In the shadow of deimos, p.3
In the Shadow of Deimos, page 3
part #1 of Terraforming Mars Series
Several of his colleagues scrabbled down the canyon towards Paul, without wasting time to attach themselves to safety lines. Luka watched them – desperate to help but knowing they had far more expertise than him – as he feared he could be witnessing the second death on Mars in as many days.
It might have been three deaths if someone standing nearby hadn’t grabbed his arm and pulled him from the path of the swinging chain which had returned to take another swipe at him. Its tip barely missed him, and he stood, breathing hard, as the crazed machine kept thrashing in front of him like a horse trying to throw its rider. It had to be stopped. Luka looked around, but the person who had pulled him out of the way was no longer there. He might not have the experience to save Paul, but he knew he had something else to offer that would help.
He realized if he didn’t do something, nobody would.
Luka crouched low and scurried underneath the reach of the jib arm towards the empty cab. Hauling himself up into it, he sat in the operator’s seat and stared at the unfamiliar controls. Two joy sticks were moving themselves on either side of a dusty computer screen filled with data. He quickly took in the information on power reserves, coordinates, and a whole other collection of graphs and numbers he didn’t understand and knew he had no time to figure out. Beneath the screen, a row of dials and buttons probably did something very important, but he didn’t understand what they did either and none of them were an obvious “off” switch.
He could figure it out though. He just had to rely on his old skills – those he’d left behind on Earth.
He tapped at the computer screen, preparing to troubleshoot. Nothing happened. It was only a display, not a touchscreen. He cursed himself for his Earth-based thinking. The particles in Mars dust were known to cling with static to any machinery around them and that meant touchscreens couldn’t be used on the exposed surface. If he couldn’t access the crane’s systems through the computer screen, he would have to go to the heart of the controls.
Under the dashboard there should have been a shield to protect the electronics, but it was missing. The wires and circuit boards were covered in a film of Martian dust. He bent down to get a better look, but his helmet was too big to fit in the gap and it banged against the dashboard. Machine maintenance was supposed to be carried out in a pressurized environment, not out on the planet surface. He slipped off the operator’s chair and maneuvered his body into the space as much as he possibly could and felt his way around the circuitry. Encumbered by the thickness of his gloves, he couldn’t feel very much and yanked at anything he could get hold of. On his fifth attempt, he must have found the power cable as he pulled out a wire and the jib arm shuddered to a stop.
“It’s stopped! It’s stopped!” came a cry over the comms.
Luka relaxed back with a sigh of relief and clonked his helmet against the seat of the chair behind him. The controls were half hanging off from where he had pulled at them, and he decided to finish the job. He reached to pull the whole thing out from under the dashboard so it could be examined later.
He emerged out of the cab clutching the offending collection of electronics as three people climbed out of the canyon onto the ridge. In the center, relying on the other two either side of him to walk, was Paul with a strip of gray patch tape stuck across the front of his helmet. Behind him, one of his rescuers carried an emergency air canister attached to a line from his suit.
If it hadn’t been for their quick thinking and expertise out on the unfamiliar Martian surface, it could have been very different. It was a stark reminder, as if Luka needed it, of how close they lived to death every single day and how they relied on each other for survival. The somber thought continued to ruminate in his mind as he followed them to the vehicle which would take them back to the habitat and to safety.
Chapter Four
Julie watched herself on ICN and wished someone had warned her that the news crew had been waiting for her outside UNMI headquarters. They caught that startled look in her eyes as she stepped into the street and was confronted by two HoverCams and a smiling reporter. Her hair, which she had recently shortened so her light brown strands streaked with blonde finished at the bottom of her ears, hadn’t been brushed carefully in her rush that morning. Her skin was exceptionally pale and there were shadows under her eyes created by the overhead lighting. She looked, she had to admit, tired and stressed.
She remembered the reporter asking what she hoped to find in her investigation into the asteroid disaster and how she’d tried to respond in a noncommittal way which would fail to excite anyone watching. Looking at the footage on the window in front of her, she had at least achieved that. “It’s early days yet,” she watched herself say. “I have to speak to Rufus about the scale of the investigation first.”
Indeed, she was watching the news feed while she sat outside of Rufus’s office before having exactly that conversation. It had been a short walk from the UNMI offices on Main Street in Tharsis City down to the Terraforming Committee headquarters, where an officious woman had told her to sit in the reception area where the window was set to display ICN. She sat alone among the collection of low, upright armchairs upholstered in red, green, and brown fabric. Only occasionally did one of the Terraforming Committee staff walk by, glance over in her direction, and pretend not to be staring as they recognized her as the head of UNMI.
Julie ran her fingers through her hair in an attempt to brush it neater ahead of her meeting with Rufus. Meanwhile, the news report continued. It had, thankfully, moved away from pictures of Julie, and the reporter was speaking over footage of the downed asteroid. “Many commentators have expressed relief that more people weren’t killed,” he said. “Just one technician was at the research center at the time of the crash and none of the scientists who many people feared might have been stationed there. We caught up with Doctor David Kobayashi, one of those very scientists, and got his reaction.”
