“Sure,” said Frank.
“I need to show they work in the field. They are, partly, my own design.”
“Sure. OK. I’m saying yes.” He waggled his mug. “Just let me finish this and go and press some buttons. You’ve cleared this with Lucy?”
“I will.”
She slid her tablet across towards him, and Frank pulled it closer. The annotated photograph showed the volcano, Ceraunius Tholus, and markers marching up the line of the Santa Clara, all the way to, and around, the vast crater at the summit.
Right up on the summit. M2 were down on the far side to the south, but the top of the volcano would be very much within their range. Even if they couldn’t get that far any more—even if they were all dead by now, and Frank didn’t know how to react to that possibility as his emotions were still swinging between rage and fear—then there might be evidence that they had been up there.
Perhaps he should change his mind, and go up on his own to scout it out. But it was too late.
“You think that’s too much?”
Frank circled his finger around the crater. “You’ve done the training. You know how much hard work it is just to be in the suit. We can give it a go, but I’m guessing we’ll need to do more than one trip out.”
That might give him time to check out the upper slopes on his own.
“Much is expected of me,” she said.
“It’s expected that you get back in one piece.”
She frowned, as if Frank didn’t understand. “A lot of money was spent getting me here.”
Frank looked around. No one else was within earshot. “We’ll do what we can, but we’re not pushing it, OK? Mars is waiting to kill you.”
She nodded, taking the tablet with her when she left. He watched her go. She had nothing to prove: to him, to her government, to anyone. And yet that, apparently, brought its own pressures.
The rule was—Lucy’s rule, NASA’s rule—no expeditions without a buddy. The immediate area around the base was fine, but someone still needed to sit in Comms and listen, just in case they needed to answer an alarm. That made perfect sense. Proper safety procedures, observed at all times.
Then there was Frank, who didn’t work under that rule. Lucy didn’t like it, but she wasn’t his boss, and she had no authority over him. He could go outside whenever and wherever he wanted. He didn’t even have to tell her, though he did because he didn’t want to shit the bed. And he liked her. She was efficient. She got stuff done. She cared very much about the safety of her crew, and by extension Frank, which frustrated them both but they’d probably work it out eventually.
What she did do was trust him enough to double up with her people. That… that didn’t sit well with him. He was a fraud, an impostor, and he wasn’t telling her things that she really ought to know.
If she did find out, what would she do? Leave him here? It was a certainty. Rather than spend the eight months with a murderer, on a spaceship that wasn’t quite big enough for six, she’d maroon him. Hell, it’s what he would do. It was the only sensible decision.
So he wasn’t going to tell her. Do the job, go home, find Mike. Nothing beyond that. Nothing outside of that. Keep it zipped up, wrapped tight. He finished his coffee, which was more cold than hot, then went to the can.
Yun was already outside, loading up the trailer, by the time he suited up. She was carrying the weather stations—they were more than that, but that was the name she called them—from the supply rocket in the boneyard to the trailer, fifty yards away. They weren’t heavy, but they were bulky, and the longer they spent packing for the journey, the less time they could spend setting up the experiments.
So, Frank backed the trailer up to the rocket. He even managed to make it took easy, which wasn’t his intention at alclass="underline" it was just practice. Marcy had been a good teacher.
Frank strapped the load down, gave them all a shake and tightened the ratchets one more click. They were good to go, and with one last check with Lucy in Comms, they were heading for the entrance to the Santa Clara.
There was no sea level to take as zero—Yun called it “datum”—but the numbers meant that Ceraunius was close to thirty thousand feet high. Because they were in spacesuits, the altitude didn’t mean anything as such, just wear-and-tear on the batteries. Still, it was the longest journey he’d made since his encounter with the M2 crew member, and he was heading in their direction.
He felt a tightness in his chest. The Santa Clara river bed was sinuous, with broad, sweeping curves and high arching banks that obscured both the way ahead and the view to either side. Every turn that they took, each new vista that opened up, could reveal a figure in a spacesuit, a buggy.
And every time it didn’t happen, Frank would feel a surge of relief that would slowly fade as his anxiety built again. He started to realize exactly what keeping secrets for XO meant. It wasn’t that he couldn’t manage the lying, the misdirection, the pretending to be someone else: it was the sheer physical toll it was going to take on him.
He’d survived worse. He’d just have to grit his teeth and do it.
It helped that Yun liked to talk. That was fine. Frank didn’t mind it so much because she seemed to be in the habit of pointing things out to herself, so she could remember them later, rather than expecting a conversation: there appeared to be no requirement that he listen, let alone respond. If she mentioned his name—Brack’s name—he knew to tune back in.
She described the river bed’s snake-like track up the slope of the volcano, how the sand had collected at the well-defined edges of the valley and especially in the outer bends of its path, and how the material was still traveling downhill under wind-power, as evidenced by the tear-drop shapes around the craters that had subsequently been carved into the dry soil.
If she had noticed the earlier tracks he’d made, she didn’t say: but time had smudged them, showing that the processes that were giving the sand surface ripples were still ongoing.
They kept on climbing. Frank had one eye on the direction of travel, and the other on the battery stats: they’d use less juice coming down, but he still wasn’t going to go under fifty per cent. It was sixty or so miles to the very top, obviously the same going back. Easily doable on paper, but getting them stranded wasn’t such a great idea.
“Lance, can you stop?”
He relaxed his grip on the controls, and the buggy coasted to a halt. Yun extricated herself from the latticework behind him and jumped down onto the ground. She reached for the still camera that was attached to her waist—two cameras side by side, with a supporting frame and a dust-free enclosure that made it deliberately two-handed—and advanced towards the valley wall. She had, inexplicably, gone quiet, and she walked like she was stalking prey.
She raised her camera, framed her shot and took several pictures.
“Have you seen this before, Lance?” She pointed at the ground, at the darker patch of soil that seemed to leak out of the top of the sand bank and spread out downhill.
“I guess I must have done. What is it?” Sure, they were there, most times he’d driven up the valley.
“It’s a recurring slope linea. Can you get the ranging pole from the trailer?”
Frank clambered down and retrieved the telescopic pole, locking the sections together as he walked to her.
“So what causes it?”
“Water,” she said.
“But water boils away.” He turned so he could look into her helmet, at her intent, focused expression.
“When the water is super-saturated with salts, it can exist in liquid form at these temperatures and pressures. The evaporation rate will still be high, but it’s believed that being entrained in a matrix of small grain-sized particles will permit the water to flow subsurface. This is water, Lance, melting from the ground. At night it should refreeze, and the dark patch disappear, but once temperatures rise again during the day, it’ll restart.”