Seconders, p.20
Seconders, page 20
He knew that they were far from safe, and he understood that Mars was trying to find new ways to kill them every sol, but he gave thanks for this sol, and he thanked God that they had found a little time to laugh, rather than fight for survival.
Jan could read the mix of relief and joy in everyone’s faces over the last few sols. Against all reasonable expectation, they had built a dome and grown crops in a valley at the bottom of an angry red planet. It suffered them to live, but they not only lived, they thrived and now they had started to multiply.
When he emerged into the light, Jan saw traces of pearlescent cloud high in the amber sky. He watched as the sunlight caught the tiny frozen crystals of carbon dioxide and turned them every colour of the spectrum: the memory of a rainbow, here on Mars. Someone was smiling on them.
Sol 401, Tithonium Eden Two – V Meier
“You have a visitor,” announced Cathal, his face strangely neutral.
“Ja, everyone here has visited us over the last week,” she replied.
“This one has travelled a little further,” answered Cathal and stood back to beckon Markus in.
“Congratulations Frau Meier, Herr Delaney.”
“Dänke, Markus. I am guessing that you didn’t travel all the way to Tithonium to see Leo?”
“Ja, stimt. I do not mean to be disrespectful; I know I was… harsh in my previous views about your baby, but I have put such views in a wider context now.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Markus.”
“I would be grateful if Cathal could come back to Pavonis with me.” Both Verena and Cathal gave Markus a strange look and he nodded, acknowledging how it must sound. “Things are… deteriorating.”
“The dome?” asked Verena, fearing imminent collapse.
“We have fought to prevent the stress cracks from widening but the screw piles were not enough. A large section of the dome has been sealed off and abandoned. We have erected temporary barriers to protect the remaining crops and habs. All this we could deal with, especially as we are now in the final stages of building the east flank dome, but our real problem is our captain.” Markus paused, searching for words. Verena and Cathal waited silently, even baby Leo was quiet. “I am worried that Bulman is losing his mind.”
“Bulman’s always shown behaviour which seems aggressive and intimidating,” said Cathal, “but I wouldn’t have seen that alone as a sign of mental instability.”
“He hit me,” said Markus, turning his head and pushing his black hair back to reveal a livid purple bruise across his left temple. “I was not the first and I will not be the last.”
“Sheiβe, Markus, you shouldn’t be driving thousands of kilometres like that,” said Verena, shocked.
“Ja, I had to. I am worried that he is going to do something much worse, and I would like for Cathal to come and certify his condition so he can be removed from authority.”
Cathal took a moment to process what Markus was saying. “What do you think he is going to do?”
“I am not sure… but I overheard him talking to John Shanks and Ben Voight…”
“Go on.”
“I think he was giving them weapons.”
14
The Bringer of War
Sol 401, in flight over Valles Marineras – J Wojcik
Jan was scared. What the hell could a miner, a psychologist and an engineer do about armed madmen? And who were the madmen going to attack? Jan had reluctantly agreed to fly Cathal and Markus back to Pavonis. Verena recounted the troubling report to Jan and begged him to be the pilot. He understood why: not only was he one of the few left who could fly, but he was originally a first team member, so he would be less of a threat. Jan reminded Verena of how he had ended his last exchange with Bulman, but she waved this away.
“Bulman holds a grudge against all of us, just for leaving, but you’re not an ‘expert consultant’”, Verena had grimaced at the phrase, “so he may not be as bad with you as he would be with someone like me.”
“Nothing like a back-handed compliment to motivate me…”
“Sorry, Jan, but you know what I’m trying to say. You’re a good listener. I know you won’t go in upsetting people; you’ll tread carefully. Besides, Cathal thinks he might show you a little respect for having stood up to him.”
“What about Johanna? I thought Bulman respected her?”
“She can’t fly.”
“She knows when to keep quiet and listen, and she could come with us at least.”
“We would rather keep it to the three of you. If a larger group turns up out of the blue, then he is likely to get suspicious. We want to help him, and the people at Tharsis, not start a war.”
War. How could they even be thinking about such a thing? People had only been on Mars for thirteen months so how could they possibly be at each other’s throats already?
The mountain peaks of Valles Marineras caught the rays of the distant sun and the butterscotch sky rippled across the glider carapace. Jan tried to reconcile the harsh beauty around him with the tense silence inside the cockpit. Cathal looked especially grim.
“You don’t look optimistic, Cathal,” noted Jan, quietly.
“Me? I’m another feckin’ expert,” said Cathal. “I doubt yer man will let me near him. My plan is to talk to everyone else there so I can put together a picture of what’s been going on. It isn’t as good as talking to Bulman, but it’ll be a start. I’d like you to talk to John Shanks.”
“Shanks?” asked Jan, remembering the dent left in the airlock door after John Shanks had been thumping it and his bellyaching about the preparation for the second team landings. “He won’t talk to me.”
“Why not?”
“He didn’t like it when I stuck up for the second team. He didn’t like it when you all arrived, and now he sees me as one of you.”