The images on the window changed to show the outside of some sort of sports center. Julie didn’t recognize it and assumed it was somewhere in Thor City, the complex ThorGate had built for its personnel. A man in white martial arts attire, who had that same startled look Julie had seen in herself, was stopped by the news crew as he approached the entrance.
“It’s awful, absolutely awful,” he told the ICN camera in a southwestern American accent, distinct from Julie’s own Baltimore one. He was a handsome man, in his early thirties, with a fringe of black hair which he swept across his forehead. Although, under the attention of the news camera and after what must have been a stressful day, he looked completely washed out. “It could have been us. It could have been all of us.”
“But you’re still here for your martial arts class?” suggested the voice of the reporter, off camera.
“What else is there?” said Doctor Kobayashi. “The only thing you can do when you escape death is continue to live.”
He turned away and walked into the sports center. The report continued to speculate on all the unanswered questions posed by the disaster, but Julie was still thinking about what the scientist had said. She found it chillingly profound.
Rufus emerged from his office and stood in the doorway, with the sense of calm authority he always seemed to carry. His tall, lithe body virtually filled the doorframe and his smooth dark skin seemed to glisten with health under the lights. Despite the weaker Martian gravity which didn’t require people to be muscular, it was obvious he worked hard in the gym to maintain his strength.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Julie,” he said. “I had some urgent messages to send off to Earth. Please, come in.”
Julie gave him a sideways glance as he stepped back to allow her inside. “I’ve just been watching myself bat away questions on the ICN feed,” she said, allowing her anger to show in her voice.
“There’s a lot of concern about the asteroid disaster, quite naturally.” Rufus strode over to his desk, which lay at one end of the spacious room, and reclined into the padded fabric of his substantial office chair.
“But they’re asking me about it, thanks to your stunt at the crash site.”
“Are you referring to me asking you to lead the investigation?”
“Asking me wouldn’t have been a problem. Deciding that I would agree and announcing it on the news without talking to me first is the problem.”
She paced around Rufus’s spacious office. It was an ostentatious room designed to reflect the status of the Chair of the Terraforming Committee, with a desk large enough to be a dining table and an informal area where two sofas gathered around a coffee table. Rufus lorded over it like a medieval king who was comfortable in his palace.
“Julie, why don’t you sit down?”
“Because I’m too angry, that’s why!”
Rufus sat upright in his chair and rested his elbows casually on the desk to give her his full attention. “If you didn’t want to be involved in discovering what happened with the asteroid, why did you go to the crash site?”
“What sort of a question is that?” she replied, feeling like he was trying to manipulate her.
“A reasonable one,” he retorted. “You have to accept that you’re no longer in charge here. The Terraforming Committee was democratically elected and that gives me the right to make certain decisions without consultation. What I said to the ICN crew out at Noctis Labyrinthus is the truth: we need someone trusted and independent to carry out the investigation. I can think of no one better than you. You should take that as a compliment.”
“You may not have needed to consult with the rest of the Committee, but you could have at least consulted with me.”
“You’re right. I apologize.”
“And that’s supposed me make me feel better?”
“That was my intention, yes,” said Rufus. “Look, are you going to sit down and have a reasonable discussion or are you going to continue to pace around and make me feel dizzy?”
Julie grabbed the visitor’s chair on the near side of the desk and dropped into it.
“Much better. Perhaps I can offer you a drink? I may have some coffee left from the last shipment from Earth.”
“Is that supposed to be a bribe?”
“It’s supposed to be an offer of coffee.”
Julie sighed and sagged a little in her chair to calm herself. “You have to understand, Rufus, I have UNMI to run. You can’t just give me another job to do at the same time. Our greenhouse gas emissions are behind schedule, the atmospheric pressure on Mars has barely increased since the terraforming announcement, and we need to be in a good position to put our proposals to the Terraforming Committee on the next funding round.”
Rufus leaned even further over his desk. “I understand the pressures of your job, Julie, I do. But this has to be an independent investigation by someone without reproach. I apologize for thinking on my feet, but I saw you there and I knew you were the right person. I can’t do it, I’m a Kelvinist. Everyone knows our position on warming the planet first means we support CrediCor’s asteroid program. No offense to your greenhouse gas operation, but it could be hundreds of years before a thicker atmosphere is able to hold onto enough heat to make Mars habitable. Even with those super things you’re so keen on… the fluro whatsitsnames.”
“Perfluorocarbons,” said Julie. “Super greenhouse gases.”
“Even with those things. The point is, I wouldn’t be seen as impartial in an investigation. If we had a police force on Mars, maybe things would be different. I could merely hand everything over to them. But our security services are only personnel in uniform, they’re not investigators. We need to find out what went wrong and why. Only then can we stop a similar disaster happening again. You may have been a spontaneous choice, Julie, but you were the right choice.”
“What you’re saying is, I can’t say no.”
“Your opportunity for that was at the crash site. You’ve effectively already said yes.”
Julie thought about it for a moment. “Fine. I’ll do it. But next time, I’d appreciate it if you speak to me before you broadcast it all over the solar system.”
