Mars Nation 3 Read online

  The man pushed him toward the back of the cabin. Why doesn’t he just say what he wants, and why? At the rear of the vehicle was another airlock that led to the second rover. Theo was about to lean down and reach for his spacesuit when the Texan shoved him again. Got it. You don’t want me to take my suit along. Theo had to acknowledge that the rationale behind this was quite clever. If they stuck all the MfE men in the second rover and removed the airlock, they’d be cut off from every possible escape route. No one could leave the rover without a suit. They would be able to transport them across the Mars desert without any kind of security watch.

  But this would be torture for the prisoners. The trip would take at least four days, or five, and maybe longer. They would have to spend the time together in cramped quarters, without any privacy whatsoever. And the sanitary facilities would be primitive. Would they provide them with enough food and water? Of course they would. The administrator was following a specific strategy. Every life had a role to play. The larger the gene pool was for his colony, the easier it would be for it to survive. If the man wasn’t such a big asshole, they might have agreed to join him before now. It would have been reasonable. It didn’t make sense to maintain three separate human settlements on the planet.

  “Can’t you hurry up?” the man behind him called.

  Theo didn’t let this ruffle him. He was about to exit the tube when he heard Andy’s voice.

  “Don’t touch me!” Andy shouted.

  “I’ll touch you whenever I want to,” the Texan replied.

  Theo stopped. He knew what this expression really meant. The man wanted an excuse to pick a fight, and he was just waiting for the right opportunity to hit Andy. The delicate Georgian probably looked like easy pickings to him.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Theo yelled. He could be at Andy’s side in three seconds.

  “Keep out of this,” the Texan said. “It doesn’t concern you. Have you already forgotten who’s got the gun here?”

  That did it. Theo strode back down the tube. The man was aiming at him, but he didn’t stop. “You’d be a dumb ass to fire,” he said. “But hopefully you already know that.”

  The guy lowered his weapon. “Fine,” he said. “Just go! Into the other rover. We’re about to leave.”

  Rebecca was waiting on the bridge, but she didn’t know why. What was happening on the surface? What was the administrator going to do with the men? Nobody was answering her questions.

  Two armed guards were stationed down here with the women. They were strolling down the corridors, making lewd, immature jokes as if they had never seen a woman before. Regardless of their weapons, if they wanted to, the women could take out the two jokers any time they chose.

  But that might put the lives of the men at risk! That had probably been the administrator’s idea to begin with. If he separated the two groups, he could use the one as a pawn against the others. Rebecca was afraid that his plan might actually work.

  The two strangers had shown up on the bridge just now, unexpectedly. It was evident that they were listening to orders via the small button speakers in their ears. “Alright, people,” one of them finally said. “We’re going to leave you on your own. Twice a day, you’ll need to contact the office of the administrator to receive your daily duty roster.”

  “And what’ll happen to our men?” Ellen asked.

  “We’re taking them with us. They will be put to good use in the city.”

  “But you can’t...,” Rebecca started, then stopped as she realized what she was saying. Of course they can.

  Ellen grabbed Rebecca’s upper arm.

  “Good, ladies,” the other man said with a nod at the two of them. “And if any of you ladies find yourselves needing a real man, just call for Jack.”

  The first man slapped him on the back. “You’re married, bro,” he said.

  Jack gave a ‘whatever’ shrug.

  The men fastened up their suits before leaving the bridge through the airlock. As soon as the light attached to the lock chamber glowed green, Rebecca followed them in her spacesuit. She was too late. A trail of dust indicated that the three vehicles had already driven out of the crater, heading eastward. She waved after them in the crazy hope that maybe Theo could see her through a telescope. Then colorful flecks of light surrounded her.

  She turned around and saw the daily rainbow. Her promise that she would see Theo again. No question, she told herself firmly.

  Sol 317, NASA Base

  “Good morning!”

  Lance set the tray holding fresh coffee and muesli down on the table. Sarah sat up in her bed. He picked up the pillow from the foot of the bed and handed it to her. She stuffed it behind her back so that she could lean against the wall.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

  Sarah smiled. “Mostly. He only woke me up every four hours or so.” She pointed next to her, where their son was sleeping in his little basket.

  Lance stood beside the bed and watched him. He was beautiful, but he also looked quite fragile.

  “You could change his diaper,” Sarah suggested.

  He stared at her.

  “You do know what diapers are, right?”

  “Yeah, uh, I can do that?”

  “Give it a shot. It’s just as new for me as it is for you, or do you think that women are somehow born with this special knowledge?”

  “I... No, of course not.” Lance leaned over the basket and carefully picked up his son. The baby opened his eyes and stretched. “Amazing,” he said.

  He lifted him up to his face and touched his soft skin with his cheek. The baby smelled sweet. Lance then set him carefully down on the end of the bed before unbuttoning the tiny sleeper. Lance remembered how Sarah had sewed it from spare clothes at the base. At that time, everything had still seemed so far off. Now a diapered bottom was right in front of him. The diaper was made out of thin cotton fabric. He tried to memorize how it was wrapped around his son’s lower body. He would have to recreate it somehow.

