Rescue Mode - eARC (37 page)

“Geez, I hope not,” Billy said. “I was looking forward to meeting those guys when they get back. They’re real heroes. And besides, I’d like to go to Mars myself, someday.”

“Me too,” said Jim.

“Yeah,” Manuel agreed. “That’d be great.” Then he slipped his sensor net back on his head. “But are you guys ready to kick some more Martian butt?”

“Let me at ’em,” said Jim and Billy, as one.

December 8, 2035

17:24 Universal Time

Mars Landing Plus 33 Days

Habitat
Fermi

It’s like being in jail, Ted Connover thought. The four of us crowded into this tiny space, like four prisoners locked in a damned jail cell.

Connover was sitting disconsolately at the command panel, where the jiggling curves of the display screen showed that the radiation level outside their shelter was still murderously high. Catherine and Amanda were bent over some computer game they were playing, hardly more than an arm’s reach away. Hi was pacing methodically back and forth: four paces one way, then turn around and four paces back.

He’d rather be back in the auxiliary airlock with Catherine, Connover told himself. Can’t blame him. I’d rather be
anywhere
except this effing Black Hole of Calcutta.

McPherson stopped his pacing and came to Connover’s side. “How’s it going?” he asked.

Pointing to the jagged curves, Ted replied, “Still hot enough outside to fry your
cojones
in half a minute.”

“No letup?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s Houston say?”

“Another six hours, at least.”

McPherson straightened up and looked across to the two women, still busy with their game. “We’re okay in here, though.” It was a flat statement of hope.

Connover nodded tiredly. “Yep. Radiation level inside our little igloo is just about normal.”

“That’s good. We’re in—”

“
Fermi,
Houston here.”

Both men jerked with surprise. Amanda and Catherine looked over to them, their faces worried.

Nathan Brice’s face appeared on the communications screen. He looked tired, pouchy-eyed.

This can’t be good, Connover thought.

“
Fermi
here,” he said, knowing that his words wouldn’t reach Brice’s ears for a quarter of an hour. “Go ahead, Houston.”

Brice hadn’t waited for his reply. “We’ve been working on this nonstop ever since Amanda’s report on the biomarkers. The bio team confirms that everything checks out: complex prebiotic molecules, PAHs, even amino acids. Tell Amanda she’s verified the Chinese findings and then some. Good work, guys.”

Amanda shot out of her chair and raced to the comm screen, a gleaming smile splitting her dark face. Catherine got up too, more slowly. McPherson pumped both his fists in the air.

“You did it, girl!” He grabbed Amanda in a bear hug that lifted her off her feet.

Connover grinned happily at Brice’s image on the screen.

“Thanks for the good news, Nathan.”

But Brice was still talking. He concluded with, “By the way, you should be clear of the CME in another four-five hours.”

Who cares? Connover thought, as he watched Amanda, Catherine and Hi dancing across the cramped room.

December 9, 2035

14:00 Universal Time

Mars Landing Plus 34 Days

Fermi
Habitat

“Satellites show that the radiation level’s been normal for six hours now,” Connover reported into the intercom. “Storm’s over.”

In the sleeping area, where she’d been going over the results of their previous excursions on her laptop, Catherine smiled tentatively and asked, “We can go outside again?”

“Don’t see why not,” Connover replied, still eying the displays on his control panel. “But let me check with Houston first, just to make sure.”

McPherson called, “Find out how they did on the
Arrow
, Ted, while you’re at it.”

“Will do.”

Benson smiled as he pulled the comm bud from his ear. “Houston confirms it. We’re in the clear.”

Virginia and Taki, sitting against opposite walls of the box shelter, looked up from the chess game they were playing on their tablets.

“We can get out of this coffin?” Taki asked. She hadn’t used that term for the confining shelter before, while they were still in the radiation cloud.

“Back to normal,” Benson said, his smile widening.

Taki floated to her feet and started lifting up one section of the shelter. “First thing I’m going to do,” she announced, “is take a shower.”

Benson raised a cautionary finger. “We’re still rationing the water, you know.”

