Red Planet Run (19 page)

Sean started another flat germinating with the seeds Roger had included with the disk, and even I had to admit the herbs smelled wonderful when you rubbed the leaves. I started to experiment with them in the cooking. Thyme improved the flavor of biopork tenfold, oregano covered a multitude of sins in spaghetti sauce, and spearmint grew like a weed and was wonderful dried and brewed for a sweet tea. I immediately sat down and bounced Charlie a message off Phobos to the effect that I now knew how to cook. Four weeks later came her reply: “Did you pack any baking soda?” I was pretty sure she didn’t mean as an ingredient.

Paddy had been vitally interested in astronomy since before she could walk; she spent most of her free time in the bubble port peering up at what stars she could find with the 3-inch telescope and the astronomical calendar that had been the major portion of her personal luggage allowance. The same dust in the air that caused our spectacular sunrises and sunsets frequently obscured the telescopic view, and Paddy cursed Mars’ bad seeing loudly and often. I wondered what she’d do when we had our first real dust storm.

Paddy wasn’t one to sit around twiddling her thumbs, though, a character trait she shared with her sibling. Thank Christ none of my children were the kind who sat around moaning, “There’s nothing to do!” When it became evident that the roiled-up Martian atmosphere would balk regular attempts at observing, Paddy simply lowered her sights.

She called up all the available information from our ship’s computer on geology and soon her conversation was peppered with references to “the erosional work of the wind” which was “preeminent in arid to semiarid regions” such as Mars in shifting “dust, silt, fine and coarse sand” and creating features such as “sand dunes, deflation hollows, and pedestal rocks.” She seemed especially fascinated with the sandblasting effect on the latter; during our long run down Valles Marineris she never let a spire or a monument get by her.

For fun she folded origami. Kevin Takemotu had taught her how on Ceres, someone else had invented reusable washi paper, and Paddy had included a multicolored ream in her personal freight allowance. One day Sean found a tiny golden crane sitting serenely among the cherry tomatoes, a brown hippopotamus grazing through the hyssop, a silver samurai helmet perched on top of a cucumber. Another morning we woke to a galley ceiling papered with a galaxy of stars— yellow giants, red supergiants, brown dwarfs, silver globular clusters. A rocket ship stood poised to enter this array over the door into the science station. Paddy must have used up all her paper, though, for the exhibit remained only a day before vanishing, to reappear on the galley wall ten days later as an intricate, many-towered castle with a blue moat and a dragon breathing fire and smoke over all.

Between Mars and the twins, waking up on the
Kayak
was always an adventure. I didn’t mind, as long as I woke up the same color I went to sleep.

· · ·

We reached the mouth of Valles Marineris two months out of Picnic Harbor, and came more or less by accident upon Gagarin City. Less because we had its coordinates locked into the computer and had been planning a visit since touchdown. More because we got caught in a dust storm, the first of the season, and could have been dumped anywhere from Chryse Planitia to the South Polar Cap.

Once every Martian year the planet approached perihelion, or a little over 200 million kilometers from Sol, the closest it got to the sun in 687 days. At least once during that time, the entire planet was blanketed by a dust storm of hurricane-force winds, theoretically created by the 150-degree difference in temperature between day and night, in turn created by the planet’s proximity to Sol. Let me tell you right here and now that while Martian air at rest may be the 98-pound weakling of planetary atmospheres, when it wakes up it hits like a heavyweight. We’d been experiencing winds no stronger than 60 kilometers maximum; during the storm, our anemometer broke off at 114.2 kph. I would have, too.

And it caught us on the hop. We weren’t at perihelion— we wouldn’t be for another month—but in that perverse way any planet’s weather has of confounding all expectation and prediction, it blind-sided us. One minute we were floating innocently at a thousand meters, sighting in on Deneb to check the IMU’s calibration. The next we couldn’t see a centimeter outside the CommNav port. The winds shrieked. Lightning flashed. The sun was a half-hearted, fading glow. We couldn’t tell how fast we were going because our instruments couldn’t see through the dust to measure our ground speed. We battened everything down including ourselves and rode it out because mere wasn’t anything else to do. It wasn’t that rough a ride, surprisingly, but we were flying blind, coasting on the crest of a wannabe Force 10 gale.

