She eyed the approaching storm with a touch of annoyance. “Just another beautiful day on the Arcadian Plain.”
Kazuo Nagai’s voice came in over her headset. “Cry me a river, Sal. You love it out here. I know it, and you know it. Now stop working your jaw and gimme a hand with this.”
She estimated an hour or more before the storm would hit, time enough to get their work done with ease. She was also pretty sure she outranked Kazuo, so she kept moving at her own leisurely pace. At least, she thought she outranked him. As she watched the coming storm, she wondered if anyone really understood the GAF chain of command.
Sal turned back toward the wall of the Ares Colony, where Kazuo was impatiently holding up a half-tonne composite steel panel. His powered environment suit, called a MASPEC, made him look like the bastard offspring of a man and a forklift, and the forklift had more dominant genes. Sal made a mental note to do something about the suits’ aesthetics once she got all the bugs worked out.
She marched over and grabbed the other end of the panel, and together they carried it to the side, revealing the bare innards of the atmosphere processor beneath. The compartment was full of ducting and jumbled wires. She hated electronic spaghetti. “Remind me to chew out whoever left this mess. It’s like they never heard of cable ties.”
“Probably your father’s work.”
“Shut up.”
Kazuo flicked on his shoulder lamp and hunkered down in front of the compartment. “Which board is it?”
“Jay five. The rack with the bright red error light.”
“I’m color blind, Sal. I’ve told you at least a hundred times.”
“And it’s funny every single time,” she said without malice.
Kazuo selected the screwdriver attachment on his wrist tool, and went to work on the screws which held the circuit board in place. “Tell me something interesting about Mars,” he said while he worked.
Sal pulled the replacement board out of her pack. “Alright. Did you know that in ancient times, Mars was inhabited by a race of intelligent tiger-lizard men?”
“Is that so?”
“Absolute fact. Although their civilization collapsed, a few of them survived into modern times, and around the turn of the century, they assisted human efforts to explore the red planet by wiping off the rovers’ solar panels at night while the machines were powered down.”
“Amazing,” Kazuo said. He handed her the burnt out board, and she gave him the replacement. “Now, what exactly is a tiger-lizard man?”
“They’re basically like normal lizard men, but with jaunty stripes and cheerier attitudes.”
Kazuo gave the replacement board a healthy nudge to make sure it was properly seated, then went about screwing it in. “That makes some crazy sort of sense, I guess. Wait… Last week, didn’t you tell me Mars was originally colonized by little green men with fat heads? There are shenanigans afoot.”
Sal gave the faulty board a quick once over, looking for any obvious signs of failure like a burnt capacitor, but there weren’t any. She’d have to take a closer look in the lab once they got back. “No shenanigans. The little green men, the Quazlpacti as they were called, were the first to colonize Mars, and they brought the tiger-lizards with them as pets. Unfortunately, they didn’t foresee the mutagenic plague which, in a fit of poetic justice, turned them into docile pets and the tiger-lizards into their cruel masters.”
“Fascinating,” Kazuo said. “We’re ready to seal up here.”
Sal packed the faulty circuit board away and then lifted the steel panel up. “It was the Quazlpacti who left the Nazca Lines on Earth, you know.”
“To warn us against the dreaded gas monkeys of Jupiter, right?”
“Nope. Just graffiti. The Quazlpacti were jerks.”
Kazuo stood and turned to give her a hand with the panel, but stopped and put his hands on his hips instead. His posture positively radiated frustration, and Sal was once again amazed at how much subtle body language made it through the bulk of the powered suits.
“You’re holding that panel up by yourself? You weren’t going to experiment on production units anymore, damn it.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t experimenting. It’s just a little performance tweak.”
“Tweak my ass,” Kazuo said. “The suit’s only rated to lift half that weight.”
She walked past him and lowered the panel over the exposed compartment, then punched the pressure seals into place. “I wrote the spec, thanks. No need to quote it to me.”
“That’s not the point. It’s not safe, Sal. What if your ‘tweaks’ fail and five hundred kilos of steel come tumbling down on you? What then?”
“Then my stalwart yet officious partner digs me out and carries me back to the airlock.” She gave Kazuo a nudge in the ribs, which he certainly didn’t feel. “Those are the dangers of frontier engineering, soldier boy. Better get used to it.”
With the panel sealed up, they both marched back toward the eastern airlock at a pace much slower than their suits were capable of. After a long silence, Kazuo said, “You’re really aggravating, you know that?”
“Of course I know it,” Sal replied. “It’s why you like me so dang much.”
Kazuo groaned, and Sal took it as a sign of affection. Kazuo wasn’t the kind to let his positive emotions bubble up to the surface, but it meant they burned twice as bright deep down inside. At least, that’s what Sal told herself while she continued to dig around for them.
By the time they reached the airlock, the sandstorm was still brewing in the distance, and hadn’t made much progress. Sal would’ve been delighted if it never bothered to come together at all. The sound of stones battering the colony’s outer shell always ruined her concentration in the lab.
The airlock doors closed behind them and the chamber began to pressurize, a process made agonizingly slow by obsolete, decrepit airlock hardware. The old tech did its job, though, and just well enough that Sal’s requests for replacements from Earth were ignored. Since they were all mission critical systems, she wasn’t even allowed to experiment on them. Not the slightest little bit.
“Tell me something interesting about Mars,” Kazuo said, looking to kill time.
Sal’s mind was still on those annoying, tiny little rocks. “Did you know that ninety percent of the rocks currently on Mars were brought here by the original colonists?”
“Is that so?” Kazuo asked.
“Absolute fact. The Martian landscape, as originally seen by the Viking probes, was mind numbingly boring, so the colonists brought rocks with them to liven up the scenery. A quarter of the colonists were landscapers by profession, and they spent the first three years carefully arranging them, like some kind of giant Zen garden.”
“Incredible,” he said. “What about the sandstorms?”
“Ruined all of their hard work over and over again, until they finally gave up trying.”
The pressure was half-way there.
“Tell me something interesting about Earth,” she said.
He took a moment to think. Kazuo wasn’t the imaginative type, so he tended to answer with actual, interesting facts. Or things he thought were interesting, but often times weren’t. “Did you know…” he droned out as he tried to think of something, “that when Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, the Great Wall of China was the only man-made structure visible from space.”
“I did know that.”
“Oh.”
“And it’s not true.”
“Damn.”
An uncomfortable silence persisted until the green pressure light came on and the internal doors parted, revealing the mission readiness bay. The oblong room was filled with standard GAF pressure suits hanging on racks, as well as a half-dozen of Sal’s MASPEC powered suits, which faced the wall with their backs open.