S Morden - No Way

“It’s a recurring slope linea. Can you get the ranging pole from the trailer?”

Frank clambered down and retrieved the telescopic pole, locking the sections together as he walked to her.

“So what causes it?”

“Water,” she said.

“But water boils away.” He turned so he could look into her helmet, at her intent, focused expression.

“When the water is super-saturated with salts, it can exist in liquid form at these temperatures and pressures. The evaporation rate will still be high, but it’s believed that being entrained in a matrix of small grain-sized particles will permit the water to flow subsurface. This is water, Lance, melting from the ground. At night it should refreeze, and the dark patch disappear, but once temperatures rise again during the day, it’ll restart.”

She told him to approach the flow from the side, and lay the striped pole down near, but not on, the stain. Frank did as he was asked. The boundary between light and dark wasn’t distinct, close up, and neither did it appear to be visibly spreading.

Yun took more photographs, moving slowly around its base in an arc, then marked the place on her tablet with a touch and some quick one-fingered typing. “When you collected material for the water maker, what did you use?”

“We—me and the robots, that is—just shoveled soil from near the base into the machine. I suppose I assumed that it cooked the rock and drove out water. Not that there was actual water just below the surface.”

“It’s not everywhere on Mars,” she said. “But this is one reason why MBO is situated where it is. It’s a resource-rich site, one where it doesn’t take much energy to liberate volatiles. Mapping the extent of the resources will help determine the viability of future missions.”

“Colonization, you mean. Living here permanently.”

“Yes. Do you have an opinion on that, Lance?” She picked the ranging pole up herself, and twisted it back down to its transportable size.

“My opinion?” He clicked his tongue. “I don’t think it’s for me, somehow.”

“You miss Earth?”

“Something like that,” he said.

“You may change your mind.”

“Would you? Seriously? This planet has tried to kill me so often.”

“The Chinese government is enthusiastic about the possibilities for Mars colonization and seeks to establish its own permanent presence before the end of the century,” she said.

It was as if she was reading a script. And he recognized that, because it was exactly like he sounded when he had to parrot the XO line. So he laughed: an involuntary response which he stopped as soon as he saw her expression.

“I’m not being mean,” he said. “But I understand. I really do.”

He climbed back up onto the buggy, and Yun resumed both her position behind him, and her commentary. She pointed out that the further up the volcano they drove, the tighter the turns in the valley became, so that they were almost like overlapping, interlinked C-shapes, with sharp, cliff-like projections into the bed of the river, followed by lazy left- or right-hand turns.

Frank had never been up so high, and they had further to go. At the five thousand meter mark—he had to work out what that actually was, sixteen thousand feet or so—they stopped and carried a box of instruments off the trailer and up the side of the valley, the crate slung between them, each holding one of the straps. The material underfoot was loose, and it was steep. Frank, who was much more used to being outside, plotted the route up to the top of the bank.

They then walked another hundred or so yards away across the stepped volcanic surface, and put the box down. There wasn’t anything left for Frank to do now but admire the view while Yun set up. They were on the north-western flank of Ceraunius, and he could just about make out the wildly broken ground that was, what, sixty miles away due west? Uranius was off to his right. The haze level was, he guessed, about average. Certainly not as fuzzy as he’d seen it before, and some days were unexpectedly clear like glass.

There was little chance of spotting actual features near the base of the volcano: he couldn’t even see where it joined the sand sea. Such was the size of the broad shoulder of rock he was standing on, most of what he could see was just slope, up to his left and down in every other direction. M2, whatever state it was in, was going to stay hidden for now. Just as long as there weren’t any unexplained debris or bodies up on the top, he’d be fine.

Quite how often Yun had practiced setting up the weather station was something he didn’t ask, but he could tell by the speed and accuracy of her movements that she’d trained over and over again until she could do it blindfold. The station itself was mounted on a tripod she assured him wouldn’t blow over, and the boom held pressure and temperature sensors, as well as a laser to measure the dust-load. Powered by a palm-sized solar panel, a resin-square of electronics collected all the data and beamed it back to MBO via the whippy aerial mounted on top.

She talked to the device through her tablet, turning it on, running the diagnostics and making sure it talked to the main computer. A quarter of an hour, from start to finish. It was a good piece of kit, and she—and probably a whole team of people—had thought hard about how it went together. Of course it was designed well. Even XO had done that.

But there was such a stark contrast between the ideals of the people who’d designed the weather station and the minds of the people who’d stranded him on Mars. It was probably best that he didn’t dwell on such things.

Yun replaced the lid on the box, and they carried it back, sliding down the slope along the path made by their earlier bootprints. Yun seemed particularly keen not to walk just anywhere, as if stepping off the newly created path and leaving more marks would somehow spoil the uniqueness of that place. He didn’t really see the problem, but he followed her lead anyway.

Equipment stowed and back on the buggy, he checked his air and his fuel, reminded Yun to look at her suit too, and judged the daylight and weather conditions by leaning back and looking up. There was no good reason not to go to the summit.

The closer they got to the top, the more ragged the valley became: sharper turns, steeper sides, and evidence of waterfalls cascading down from tributaries, even islands, left high and isolated mid-stream.

Frank consulted his map and took a right fork to avoid ending up in a lake bed, and instead drove up one of the feeder rivers, which gradually eased them out onto the open slope of the volcano, near the rim of its huge, flat-bottomed crater.

They were now twenty-two thousand feet above datum, not that it felt like that at all. The volcano’s shape made seeing anything but the volcano impossible. The only feature was the far wall of the crater that was still another five and a half thousand feet higher than the one they were on. That was as tall as a mountain in its own right.

They stopped to put another weather station up and tie it in with the network, then drove right up to the edge of the crater. Yun called it a caldera, and Frank let the word glide by rather than reveal more of his ignorance.

The crater, caldera, whatever, was ten miles across, pretty much flat at the bottom, and bounded by steep, broken slopes. From the maps, the descent to the floor looked pretty much impossible, but standing on the edge of it, it seemed it might be doable in places. The gradient was greater on the far, east side, but twenty, thirty per cent where they’d parked up on the rim.

“I’m guessing that Jim will want to come out here sometime,” he said.

“I imagine Jim would probably want to live out here,” said Yun. She stared out over the bowl of rock, slowly turning from left to right to try and take it all in. “You see that patch of rougher ground in the middle?”