And then as suddenly as it had started, six hours later it stopped. The skies cleared, and a breeze hardly worthy of the name wafted us gently north, and we forgot the storm when we saw what was outside the port.

Paddy, barely breathing the words, said, “Olympus?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said softly. “We covered a lot of ground, but not that much.”

It was immense, a mound of Martian earth that climbed up, up into the sky, slowly, gradually, so that its height was deceptive to the naked eye. It reminded me of the gradual slope of Mauna Loa on Hawaii, until you were at the peak and 4,169 meters, with the world at your feet and no recollection of how you got there.

“Arsia?” Sean suggested.

“I don’t know. Let’s take her up.”

We made helium until we reached 12,000 meters and gave up. Before we blew air to descend, we saw Arsia rising in the southwest and Ascraeus almost directly north. “Pavonis, then,” Paddy said, looking up at the great volcano with something approaching awe on her face, an expression usually reserved for natural wonders viewed through a telescope.

“The Middle Spot,” Sean agreed. “Wow.”

“We must be right on the equator,” I said, and reached for the deflation port switch. “Let’s see if we can find us a place to camp for the night. I’d purely love to watch the sun set behind Pavonis this evening.”

We set the
Kayak
down on the first level patch of ground we came to and spent the next week watching sunsets and cleaning dust out of various exterior orifices on the gondola. The rock bug shared locker space with a kilo of the stuff. Each and every one of the ports had long, thin grooves scored into their graphplex surfaces by wind-driven sand, and we spent another day filling those in. Our outside instrumentation needed extensive repairs (including a new anemometer) before we would know precisely where we were, but I called a day off and we went flying instead.

We’d been lucky, and I knew it. The Martian dust storm seasons usually last for months and cover the entire planet, and I didn’t think for a moment we’d seen the end of this one. It was time we went to ground.

On my first glide, I saw it. Another of the ubiquitous splosh craters, almost at the periphery of our range of vision, at the extreme edge of the eastern slope of Pavonis Mons, just far enough off to escape the mountain’s five o’clock shadow. The sun glinted off something. I grabbed for altitude and there it was, an obviously man-made structure with square, flat surfaces in geometric solids.

The
Kayak
was a taut ship. When she broke down, she always picked a good place to do it.

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.

 

—Walt Whitman

 

THE FIRST THING I SAW
on settling the
Kayak
inside the crater were flashes of light resulting in little explosions from the side of the habitat. “What the hell?”

“What is that, Mom?”

“I don’t—is it—damn!”

“What?”

If I could believe my eyes, it looked like hits from small-arms fire, the same kind of hits we’d seen on those pieces of the
Tallship
left big enough to identify, the same kind of hits on the freighter back on Ceres. They were getting too damn familiar to me, and it was starting to piss me off. I tried to raise Gagarin City on the net; no answer. No surprise, they were busy. I made a tape identifying and describing ourselves and our ship, said we were friendlies and please not to shoot us, and had the computer translate it into Russian and set it to transmit in Russian and English every five minutes. I set the
Kayak
down safely out of range and began to suit up. “What are you doing?” Sean said.

“I’m suiting up. I’m sick of this shit. I’m going out there and help the Gagarins shoot back.”

They stood watching in silence for maybe a millisecond, and reached for their own suits. I paused half-in and half-out of my goonsuit and demanded, “And just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“We’re sick of this shit, too, Mom,” Paddy said. “We’re going out there and help you help the Gagarins shoot back.”

I stood up straight. “You’re doing no such thing. Get those suits off and go stand by in CommNav.” They didn’t move. “Did you hear me? Go stand by in CommNav!”

“No,” Paddy said.

“No,” Sean echoed. “We’ll give the Gagarins help, but we’ll
all
give them help.”

“All or none, Mom. Besides, why have you been making us practice with small arms and hand-to-hand for, if not for a situation like this?”

“We’re fighting men, Mom,” Sean said, “and you made us that way.”

“You have no combat experience,” I said.

“No,” they agreed, and waited for me to work it out for myself.

