Mission Mars (37 page)

She grabbed a few tools from Adam's sled and went back outside. She disengaged the two rear directional thrusters she'd blasted and dropped the melted units in the dust before returning to her sled. Adam was still unconscious. She pulled her two least needed directional thrusters and, after a few minutes, had them attached to his sled. It would not go fast, but it would go. She went back to check on Adam. He moaned and shifted as if he was starting to come to. She considered her idea for a moment and then realized he probably wasn't going to cooperate, so she picked up the torque handle he had brought to use on her and hit him in the head with it, knocking him back out again.

Using the gravity nets, she lifted the ice off of Adam and reattached it to the conglomerate. She then attached the nets she'd worn on her feet earlier and easily lifted and moved him back into his sled. Quickly, she removed his pressure suit and put the re-breather on him. His brief exposure to the thinner atmosphere would not harm him, she knew, and the re-breather would support him until the interior of the sled
re-pressurized and balanced the atmosphere within the sled. She left, taking her nets and his pressure suit with her.

Once back at her sled, she rigged the conglomerate for towing. It was smaller than her normal haul, but the fee for the meteorite would more than compensate. She informed the Atmobase that her trespasser would be limping in, probably in a couple of days and gave them the sled's identification code. They acknowledged her report and told her that they would be watching for him. As she pulled away, she watched Adam's sled shrink behind her in the distance.

Halley could see the others through the thick, durasynth walls of the atmo-bubble as the solar storm silently decomposed them. She watched the little human figures slowly vanish in the windblown sand. Like in a desert mirage, the figures writhed and swayed. One was her mother. Black, tiny, she looked like an errant crayon scribble across the perfect red of the Martian landscape. Another, desperately digging into the sand for a grave of protection, was her father. She didn't know how she picked out their shapes from among the crew, but she knew it was them. She watched several others—hazy human blobs—running toward her and the safety of the atmo-bubble. But it was too far, and she knew they were too late. The unseen radiation picked them off one by one.

It was strange that a sun so distant, burning cold in a violet sky like the bioluminescent lure of a deep-sea creature, could melt synth and human flesh in a matter of minutes.
Halley had seen it once before. Kendal the mechanic. That's what the adults had called her. It was the face-plate that had melted away. “Defective,” her father had said in a grave voice, because they all knew the recall on the suits was pointless. It would take months for new ones to arrive. There was nothing to do in the Promethei Terra Colony Zone, except wait out the sweeping sun flares within the safety of the atmo-bubble.

Halley hadn't been scared though. She knew all about solar storms and living on Mars. She had been homeschooled, but even now, her mother insisted she continue to do research and science projects whenever Earth rose high enough above the horizon to access the teleweb. The first paper she wrote was about Mars. Mars, the planet named for the Roman god of war. That, she realized, was a misnomer. It wasn't a planet of war. It was simply a planet of death.

For hours, she sat on the cold ground hugging Snacker, her stuffed T-Rex she'd gotten from the Dinosaur National Monument. She knew that when you got lost, you were supposed to stay in one spot and wait for someone to find you. Her father had told her that back when they lived in Utah and the desert had stretched out in a thousand directionless directions. She watched. Waited. But no one came for her.

Then again, she wasn't the one lost.

They'd all gone out when the well drill had malfunctioned. The wells were the crew's first priority. They had to be deep enough to reach water, but not so deep that they became infected with the deadly bacteria that thrived deep in the planet's crust where the radiation couldn't reach. The colony was to be built around the wells and around the first successful drilling they had erected the atmo-bubble. It freed the team
from the suits while at home base, making it easier to move, stretch, pump water, eat, and play. Halley had hardly moved during the first six months. It was too difficult to kick around in her stuffy atmo-suit. It tugged and wrinkled in all the wrong places, and made her feel like a mummy. That's what the little human figures beyond the durasynth walls had become. Halley watched them vanish slowly like fossils under the windblown sand.

Halley did not cry. She sucked on her vitamin candies instead and waited. She tried using her mind powers to make the little figures in the distance get up and move. It was her mother who'd told her about mind powers. “Put your mind to it,” her mother had said whenever Halley didn't feel like doing her homework. “You just have to want something bad enough for it to happen. And then … poof! It will happen. Just like that.” Her mother always snapped her fingers when she said that.

“Like the colonies,” her father always added. “You know, Little Comet, we are the forerunners of an entirely new civilization. We'll probably have a city named after us and everything. In fact, I bet there'll even be a special street named just for you: Halley Morton Boulevard.” That always made Halley laugh. She liked the word “boulevard” because it was a big, grown-up word. “Halley Morton Boulevard,” her father repeated. “Right in the middle of town.” Right where she was sitting, she thought.

She closed her eyes and watched the reds and purples of the solar storm dance behind her eyelids. Funny how some things could be seen only in the dark.

She woke as the sun was setting. It wasn't brilliant orange
like the sunsets in Utah. Instead, it was an eerie blue, like the sun was choking for air as it went down. The way her parents must have choked as their faceplates were destroyed. She sat up and checked on the distant figures one last time. Her mind powers had not worked. Her mother had lied.

Halley laid down and rolled over on her side, watching the sun sink. Somewhere beyond that horizon, there were other colonies being built. Her father had said so. “Where are they?” Halley had asked.

