Mission Mars (16 page)

I hold on to the scent of eucalyptus, and to the slippery wrinkled skin of an infant as Astrid stitches me. I hear the crinkle of paper as Astrid unwraps the syringe. I hum, the vibrations of my chest rocking the pile of flesh in my arms. Astrid's movements are smeared by the slow motion of my eyes and ears. Morphine fills the syringe. She moves towards me. I place my hand on her, on the syringe.

“Give me a minute,” I ask.

“It will hurt more later. Just let me do it,” she halfheartedly argues, leaving her arm limp. I grab the syringe.

“You have a minute.”

Anger clenches at my ribs, at my teeth. It shakes the
cells of my body. Any remaining logical thoughts melt in the embers of my rage. My fist clamps on the syringe. I can solve this. My body chants its mantra. I can solve this. Louder. A directive.

“Time's almost up,” Astrid says as she leans forward, reaching for the blood pressure cuff behind me. The concave dip between her shoulder blades is exposed, vulnerable and enticing. There is ample room to plunge the syringe of morphine.

In deference to shock, or slow reflexes, Astrid stands frozen for some time before she collapses. The low dose of morphine merely induces a high. She is not dead. Her breath is even, slow. Her eyes stare at the ceiling. I wrap the infant in a towel and place it on the floor. It squirms for a moment, then settles. In front of me is an impossible equation.

I place the scissors, needle, forceps and clamp in the sterilisation solution. I collect the birth remains in a compost bucket. I wipe the surfaces, twice, just as we practiced. Then, I refill the syringe with morphine.

My knees liquefy. I sink to the floor. The blanket wrapped body seems to float into my arms. I place the full syringe on the floor. One last chorus, one last Home Among the Gum Tree, whispers past my salty lips. I kiss the forehead where wrinkles arch over eyebrows.

Beside us, a raspy breath catches in Astrid's throat and she coughs. It is not long before drool pools in the crease of her lip, but my trance has been broken.

I grab the syringe. Metal to new flesh. Minus one.

Exhausted and undone, I arrange myself on the floor.
No longer sucking, the tiny lips fall away from my breast, cold and still. Astrid's back curls into mine, warm and vibrating with breath. My heart beats. Blood circulates. My lungs expand and contract. I meet the basic requirements for life. It is all I need to survive. Exhausted, I close my eyes and rest.

We had only been on Mars twenty-four hours when the first disaster struck. Rienholt was on the command-deck, Isabella, Pank, and I were on the surface. Isabella and Pank were running up the habitat, and I was deploying the mining equipment, when the sand under one of the lander's strut pads shifted. Strut number four sank into the ground. As the sand under number four shifted, the lander, twenty-five meters of command-deck and living space atop twenty-five meters of hypergolic fuel and rocket motors shifted and began to lean.

Thank our good luck that Rienholt was near the control board. If he hadn't caught it, the lander would have fallen over. The explosion of ruptured fuel tanks would have turned us all into confetti, but his pilot's reflexes kicked in. He fired the maneuvering jets and the cable-stay system. The jets roared in the thin Martian atmosphere, a whistling scream that was piercing even through my surface gear. Then the four cable-
stays flashed out and their auger tips buried themselves in the ground. The robotic augers burrowed until they were anchored deep enough to keep the lander pointed toward the Martian sky. The cables snapped and sang as they pulled the lander's nose back to vertical.

The jets stopped firing with a pop that made me look up at the ports. I didn't like that popping noise. A wisp of grey smoke floated away on the breeze.

I began to breathe again when Rienholt said, “All systems clear.”

“Schedule: add an additional maneuvering system inspection,” I told the computer and set my concern aside.

“What's up, Mac?” Rienholt asked.

“The jet's popped when you shut them down. They shouldn't do that. Good catch, by the way,” I added.

“Thanks. I happened to be looking at the right read-out. Why did number four start sinking? I can't see it from up here.”

“I'm trying to figure that out. Standby.”

I walked over toward strut four. I needed a better vantage point to figure out what exactly caused the lander to shift—other than soft sand.

“
Merde
!” Isabella, our metallurgist, cursed in French.

“Isabella?” Rienholt and I both asked at the same time.

“I nearly got clipped by the hatch. What was that?”

“I'm trying to figure it out,” I reminded them. What I hadn't known was that Isabella was coming out onto the ladder when the lander started to shift. She was stepping through the hatch when the door swung shut with a clang, barely missing her leg. I didn't want to consider what could have happened if
the door had closed on her leg. If it had, and her surface gear failed, Isabella would have lain in a grave on Mars years before she planned.

As the cable-stay system hauled the Lander back to vertical, the other three pads sank further into the surface. I saw the sand under the fourth pad shift again, and then a dimple appeared in the surface where pad number four had been resting. The dimple deepened and grew. Sand streamed from the edges as the dimple became a cone-shaped sinkhole. Sand and small stones rolled down toward the center, where they vanished like sand in an hourglass. The depression grew deeper and wider; then it began to lengthen. It grew to nearly three meters long, and then stopped lengthening, but it kept getting deeper and wider. When it reached a couple of meters across, the sand-flow slowed.

At the bottom of the depression, a ragged hole in dark, volcanic rock appeared. The dust, released by the sands as they slid towards the hole, didn't rise in a cloud as it should. There's negative pressure down there, I thought.

“We've landed on a lava tube,” I reported. “The weight of the lander caused a cave-in. There's nothing under pad four but air. The hole in the tube is about thirty centimeters wide and twice that long. The surface depression is much larger. I don't dare get any closer to the area. I don't want to know how big that tube is.”

“Do you think we need to reposition the lander?” Isabella asked.

“Can't with the cable-stays out, and the lift-off pressure might drop the whole area into that tube,” Rienholt said.