And they never would have, if I had my way. But the world being what it was, they would get it whether I let them or not. In the meantime precious seconds were ticking past. The horrible ruin of the Tallshippers’ habitat flashed before my eyes. “All right,” I said, the most painful words ever to come out of my mouth. “But only one of you goes. Somebody has to stand watch here, keep the ship safe.”

To my infinite relief, the common sense of that observation penetrated two stubborn heads. Sean looked at Paddy. “I’m older.”

“By two minutes!”

“I’m better at hand-to-hand.”

“I’m a better shot!”

“I can—”

“Hold it!” I said. “Scissors-paper-stone.”

They played and Paddy “lost.” “All right, Sean, suit up. Paddy, you’re responsible for the safety of this ship. If the fighting comes this way, you lift fast and high.”

“What about you and Sean?”

“You
lift.
Got it?”

She paled, but said steadily, “I got it, Mom.”

“And you lift, regardless, the instant Sean and I hit dirt. Don’t leave the crater, just get high enough to be out of range.”

This time her response was immediate. “Aye, aye, Captain. I lift when you hit dirt.”

Sean and I suited up. Paddy locked down our helmets and strapped on our holsters. Sean went through the lock first. Paddy, her young face set in stem lines, gave my shoulder one hard smack before closing the hatch. I slid down the ladder and hit the ground, running lightly, head and shoulders hunched against an expected blow.

There was none, for either of us. From some kind of ports high up in the structure, the habitat was returning fire, and as we poked our heads up for a first, close-up look at the situation, one figure took a direct hit. The front of his suit exploded, and I heard Sean gasp over the headset. I counted eight figures remaining, all attired in the awkward pressure suits worn in vacuum as opposed to our own lighter weight and infinitely more flexible goonsuits. An advantage. Good.

“Sean?”

“What?”

“See that pile of rocks? Get behind it. I’ll go left. Don’t fire until I tell you to. They still don’t know we’re here, so our first shots will be a gift. Make them count. After that, keep your head low and don’t take any chances.” I grasped his shoulder and gave it a shake. “You hear? No heroics! Gagarin is returning fire, and between the both of us we can run them off. Got it?”

“Got it,” he said, and he sounded so young I nearly quailed and ordered him back to the ship.

“Okay,” I said. “Go.” Without looking back, I ran left. I’d already picked out a frost heave for myself, and landed behind it at the end of a long skid that would have made any third baseman proud. When I’d wriggled up the back side of the little rise enough to see over it, I strained to see the figure of my son. “Sean?”

“I made it, Mom? Now?”

“Not yet.” A movement caught my eye farther up the crater floor. A rover crawled into view, a vehicle with a cab made of assorted geometrical solids mounted between four enormous wheels made of individual, inflated bags. “Sean! Do you see it?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice excited. “Do want me to—”

“Maintain your position! It’s not Johnny!”

“What? How—” His reply was interrupted by a figure, also clad in a p-suit, which clambered all the way out of the rover’s top hatch, raised a weapon, and began firing at the city.

The besiegers weren’t aiming, just firing off shots at random. They weren’t even doing that much damage; the surface areas they connected with exploded in the yellow flash we’d seen from the gondola, leaving behind holes not neat but small. Behind them I saw the outlines of the inhabitants scurrying to patch those holes. There were a lot more people inside than out, and I wondered why they hadn’t mounted a counterattack.

I drew my laser pistol and checked the load. The sonic rifle had a longer range but was ineffective against a pressure suit unless you had the muzzle pressed right up against it. I sighted in on the broad back of a pressure suit, finger on the trigger. “Sean? Now!”

I squeezed. A small round burned area appeared over the sixth vertebra. The arms of the p-suit flew up, the weapon dropped from one hand, and the figure fell face forward to lie unmoving. I sighted in on the next figure over and shot again, and missed. I could just hear Caleb chiding my poor marksmanship. “Squeeze, Svensdotter, don’t jerk.” And I could see his wide grin and his dropped voice as he murmured, “When we’re in bed, you don’t jerk, you squeeze, right? Just like that.” I blew out a breath, held it, and sighted carefully. This time I connected with an elbow.