Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘The transponder you are using is a plug-in board with the digits ELEC105 on its disc-chip?’

‘It is,’ Alex replied.

‘It’s not just a transponder.’

‘No, really?’ said Alex sarcastically. Of course it wasn’t. A transponder occupying a four-centimetre-square board was only something you would find in a museum. The transponder itself was probably too small to even see.

‘The board the transponder is sited on also serves as a navigational computer and diagnostics platform,’ said Ruger calmly. ‘In the event of hard-wiring failures, it responds to signals from the other thrusters and fires itself up in consonance. It contains judgement software too, transponder linked to station sensors – therefore a very complicated piece of kit. However, it has its own rechargeable power supply and can be unplugged.’

‘So I can get myself out of here now?’

‘Wait and listen,’ Ruger snapped. ‘If you pull that now, you won’t be able to communicate with us. On the back of it are four terminals marked AER 1 to 4. You must use just AER 4 to connect to a monopole antenna. I am told that, with our distance from you now, all you will need is a couple of metres of metal.’

‘Is that all?’ Alex asked.

‘How are you for air?’

‘Three hours left in this suit and about an hour and a quarter in the VC suit.’

‘That should be enough for now,’ Ruger replied. ‘Hide yourself while I get our tactical officer here to assess your situation. I will speak to you again in precisely two hours, Ruger out.’

Alex quickly detached the transponder board and, like a night creature fleeing from the glare, returned inside the shadows of the station rim.

16

Rock Fall

Mars looked ancient, unchanging and eternal. It had remained the same for billions of years, so how could humans possibly hope to make any impression on such immensity? What wasn’t taken into account was that for billions of years the strongest force on the surface of Mars had been the blowing of winds that, in the thin atmosphere, would struggle to turn a terran wind turbine, but which had nevertheless sandblasted the planet’s valleys over eternities of time. Putting a human colony, with all its disruption and its machines, in Valles Marineris was like allowing a family of mice to take up residence in a house of cards. Boulders which would have fallen from the cliffs only after a thousand years more of attrition by the dust storms, now came loose very quickly and fell. The warnings were there, but the colonists ignored them and instead decided rock climbing might be a good recreation. The result would perhaps have been less unfortunate if they had not decided to scale the cliffs and slopes directly overlooking their base.

Mars

After finishing the recording in the computer, Var cued it up ready to send on repeat, then she stood up. She had to keep moving, had to keep searching for some way to change her seemingly inevitable death sentence. Inserting Lopomac’s super-caps into the power box of the building brought all the light back on, and enabled Var to search through the containers scattered around inside. Rhone was right: there was no oxygen here, but she did find a ten-litre barrel of water that was frozen solid. She gazed at it for a long while, considering what would be required to crack the water to source its breathable oxygen, but the sums just did not add up. She would first have to thaw the water, then it would be necessary to find some kind of electrolyte to mix into it. Next she would have to rig up some method of getting the resulting oxygen into her suit, maybe using the bottle-recharging pumps to compress and store it. All that would take too much power, so it wasn’t an option.

Within the building she also found some tools, a couple of radiant heaters that would have drained the super-caps within an hour, and some packets of dried soup. All of these were useless to her.

Outside. . .

She mustn’t simply accept Rhone’s word about the lack of oxygen here, because if there was any here he clearly wouldn’t have told her. She stepped out through the airlock into Martian twilight, now that the sun had gone down behind the mountains, then paused. Perhaps it would be better to wait until morning. She would still have enough air, and the light would be better. To do a proper search of her surroundings now would require her using her suit lights, which would again use up her remaining power supply. She decided therefore to search as best she could without the benefit of lights. Even though such activity would burn up her air supply quicker, she could not contemplate just sitting inside doing nothing.

First she checked behind the nearby regolith-block walls, looking for crates, containers – anything. So desperately did she want to find some way to survive, she could almost visualize some tarpaulin-shrouded supply dump just waiting for discovery around the next corner, or down in the shadow of that boulder over there . . .

After one hour of searching, the light growing increasingly dim, she noticed something that didn’t seem to make sense. One building was just a great mass of tumbled rubble, but why it had collapsed did not seem evident, for there were no boulders anywhere nearby. Perhaps one had struck it in passing and bounced on? And there at the foot of a five-metre slope of rubble, lying flat against the rusty Martian dust, protruded a human hand.

Var began walking over, assuming this must be some formation in the dust that just looked like a hand. She squatted down and stared at it and, close up, it still looked like a hand. Then noticing an exposed blue logo along the forefinger, she realized what she was seeing was an EA suit glove. She felt a sudden hysterical relief and reached down to pick the thing up, but the euphoria dissipated when she could only lift it a little way, and realized it wasn’t empty, but attached to an arm extending out from underneath the rubble pile.

She sat back on her heels. Surely all the dead from the Valles Marineris disaster had been found and buried? That was certainly her understanding but, then again, how much time would the survivors have spent searching for corpses? Most likely they looked just for as long as they expected anyone thus buried to survive, even clad in some sort of protective garment. After that they must have had quite enough to concern them in merely eking out their supplies until the arrival of the next Mars Traveller. Thereafter, when their efforts were devoted to building Antares Base, how many more searches would have been likely out here? She had no doubt that officials like Ricard would have considered any such search a waste of valuable Committee resources.

Var unhooked Lopomac’s pick from her belt and scraped away the regolith from immediately about the hand and arm. She then stepped over to the rubble pile and heaved up the large block from underneath which the arm extended, and tipped it aside. She was aware that in Earth gravity she would never have been able to lift it, but also knew that if her muscular development had been similar to that of someone on Earth, she could have even more easily tossed the block to one side. Further rubble tumbled down, but that did not deter her. She kept at it because if this individual clad in the EA suit had been killed by the collapse of the nearby building, then there was a chance of finding an oxygen bottle here with something still inside it.

After a few minutes, during which she exposed yet more of the arm and brought down more of the rubble slope, Var turned on her suit light. She worked methodically, trying not to get herself in a sweat and trying to keep her breathing even. Two hours later, she had exposed the helmet and upper torso, almost completely buried in the ground, with the other arm obviously folded underneath. The style of EA suit was the same as her own in that it would have the oxygen pack strapped across the belly, so it was now underneath the corpse. She would need one of those heavy picks inside the building to unearth it, and it was time to return inside anyway in order to send the recording she had made.