She laughed as they closed on the cliff. “Hold on!”
And then she set them to their fastest speed.
Almost blinded by the drifting haze, Wei could see little detail but the nearing bulk of the towering cliff. Aside from the occasional fishtail to throw up more dust, Ghost did nothing to drop their speed.
The rover charged on, Wei tensing as the grinding from the back of the vehicle only got more intense. Finally, he gasped out, “You’re going to kill us!”
She laughed again, holding them straight on a path for the looming cliff.
Wei braced himself and closed his eyes.
He heard Ghost hit a button and the grinding stopped.
After a moment, Wei opened his eyes and found himself in darkness. He turned around and looked behind them, where he could make out the red gloom of the dust cloud they’d churned up showing as a vertical line. “We’re in the cliff?”
“Yes, in a chasm; it’s narrow and hard to see. The cliff face is so rugged with fissures and spills of rock that the following drone will likely miss it. Instead, the machine will probably follow the dust cloud as it drifts off, thinking we’re in it. Whoever is controlling the drone might work it out, but we’ll be bunked down in Sanctuary by then. We’ll stay through all of today and tonight, not leaving until dawn tomorrow. We’ll also be taking a different exit.” She chuckled, but then sighed, her exhaustion resurfacing.
Wei leaned forward, trying to look up through the top of the slanted windshield. He got the occasional glimpse of sky, but it was a deep, ruddy line above the chasm’s sheer walls. “How high is the chasm?”
“Pretty high. About one hundred meters. You’ll get a better look at it later. We’ll need to do the last part of the journey to Sanctuary suited up and on foot.”
“Do the dusters and scrubbers do enough to erase the worst of the rover’s tracks?”
“Usually it’s enough. Regardless, it’s all we can do. We also usually try and time any journey for when Beijing’s orbiters aren’t around, but that’s getting pretty hard to do.”
“Why?”
“Well, there’s a lot of them. Not that they’re always looking, but we have to be careful, as our access to their data stream isn’t always reliable. The link comes and goes, all depending on when we’ve hacked it, and when they discover and cut us off.”
“So, are we safe now?” Wei asked, exhausted by it all.
She gave a tired grin. “Unless they send out another nuke, but they wouldn’t waste one on us. We’re an inconvenience, an unpredictable variable, but we’re not damaging their plans. Not yet. I think, deep down, their expectation is sooner or later we’ll have a breach or mishap in our own habitat and get wiped out. On the other hand, there’s some back at home who think they let us go just to track how we survive.”
He frowned. “They’re learning from you?”
“Yes.”
Wei thought on that. “So, in a way, Beijing has incorporated you into the various strands of experimental settlements.”
“Exactly.”
Chapter 26
Houxing MingLing Yi (Mars Command One), Mars
Liu Yang and Tung sat at their table finishing their breakfasts, both almost ready to leave their quarters and head to their commands. The meal, like so many others, had been quiet while both caught up on emails or checked over reports before going on duty, but this meal had been particularly silent.
She had noted it, but left her husband to himself, knowing he was still coming to terms with the secrets she had revealed. And leaving him to it meant she would head to her office at Mars Command Two. She grabbed a water bottle and bag, the bag holding supplements she had been instructed to take by her doctor for her pregnancy. “I will see you tonight.”
He nodded as he lifted his gaze from a tablet display.
She paused for a moment, deciding she should try a little harder. “Are you alright?”
“I am troubled by the subterfuge.”
She put her bag down on the table and then sat. “Yes?”
He looked around before asking, “Are you sure this space is secure?”
“Yes. In any case, if it isn’t, then they already know all my secrets.”
“And me?”
“What about you?” she asked.
“What secrets do I know?”
“Thankfully very few.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
Finally, he couldn’t help but ask, reasoning with himself that he had already stepped into what she was mired in. He could only judge how much of a problem it was if he better understood the scope of it all. “What if I want to know what’s really going on?”
“Do you?”
His brow furrowed, but he nodded. “I fear for you, but don’t even understand how much danger you are in.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are veiled in secrets, secrets shared with others, but I don’t even know who. You feel you need to keep these secrets from Beijing Command, which not only makes you look guilty, but leaves a stink of conspiracy and rebellion around you. That is dangerous. Yet, at the same time, you show your good intentions by saving a doomed survivor who you have never met. I feel I need to better understand what is at stake and who the players are.”
She smiled as she asked, “Why? So you can decide if you need to turn me in?”
“No!” he gasped defensively, effectively admitting he didn’t know what he was going to do.
Her smile faded. “I know you are troubled, so let me tell you a little of what is going on. If you want me to stop, just say so, but before I start, let me say that I am not working against the interests of either our nation or our efforts to make Mars a great province of our homeland.”
He sat back and gave a nod to indicate she should continue.
“I was here in the beginning, when there was only one base in my stream of missions, just like there was for your own command. Back then, we had to do a lot of things we wouldn’t today, or would at least think twice about now, as there were fewer of us and less of a sense Beijing Command was watching everything.”
He stopped her. “I was told Beijing Command ordered discipline be relaxed as there was too much pressure before. People on the first missions were being driven to the breaking point by the stress and loneliness of being so far from home, and then on top of that they were being pushed and micromanaged by people back on Earth.” He paused. “But you are making it sound like you had more freedom?”
“It was a stressful time, a hard time, and this was a place of bare facilities, accidents, and deaths, but we weren’t having our comms monitored, and didn’t feel like we were under constant video surveillance. A lot of that gear simply hadn’t been installed then, as the priority was creating airtight bases and backups. The things we needed to survive, not so much what would help the politicians back home.”
That made sense. While Tung could picture Party bosses wanting to see better surveillance of the first crews who had come out, it was obvious the priority had to be habitats, life support, power generation, and supply logistics. “So, at first, Mars was a place of some freedom, but that changed?”
“Yes, and things swung too far the other way. We went from being busy in our work, but also being able to relax, to having all aspects of our lives monitored and scheduled. Nothing subversive was happening in the early days, and the only controls we lived under were the protocols in place to maintain the secret of our presence.”
“So, when did you start to keep things from Beijing Command?”
“We always kept somethings from them, things that didn’t seem to matter. But when they got touchier and they started ordering us, from the safety of Earth, to leave some of our unfortunate crew members to die because they were stranded on broken-down rovers, or marooned by an accident out on the surface with their life support running low, we began to ignore them. In the beginning, it was never about being rebellious or wanting to break the rules; it was simply that we could see how, with a short drive or by sending a drone with a fresh surface suit, we could save one of our own even though Beijing was telling us to leave them to their fate.”