I tongued a couple of pain tabs into my mouth and washed them down with a sip of recycled water. It tasted like what it had once been.
Once loaded, we set off in the direction of Olympus Mons, winding our way through a maze of hard-edged boulders, going where no one had gone before. Or so I assumed. It was a strange feeling after the humanity-packed cities of Earth, where you had the feeling that every corridor had been walked by thousands before you, everything you saw had been seen a million times, and “new” meant “disposable.”
But the thrill of trail-blazing soon gave way to renewed anxiety over Sasha’s whereabouts and the neverending task of placing one foot in front of the other. It was cold outside, minus 24 degrees F according to my helmet display, but I soon started to sweat. Turning my thermostat down helped a little, but the problem remained. Try as I might, I had a difficult time internalizing the fact that the sweat was inside rather than outside my high-tech skin. We had traveled about five miles by the time my passenger broke the silence. Her voice was synthetic, and sounded vaguely familiar, as if she’d modeled it on a holo star. “I’m sorry.”
I gauged the ledge ahead, decided I could make it thanks to the lower gravity, and jumped. Slow-motion dust geysered up and away from my boots. I checked the path and started after the mule ahead. “Norgleszap? I mean, sorry? Sorry about what?”
“About you having to drag my nonexistent ass cross country.”
I sidestepped a rock and laughed in spite of myself. “It isn’t your fault. Or I assume it isn’t, anyway.”
“No,” the voice said, “I’ve got an alibi. I was sitting in a crate aboard Roller Three when the shuttle crashed.”
“Sounds airtight,” I agreed politely. “Well, I sure hope you and the others know what you’re doing, or this is gonna be a one-way trip.”
“Oh, we know what we’re doing,” she said confidently. “That’s not the problem.”
“It isn’t?” I asked stupidly. “Then what is?”
“Why, the condition of the shuttle,” she answered calmly. “What if the shuttle went in hard? The walkers were in the main cargo bay. They could be spread all over the place.”
I skidded down the side of a ravine and tackled the other side. “But the ship’s artificial intelligence said the cargo is okay.”
“The ship’s artificial intelligence ‘thinks’ the cargo is okay,” my passenger corrected me. “But doesn’t really know, since it’s bolted into a panel somewhere.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “That’s the prognosis, alright. My name’s Loni. What’s yours?”
“Max. Max Maxon.”
“Glad to meet you, Max. Any chance you’d do me a favor?”
I swore as the mule in front of me came to an unexpected stop, forced me to do likewise, then started up again. “Sure, what do you need?”
“I’m tired of the darkness, Max. Tell me what you see.”
Suddenly I knew something I hadn’t known before. I knew that whatever I had lost, others had lost even more. Loni’s brain was intact, but the eyes, ears, arms and legs designed to serve it had been taken away, either through bad luck or a conscious decision on her part. I thought of the darkness within her box, the isolation from the rest of humanity, and shivered. I turned the heat back up a notch and did my best to sound cheerful. “Okay, but I spend a lot of time looking at my feet, so I’ll start there. They are size fourteen or so, large enough to qualify as battleships, and covered with reddish Mars dust.”
Loni laughed, and thus encouraged, I continued. Describing what I saw to my sightless passenger forced me to realize how beautiful my surroundings were and made the time pass quickly. It seemed as if little more than a few minutes had elapsed when Dawkins announced the halfway point and declared a ten-minute break.
Mules headed in every direction as they looked for places to sit. Talking to Loni had been pleasant, but Sasha was very much on my mind, so I waited for the greenie to light on rock and ambled over. Loni was telling me about her VR-driven training, but I cut her off in mid-sentence. “Sorry, Loni, but I’ve got a personal matter to attend to. Hold that gafornk.”
The greenie turned her helmet in my direction but made no effort to avoid me. There was plenty of room on the rock she had chosen, so I sat down beside her. My helmet thumped against hers. It’s hard to be brain-damaged and subtle at the same time. I wasn’t. “You shot at us.”
Her reply was direct. “Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why shoot at us?”
“Because I was ordered to do so.”
“By whom?”
“Screw you.”
“What about the girl? What happened to the girl?”
The woman shrugged. The suit fit fairly well and shrugged with her. “Beats me. The gas put me out.”
I swore. The woman hooked her thumbs under the pack straps that held her cyborg in place. I could barely see her eyes through the sand-abraded face plate. Was it sympathy I saw?
“You really like her, don’t you?”
I was confused. “Like who?”
“The girl.”
“Yes, I really like her.”
“Well,” the woman said, “think about her before you unleash whatever technological hell you’re working on.”
“I’m not working on a technological rebonk.”
“Really?” the woman asked. “Then what are you doing here?”
Part of me wanted to give the obvious answer, to say something about protecting my client, but the rest knew she was right. There was something more going on, something Sasha at least partially understood, assuming she was alive, that is.
“On your feet,” Dawkins ordered. “We have about twelve miles to go and barely enough air to get there. Let’s haul ass.”
The next two and a half hours were difficult. Perhaps some of the others had thought to catheterize themselves prior to departure, but I hadn’t and needed to pee. Add to that the fear of what we might find when we arrived at the crash site, and my concerns for Sasha, and it made for a hard, cold lump that rode my gut for the rest of the day. It was twilight by the time we hit flat ground and the mule called Swango saw the first chunk of wreckage. He sounded worried and ecstatic at the same time. “Dawkins! There it is! A piece of wreckage!”
“Good boy,” Dawkins said calmly. “Now stay away from it until I get there and take a look-see. It could be dangerous.”
“Or it could be loaded with goodies like oxygen,” Loni said over our private intercom.
I hadn’t thought about that but knew it was probably true. If the mules stumbled across some O2, the Field Supervisor’s immediate authority would be considerably lessened. And, while the mutineers wouldn’t have any place to go after their rebellion, Dawkins could be more than a little dead in the meantime.
The wreckage consisted of a huge engine, one of four required to keep a shuttle aloft in the planet’s thin atmosphere, and glittered with a coating of diamondlike ice crystals. I figured some sort of liquid had been liberated when the engine tore free; then it had vaporized and frozen in a matter of seconds.
We were close now, and picked up the pace without being asked to. It was relatively easy to follow the trail of debris, which, thanks to the lighter gravity, was much longer than it would have been on Earth. Judging from the wreckage, and the huge scars scored in the rocky soil, the shuttle had cartwheeled for two or three miles after it hit before finally coming to rest.
We found more and more wreckage as we followed the trail. I described it to Loni. “And there’s something that looks like a piece of wing with part of an engine still attached.”