“Duly noted.” He smiled and leaned back in his chair again. “You have my full support in this investigation.”
Julie stood. “I’ll hold you to that, Rufus.”
Rufus grinned. “I’m sure you will.”
Chapter Five
Luka scraped the final bit of his beef steak around the plate to scoop up the last of the gravy, brought it to his mouth and chewed on the tender protein. Less than a year ago, he would have thought his meal bland and unappetizing but, after six months on a spacecraft eating pre-packaged meals, he could appreciate what little taste it had. Not that the brown, artificially grown protein slice had been anywhere near a cow, but at least it made an effort.
He had managed to procure himself a table on his own in the communal space of the construction habitat which doubled as a recreation area and dining hall depending on the time of day. With almost all the fifty migrants in there at the same time, it was full of the chattering voices of colleagues. The whole habitat felt spacious after their journey to Mars in a cramped spaceship. He even had a private room, with his own bed, rather than having to get whatever sleep he could in a sling floating in the weightlessness of space.
The habitat had been constructed largely out of the Martian soil by robots programmed to build the structure to precise specifications. It would be their home for several years as they worked to construct and fit out Noctis City. There had been no room for them at ThorGate’s main operational base, Thor City, which was in any case a considerable journey by rover or bus from the site.
With his prescribed calories consumed, Luka glanced at his WristTab which was showing a safety alert about the dangers of extreme radiation events. “In the event of a major solar flare,” the message declared, “Mars will be subject to lockdown. All personnel must stay inside or return to–”. He dismissed the message and made a mental note to delve into the settings at some point and shut the thing off.
Luka found the connector he had been looking for on the side of the WristTab and reached across the table to where he had left the hunk of electronics pulled from the crane. He dragged it closer to him, leaving behind a trail of Martian dust despite having made an effort to clean the thing in the airlock. Under the lights of the habitat, and without his rad-suit getting in the way, Luka was able to identify most of the disconnected wires and cables. He hesitated, knowing he should pull Alvar away from damage control to give him the electronic hunk, but his curiosity got the better of him. He plugged the data cable into his WristTab and downloaded all the surviving information to review. If something had gone wrong with its programming, he might be able to figure out what it was.
The sound of voices around him lessened and Luka looked up to see that Al Vertanen had entered and was heading for the center of the room. Without his helmet or the additional bulk of a rad-suit, he seemed a smaller man, but stocky, with the sort of build and demeanor which suggested he was not the type of person to pick a fight with.
“I just want to let you know–” he addressed the room, raising his voice until the last of the chatter subsided, “–that I’ve just come back from seeing Paul. He’s fine. A little shook up, obviously, with some impressive bruises which are going to hurt for a while, but nothing broken. The medics can’t find any sign of serious oxygen deprivation, so the breach in his helmet looks to have been relatively minor. But it could have been much worse if it hadn’t been for the quick actions of Anders, Robert, and Morten…”
Applause rose up from the tables. Luka joined in as he saw everyone’s gaze had shifted to a corner near the door where the faces of the three heroes of the hour were flushed with embarrassment.
“Some of you have asked me what went wrong with the crane,” continued Al, “and my honest answer is that I don’t know – yet. I promise you that it is being looked into. I know that, after today, I don’t have to tell you to be careful out on the construction site. But I’m going to tell you anyway: watch out for yourselves and your colleagues. And remember Mars has more ways to kill you than Earth, OK?”
Murmurs and nods of agreement disseminated around the room, followed by the gradual return of chatter as Al left his position in the center of the floor and headed towards Luka.
“I believe you are owed a thank you as well,” he said, grabbing hold of a chair and sitting opposite him at the table.
Luka, embarrassed, shrugged off the compliment and avoided Al’s gaze. “I only cut the power to the crane.”
“You did more than that, it seems.” Al looked across at the dusty collection of electronics on the table. “Is there a reason you didn’t give this to me right away?”
Luka expected the admonishment and tried to explain. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to turn it off. I thought I would take a look at the code to see if there are any obvious errors, but I understand you need it.” He offered it across the table, and Al slowly took it.
“I only came over to commend you for stepping in to do something. But also to say that Anita Andreassen would like to thank you in person – perhaps you can take this dusty collection of junk to her and explain what happened. There’ll be transport waiting for you in the morning.”
“Transport?” asked Luka.
Al chuckled. “You’re not expected to walk all the way to Thor Town.”
“I meant, she wants me to visit her?”
“Of course! Consider it an opportunity for a nice day out. Come and get this before you leave, OK?”
•••
Luka approached Thor City across the Martian plain, peering past the head of his driver to see the view through the windshield. “Thor Town” , as it was affectionately known, only accommodated up to around five hundred people. Like the migrant habitat, it was built from compacted Martian soil bricks which provided adequate shielding, but unlike the habitat, which was relatively small and unremarkable, it appeared to rise out of the ground like a series of red mountains on the horizon. Surrounding it were banks of a solar array which swiveled to track the sun as it moved through the sky, while the panels glinted like worshippers at the foot of the building.