“A Seconder?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds like Shanks is one of the people who’ve been driving that wedge from the start,” said Cathal.
Jan studied the ochre horizon and grimaced. “He’s not the only one, but he’s one of the worst.”
“Surely there must be some way to connect to him?” asked Cathal.
“I doubt you will get to speak to Shanks, Voight or Bulman unless you climb Pavonis,” said Markus. The others turned to look at him. “The day after I overheard their talk about weapons the three of them took a rover to the elevator base at the mountain rim and left Sunil Patel in charge of Tharsis.”
“Sunil’s in charge of Tharsis Eden One?” asked Cathal.
“Yes. But it is no Eden anymore.”
Sol 402, Tharsis Eden One – J Wojcik
Tharsis Eden One had deteriorated. A wall of inflated dome cushions shut off the top edge of the dome where the rim had crumbled away from the side of Pavonis. All habs had been dragged down to the far end of the dome by rovers and thrown together in what felt to Jan like a frontier shanty town, or a refugee camp. Colonists looked gaunt, unshaven, and unkempt. There was a sense of quiet desperation about what he saw, as if one of humanity’s most ambitious achievements had been allowed to decay and there was nothing the colonists could do about it. Worst of all, no one spoke to Jan, no one would look him in the eye.
Jan had spent an hour sitting among the unwashed clutter in the canteen hab, trying to casually engage his former team-mates in conversation. He knew that small talk was a challenge for him, but he didn’t think he was that bad. The most he had managed was a desultory nod from Sally Hunter. When Jan asked her how she was, Sally just shrugged and walked off, carrying a half-eaten pot of rice with her. It was painful, so Jan got up and went for a walk between the fields of crops.
Over to Jan’s right there was a rover pulling a plough followed by a small team sowing new seeds and watering. To his left the field was empty, barren, no crops and no sign of any planting work. He stopped one of the sowers, Parva Gohil, and asked her if the field was being left for a reason.
“After the dome edge collapsed around the bio-hab, we don’t have enough bacteria to make the soil useable in all the fields,” Parva answered.
“Have you planted any Einarite?” said Jan and regretted it the moment he had asked.
“The Seconders won’t share that with us, will they?” an uncharacteristic edge in her statement.
Of course, they should have come with Einarite! It was obvious now he saw it. The Martian plant would consume the poisonous perchlorates in a matter of days and expand the soil available for planting. “I know that Tithonium will bring some,” Jan said, but Parva just gave him a look that said, ‘prove it’ and carried on with her sowing.
Jan wondered what else they had failed to think of since they had been separated for so long and he walked on to the make-shift wall at the far end of the dome. He wondered how they accessed the mining area now that the tunnel entrances were all in the danger zone beyond. When he reached the wall, he saw an airlock and a hand scrawled message on a white board beside it: “NO ACCESS WITHOUT AUTHORISATION.” He put his forehead against the porthole in the middle of the airlock door and peered at the slope beyond. A dozen dome anchorage cables lay on the ground, just curled where they had fallen when the anchorages had come loose from the split rock above. The dome cushions were intact, but the rim was crumbling, he could see daylight between it and the bottom ring of cushions. Once green fields lay blackened with the withered remains of suffocated frozen crops. This had been where they had started planting because it was closest to the original hab locations. It was heart breaking.
“Come to gloat?” Jan turned around. Hans Escher stood a couple of metres away.
“No. I want to help, but no one will let me.”
“Go back to your new friends,” said Hans, his tone flat. He looked so tired; his usual determination seemed to have drained away with the last of his energy.
“What will you do about this?” Jan pointed at the wreckage beyond the airlock.
“Nothing. Not yet.”
“What do you mean, not yet? Surely you should be trying to repair it or move everything to the new dome you’re building on the eastern flank?”
“We have more important things to deal with first.”
Jan wanted to ask what could be more important than reclaiming or rebuilding crop growing land for their survival, but Hans was already walking away.
Sol 402, Tithonium Eden Two – V Meier
Verena was fighting the effects of her broken sleep, but she wanted to find out what was happening, so she wrapped Leo in a sling and carried him with her into the research lab.
“Any more news about the unwanted visitor from the asteroid belt, Sam?” asked Verena, not really wanting to know, but wanting to talk about something other than nappies.
“About twenty sols away,” he answered, a dark frown on his face. “But there’s another smaller meteorite that will reach us about a sol earlier: we couldn’t see it against the big one until now.”
“A second meteorite. Could that hit us as well?”
“They will both pass very close, but I believe they’ll miss us.”
“Could they hit Deimos or Phobos?” she asked, cradling little Leo to her, as if she could stand in their way to protect him. She noticed how tired Sam looked. Dark circles around his eyes which were bloodshot and raw.
“I still can’t tell for sure. It seems statistically unlikely, but they would be close enough and big enough to do so.”
“Just how big? Can you tell that yet?”
“Our best estimate for the small one is around eight kilometres across. We think the big one is about six hundred kilometres.”
“How big?”
“Almost the size of Germany, Verena.”
She stared at him, open mouthed. Verena couldn’t really conceive a meteorite the size of a country, but it gave her a small insight into how destructive it could be.
