S Morden - One Way

And while Demetrius thought about that, Frank got to consider how they were going to recover the cylinder that was eighty miles away. At that distance, plus the time it took to load the cylinder onto the trailer, it was out of range. They needed a pressurized environment to change out their life-support systems, and unless they built one, say at the top of Long Beach, there was no way they could collect all the parts.

So that was the obvious solution. Erect one of the habs with an airlock out on the plain, pressurize it, and use it as a staging post for as long as they needed it. Then, when they didn’t, take it down again. The only problem he could see would be taking the air to the hab once it was up. It only needed five psi of pure oxygen to work, but whether the scheme would work was dependent on whether they could find enough tanks to fill.

Even better, just take the airlock. He’d have to practice changing the life support in such a confined space. But that would be quicker and easier to arrange: he could just tow one to the right spot and dump it until he needed it, rather than truck everyone out to the edge of the crater and have them build a full hab. He’d need to pressurize it, but once they got the air plant running, they could use one of the scuba tanks to do that.

It would put everything in range. And it would provide anyone out on the plain with a lifeboat.

Would Brack say no? If he wanted the base actually built, then he’d say yes. He’d be forced to say yes in the end: XO would surely tell him that he had to.

All they had to do now was solve the energy crisis. He had no idea how that was going to pan out. Perhaps XO would demand that Declan took the power from the ship. Perhaps it was XO’s decision not to allow it, and Brack was simply following orders. But surely, if there was spare capacity, then eventually they’d have to use it, allowed or not.

They traveled on. The wheels rattled and bounced over the rocks on the surface, making their hands numb and their teeth ache. And after an hour, the cylinder containing the air plant should have been dead ahead on the wide, open landscape, but Frank couldn’t see the telltale parachute. The canopy was almost thirty yards across which, considering the transponder was giving him a distance of a couple of hundred yards, should have been visible.

He slowed down and edged forward. If the air plant had hard-impacted, then it was pretty much game over. And there was a crater, right in front of him. But it didn’t look sharp-edged and fresh; the rim had eroded down to the same level as the surrounding plain.

He parked up and waved at Dee to do the same. He jumped down, and walked as his map indicated. There was the parachute, and there was the cylinder, some hundred feet down in the bottom of a depression that was a thousand feet across.

“Well, that’s not helping.”

“At least it’s not broken.” Dee stamped his foot on the ground. It seemed firm enough. “Drive down?”

“I’ll walk it, and you can follow. If we leave one buggy at the top, at least we don’t get stuck if something happens.”

“What if we need both to drag it out?”

“We’ve a hundred and fifty feet of cable on each winch. If we can get the trailer to within that distance, we can use both. But the slope’s not so bad, less than ten per cent. Long Beach is steeper.”

Frank stepped down into the crater. The sides were packed-down gravel: the base, a cracked rock pavement. He had thought it might have more dust and sand blown into it, filling it up, but the reverse seemed to have happened. The whole basin seemed scoured, like a pot.

He waved Dee down behind him, and crunched his way to the cylinder. The scorch marks from the rockets had faded to gray, and the painted XO logo was, along with the rest of the white pigment, worn thin. He opened up the cargo hatches and saw that everything was still packed in tightly.

No need to disturb anything yet. Wait until they could get the thing home.

Dee couldn’t back the trailer up, so Frank had to, and it took even him three goes to line it up correctly. They decoupled the motor unit from the bottom end of the cylinder—the fuel remnants were toxic, explosive, and best left where they couldn’t do any harm—and attached the winch cable to the rest, winding it slowly on to the open framework until the balance of the trailer had shifted enough for the weight to tip forward. The rear end came up, and the buggy shuddered as it found a new equilibrium.

“OK. Fast across the flat and let your momentum carry you up. If you start to slip, keep it straight and stop only if you have to.” Frank looked up at the pale sun and checked his timer. Nearly four hours in. “Go. I’ll see you at the top.”

Dee pulled away and headed up towards the lip of the crater, leaving Frank to trudge along behind. The walking was fine, though: a steady gradient and none of those fist-sized loose surface rocks that seemed to predominate out on the plain.

He was halfway out when his earphones suddenly squawked, overloading with signal. He winced, and instinctively his hands went to the sides of his head, where they encountered only his helmet.

“Who the hell was that?”

“Frank? Frank? It’s me. D-Dee. What’s happening, Frank? What’s going on?”

The back end of the trailer had already vanished over the crater rim. Dee and the buggy were invisible. The only choice Frank had was how fast he dared run.

It was more skipping than running, faster than the low, loping pace he’d managed with Marcy, but slower than a full sprint on Earth. He still spent too long in the air, and not long enough pushing himself forward on the ground. And the suit restricted his full movement, too. He felt strangely incapable of speed, almost as if he was dreaming and fighting to wake up.

He scrabbled up the last few steps.

“Hang on, Dee. Hang on. Don’t panic. I’m co—”

The sight struck him dumb. Tornadoes. A dozen, maybe more, it was difficult to tell, were spinning and snaking towards them. The tubes were almost ghost-like, pale and fading high into the sky, where they maintained sinuous curves. But at their bases, they were white with spinning dust.

“What do we do, Frank?”

Frank was mesmerized. The bright funnels tracked briskly across the ground, and then they were among them. One passed over Frank’s trailer, then right past him. He could hear the patter of dust against his helmet, but rather than pelting him with debris, it seemed to strip off what he’d accumulated, and carried it away.

The twister descended into the crater, obliterating his footprints. The others took their own paths, all roughly in the same direction. The air cleared, and the tornadoes moved away, becoming indistinct in the horizon’s haze.

He was aware of another voice in his ear. Alice.

“Frank. Report.”

“It’s OK. It’s OK. Just… surprised, that’s all. Bunch of Martian twisters ambushed us. I’ll check over the suits and the buggies, but we’re OK. We’ve got the air plant.”

She seemed satisfied. Frank walked over to Dee’s buggy and stared up at him.

“Next time, you tell me what the actual problem is.” He was still breathing heavily after his exertions. “Or, goddammit, I’ll kick your ass all the way back to the ship. Got that?”

It took a moment, but he managed to wring an apology out of Dee.

“I… sorry. Sorry.”

“Damn right you’re sorry. You’re not a child. You’re an astronaut. Try and behave like one.” Frank turned round and stalked back to his own buggy. “Let’s find the hab and go home.”

He was angry. Angry with Demetrius, but mostly angry with himself. He knew he should have reacted sooner, and got out of the twisters’ way, rather than just standing there like an idiot. He’d had no idea what might have happened, and it could all have ended very differently.