Then he realized. His suit transmitter was still off. He’d turned it off that night, and had had no reason to turn it back on again. Away from both the main base and the ship, the map app had no way of talking to the satellites above. Did he dare risk turning his suit comms on? Did he dare not? If he couldn’t place himself on the map, he might end up traipsing across half of Mars looking for stuff and then not be able to find his way home.
If he was talking to XO, then he guessed he’d already made that decision. He tapped his way through his suit menu until he got to the right tab. He poked it back on, and a few seconds later the map recentered on his position, right at the top of Long Beach, and his targets bloomed on the landscape.
He set off southwards, skirting the edge of the crater, until the cross he was looking for merged with his own pointer. Then he stopped, stood up on the buggy’s frame and steadied himself using the roll cage, scanning the surroundings for any sign of the cylinder or its parachute. The map would only put him in the right area. After that, it was up to him.
And even though it was a plain, almost laser flat, the ground was pocked with craters, large and small, young and sharp-edged, old and barely even hollows. He’d had to retrieve cargo from several, sometimes even running a line over the rim and dragging the damn thing out. For all that they’d traveled a hundred million miles and all but crashed onto another planet, the cylinders really didn’t like lateral stress. He’d bent more than a couple that way.
There, half a mile distant, half hidden in a slight depression. This was going to be sweet. He’d be able to literally leave the lights on all night if he wanted: a full farm, another two big batteries, a full fifteen kilowatts of generating capacity. Of all the things to get excited about, he’d never thought that scavenging items from the surface of Mars would ever figure.
He drove over, dismounted and went to inspect the cylinder, lying slightly point-up and looking like a thirty-foot-long white pencil. The last solar farm had hard-landed, and over a third of the panels had broken on impact: it had only been luck that the batteries had survived, because if it had been the other way around, they’d have frozen to death. This one, barring some scorch-marks up the side, was intact, right down to the XO logo painted on the side.
He used the tool to open one of the pair of side hatches, and he had enough experience to know that the door tended to blow out when released. He was ready for it when it popped—not an audible pop, more something that he could feel through his feet. Then he helped swing the door the rest of the way, and he rummaged through the layers of insulation until he could read what was on the side of one of the drums. Panels: solar. 5x1kW. This was what he’d come for.
He pulled the hatch closed and relocked it, then winched the cylinder onto the trailer, just past the point of balance so that the end cleared the ground. Done. The parachute was gone, somewhere. Sometimes they detached properly, and ended up miles away. Other times they were still hanging from their lines, and the Martian wind wasn’t strong enough to shift them after they’d touched down.
The parachutes were useful all the same. Frank tended to pick up everything he could, and take it with him. It had cost a lot to get the stuff there. There was no point—unless it was actually dangerous—in leaving it. He’d have to leave this one, though, if he couldn’t find it easily.
He stood up on the buggy frame again and looked for the telltale black-and-white against the dun-colored ground, but couldn’t immediately see it. He checked his air, and the light, and decided that he could afford to spend ten minutes circling the drop site to find it. After that, he’d have to head home. He set off, more sedately than before because he was towing, and drove another half-mile south, before turning slowly eastwards. Every so often he’d stop and climb up, hanging off the roll cage, but he couldn’t spot it.
But he did see something. Tire tracks that he couldn’t possibly have made, because he’d never been this way before. He parked up next to them, and climbed down to make certain that these weren’t apparitions like his dead crewmates.
Squatting awkwardly in the dust, he peered at first one, then the other, of the parallel lines. They were reaclass="underline" when he ran his hand through the dirt that carried them, he left lines on the ground, and red on his gloves. They weren’t fresh tracks: in comparison to the ones he was making, the edges of the plate-marks were blurred, and if he looked up and down the track he could see there were places where they’d been obliterated completely, presumably by the passage of a Martian twister. That would make them a couple of weeks old, but not a couple of months.
All tracks made by his wheels had a direction—the central tread was V-shaped. These had the same pattern. They were, in fact, identical, and could only have been made by an XO buggy, heading north. Brack had been this way before, then, presumably on his way back from collecting the NASA equipment. He stood up and stared into the south, past the sloping flanks of Ceraunius and into the haze. There was nothing there, either.
He checked his air again, and the battery level on the buggy. It was time to abandon the parachute to Mars, and he turned the wheels to head back to Long Beach. Something was tickling his mind, giving him a feeling of unease, but there were so many things he was worried about. It was only when he met his outgoing tracks that the thought crystallized.
There were no other tracks leading south.
He stopped. He stood up. He turned around and looked behind him. There was still nothing. He’d driven maybe five miles after turning right at Long Beach, pretty much due south. He’d never driven south before from that point. He’d gone all points of the compass—north, north-east, north-west and west. That had been where all the supplies had landed, out on the Tharsis plain in a roughly triangular area between the three volcanoes. Some of the drops had been beyond the range of one life-support pack, necessitating a dangerous swap-out halfway.
But none had fallen in the south.
Brack may have been south. May. But he would have had to travel east first, then south, then back following the exact same route. Two sides of a triangle, twice, when a shorter direct distance was available. They could literally go straight on Mars, unless there was an impassable geographical feature they had to detour around. The shortest route was always best.
Was it subterfuge on Brack’s part? Tire tracks south might have alerted the crew as to the arrival of fresh deliveries. Then again, none of them had been out as far as Long Beach since they’d picked up the very last of the containers they’d needed for Phase one, which was months ago. And Brack had chosen to stack the NASA equipment at the base of the Heights, which was hardly hidden away. Granted, he hadn’t been making good decisions by that point, but after that he’d still managed to kill three men and had nearly done for Frank, too. So he hadn’t been completely incapable of action.
It simply didn’t make any sense. To go south, anyone would have got to the top of Long Beach—which was itself a lengthy drive—and gone straight to their destination. Unless…
Unless there was something hidden in the distance, out on the plain due east of Rahe, that Brack had called at on his way out, and on his way back. That would make as much sense as anything, but he didn’t have the time, nor the range, to go and look for it today.
Soon, then. The tracks were there. All he had to do was follow them out and see where they led.
6
[Message file #87472 11/14/2048 1437 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]
I’m sorry, Frank. This situation is very new to us as well. We’re trying to keep things professional here, and anything that affects that—of course that includes your well-being—is our number one concern. We’ll have to try a little bit harder to communicate that to you, and I can only apologize if you feel we’ve let you down so far.