Mission Mars (35 page)

Kayla stepped out of airlock G5, taking her away from the comforts of Atmobase 173 and out onto the dusty, tan landscape of Mars. She adjusted the strap of her respirator that rubbed against the back of her neck. Irritating as it was, she knew, too, she would have to wear the bothersome pressure suit for the next ten to fifteen years. Summers in the land between Mare Sirenum and Aonius Sinus could be downright comfortable, but winters still tended to be life threatening, even with the extra temperature boost the new atmosphere granted.

Her supplies for the next three months floated on the hover disk behind her, attached by a clip to her suit at the end of a length of polycord. Kayla headed over to the parking structure to get her hover sled. The parking structure stood apart from the atmobase for security reasons. It was little more than a well-lit, multilevel hitching post, constructed after
some idiot collided with the atmobase while attempting to dock. Kayla's sled looked more like a big, floating armored box than a sled. When she first purchased it she had thought it was huge, being fifteen feet wide and twenty-five feet long. but because it slipped along on antigravity plating and was smaller than lightly armed fighter class starships, they called it a sled. For Kayla, it was home.

Her sled was larger than some and as fast as any, but because of its size, it wasn't as maneuverable, which was fine. She'd bought it because it was capable of towing very large loads. She'd spent her entire savings buying the machine. Fortunately, she had enough left to add an independent air lock, a dual function towing apparatus, and twenty anti-gravity webs.

After her initial expedition, Kayla splurged on two classes of high-energy lasers, which were much faster and more precise than hand cutting tools. The bigger of the two was vehicle mounted and powered by her sled. It could make large cuts in an ice field that Kayla could work with. The smaller one was a rifle-sized cutting laser she could use to make finer cuts, while standing on the ice. The lasers also made excellent defensive weapons that, if needed, she would use without hesitation. It was technically illegal to be armed, but it was practically impossible for the law to prevent the miners from creating some kind of defensive weaponry out of their mining tools. Claim jumpers were rare but not unheard of, so Kayla was always alert and prepared. Kayla, cleverer than most at mining, had only had to use the filament technique on her first trip. She had felt somewhat vulnerable during that first expedition, having only the sled's armor for protection, but the cutting
lasers thankfully had removed that feeling of insecurity.

Anxious to get back to her claim, she didn't waste any time stepping on board her hover sled and securing her load. She detached the locking clamps and eased away from Atmobase 173. The ice was out there just waiting for her, and she couldn't wait. She had a good-sized claim on a massive glacier in the southern polar cap.

Kayla had chosen a career in ice mining because it was very profitable. It could also be very dangerous. As luck would have it, on that first expedition, she happened upon a massive section of virgin ice that was already on the verge of calving. She'd set up the antigravity nets so that when the section fell away from the glacier, it would not even hit the dust. Running two hundred yards of titanium wire took time, heating it required lots of energy, and waiting for the wire to slice through the ice took even longer.

When she arrived, she was surprised to see that things had changed significantly. Her carefully organized field was shattered. Over several jobs, she had taken the time to extract the ice in a way that made it easier to remove the next piece. Picking up all the pieces to clear it so she could resume orderly work was going to take forever. She sighed and slowly maneuvered her sled up the ice field to see what had disrupted her claim. She followed the largest crack thirteen kilometers south, to the center of the event, and discovered the source of the problem: a meteorite had impacted on her claim, blasting a crater five hundred meters wide in the ice. Back on earth not many meteors survived the heat of passing through the dense atmosphere, the ones that did had very dense cores and had started out hundreds of times larger, what tiny percent
the atmosphere didn't burn away was moving so fast that they left enormous craters behind. Here on Mars the atmosphere was still pretty thin so even small meteors with solid cores had a chance of making landfall. Kayla surveyed the damage—one small meteorite and a perfectly pristine ice field was in shambles.

She landed her hovercraft in the crater next to the impact site and could see that the meteorite, heated by the atmosphere upon its entry, had melted its way into the ice. It was evident the impact had not happened long ago, as there was still water around the meteorite. However, she knew, too, that at over minus sixty degrees Celsius the water was going to refreeze in mere minutes, so she'd have to work quickly to remove the meteorite before it froze in place.

Kayla snapped on her helmet, released the lock on the magnetic towing cable, and stepped into the airlock. In moments, she was outside. After deploying the ice anchor spikes in her boots, she uncoiled thirty meters of cable. As most meteorites were part iron, she was hoping the magnetic grapple on the end of the towline would lock onto the core so she could bring it up. Carefully she guided the line down to the bottom of the liquid pool. She smiled, when, at ten meters down, she felt a gentle tug on the line and heard the barely perceptible clank as the grapple grabbed onto the meteorite. Returning to the sled she switched on the winch, drew up the slack in the line, and hauled up the steaming meteorite, allowing it to suspend freely above the crater. Kayla inspected the meteorite, it was a little larger than a grapefruit but it still glowed with a bright orange color, and she could feel the radiant heat it still possessed through her pressure suit. She
was glad that she hadn't had to handle it herself. She would allow it to cool while she continued to examine the rest of the site. Returning to her cockpit, she piloted her sled out from the center of the crater in a spiral pattern, scanning the ice to see if the meteorite had fractured and scattered other pieces across any more of her claim. Her search turned up nothing further. Whatever the core was, it had remained in one solid piece.

