I felt pressure in my ears, thin fingers pushing into my head. I opened my eyes to slits — my eyelids had pressed themselves tight shut instinctively — to see Ilya. He lay on his back, shoulder wedged against the side of the trench, staring up, eyes searching.
“This is going to be a bad one,” he said. “I’ll finish the story later, okay?”
“Okay. But don’t forget.” I shut my eyes again.
For a moment, the surge sounded like huge drums. A thin shriek descended into a monstrous, horrifying bellow. I thought of a ravening god marching over the land, Mars itself, god of war, furious and implacable, searching for things that might be frightened, things that might die.
The pressure suit loosened around me, then clung tight to my skin. A sharp pain in my ears made me screw up my face and groan. The torch fell between us. Ilya grabbed it again, shined it on his face, shook his head, face slick with tears, and held me tightly. I could feel his heart through the suits.
The vibration of the trench walls stopped. We lay for a moment, waiting for it to begin again. I started to get up, pushing against the tarp, frantic to see daylight — but Ilya grabbed my shoulder and pressed me down. I could not hear very well. The torch illuminated his face; he was trying to mouth words to me. Somehow I understood through my fear — rocks and dust would be falling outside. We might be killed by rocks falling from thousands of meters in the wake of the surge, striking at eighty or ninety meters per second. I pressed myself against him, mind racing, grimacing at the pain.
Time passed very slowly. My fear turned to numbness, and the numbness faded into relief. We were not going to die. The worst of the surge had passed over and we were still in the trench — but a new fear hit me, and I had to fight myself to keep from clawing out of Ilya’s embrace. We could be buried under a fresh dune — tons of dust and sand, dozens of meters high. We would never dig out. Our oxygen would be depleted and we would suffocate, this trench would become just what it seemed, a grave… I began to squirm, breath harsh and short, and Ilya struggled to keep his arms around me. “Let me go!” I shouted.
Suddenly, I flinched and stopped thrashing. A light had hit me in the face, not our torch. The lab’s arbeiters were ripping away the foils and tarps, searching for us.
The chief arbeiter appeared on the edge of our trench. A jointed arm had been wrenched loose and the machine was covered with dents and red smears — rock impacts. It had weathered the storm outside, tending the edges of the foil until the last moment. It must have been blown around like a small can.
Ilya pulled me up out of the ditch in deathly silence. The mobile lab was still intact above us; we might be able to get to a station on our own.
We brushed each other down, more for the reassurance of physical contact than any other reason. I felt light-headed, giddy with still being alive. We walked beneath the main foil and tarps, inspecting the lab, then emerged to stand in the open.
The foil on the specimen shed had failed. It was nowhere to be seen.
The sky from horizon to horizon glowered charcoal-gray, almost black. Dust fell in thick snaking curtains, great sheets unrolling, drifting, hiding. We gathered the arbeiters beneath the lab and climbed the steps into the airlock, quickly sucking the gray dust from our suits, then stripped.
Ilya insisted I lie on the narrow fold-down cot. He lay on his cot across from me, then got up and pushed in close beside me. We shivered like frightened children.
We slept for an hour. When we awoke, I felt ecstatic as if from drinking far too much high-powered tea. Everything seemed sharply defined and highly colored. Even the dust in the lab interior smelled sweet and essential. The pain in my ears had subsided to a dull throb. I could still hear, but just barely.
Ilya showed me the lab’s weather record. The surge had topped at two bars.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
He shook his head and smiled, tapping his own ears with a finger. Then he wrote on his slate, “Compressible fluids — a lot to learn.” He added with a rueful grimace, “Some honeymoon. I love you!”
With little ceremony, and not much in the way of clothing left to remove, we celebrated still being alive.
We checked in with the satcoms to tell everybody we had survived and could take care of ourselves. Resources were strained from Arcadia to Mariner Valley — the surge had sheared into three parts crossing the Tharsis volcanoes, and twenty-three stations had been hit by the three-headed monster. There were casualties — seven dead, hundreds injured. Even UMS had suffered damage.
Ilya and I inspected the lab from outside, elevating the tires again and cutting the tie-downs. The foils and tarps had protected it against most of the boulders flung by the surge. Minor damage could be fixed by patches.
We decided to collect what specimens we could from the shed’s remains and drive the lab back to Olympus Station. Replacing our suit tanks and purifiers, we walked west from the lab several dozen meters.
Ilya was somber. My tinnitus had passed but hearing was still difficult — his voice in my com was a barely understandable buzz. “Looks as if we’ve lost the cyst,” he said. The shed itself was nowhere to be found — it might have blown clear to Tharsis by now. But it would undoubtedly have spilled its heavy contents.
I looked up through the thinning curtains of dust. The sky peeking through the gray seemed greenish. I had never seen that color before. I pointed it out to Ilya. He frowned, looked back at the lab, then set his jaw and said we should keep searching.
The air temperature hovered just above zero. It should have been thirty or forty below at this latitude, at this time of the year.
My ecstasy was fading rapidly. “Please,” I muttered. “Enough. I’m not an adventurous woman.”
“What?” Ilya asked.
“It’s hot out here and I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I,” Ilya said. “But I don’t think it’s dangerous. There haven’t been any more warnings.”
“Maybe something local is brewing,” I said. “Everyone knows weird weather lives in the sulci.”
He vaulted across a wind-exposed boulder and picked up a pale brown cylindrical rock. “One of our core specimens. Maybe the shed dumped its load here.”
“I think we should go back.”
Ilya stood and frowned deeply, caught between wanting to please me and a powerful need to find something, anything, of the broken cyst and the other specimens. Suddenly, I regretted being such a coward. “But let’s look a little longer.”
“Just a few more minutes,” he agreed. I followed him to the edge of a canyon. A hundred meters below, fine dust drifted like a river through the canyon bottom. Gray dust mixed with, swirls of ochre and red, immiscible fluids, Jovian; I had never seen anything like it. Ilya kneeled and I squatted beside him.
“If they fell down there — ” he said, and shook his head. Our suits were covered with clinging gray dust; the suck and destat in the lab might not be able to remove enough to keep it from getting into the recycling systems, into our skin. I imagined smear rashes itching all night long.
Something fogged the outside of my face-plate. I reached up to wipe it. A muddy streak formed under my touch. I swore and removed a static rag from my waist pack. The rag did not work. I could hardly see.
“The dust is wet,” I said.
“Can’t be. There’s not enough pressure,” Ilya said. He looked at my suit and streaked the muck on my arm with one finger, then examined the finger. “You’re right. You’re wet. Am I?”