“Mac, I don't blame ya,” Pank, our roboticist quipped. She
is skinny, plain, and blond, but smart. Pankratii ‘Pank' Escobar took care of the machines that did a lot of the physical work. She was also responsible for recording and reporting all of our geologic investigations and metal discoveries—an Earth Corps condition of our surface lease. “I'll get a crawler on a tether down there, so if it tumbles in we can retrieve it.” She had four robot crawlers intended for investigating dangerous places.

“Before you go looking for Martians, Pank,” I said, “let's get the rest of the habitat equipment out of the cargo module. Then we'll get the habitat's compressors started. After that….” Pank didn't let me finish.

“If the tube is big enough, we can move in. It would be better than a surface shelter, even after we cover it.” Pank said. The plan called for an inflatable habitat covered in Martian soil mixed with resin.

“We were told that Lunae Planum doesn't have the geology for lava tubes.” Yet, here we have one, I thought. “Look, we have the equipment to set up a surface shelter. Once the frame is inflated and the resin cures, we will bury it,” I replied. This was an old discussion with Pank. One I was tired of having. I could see her, about twenty meters away, standing next to a crate she had pulled from the cargo module.

“You've seen the test results, Pank. On Earth, the bare hab, inflated, cured, and secured to the surface with tie-downs, survived hurricane winds. Covering it gives us the shielding we need, and covering the domed rectangle shape with half a meter of dirt mixed with resin makes it safer than a hole in the ground—one that might collapse like that tube just did.

Pank gave a lazy wave and got back to unpacking whatever
piece of equipment her list said was next. She just won't give it up, I thought.

My task was to deploy the nano-miners. I had twenty spears, Selectable Precision Extraction Assembly Regulators, to deploy. I stopped watching the sand fall into the hole. Each SPEAR contains and manages a couple billion nanometer scale machines. The nano-bots collect the molecules that the system is set to.

I sat the first SPEAR down on a flat spot and pressed the button on the top to activate it. The tube separated into two sections and telescoped up to its working two-meter height, while an auger in the base of the SPEAR dug into the ground to provide stability. The super conductor magnets along the rod pulsed, and a magnetic field unfolded around it. I backed out of the field. The lower part of the spear opened, and golden “nano-dust” spilled out onto the ground. I set the mag field to maximum area and adjusted the collection settings for gold, silver, and iridium—iridium being the ‘cash cow' of this mining expedition.

“First SPEAR deployed. Computer, access and monitor,” I ordered. The machine beeped to let me know it understood.

A few seconds later the computer announced, “Connected—SPEAR one nominal.”

I expected it would take days to collect enough material to see. Nano mining is not the fastest process in the universe.

“Our clock starts now,” Pank said. I could hear the smile. We had a wager over how long it would take the first iridium crystals to be visible to the naked eye. She thought it would take a day or two. I thought a week might not be long enough.

Nineteen SPEARs later, I walked back by the first
spot. At maximum magnification, I could see a tiny iridium crystal growing in the center of the ore tray as the nano-bots assembled it. It was gorgeous, pure black iridium covered with golden veins of nano-bots crawling over it.

The hab was nearly fully inflated so I stepped into the airlock and started the airlock cycle while I used the vacuum to clean the dust off my gear. Inflated, the habitat is a rectangular structure with short vertical walls and a domed roof. It has rigid airlock assembly at one end and an equipment bay at the other. When it is completely set up it will look like an oblong hill with antennas and vents sticking up from its crest.

Inside the hab Isabella, Pank, and Rienholt, in shirtsleeves, each worked on their assigned tasks around the work bench.

Pank was assembling one of her explorer robot crawlers. Rienholt was sorting rations, and Isabella was assembling our radio equipment. I leaned on the bench and watched the material between the roof ribs ripple as the atmosphere regulator worked to bring the pressure in our habitat up to spec.

“The miners already have a detectable crystal of iridium growing on one of the trays,” I said. They all looked up. “About three microns across, just visible at high magnification.”

“Sweet!” Rienholt said.

Pank grinned, Isabella, stepped over, wrapped her arms around my neck, and gave me a big kiss, which I returned with enthusiasm.

“Isabella, I would love to keep doing that, but we are on a schedule,” I said, grinning. Isabella stepped back, “Slave driver,” she said with a mock pout and a bedroom smile. Pank looked up from the little robot and gave me a wink. Rienholt smirked.

I sat down to pop off my left prosthesis so I could look at the stump of my lower leg. I didn't see anything wrong, but the pain was mixed with an itch that was driving me a crazy. I rubbed my stump vigorously. Ever since I lost my lower legs to a wire mine during the New York Intifada of 2028, I'd had to wear prosthetic legs and feet — and the moniker “stumper.” Earth Corps preferred stumpers. It cost less to lift us into orbit.

Isabella looked over and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Something wrong, Mac?”

I shook my head. “Just a fold in the sock, I think.” I said, as I pulled the sock and the leg back into place.

At the supper table that night, we discussed the tasks on the schedule for the next day.

“We need to set aside the schedule to explore that tube,” I said after each of our lists had been reviewed. Pank nodded and grinned.

“It's a good idea. We might have to move cargo and the Hab,” Isabella agreed.

We weren't a military outfit, and, since we were all cross-trained within a hair's breadth of boredom, we often just agreed without votes and consensus exercises. We each had daily inspections to carry out that could not be put off or ignored so we decided to let Pank explore after we finished our morning chores.

Then we retired to our own rooms, each of us too tired to think of anything but sleep.

The next morning we found gleaming crystals of iridium, gold, and silver growing in all twenty trays. The computer reported that the nano-bots were still finding iridium at a depth of three to five centimeters.