S Morden - No Way

Date:Wed, Mar 3 2049 12:10:41 -0300

Subject:re: HiRISE2

Hola, Mark.

Gracias! I’ve passed them on to my research student, Carolina. If you’re planning to do another pass of that area soon, she’ll be interested in the updates—I’ve copied her in so you have her email.

Mig

They parked outside the outpost, and Frank lowered himself to the ground. He’d driven hard, and his bones ached. He wondered if they were thinning. They probably were. He wondered how much further they’d go and how debilitating that would be back on Earth. Exercise. Actual weight-bearing exercise. He should do some.

Leland went through the airlock first, and then Frank.

He realized that everything wasn’t quite right the moment he stepped inside the hab.

There was Yun, out of her suit. And Leland, opening up his own. No Jim. Frank almost blurted out something, but he caught the position of Yun’s finger, pressed against her lips. Don’t say anything. No comms.

Frank tabbed his suit controls to open, and crawled out backwards.

“Someone mind telling me why we’ve gone all Secret Squirrel?”

Leland, cold at altitude, in an unheated hab, dressed only in his thin long johns, batted his arms around himself. Then he spotted a spare insulated jacket, and he struggled into it. “Jim’s missing.”

Frank looked around the hab, at Yun, at the equipment. “What? But you were with him.”

Yun’s face contorted. “He said he was going to be ten minutes. Something he’d seen. An outcrop. I said I’d finish off the drilling. After half an hour I called him, in a way that wouldn’t tell Lucy he’d gone off on his own. I got no answer.”

“Did you go and look for him?”

“Of course I went to look for him! I looked for an hour, and he wasn’t there. So… I called you.”

Leland was silent. His mouth moved, but he couldn’t find the words.

“The suit thing,” said Frank. “You made that up.”

“I kept on looking for him.”

“Goddammit, Yun. You’re all supposed to be fucking geniuses and you pull shit like this.”

She looked down at the ground.

“It’s not the first time you guys have done this, is it?” Leland had finally found his voice. “You did it once, and it felt wrong, but no one caught you, so now it’s become a habit. Lance, or whoever, disappears down the hill, and you split up. All you have to do is make sure you’re both back in time for the pick-up.”

Frank started climbing into his suit again. “Stay here. What you tell Lucy and when is up to you. But I’m going back out to find him.”

“We should all come,” said Yun.

“No. You two stay here. Which way did he go?”

“South from the second point, a kilometer or two. There’s a ridge he thought might be a late-stage intrusion.”

The second sentence didn’t mean anything to him, but the first part? One k was barely any distance at all. “When I find him, I’ll call you.” When. When. Jim went south, dammit.

He thumbed his suit closed, and he went back to the airlock. It cycled, and he was once again outside on the hard red rock. There was some dust-drift going on. Maybe afternoon heating, maybe a storm brewing, but his distance vision fuzzed slightly, then cleared, as a band of airborne dust blew past. Upwind of the hab, the rock was bare pavement, with a surface like hammered metal, but downwind, there was some settling.

Being very careful not to swear, even under his breath, he climbed into the driver’s seat and set off across the plateau.

Every few seconds, he wanted to spot Jim walking back, carrying a big bag of rocks over his shoulder. But he didn’t. He reached the seismometer site after a few minutes. Tools were lying where they’d been dropped, and, almost without thinking, he climbed down and burned some air collecting them together and stowing them on the trailer.

He dialed both his suit lights and his buggy lights up, and stood up on top, holding the roll cage, assuming that being lit up like a Christmas tree would attract Jim’s attention. If he was out there. Frank couldn’t see him, and evidently couldn’t be seen either. But he could see Jim’s target, even though it was sometimes partly obscured by the haze: a nondescript line of rock rising ragged from the otherwise ubiquitous lava.

Strap in, go and take a look.

The ridge was barely a hundred feet high. He drove along its base. Unless there were overhangs or caves, Jim wasn’t there—he could see down the entire length of the outcrop—but he was also looking to see if there was anything to show Jim had been there: freshly broken rock, tools, bags, markers of any kind.

Nothing.

People don’t just disappear. Weather stations don’t just disappear either.

M2. M2. Please don’t let it be M2.

Then, he thought, maybe he’d gone into that river bed, the one that started about nine o’clock and forked part-way down before spilling its contents onto the plain. The sides were steep at the top, and he might be in the radio-shadow the cliff cast.

He was at the head of the channel. It was sinuous and he couldn’t see far down it, but there was no evidence of Jim having gone that way. Not that there was any evidence at all. No footprints, no dust to have footprints in. He’d have to drive into the channel to check.

Frank had been gone, what? Fifteen, twenty minutes. No need to worry. He looked at the maps on his tablet, and saw that if he drove around the western end of the ridge, he could get to the top of it. He was pretty much there already. He carried on, then around, then up. He headed back eastwards, until he couldn’t go any further. The gaping maw of the caldera blocked his path, and while he might make it down that wall in the buggy, he was pretty certain he wasn’t going to make it back up.

And if Jim had fallen in there? How solid was the slope?

He dismounted and got as close as he dared. The edge was pretty well defined, but he decided he wasn’t going to take stupid risks. He paid out fifty foot of cable and threaded the hitch through his belt, before clipping it back on itself. He ran the cable through both hands and approached the drop-off.

That… was a long way down. A thousand feet? Something like that, and approaching a one-in-one slope in places. Blocky and stepped, all the way. Reduced gravity or not, he’d break either himself or his suit if he fell. He tightened his grip on the cable and walked forward as much as he dared.

He got himself in a position where he could see all the caldera floor, left and right of where he was dangling. No sign of Jim. The place was empty, from one side to the other. He turned himself around—carefully—and hauled himself back onto level ground.

Frank’s question still stood: where was Jim?

He certainly wasn’t where he should be. He wasn’t at the bluff, and he wasn’t on his way back to the outpost. Frank looked in that direction. He couldn’t see it from where he was. He was struck again by the immensity of the planet, the inhospitableness of it. That he was just a fly landing on a vast red face, that he didn’t belong there, and in a moment he’d be swatted away.

Goddammit, if Jim was hiding from him, engaging in some practical joke, he’d… let Lucy deal with him. He was pretty certain that whatever he could do or say, what she could unleash would strip paint. Dicking around on Mars was going to get someone injured. Or worse. And he needed to get himself, Yun and Leland back to MBO before they ran out of options.

But there could be other, more terrible reasons for Jim’s absence than him being a jerk.

Jim wasn’t calling for help. Perhaps his radio was malfunctioning after all. Perhaps he was trapped somewhere. Perhaps the ground had indeed swallowed him up.