Sam continued; his voice strained. “The size of the meteorite thought to have caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event was estimated to be about fifteen kilometres across.”
“Excuse me?”
“It has a mass about eighty thousand times bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs.”
Verena sat down and looked at Leo: asleep and oblivious. “Just as I said before, don’t tell anyone. There is nothing we can do, so they don’t need to know.”
“No… no they really don’t,” said Sam, staring at the floor. Verena looked at him, questioning the tone of his response but decided to give him some space.
Sol 403, Tharsis Eden One – J Wojcik
“I think the Martian sol is taking its toll on them,” said Cathal.
“What do you mean?” asked Jan.
“A day here is thirty-seven minutes longer than it is on Earth. The sleep specialists knew it could be an issue and we all had problems when we first got here, but I thought we were adjusting. Everyone I’ve seen here looks shattered and my best guess is the cumulative effect of the longer Martian day and the worry of living next to a landslide.”
“Why aren’t the Tithonium colonists feeling it?”
“I think they are, but they seem to be coping better. Ever since we had the new dome up and the first vegetable crops people have had a real upbeat outlook there. I don’t think these guys remember when they last felt happy.”
“Debbie and Charlie are on their way in the rover with a huge batch of freshly grown Einarite,” said Jan. “I hope that might give them something to smile about.”
“It won’t hurt, but I think there’s more going on that I’m not being told about. I can’t get anyone to talk about Bulman, it’s as if he’s the bogeyman.”
“Escher told me to go back to Tithonium. Makes a change from being told to go back to Poland though,” he added with a wry grin.
Cathal gave him a sympathetic smile. “We Irish never stop talking so people never get a chance to tell us to feck off back to Ireland. That and they all want an Irish pub.”
“Didn’t we all come here to get away from that?” asked Jan. “A multi-national team, deliberately picked to be the best of humanity?”
“We trained in our teams, not as a colony,” Cathal shook his head. “So, we trained to think of ourselves as part of a team, not part of a colony. And look at us now.” He gestured at the shabby huddle of habs around them. “This feels more like a ghetto than a new home.”
“It can’t just be the length of a sol or the way we trained. This can’t happen if you have motivated and highly trained colonists. This is… madness!”
“They’re depressed. They’re hundreds of thousands of kilometres from Earth, their dome is falling around them, and their leader has abandoned them. Sunil is trying his best, but he wasn’t trained to organise a colony.”
“Have you talked to Sunil?”
“He was hassled, but he gave me enough time to see that he wasn’t coping. Whenever he tries to call Bulman or Voight he gets brushed off and told to go figure it out. I asked him why they had gone to the Pavonis elevator base, but Sunil wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”
“Do you think he was hiding something?”
“I couldn’t tell if he didn’t know, or he didn’t want to know.”
“We should go to the top of Pavonis then.”
Sol 404, Pavonis Mons, Space Elevator base – J Wojcik
Jan and Cathal drove a borrowed rover up the rough track that wound its way gently around the dead volcano. Below Jan could see sunlight catching the half-crumpled edges of Tharsis, no longer Eden to anyone. The open carcass of the Aldrin lay broken across the slopes above Tharsis, and he could see a pair of droids scavenging for parts and materials in the dusty wreckage. Occasionally they would drive across the coils of elevator cable, lying where it had fallen so many sols ago. Jan peered at the rim above them and wondered what they would find there: more signs of abandonment and decay?
Markus had returned to supervise the final connections of the pipeline he had helped lay from Tithonium to Tharsis. At least Tharsis would have a welcome additional water supply before long, but the achievement seemed small against the list of troubles that had befallen the first colony.
Jan glanced at Cathal beside him, staring out of the cabin at the ruddy slopes. He wondered what he must be thinking: perhaps he was remembering when he and Verena had first arrived on the elevator in the middle of that storm? Maybe he was planning what to say to Bulman, or simply missing his baby son? Jan found that he was missing Tithonium. He missed the sense of optimism and planning for a future. He missed his friends, especially, he found to his surprise, Charlie.
The rover crested the rim and Jan saw the elevator base, squat, solid and glinting like the day it was finished. The only sign of trauma was the cable line lying across one side. There were no signs of life within or without, so Jan and Cathal suited up and crossed the stony forecourt to the airlock. Beside the door was another white board with a hastily written message in capital letters: “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS.” Neither Cathal nor Jan were looking for authorisation, they entered the airlock anyway.
The air hissed as the inner door slid back and the LEDs flicked on when the motion sensors registered their presence. Removing their helmets Jan and Cathal paused, nervous, listening for any sign of the men they sought. Silence.
“Where are they?” asked Cathal. “Looks like this place is deserted.”
“The only other place they could be is the cable relaunch facility.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a back-up, in case the elevator cable dropped. They can relaunch the cable back to orbit and reconnect it. Except we don’t have anything we can reconnect to,” added Jan, sourly.
“What do they relaunch it with?”
Jan was silent for a moment and looked at Cathal. “Missiles.”
