out of the ground; three hundred meters of slip fault in reverse. A crimson butte stood square and stolid, casting a square, stolid shadow over a merry tumble of stout little stone sausages. Vermilion sandstone mushrooms grew in profusion from a heap of boulders sliding down the left side of the canyon’s mouth. Four bulging, maroon balloons surrounded a rectangular platform with a weird superstructure in a tumble of various geometric solids that stood six meters high. A single scarlet tower, almost perfectly cylindrical in shape, rose up regal and alone, the grounds around it scoured clean of the merest pebble, waiting for the muezzin to mount upon high and call the faithful to prayer.

Landscape by Venturi, commissioned by Disney, with advice from Salvador Dali. Who says Mother Nature doesn’t have a sense of humor?

With the part of my mind that was still working I wondered what direction I was facing. I realized I had no idea. It scared me. I hate being lost.

What scared me more was how close our botched descent had brought us to disaster. I’d spent all my time worrying about bouncing off Mars’ atmosphere and into orbit around Capella. The spires nuzzling our starboard bow were jagged and menacing, with sharp promontories and purposeful-looking outcroppings. That the
Kayak
had not shish-kebabed itself on one of them, had not tangled in the chessmen or smashed itself upon the butte or been skewered by the mosque or disappeared into the abyss lurking at the canyon’s mouth, had in fact come to rest so sweetly, so neatly in the only acreage unencumbered by rocks with points on them within a half dozen hectares, was almost enough to make me believe in God.

Belatedly, I turned to look at the twins. They had been born on Outpost, actually on the
Hokuwa’a
before it became one half of Outpost. They’d been on and off and in and out of a hundred asteroids before they could walk. They’d grown up with the infinite, glittering backdrop of space. It was anyone’s guess how they were going to react to a finite horizon. They were both still upright, which I took to be a good sign.

“Wow,” Sean said.

“Wow,” Paddy said.

“Wow,” I agreed. No visible signs of agoraphobia, at least not yet. I was relieved until I turned back to the view and saw that the maroon balloons had begun to move.

The balloons were down at the mouth of the canyon, where rays spilled inside from the setting sun, touching everything within reach with ruby gilt. It was a dazzling sight to behold, especially since it had been a decade and more since I’d seen anything like it. I watched the balloons glimmer in the distance, thinking the atmosphere was distorting my line of sight since they looked larger than they had seemed at first. Then I realized they weren’t larger, they were closer. Closer and getting more so with each passing second.

“Mom?” said one of the twins.

“Mom?” said the other. “Do you see that?”

I blinked. The balloons were rolling over each other. Was the wind blowing into the mouth of our canyon? I looked up and saw that our envelopes weren’t rising exactly straight off the top of the
Kayak,
but that was because the
Kayak
had landed crooked. I didn’t see any dust. So no wind.

I looked back at the balloons. They were closer, maybe a kilometer away.