  “Who diapered him like this?”

  “Ewa,” his girlfriend declared.

  “Ah, she seems to have mastered it.”

  “It’s not hard,” Sarah said.

  Maybe, maybe not. He removed the used diaper. The blackish smear in it smelled slightly sweet, not at all unpleasant. He folded up the diaper. Someone had set a bowl of warm water beside the bed. A rag hung over its edge. “The water?” he asked.

  “Ewa brought it by right before you came with breakfast.”

  “Oh, the coffee!” Lance exclaimed. “Please serve yourself, or it’ll get cold.”

  “I’m hungry,” Sarah said.

  “Enjoy!”

  Lance cautiously cleaned his son who suddenly screwed up his face and began to screech. Lance flinched. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Who knows?” Sarah said. “The rag might be too cold for him.”

  Lance dried the damp skin with a towel, pulled out a fresh diaper from the container under the bed, and tucked it under his son. He did his best to replicate the wrapping technique. It worked. The baby looked just like he had before the soiled diaper had been removed. “Look,” he said proudly. “Freshly diapered. And, he isn’t crying anymore.”

  “That’s good,” Sarah said. “Now we just need to do that a thousand more times, and he’ll be in the clear.”

  “Sounds promising,” Lance replied wryly as he juggled wiggly little arms and legs back into the sleeper. “By the way, we haven’t discussed names yet. Why not?” Had he been trying to suppress thoughts of the impending birth? Lance was surprised at himself.

  “That’s true,” Sarah said. “I also don’t know why we didn’t. Maybe because I’ve always had a name in mind and didn’t want you to try to change my mind.”

  Lance laughed. “What made you think that I’d try to change your mind?”

  “Well, you might not have liked it.”

  “You’d have to tell me what it was before I could do that.”
>
  “Okay. I came up with Michael. The name sounds good in German and English. And—”

  “And what?”

  “It’s a little crazy.”

  “Out with it.”

  “After the first moon landing,” Sarah continued, “everyone focused on Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. But no one gave any thought to the poor man who spent all that time up in the Apollo shuttle, circling the moon by himself.”

  “Michael Collins,” Lance said. “I remember it as if it were yesterday.” He laughed. The first moon landing had been over seventy years ago. Would the history books someday tell the story of the first Mars landing? At this moment, it didn’t look like there would be any more history books written.

  “Good, you even know his name.”

  “That was part of our training. History of NASA 101.”

  “So… what do you think of Michael as a name?”

  He spoke the name several times out loud. “What does it sound like in German?” he asked.

  “Michael,” Sarah said.

  “Mikhael.”

  “Something like that. A soft ch sound, you know?”

  “Soft is good. I’d prefer that he not turn into one of those hardened men.”

  “He shouldn’t turn into a hardened man?”

  “Of course he’ll become a man. But not so callous, you know?”

  “I think I know what you mean. So we agree on Michael?”

  “Yes, he should be named Michael for the man who never got to land on the moon,” Lance said.

  “Did you know that Collins was later offered the opportunity to walk on the moon with the Apollo 17 mission?” Sarah asked. “He turned it down.”

  “Good call. He wanted to stay alive. The missions were just kind of cobbled together back then.”

  “Probably. But I prefer to interpret that as his decision to remain the man in the background. He always spoke with such unbelievable humility. I really liked that about him.”

  “Yes, that suits you,” Lance said.

  They gathered on the bridge around noon. Sarah brought Michael along in his basket. He stayed fast asleep as she carried him through the base’s corridors.

  “I would like to introduce you to Michael,” Lance said once they were all there.

  “We know each other already,” Ewa said with a smile.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Sharon said. “I’m Sharon, but you may call me Aunt Sharon.”

  “I’m Mike. You may call me Boss.”

  Sarah laughed in response.

  “For real, it’s a nice name,” Mike stated. “In honor of Michael Collins, I assume?”

  “My NASA hero,” Sarah said. “Besides, I like how the name sounds in German.”

  “Michael,” Mike said.

  Sarah looked at him with appreciation. “That was perfect. Where did you learn to pronounce the soft ch sound?”

  “Kiss-up,” Lance said.

  “At school,” Mike replied. “We had a very pretty German teacher, so all of us guys worked harder than usual.”

  “You had German in school?” Sharon asked. “I hadn’t heard about that.”

  “It was totally normal when I grew up in North Dakota. There were a ton of German Americans up there.”

  “But your mother was from Italy, right?”

  “That didn’t mean the German teacher wasn’t really pretty, which was why that language interested me more than my mother’s native one.”

  “That’s great. You can speak a little German with Michael sometimes,” Sarah said. “It would be good if I wasn’t the only one he heard speaking it.”

  “Unfortunately, I’ve pretty much forgotten everything I learned.”

  “Then I’ll refresh your memory.”

  “Maybe later, after we’ve solved the Summers problem,” Mike said.

  All of a sudden, the mood on the bridge darkened. What a shame, Lance thought. Reality had returned.

  “How should we respond to an attack?” Mike asked.

  “We should surrender,” Sharon replied spontaneously. “I don’t see that there’s any way we could defend ourselves.”

