Yves Giraud - Kahnu

“Merde! Liu!”

Rising slowly from under the covers, Sabrina, still half asleep, asked, “Hu… What is it, baby?”

François did not answer. Rushing out of the pod in his underwear, he rushed past Ladli and Tendai, and threw himself into the next tunnel.

“Dedrick! Dedrick! It’s Liu! She’s out!”

“Who? Wh… what?” mumbled the Russian, awakened by the sudden intrusion.

“Liu! She’s gone! She left the station.”

“What? How? What time is it?”

“Almost two in the morning. I just heard the alarm. She got out through her hatch. I’ve tried to find her with the outside cameras, but you can’t see shit out there! It’s still a mess with that storm.”

“Fuck! We got to go after her,” replied Dedrick, rushing out of bed.

“Oh my God! No. What is she doing?” Vera had just woken up. “Wait, I’m coming with you!”

“No. You stay here. It’s too dangerous. François and I will go.”

Dedrick grabbed his boots and, putting a hand on François’s shoulder, added, “Come on, let’s go!”

Within minutes, the entire base was on alert. Vera was trying to stay in contact with Derick’s rover. But the storm was messing up the signal.

“I had her a second ago. She was moving north-east towards Mount Shamsi. I think she’s heading for Najib’s block.”

“Ok, thanks. Don’t worry, we’ll find her.”

Vera wasn’t so confident. They all knew it, in that storm, it would be hard to see anything past a few meters, and she already had several minutes on them. They also knew she had only a few hours of breathable air in her suit, if the tanks were full.

The visibility was almost zero. The rover and its two passengers had been driving for over two hours now, forming wider and wider circles around the station, but with the storm still raging, finding Liu was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

“Fuck! I can’t see shit in this crap. What was she thinking? And the batteries are getting low, we’re gonna have to turn back soon. Still nothing?” asked François, trying to look at the radar screen in front of Dedrick.

“No. I got nothing. But the instruments are having a hard time with all this stuff flying around. How long do we have left?”

“We’re down to thirty-eight percent power and forty-one percent oxygen. We can’t stay out much longer.”

“Damn it! We must find her. We HAVE to!”

Dedrick didn’t need to spell out why. Both men knew her suit had enough oxygen for three hours at best.”

“Maybe we should… Wait! I’ve got something! Turn left!”

The suit Liu Xing was wearing was equipped, as were all their suits, with a transmitter that the rover’s radar system could detect, that is, up to a certain distance and weather permitting. Usually capable of detecting a signal over several hundred meters, the current weather conditions had drastically reduced that to a mere few dozen.

A weak beep suddenly appeared again on Dedrick screen as François veered left. Pushing on forward through the thick wall of dust, the two men were frantically looking in all directions around them, hoping to spot Liu in this foggy mess. Dedrick was also keeping an eye on the unreliable but helpful infrared camera.

“We’re close! She should be right in front of us.”

“I don’t see anything,” replied François.

“It’s this damn storm. It’s messing with the instruments. She can’t be far. I have a strong signal now.”

Slowing down to a crawl, François was moving in short zigzags, trying to cover as much ground as possible.

Suddenly…

“There! There she is! I see her!” screamed François, pointing slightly to their right with one hand, while turning the wheel with the other.

“Liu! LIU!” screamed Dedrick in his suit radio. After checking that François had his helmet on, he jumped out of the rover still moving.

She was walking in a straight line, her back turned to them, apparently unaware of the edge of the cliff ahead. Her slow but steady walk gave her a robotic stance, dragging her feet, as if on auto-pilot. Dedrick reached her within only a few steps of the precipice and grabbed her arm.

“Liu! Stop! LIU!”

Barely fazed by Dedrick’s hold, she turned around and looked at him through her helmet with a dazed look that sent chills down his spine.

“Liu, where are you going? You can’t be out here. It’s not safe.”

But the South-Korean woman was not responding. He could clearly see she was not herself. She did not even seem to “see” him. “ Probably the sedative Vera gave her, ” thought Dedrick. “Come on, Liu, let’s go home.”

“Home?” she repeated in a weak voice.

“Yes, come on, let’s go home.”

“Home,” she whispered again, so low, Dedrick barely heard her.

Turning around in the thick haze, Dedrick radioed François.

“Ok, I have her. We’re walking back to you. Can you flash the headlights or something, I can’t see a thing?”

“François, did you hear me? François?”

No answer. Dedrick’s grip on Liu Xing’s wrist tightened a bit. Looking frantically around, trying to spot the rover’s dark shape through the impenetrable fog, Dedrick called out again.

“François! FRANÇOIS!?… Fuck!”

Having released his hold on her, Liu began walking away again, in the wrong direction. Dedrick turned around just in time to see the frozen edge of the plateau a few feet away from her. He threw himself forward and forced her to the ground, only centimeters from the sheer drop. The cold ground cracked slightly in a few places around them, and the Russian had just enough time to roll the two of them off the collapsing corniche. A large chunk of rock gave out and fell down the abyss. His heart beating furiously in his chest, he rested there a moment before getting back up on his feet. Pulling Liu Xing to his side, he began walking slowly back against the wind, in the general direction, he was fairly certain that he had come from, looking for the rover.

“ I don’t understand, he was right here. What happened? ” wondered Dedrick.

A mere hundred meters away, François was driving in circles.

“Crap, where are they? I can’t believe this.”

“Dedrick? Liu? Merde! ”

“Fran… ctttcrk …”

“Dedrick? Dedrick, where are you?”

“ Crrrckkk… sssssshhhhhh… ”

“Damn it! Lost them again.”

Driving blindly through the dense dust cloud, one eye on the occasional beacon light appearing on and off on the dashboard screen, François suddenly heard something hit the side of the rover. He stopped the vehicle immediately.

A hand appeared on the passenger side window.

“Dedrick! Thank God!”

“I know, I thought you’d turned back without us!”

“Don’t be stupid. How could you even think—?”

“Open the hatch!”

Liu Xing was of no help. Dedrick had to lift her carefully into the cabin of the vehicle and remove her helmet for her once the pressure had stabilized.

“So, what happened to you? Where did you go? You had me scare there, for a moment.”

“Yeah, sorry. Right after you stepped out to grab Liu, I almost drove off the edge of the plateau. I had to roll back. I started looking for you, and… But that doesn’t matter now. Listen, we better hurry up. We only have 21% oxygen left.”

After seeing how sad and depressed Liu looked, neither men had the heart to reprimand her for her actions, even if she had put more than her own life in jeopardy. Dedrick tried to say a few comforting words, but none seemed to even reach her. She spoke none to him.

The morning sun was slowly making its way along the ridge the Mars First station rested on. There was a good 200 meters or so of plateau between the Martian colony and the edge of the cliff. Close to the precipice, Vera was contemplating the beautiful landscape of the giant canyon in all its rust-orange splendor, a site she could never get tired of. François approached her and sat to her left on a flat rock.