S Morden - No Way

The air was beginning to resemble a brown soup. Even with full lights, visibility was atrocious. Frank was having to wipe his faceplate every few steps, and the damn stuff was sticking to everything. Then they moved beyond the river, into new territory, now going downhill on the river’s far bank.

Something like a flashbulb went off. He stopped and looked around. Then what sounded like atmospheric entry rumbled overhead.

“What the hell was that?”

“Lightning,” said Fan.

“You mean, like actual lightning? Storm lightning?”

“It’s the dust.”

“We’re on top of a fucking mountain. We have no cover.”

“We have to keep looking. We need to—” Fan’s voice broke. “We need to find Jim.”

Frank looked across to the buggy. The figure on top was high up, compared to everything else. Only the top of the roll bar was taller than Isla’s helmet.

“Isla?”

“We keep looking,” she said.

Did she sound scared? Did he? There was plenty to be scared about.

“OK. Let’s do it.”

They approached the westernmost end of the sweep, then Isla pointed the buggy southwards to block off the end of their search area. The lightning played above them, lighting up the clouds of drifting dust, revealing their many layers and bands for a snapshot second before everything went dark again, and the mountainside grumbled as if clearing its throat.

Everything that was happening outside of Frank’s faceplate told him he was out in hurricane-force winds. The air was granular, and moving, thrashing at his suit with a sound that made him think of the very distant whine of jet engines. Yet he felt no motion. No buffeting. Nothing. It was disconcerting, as strange as when he’d got caught up in the twisters out on the plain.

There, right in front of him, was a tire mark, in the dust that had caught in the lee of a small crater. It was eroded away, was disappearing before his eyes even, as the wind tore at it and stripped away the distinctive ridges and troughs made by the treads.

He stared at it. Had he made this? Had Jim? From what was left—a print barely a couple of feet long, only a foot wide—it seemed to have been heading north at the time.

“Lance? Lance, you’ve stopped.”

Had Jim ever used a buggy out this way? Frank wasn’t sure that he had, not recently. And he himself hadn’t passed this way, even yesterday: that was closer to the main caldera, and not this far downslope.

Was this what he was looking for? Proof that M2 had been up here? Could they have found Jim? Taken him back to M2?

“Lance?”

He suddenly realized that Isla was talking to him.

“I’m OK. I’m OK.”

“Have you found something?”

“No,” he said. “No. I thought I might have, but it’s just… nothing.”

He was going to have to go over to M2, wasn’t he? He was going to have to check, or he was going to fall apart under the strain. Unless they found something today, he was going to have to take a buggy and drive it all the way over to the other side of Ceraunius and see what state they were in. With XO’s permission or not.

The tracks were crumbling, eroding away, even while he stared at them. He deliberately scuffed at them with his boot, and walked on.

Lightning washed above, in flashes and sheets. Intense and bright. Electric.

The buggy was glowing, a flickering blue-green fire clinging to its metal latticework.

“Isla?”

“Lance?”

“What the hell is that?”

She rolled to a stop, and killed her lights. It was obvious now. Startlingly obvious.

“OK, I’ve had enough,” she said. “Fan, Jim was our friend. He was special to all of us. But we can’t stay out here in this. Come back to the buggy. We’ll drive down into the river where there’s some shelter.”

She started up again, turned the vehicle around, the pale moons of the headlights washing over Frank. He walked steadily towards it, reaching up to its dust-caked frame and pulling himself up. Fan approached from the other side, climbing up and staring straight ahead, not looking at Frank, not engaging with Isla.

She found, more by luck than judgment, the banks of the river, and slowly rolled down the steep sides to the river bed. The air was barely clearer, but they were below the level of the surrounding ground. There was another flashbulb moment, and a few seconds later a stuttering, growling boom.

Frank habitually checked his air. He had just over half a tank left. They had spares in the outpost, but that was no longer the limiting factor.

“Have we any idea how long this is going to go on for?”

He got no response. In fact, he could see Fan’s mouth moving, and he was getting nothing. The storm, the high-sided valley, was wiping out his comms completely. But only his comms, because Fan was clearly in a conversation with Isla.

Frank tapped Fan on the shoulder, and then, when he had his attention, double-tapped the side of his own helmet: the universal sign for deaf.

Fan frowned and leaned in so Frank could hear the to-and-fro. It looked like NASA comms were more sophisticated than Frank’s own.

“—get this far north,” Isla was saying. “We don’t know enough about Martian weather to predict it. It could go on for days, weeks even. What we do know is that we’re at the extreme edge of the storm: if it shifts even slightly southwards, then we’ll get clear air, quickly.”

“We can wait an hour,” said Fan. “Then start again.”

“OK,” said Frank, “I’m very sorry about your friend, but there’s nothing we can do about that right now. What I’m now worried about is us getting killed out here. We’re in the middle of a dust-storm. We can’t see shit. We’re in spacesuits that rely on complicated electrical equipment to keep us alive. One bolt of lightning and any one of us will stop breathing. Now, we’ve got enough buffer at the outpost to bank what we’ve got left in our tanks. We get out of this dust. We can get something to eat and drink. We don’t run the risk of getting fried by Odin.”

“Thor,” said Isla. “Thor is the god of thunder.”

“Whatever. Fan, you’re supposed to be in charge of this outing, and I’m not going to just walk off and leave you, but goddammit this is crazy and you have to see that.”

Fan pulled away and leaned back to take in the slot of sky. Another flashbulb moment, illuminating the dry river bed and the sand cascading down over the banks like living water, followed by, a few seconds later and in the darkness, the gut-rumbling of the sky, seemed to galvanize him into action.

He leaned in again, banging his helmet against Frank’s, and the sound was mediated by the dust and grit between the two surfaces.

“I’ll talk to Lucy. No. I’ll tell Lucy, in my position as senior medical officer, that we’re suspending operations.”

As far as they knew, Jim was gone: they were abandoning their search for him, and they weren’t going to find him any time soon. If he was still on the volcano, maybe a satellite could pick up where the body was, but only when the weather had cleared. If so, they could retrieve him. When it was safe to do so.

If. If he was still on the volcano. What if he wasn’t? How could Frank possibly explain any of this?

Isla turned the buggy around and tracked back up to the top of the valley, emerging into weather that had, if anything, deteriorated. She turned her own suit lights to maximum, just to be able to see the screen so she could switch the buggy lights back on.

She headed left, and crawled, barely at walking pace, across the exposed shoulder of volcanic rock that was shrugging itself into the path of the storm. The distance to the outpost shouldn’t have been great, but it felt interminable. They couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see anything except that which was right in front of them. There was more than an element of guesswork governing the direction they were heading in.