Kim Robinson - Red Mars

It had happened before several times, but she was annoyed with herself for getting distracted by the irrelevant spectacle of the sky.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Frank shouted over the intercom. Ann jumped in her chair; she would never get used to Frank’s biting vehemence. “Get going!” he shouted.

“I ran it onto a rock,” she said.

“Damn you! Why don’t you watch where you’re going! Here, stop the wheels, stop them! I’m gonna put the grip cloths under the front wheels and lever you forward, and then you get it off this rock and up the slope as quick as you can, understand? There’s another surge coming!”

“Frank!” Maya cried. “Get inside!”

“Soon as I get the fucking pads down! Be ready to go!”

The pads were strips of spiked metal mesh, set under wheels that had dug holes into sand, and then pegged out ahead so that the wheels had something to grip. An ancient desert method, and Frank ran around the front of the rover cursing under his breath and snapping directions to Ann, who obeyed with her teeth clenched and her stomach knotted.

“Okay, go!” Frank shouted. “Go!”

“Get in first!” Ann cried.

“There’s no time, go, it’s almost here! I’ll hang on the side, go, damn it, go !”

So Ann gently accelerated the front wheels, and felt them catch on the grips and scrape the car forward over the rock, until the rear wheels touched down again and they scraped off and were free. But the roar of the flood suddenly doubled and redoubled behind them, and then there were chunks of ice bounding past the car, bursting along with a hideous cracking, and then the ice was overwhelmed by a dark wave of steaming bubbling slurry, a surge that washed up over the windows of the car. Ann floored the accelerator and held the wheel with a death grip as it bounced in her hands. Mixed with the crashing of the surge wave she heard Frank’s voice shouting “Go, idiot, go!” and then they were hit hard and the car slewed off to the left, out of control. Ann hung onto the wheel as it threw her from side to side. Her left ear throbbed with pain, she had hit something with it. She held on to the wheel and kept her foot jamming the accelerator to the floor. The wheels caught on something and the rover ground through water, it poured from right to left and there was a dull banging against the side of the car. “Go!” She kept the accelerator floored and turned uphill, bouncing wildly in the driver’s seat, all the windows and TV screens liquid madness. Then the water ran under the rover, and the windows were clear. The rover’s headlights showed rocky ground, falling snow, and ahead a bare flat area. Ann kept it floored and jounced wildly toward it, the flood still roaring behind them. When she reached the flat rise she had to pull her leg and foot away from the accelerator with her hands. The car stopped. They were above the flood, on a narrow bench terrace. It looked like the surge was already receding. But Frank Chalmers was gone.

Maya insisted that they return and look for him, and as it was likely that the initial surge would be the largest one they did so, but it was futile. In the twilight the headlights cut fifty meters into the snowfall, and in the two intersecting yellow cones, and the dark gray world outside them, they saw only the ragged surface of the flood, a pouring sea of flotsam and jetsam without the slightest hint of any regular shape; in fact it looked like a world in which such shapes were impossible. No one could survive in such madness. Frank was gone, either knocked off the car in its jouncing, or swept off it in its brief and nearly fatal encounter with the wave.

His final curses still seemed to bubble out of the static on the intercom, out of the roar of the flood. His final imprecation rang in Ann’s ears like the judgment it was: Go, idiot, go! It had been her fault, all her fault—

Maya was weeping, choking on sobs, doubling over her stomach as if cramping. “No!” she cried. “Frank, Frank! We have to look for him!” Then she was crying too hard to speak. Sax went over and dug into the medicine chest, and walked over to her and crouched by her side. “Here, Maya, do you want a sedative?” And she uncoiled and dashed the pills from his hand, “No!” she screamed, “they’re my feelings, they’re my men, do you think I’m a coward, do you think I would want to be a zombie like you !”

She collapsed into helpless, involuntary, racking sobs. Sax stood over her, blinking, face twisted with a stricken look; Ann found herself cut to the quick by that look, “Please,” she said. “Please, please.” She got up from the driver’s seat, went back to them and held Sax briefly by the arm. She crouched to help Nadia and Simon pick Maya up off the floor, and get her to her bed. Already Maya was quieter, withdrawing from them, her eyes red and her nose running, off in her own grief, one hand clenched in a death grip over Nadia’s wrist. Nadia looked down at her with a doctor’s detached expression, withdrawn in her own way, murmuring in Russian.

“Maya, I’m sorry,” Ann said. Her throat was cramped, it hurt to talk. “It was my fault. I’m sorry.”

Maya shook her head. “It was an accident.”

Ann couldn’t bring herself to say aloud that she had stopped paying attention. The words stuck in her throat, and another spasm of sobs racked Maya, and the chance to speak was gone.

Michel and Kasei took over the drivers’ seats, and started the rover along the bench again.

Not far east of that, the southern canyon wall finally sank down into the surrounding plain, and they were free to move away from the flood, which was in any case following Eos Chasma in a swing to the north, off to a distant reunion with Capri Chasma. Michel ran across the hidden colony’s trail, but lost it again, as the trail ducks were often buried in snow. He tried throughout all one day to locate a cache he thought was nearby, but failed. Rather than waste more time they decided to drive on at full speed, a bit north of east, toward the refuge they had been trying to reach, which Michel said was in the broken terrain just south of Aureum Chaos. “It’s not our main colony anymore,” he explained to the others. “It’s where we went first, after we left Underhill. But Hiroko wanted to leave for the south, and after a few years we did. She said she didn’t like this first shelter because Aureum is a sink, and she thought it might become a lake someday. I thought that was crazy, but I see now that she was right. It looks like Aureum may even be the final drainage for this flood, I don’t know. But the refuge is at a higher elevation than we are now, so it will be okay. It may be empty of people, but it will be stocked with supplies. And any port in a storm, yes?”

No one had the spirit to reply.

On the second day of hard driving the flood disappeared over the horizon to the north. The roar of it went away soon after. The ground, covered with a meter of dirty snow, no longer trembled underfoot; the world seemed dead, strangely silent and still, shrouded in white. When it wasn’t snowing the sky was still hazy, but it seemed clear enough for them to be spotted from above, so they stopped traveling by day. They moved at night without headlights, across a snowscape that glowed faintly under the stars.

Ann drove through these nights. She never told anyone about her moment of inattention at the wheel. And she never even came close to doing it again; she stayed focused with a desperate concentration, biting the inside of her mouth till it bled, oblivious to everything but what lay in the cones of light before her. She usually drove all night, forgetting to wake the next watch’s driver, or deciding not to. Frank Chalmers was dead, and it was her fault; desperately she wished she could reach back and change things, but it was hopeless. Some mistakes you can never make good. The white landscape was marred by an infinity of stones, each capped with its own cake of snow, and the salt-and-pepper landscape was such a patchwork that it was hard at night for the eye to make sense of it; sometimes they seemed to be plowing underground, or floating five meters over it. A white world. Some nights she understood she was driving a hearse, across the body of the deceased. The widows Nadia and Maya in back. And now she knew that Peter was dead too.