He felt a cold sweat break out across the whole of his body, and his breathing quicken. The planet was so huge, and he was the only one on it. Don’t panic, don’t panic. Breathe. Hold. Breathe.
The moment passed, but he still wondered if he wasn’t taking too much of a risk, going so far from home when it wasn’t necessary. He almost turned around. Almost. Luisa would have liked that.
But others were coming soon. It would be fine. Everything was fine.
He consulted his map again and angled the nose of the buggy back towards the volcanic slopes. The quality of the ground slowly changed again: fewer craters, and more exposed rock. Rilles and runnels snaking downwards, like smaller versions of the Santa Clara, almost as if a dusty, crater-pocked sea lapped up against a continent, flowing up its rivers and retreating from its promontories.
He had to be getting close, but how to get to where he wanted to be through what was rapidly becoming a labyrinth of channels? He glanced at the map again, and saw that he was losing his signal. Blocked by the intervening higher ground, his suit was struggling to stay connected.
He could retreat. He could also, looking at the last iteration of his map, go higher still. If he drove up and out of the valley he was in, he’d find himself on the clear slopes above. He eased forward, crossing the unfamiliar terrain until his view opened up again, and he was on one of a staircase of rock steps that seemed to climb, irregularly and imperfectly, all the way to the very top.
Frank had his signal again, and the cross that marked his target was centered on his position. Somewhere, within a couple of hundred yards of where he was, was what he was seeking, but damned if he could see it. He parked up and walked up to the next rock step. Though the riser was blunt, he found out just how difficult it would be to climb in his spacesuit. His knees creaked with the effort, and he used his hands as much as his feet.
He pulled himself upright, and stared out across the lower slopes, looking for a splash of color or scorch-marks from the landing rockets. Right down on the plain, momentarily, he saw a figure in a spacesuit, walking out from behind one bluff and into the shadow of another. From the size of them, it could have been Marcy again, or Alice, or Declan. Definitely not Zeus. He raised his hand, but that was stupid, and he dropped it again quickly. They’d gone, anyway, and they were never really there in the first place.
He was still on the clock, and he had to get on with his search, or abandon it. Where could the cargo drop be hiding?
There was a channel nearby, one with steep, almost cliff-like banks. Wary of going too close to the broken edge, but having to peer down inside it all the same, he shuffled up to it and let his eyes adjust to the dark. There. The parachute had wrapped itself around the cylinder, covering it almost completely, which was a new one on him. And when he looked again, the parachute seemed lumpy. It didn’t bode well for the state of the cargo inside, but he was going to see for himself whether there was anything he could salvage.
The best way in was to drive down from the top of the channel. The buggy made heavy weather of the steps, just like he had, and he had to dial the plates to their maximum surface area to get enough grip, even at the slowest speed. The trailer grounded, and he had to drag it, vibrating, until the wheels met the rock again and slowly rolled around the step.
He had to do that twice more, scraping the underside of the trailer frame along hard volcanic rock before it cleared. But then he was able to swing round and into the channel. The banks rose around him, but the valley floor was flat enough. It curved left and right, and finally he was able to park up next to the cylinder.
It looked at first sight as if it had landed safely on the top of the bank, and then fallen the fifty feet or so into the ravine. The cargo doors had burst open, and then the parachute had descended on it, covering it up.
Frank pulled at the fabric, heaving great handfuls towards him as if it was a giant sheet. He was right: the doors were both open, and there were obvious dents and dints in the casing, gouges where the metal underneath had been exposed and shone dully silver.
Half the drums inside were missing, and he turned around, expecting to see the debris scattered down the channel. It wasn’t there. He went back to the cylinder and peered inside. Definitely, three of the six drums weren’t present. The insulation around them had gone. The straps that secured them in place had gone. The drums themselves had gone.
And yet of those that remained, everything was intact. That… made no sense.
He checked the catches on the doors, the ones he usually used the tool that hung on his belt to turn. The doors hadn’t burst. They’d been opened. The parachute: the parachute hadn’t fallen on the cargo. It had been placed there, deliberately, to keep the dust out.
His feet. The channel bed was bedrock, with a fine covering of weathered sand and wind-blown dust. Bootprints, identical to his, in places where he hadn’t walked. And there, twenty feet away, tire tracks that showed that a buggy had come up the valley, and then three-point-turned back down it.
Brack?
It couldn’t be Brack. Brack would have had a trailer, like he had a trailer. He’d have winched the whole cylinder on and carried it away.
Was it… him? Was this Frank? Was he suffering some kind of psychosis?
He put his hand on the side of the rocket. It was real. As real as the boots and the buggy.
In a daze, he left everything as it was and climbed back into his buggy’s seat. He clicked the harness on, unconsciously testing the clasp had locked by leaning forward because he could never hear it fasten.
He looked at the tracks in the ground ahead of him, and started to drive slowly, following them down the channel. There were two tracks, overlain. One that went towards him, one that went away. There was no mistake here: an XO rover, driven by someone in an XO suit, had been out this way in the last couple of months, and maybe it was Brack, and maybe it was him.
Frank remembered conversations he’d had with Declan, when they thought that someone had been using the buggies on unauthorized jaunts at night. They’d concluded that all those journeys had been to the descent ship and back, not this far out. But Brack had definitely been out on the plain, picking up the NASA equipment. Declan would have spotted the discrepancies in the power levels a mile off, and a fully drained battery wasn’t something anyone could hide from him. So Brack must have recharged the fuel cell from the ship before returning it, masking what he was doing from the surviving cons.
It had to be Brack, and yet… the tracks, once out of the channel, turned resolutely and inexorably south-east, skirting the ragged volcanic rock and following the edge of the dust sea. The buggy had come from the south, and it was returning that way.
There was nothing south of him. Nothing but red desert.
Finally, he came to his senses, and stopped. He was past halfway through his air, and nearly seventy miles on the clock. He hadn’t hammered it, but he’d either have to drive quicker to get home, or avail himself of the spare life support at the top of Long Beach. That was now thirty miles away as the crow flew, if there’d ever be such a thing on Mars. Add the fifteen-twenty along Sunset and up the Heights… the range of the buggy was somewhere between one fifty and two hundred miles.
He was no longer safe, even by his standard. And he was towing, which despite being empty added an extra strain on the fuel cells.
And still the incontrovertible evidence of his eyes was that the tracks he was following led south. They originated in the south, and were using their outward-bound journey to guide their way back.
Back to where?
Frank looked at his map, zoomed into the highest detail allowed. It didn’t show individual tracks, because the resolution at that scale was too low. Disappointingly, it didn’t even show Sunset Boulevard, which had to be the best-delineated and most-used road on Mars. He checked for other features it might show. Not the MAV, which was a recent addition and perhaps the satellite photography hadn’t caught up with it. But there was the ship, and the MBO was a clear artifact in pale pink and white.