Once the meteorite core was cold enough to release from the magnet and handle, she landed, stepped outside, and examined it. Once she had brushed off the layer of soot and grit that still clung to it, the rock was reduced to the size of a soft ball; veins of silver covered a dull black core. There was ferrous metal in there somewhere, but until she had it analyzed she wouldn't know exactly what she'd found. Until then, her basic safety sensor array had ruled out any threat of dangerous radiation. Besides, the rock was pretty.

Once back inside her craft, she locked her prize into one of the clamps set into the wall normally reserved for core samples. It was an ideal secure, temporary trophy setting. Restarting her sled, she lifted off and headed back to the face of the ice sheet so she could begin cleaning up. At least she had a souvenir for her troubles.

Setting down the sled in front of her ruined ice shelf, she began the tedious job of deciding which pieces to melt together with the lasers. Creating a big enough conglomerate of ice worth bringing back was going to take time, but it would be worth it. Ice was a very valuable commodity on Mars and every little bit mattered. The chunks that were fist sized or smaller could be used to augment her own systems and be
purified for her own personal water supply. Using antigravity nets and her personal laser, she was able to get the largest of the debris melted together into one chunk.

After ten hours of working her claim, she decided to call it a day. In order to gather the pieces together into a piece big enough to make the trip worthwhile, it would take the rest of the week. Four times longer than she would normally take for a piece of carefully cut glacier. As the sun set, she blessed the nearly earth normal length of the day, even if the Martian year was more than twice as long as earth's, it still seemed more comfortable to her to have that one familiar thing. After sealing the exit and turning on the sled's proximity alarm, Kayla set her personal laser in its wall mount to recharge, stripped out of her pressure suit, cleaned up, and settled in to her cot to get some sleep.

The com unit in Adam's ship suddenly burst to life. Adam, his head resting on the console, was jolted out of a deep sleep. He slipped out of his chair and fell onto the floor. The hailing signal repeated several times as Adam picked himself up off of the floor and rubbed the new bruise forming on his forehead.

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled irritably, “I'm here. What do you want now Robbie?”

“Robert,” the voice on the other end of the com said. “No one calls me ‘Robbie'.” Adam liked to get under the guy's skin. Robert was a little too smug and pretentious for his taste.

“Fine, fine,” said Adam. “Get on with it. What do you have for me?”

“Besides contempt?” sneered Robert. “A job. Same as always. I need you to retrieve a meteorite that recently impacted on Mars. If I receive it in one piece, I will give you a bonus.”

“What's so special about this one?” asked Adam, “The last six you sent me after were not only in twenty or more pieces, but all of them were just basic magnetite, raw iron ore.”

“It's what's surrounding the core that I'm interested in.” said Robert. “The telemetry indicates that it soft-landed near, or on the southern pole, and is most likely intact.”

“What?” sneered Adam. “No exact coordinates?”

“Not anymore.” Robert ignored Adam's attitude. “The atmosphere alters the trajectory in an unpredictable way and the new EM shield makes sensor telemetry difficult at best. You'll just have to do it the old fashioned way and use your sensors and eyes.”

“Ha ha,” said Adam flatly.

“I can tell you that it's somewhere close to 160 degrees longitude,” said Robert. “Give or take ten degrees. Unfortunately, considering the trajectory of the meteorite, latitude is practically impossible to tell. All I know is that it landed on ice.”

“How can you know that, but still not know the latitude?”

“No dust plume,” replied Robert. “Which means it made a soft landing in the snow and ice. Besides, if it had fallen on the ground, there would have been a news brief on it already. That it has gone largely unnoticed is in our favor.”

“Makes sense,” said Adam. “I'll hop the next transport to the surface and get started.”

“Excellent,” said Robert. “Contact me when you've arrived.” Robert closed the channel.

Adam went to his window and stared out into space. He would not have a view of Mars for another four hours. He took a deep breath and sighed. He loved space, but hated being planet-side. He was normally a comet chaser and an asteroid prospector, but tracking down meteorites was a service he had added to gain more business. His small ship was space worthy only. The only artificial gravity he had onboard was the deck plating, so it was not rated for planet landings.

Taking a seat in the cockpit, he checked his ship's power and function status. Everything was in the green, so he activated the automated system that would fold and retract the ship's solar panels. He contacted orbital station 808—which every spacer affectionately called ‘Bob'—and arranged a docking reservation as well as a shuttle to the surface. After confirming his reservation, Adam reset his auto-pilot to rendezvous with Station Bob, sent the station his flight plan, and went to get a shower. No one wanted to be trapped in a bubble for two hours with him when he was unwashed. Not even him.