“See that one right next to that mountain over there?”

“There's just sand.”

Her father sighed deeply and shook his head. “Guess it's still too small.” Then he winked at her. “Well, Little Comet, looks like ours is still the biggest and the best.”

Halley still couldn't see the neighboring colony her father talked about, but then again she wasn't sure her father even knew where it was since he always pointed in a different direction. He wouldn't lie to her, too, would he?

Halley stood and went inside her parents' camp-dome. The walls were thick and plush with insulation, fun for bouncing off of in the low gravity, but not when her insides were weighing her down. She pulled her suit from her locker and arranged it on her cot like her mother had shown her. No holes, no tears, all the pieces were there. As long as the solar storm was over and it was night, it would protect her, she decided. Long enough to reach the next colony.

The suit was difficult to put on all by herself. The gloves made the synth helmet slippery, like trying to carry a fish bowl. Her mother wasn't there to snap it in place so it made the little clicking sound that meant she could breathe safety. But I don't
need a mother who lies. Finally, she managed, though now her nose itched and now there was no way to scratch it. She wrinkled and scrunched her face several times, then turned up the oxygen and breathed in deeply, which helped. She was ready.

Snacker had fallen to the floor and she bent down and picked him up. She wanted to take him with her, but then she decided, no, someone needed to stay here and wait. Just in case. As she sat him up by the window, looking out in the direction of the fallen crew, she said, “Make sure nothing happens to them. I'm depending on you.” The stuffed T. Rex obediently gazed out on the fallen—the evidence of a species on the brink of extinction.

Dr. Slem found Halley Morton on the Promethei perimeter at zero-three-hundred hours and took her onboard her explorer vessel. The specimen's name was printed on her suit, barely readable. A dictionary scan brought no results in any galactic language, except Ancient Earthic: in reference to a comet, and a sodium-based seasoning.

Ecstatically, Dr. Slem trilled back to the mothership that she'd found a sign of life at last and began vacuum-packing the evidence. Her chitinous claws trembled with excitement as she finished the delicate work and cradled the ancient fossil in her five-jointed arms with care. Maybe this planet was habitable after all and could be colonized by the nomadic Quel'ri. Then she'd be knighted at last—High Scientist Slem—and they'd name the planet after her. No, nobody wanted to live on a
planet called Slem. They'd probably just call it New Twallu after the old home planet they'd lost. Or maybe … yes … maybe they'd name it Halley, the Red Planet. That sounded nice.

The Planet of Life.

Carolyn is an actress and author in the Pacific Northwest who enjoys baking, knitting, and travel. Her credits include works in
Petrichor Machine, Niteblade
and
Mystic Signals
. Website:
http://www.carolynagee.com
.

Robyn is an Australian writer that has many short stories featured and published in upcoming anthology projects. Robyn is an avid lover of horror, but is also enjoying challenging herself with other genres. She has done numerous movie reviews for a leading New York website. Currently, Robyn is working on her debut fiction novel. Links to her published works and upcoming projects can be found on her Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/ robyn.andrew.9
and you can follow Robyn's blog at:
https://rlandrewauthor.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php

Cyn Bermudez is an author, astronomy nerd, and comic con enthusiast. Her fiction is forthcoming or published in
Middle Planet, Perihelion, The Best of Vine Leaves Literary Journal, BWS Quarterly Review, Fiction Vortex, The Red Line, The Milo Review, Beyond Science Fiction
, and more. For more of her fiction, please visit her website at
cynbermudez.com
. Cyn is also the editor-in-chief of
The Riding Light Review
,
ridinglight.org
. Someday she hopes to tree camp in Germany.

Scott is 47 and was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. He attended the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, earning a Bachelor's in Art with a Minor in Theatre. As an artist, he paints, draws, sculpts, does metal working, and has had showings in Fairbanks, AK. Recently, at the encouragement of his wife, he began submitting his writing for publication and has had two pieces accepted. He has two children and three wonderful grandsons. Scott presently lives with his wife of seven years on a farm in Missouri with a small menagerie of animals including chickens, rabbits, dogs, and cats.

William is a junior in high school and has been writing on and off for a few years. His main interests, both in reading and writing, are with fantasy and science fiction. This is his first story accepted into publication.

Andrew is the chair of the astronomy department at
Foothill College near San Francisco and was the 2007 California Professor of the Year. With the late Byron Preiss, he was co-editor of
The Universe and The Planets
, anthologies of science fact and fiction published by Bantam in the 1980s. He is also the lead author on an introductory astronomy textbook,
Voyages Through the Universe
. Fraknoi serves on the Board of the SETI Institute and on the Lick Observatory Council. Asteroid 4859 has been named Asteroid Fraknoi by the International Astronomical Union in recognition of his work in public education.

Mark is a published poet with a book of poetry published in the USA by Anaphora Press called
Lethe
. He is 43 years old, married with three children and earns a living as the head of Creative and Non-fiction writing at the City Lit in Covent Garden, London.

Cyndy is a retired pediatrician living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her story “The Strike” appeared in the January 2012 issue of
Jupiter
. “Shareholders” was a semi-finalist in the August 2012 Writers of the Future Contest and was published in revised form in the July 2013 edition of
Leading Edge
.