“I know. I’ll make it quick. Well within the limits we agreed to. But I feel so
grungy
.”

Once they had taken the shelter down and stored it, Benson headed for the command center. “I’d better check out the ship’s systems,” he said.

Virginia followed right behind him. “Bee, when we were cooped up like that I has a lot of time to think about everything.”

“So did we all,” he said, ducking through the hatch into the command center.

He sat in the command chair. Virginia hovered behind him, grasping the back of the chair to keep from floating away.

“I mean,” she said, her voice soft, almost wistful, “we’ve been gone from Earth a long time now, and it’ll be another eleven months before we get home. We almost died when the ship was hit, we’ve left our friends on Mars where they very well might die, and we’ve lost one of our team.”

He glanced up, over his shoulder, at her.

Virginia went on, “I’ve read just about every book I ever wanted to read and watched all the videos I can stomach. We’ve played games with each other and the computer, messed around with the VR simulator and even got some science work done.”

Benson turned around in his seat to looked squarely at her. “Where’s this leading, Jinny?”

“Bee, I’m scared. The accident, this solar storm, doesn’t it frighten you?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “A little. But we’ve come through it all okay.”

“There’s something else, too.”

Benson started to reply, but checked himself.

Without waiting for him to ask, Virginia confessed, “Bee, I’m lonely. I want to be held. I know it’s wrong, but I want to be close to you.”

“Virginia, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be held.” He reached out to her and pulled her down onto his lap. She twined her arms around his neck.

“Bee,” she whispered, “make love to me.”

“I’m still a married man,” he whispered back.

“I know. But you never speak of your wife and as far as I know you haven’t even sent her a message. Aren’t you lonely too? Wouldn’t she understand?”

Benson looked at the beautiful woman in his arms and thought about his loveless marriage back home. He and Maggie hadn’t been intimate since halfway through his training for the mission; that had been more than six months before he’d taken off for Mars. He had no idea if he had anything more awaiting him when he returned than divorce papers.

He was already reacting physically to Virginia’s presence in his arms. He took a deep breath and made up his mind.

“Jinny, I don’t give a damn whether Maggie would understand or not. My marriage was over before we ever left for Mars. We’re here together and who knows what tomorrow might bring?” Benson barely got those last words out before Virginia’s lips met his.

But then she pulled away slightly. “What about Taki?”

“You want her to join us?” Benson grinned.

“No! But I don’t want her watching, either.”

He sighed. “Well, there’s only a few places on this ship where we can get some privacy, and she just might wander in on us, unless we tell her blatantly not to.”

Virginia straightened up and pushed her hair back away from her face. It floated weightlessly around her head, like a dark halo.

“I’ll tell Taki to stay away from the cupola for the next hour or so,” Virginia said. “That is, I assume you’ll want me to tell her.”

Benson said, “Right.”

She gave him a peck on the cheek and then pushed herself off toward the hatch. Benson sat there alone, wondering how all this had happened, astounded at his good fortune.
The most beautiful woman on the team and she wants me!
He broke into an ear-to-ear smile.

Then he realized that he was the only male left aboard the
Arrow
.

Taki Nomura was in the
Arrow
’s minusucule infirmary, scanning readouts of the last physicals they had all taken.
I’ll have to do complete workups on each of us,
she was thinking,
to see if the radiation storm did any somatic damage.

Virginia glided through the hatch and hovered before her, smiling contentedly.

Looking up at her, Taki said, “Wipe the canary feathers off your chin.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“I’ve been wondering how long it would take you two to get together. You know his marriage is a mess, don’t you?”

“I had heard . . . something.”

“So he finally broke through his inhibitions?”

Almost giggling, Virginia admitted, “I helped him a little.”

“Good for you.”

“We’re going to be in the cupola, and—”

“And you’d appreciate some privacy. I know. Don’t worry, I’m not a voyeur.”

“I . . . thank you, Taki.”

“Nothing to it.”

Virginia started to leave the infirmary, but hesitated. “Taki . . . I’m sorry that . . . well, that there’s no one for you.”

