S Morden - No Way

He drove. He had Fan and Isla on the back of his buggy. But no one spoke unless they had to. He’d already been up and out earlier, in the freezing dark, checking the vehicles over, making sure they had a full charge despite the amount of crap that had built up on the solar panels: he’d dipped into the reserves to make certain each fuel cell was at capacity, and that was something they were going to have to watch if the dust kept on coming. He hadn’t slept. Hadn’t eaten either. He was burning out and only sheer willpower was keeping him going.

As they got higher up, the dust became more mobile, fuzzing the view with haze and causing Frank to keep wiping his faceplate. The walls of the Santa Clara valley trickled with grains of sand like gossamer.

Lucy was behind, driving the second buggy. Whatever she felt about Yun and her complicity in Jim’s disobedience, she had at least treated them both like adults rather than shoveling the entire blame onto one or the other. If there’d been shouting, Frank hadn’t heard it, and the base was small enough. Perhaps ice was worse than fire, but neither was directed at him.

Frank had some of his lights on. The weather had made everything particularly gloomy, and they were up and out barely a quarter of an hour after sunrise. The shadows were deep and almost tangible, but each buggy had only one fuel cell, and running the lights would eat into the range. They’d brought all the spare life support packs with them, fully charged. He already knew his search patterns, and it was going to be a hell of a long day. And it was only going to go short if someone found a body.

There was no pretending this was a search party. It was recovery. Everyone, when they spoke at all, still referred to him in the present tense. They knew, though. They knew. Jim was dead. It was, perversely, only Frank who wondered if he was alive.

He didn’t know which he wanted more. He hoped there was a body to be found so he didn’t have to go against XO’s directives, and he hoped there wasn’t, because that might mean Jim had been picked up by M2. For good reasons? To force someone to go over, and offer help? Would XO double-down on their threats to the NASA team? Or threaten his family? He didn’t know.

A body would be closure at least. Fan would examine Jim. Someone else—Lucy?—would give the suit a postmortem. They’d conclude that this was death by natural causes, and Frank could sleep again. He hadn’t asked what the protocol was for dealing with a dead astronaut. He presumed it didn’t involve them being flown into the sun.

He broached the top of the river valley, driving out onto the broad summit, and caught the stuttering light from the risen sun slanting through dust-laden skies: it was like approaching the gates of Hell. Twilight rather than daylight, and they weren’t there for any good purpose, either. Frank wondered if traipsing around in weather he’d never seen the like of before was going to represent an unacceptable risk to NASA, considering all they were supposed to be looking for was a corpse.

But Jim had been their friend. They’d trained with him, traveled with him, laughed and argued and, who knew, maybe even slept with him. Of course they wanted to know what had happened to him, and wanted to do this one last thing for him. Frank would have put his responsibility to the living over that to the dead, though Lucy clearly weighed these things differently. She was in charge: not of him, but still definably in charge all the same.

The volcano-top… it was like it was shrouded in fog. Foggish. Pink Mars fog. It came in bands like rain, as if curtains of material were being dragged over the landscape. One moment it was clear enough to see to the next crater, the nearest scarp, and then the next wall of dust advanced. Continuous, discrete, a conveyor belt of occlusions.

What was most unnerving was the sound. Mars was usually silent. All noise was man-made. Except this. It was like the planet was gently breathing on him.

They parked up next to the outpost and, aware that every moment was a moment they weren’t looking for Jim, Lucy kept it mercifully short.

“I’m going in to check,” she said.

Was he inside? If he was, had he survived the night?

The answer came quickly.

“He’s not here. Put the LS packs in the airlock. I’ll transfer them, and then we start.” Her voice was controlled, the carrier wave less so. “Let’s bring him home, OK?”

“So say we all.” Leland? It was Leland.

They piled up the spare life supports in the airlock, and Fan squeezed in with them, helping Lucy move them quickly into the hab. Then they were out again, and ready to go.

Lucy had nixed descending into the caldera. No one had done it yet, and she wasn’t going to have anyone try. Sure, Jim could have been buried by a rockfall, standing too close to the edge when it collapsed, bringing a ton of debris down on him, but that became just another reason why they weren’t going to attempt it. They had climbing rope, and they had the buggies’ cables and winches, but Frank had managed to convince her he hadn’t seen anything at the bottom.

That left two sectors, one north and east, one south and west, beyond the immediate area that Frank had already searched. Lucy had taken the north, given the south to Fan, and the doctor seemed content to let Frank do the driving. It was going to take them beyond the ridge where Jim had said he was heading, and down towards a big-ass crater marked on their maps as CT-B, where the pitted ground spoke, according to Jim’s own reports, of subsurface collapse of empty lava tubes.

It was maybe a place he might go exploring. It was maybe a place where he could have ended up trapped. And Frank, Fan and Isla were going to have to go there and look. The search area was nine miles out from the outpost, roughly six miles across, centered on the second seismometer. About thirty square miles. It was unlikely that Jim would have gone so far, just on a whim, when he could have waited for a buggy and backup to make the trip properly, safely.

That could be said for whatever he had actually done. He’d ignored that. Now he was missing.

Frank drove to the edge of the designated search area, and Isla and Fan both hopped off. They walked out some hundred yards to either side of the buggy, then turned to face the direction of travel.

“We ready?” asked Fan. He came across choppy, lo-fi.

Frank adjusted the lights on the front of the buggy, so that they shone out not just in front but to the left and right, and climbed back into the driver’s seat. “Ready.”

The buggy rolled forward, as slowly as walking pace, which was hard to achieve, and harder still because Frank had to keep on twisting in his seat to even see his outriders, who were outside his ten o’clock to two o’clock field of vision. They swept to the river channel that ran down the west side of the volcano, moved three hundred yards down the slope, and swept back.

What had seemed like a good idea back at base was now shown for what it was: ludicrously inadequate. And they were still going to do it because there was literally nothing else they could do. They were looking for a body, in a spacesuit, while wearing spacesuits themselves, on a nearly thirty-thousand-foot mountain in the middle of the worst dust-storm for a year. They had no satellite backup and their radios were starting to get flaky because of the static.

They went backwards and forwards for two hours, covering the area between the outpost and the river. Frank swapped over with Isla. She swapped with Fan. When Frank was out on the left, he could see the buggy, but the other walker on the far side was reduced to the glow of their suit lights.

Mostly, he kept his gaze forward. Scanning the ground, not for footprints any longer, just a pale spacesuit, banked with blown dust.