  “Our base should actually be pretty easy to defend,” Lance said.

  “Yes, but for how long? If we can’t get out, we’ll run through our resources. Our enemy would definitely last longer than we could.”

  “Do we have any aces up our sleeve that we don’t know about?” Mike asked.

  Sarah spoke up. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. Something that we could use to surprise them. Something that might make us unassailable.”

  “I... I could—” Ewa didn’t finish the sentence.

  “What could you do?” Mike asked.

  “No, that’s ridiculous. I can’t do anything.”

  “Just say what you’re thinking. What could you do?” Mike asked again.

  “Forget it. We should surrender when they get here.”

  “I can’t agree to that. We shouldn’t make it so easy for them. Maybe our ditch will hold,” Lance said. “Our odds might not be high, but if we don’t even try, we’ve lost everything anyway.”

  “Then I suggest that you and Sharon remove the bridge and inspect the ditch,” Mike said. “Not that it’s collapsed already, or anything.”

  The others nodded. Lance studied Ewa. What had she been about to propose, and why was she now so reluctant to tell them about it? She could be really stubborn sometimes.

  “I’ll be right there,” Sharon said over the helmet radio.

  “Take your time. You haven’t missed anything,” Lance replied.

  He examined the sky. The thin air was full of dust, as if a storm had moved through the day before. But it had been dead calm here for the past few days. Maybe this was caused by a spin-off from a dust storm farther to the north. Here, close to the equator, the weather was more stable than to the north and the south, where the seasons changed.

  The hatch in the floor opened, and Sharon’s head appeared. They should have expanded the airlock long ago so that more than one astronaut at a time could exit onto the surface. However, they’d had so many other things to do that they hadn’t gotten around to this.

  “Sorry you had to wait,” she said.

  “I enjoy taking in the sights around here. Every day, there’s something new to discover,” Lance replied.

  “Very funny!”

  Nothing except for the quantity of dust in the air ever changed from day to day around the base. The turbine he had built shortly after their landing sometimes turned slower and sometimes faster. By this point, they were extracting energy from the temperature changes in the planet’s surface. Since locating a water source, tricks like this were now possible. But he still hadn’t disassembled the turbine. After all, it was the only thing that conferred a degree of vitality on their base.

  “Let’s go,” Sharon said, reaching for his arm.

  Lance brushed some red dust from the shoulder of her suit.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  It was a good 200 meters to the outer base boundary. The ditch was definitely visible. Lance checked to see if the edge they had reinforced with ice was still solid. To do that, he had to balance on the large stones they had deposited all around to shield the ice from the sun.

  “Just be careful,” Sharon said. “A five-meter fall is nothing to laugh at.”

  Lance knelt and peered down. The ground there was stone hard. If he fell, his suit wouldn’t survive the impact. Sharon would have to quickly drag him to the airlock. He stood back up and climbed from rock to rock. He felt a little like a knight at a castle. The ditch walls seemed to be well-preserved from up here. “Should we take a look at them from down there?” he asked.

  “Sure. We have no idea how long it’ll be before we’ll be back out here.”

  He turned to face her and leapt forward with all his strength from the rock he was on to the solid ground. Something behind him crashed. The rock, which weighed at least 50 kilograms, had absorbe
d his momentum, rolled backward, and tumbled off the wall. He hoped the damage was limited to this. The collision was audible despite the thin Martian air. Lance memorized the spot in question.

  They crossed the bridge they’d made from two steel girders left over after the reconstruction of the drill tower, over which they had laid sturdy panels. They wouldn’t be able to manually remove the beams—they were too heavy for that. After all, the bridge had needed to bear the weight of an enclosed rover. The structure was dusty, just like everything else that sat out in the Mars atmosphere for an extended period of time. On the other side of the bridge, they turned to the right. From the outside, the ditch’s slope didn’t look very steep. Any vehicle that reached the ditch would have to drive down a 30-degree slope before coming to a stop in front of a smooth, five-meter wall.

  Lance and Sharon climbed down into the ditch. Sand and a few small rocks were scattered across the ground. Lance stepped very close to the wall. It wasn’t as pristine as it had seemed from the top of the ditch. Erosion had already started to work on it, but now wasn’t the time for improvements. Their enemy could show up at their door at any time.

  He looked up. The damage to the wall was superficial. The outer layer of ice hadn’t been penetrated. For an average climber, it would still be impossible to scale the five meters. Even if you drove a rover right up to the wall and climbed on the roof, you would still be short by about a meter. However, if the enemy brought along a crane... but that was unlikely, at least on their first attempt.

  Sharon walked to the left. She obviously wanted to circle the base. He followed her. They soon ran into the boulder that he had accidentally caused to crash down. Half of it was buried in the ground. Here, too, the wall was undamaged. What luck! They kept going. It was strange to be down here. He felt like he was in some sort of primitive maze since he couldn’t see any of their surroundings. Fortunately, they would eventually reach the bridge. Otherwise, they would just keep circling the base forever. At a diameter of 500 meters, the ring ditch was more than one and a half kilometers long. They needed about 15 minutes to complete the circuit.