Nomura made a smile that hardly looked forced at all. “Don’t worry about it. I’m from Japanese stock, remember? Stoic.” Her grin widening, she added, “Besides, I’ve got some VR simulations that would make a sailor blush.”

December 15, 2035

11:34 Universal Time

Mars Landing Plus 40 Days

Elysium Planitia

Hi and Catherine were glad to be out of the habitat, doing what they had come to Mars to do. This was their eleventh walkabout since they had landed; they’d collected several hundred pounds of rocks and dirt that definitely included biomarker chemicals but, so far, they’d found nothing that Amanda could identify unequivocally as a living organism, or even a fossil.

Nor any trace of water ice.

Their water situation wasn’t critical yet. The recycler was working at close to ninety percent efficiency, and Ted had calculated that at their present rate of usage they had enough water to last for another month, maybe a little more. But with each passing day they were losing a bit more of their water supply.

Both the geologists knew the vital importance of finding water, and had shifted the focus of their explorations from geology “for the sake of science” to geology “for the sake of survival.” They no longer bothered to collect samples unless they thought that particular location might be one that could yield water. But each of the sites they had sampled had turned up dry—

Mission protocol required that they stay within sight of the
Fermi
, but they had bent that rule slightly and Connover, in his growing worry about the water situation, had let them get away with it. Now, as they headed back and caught sight of the
Fermi
’s dust-stained structure standing against the dull orange sky, they both felt weary and defeated.

Catherine said disconsolately, “I know there’s ice out here somewhere. There has to be!”

McPherson tried to shrug inside his excursion suit and, as usual, failed. “If we were at the poles, we’d be swimming in the stuff. The gamma ray spectrometers on the satellites showed frozen lakes just below the surface, enough to fill Lake Michigan twice.”

“We should have landed there,” said Catherine.

Shaking his head inside his helmet, McPherson said, “The mission planners thought it’d be safer down here, closer to the equator.”

“Not if we don’t find water.”

“The satellite data showed there are pockets of hydrogen all around this area,” he said, “but they’re isolated and it’s impossible to say for sure if the hydrogen is in the form of water ice or bound to some other chemical in the soil.”

Catherine clasped Hi’s gloved hand as they walked.

“We’ll find water here,” she said firmly, as if trying to convince herself. “This area was once full of streams and rivers.”

“A couple billion years ago.”

“I cannot believe they all evaporated without leaving some reservoir underground, some pockets of ice. We simply have to keep looking. We have time.”

Less time every day, McPherson thought. But he kept silent.

They trudged back toward the habitat. Catherine remembered the sense of wonder and excitement they had both felt when they’d started exploring this new world. That was almost gone now. Now their walkabouts were more like drudgery—with the fear of failure behind it.

“Hey, you guys, quit being so depressed out there.”

Amanda’s cheerful voice startled them. They hadn’t had much contact with the habitat during their walkabouts, and had unconsciously acted as if their conversations were private—which they were not.

“Amanda,” Catherine blurted. “You surprised me.”

“Sorry about that. I wasn’t trying to scare anyone. But your doom and gloom isn’t doing any of us any good, you know.”

McPherson replied sourly, “So, you’ve got something to be chipper about?”

“You betcha! Ted and I finished the prototype garden this morning and we’re eager to show it off to you. Come on back in. We’ll grab some grub first, and then we’ll give you a tour of the first garden on Mars.”

Breaking into a grin, McPherson said, “We’re on our way, Amanda.”

“Cheerfully,” Catherine added.

Two hours later all four of them were gathered in the left wing of the habitat gazing at a four-foot by four-foot rectangular box with a clear lid. Inside the box was a long tray punctured by holes regularly spaced along its bottom. Below each hole was a short, hollow tube. On each end of the box was a telescoping boom that extended to a height of about four feet above the plastic flooring. On top of each boom was a shiny, reflective ball with wires running from their bases into a small electronics pad that was attached to the big rectangular box.

Connover, standing beside Amanda, was smiling with satisfaction.