It's that girl Annika's voice in her ears again. "Commander, with respect, one of us should go with you. It's procedure. It's how we trained!"
She grimaces inside the helmet and palms open the outer door of the base's lock. Annika is basically correct, but experience and intuition have overriden procedural norms in this increasingly threatening scenario. "You are correct, but this is not normal situation. Buddy system for safety. But I am now Marco's buddy, to bring him back. And connector for solar fields. We cannot spare the O-two for more. Just keep the channel open and check Don's suit." It's not like the Professor would be much help, but at least he will be a back-up for the unforeseen.
She reaches the roborover and looks it over. Unfastening the two oxygen spares, she hefts them up and down. "Tanks are both full. That means he has no reserve." Stating the obvious is necessary, she knows. They must be under no illusions. She's more expecting to have to retrieve a corpse than rescue a struggling survivor. That's her first thought. She won't raise her hopes, even for Annika and Don. Expect the worst, and you'll be proved right at least half the time, in her experience.
She herself has two spare oxygen bottles clipped to her waist belt. So there is plenty of time to walk out a few kilometres along the robo's trail, and back. Take no risks, and waste no time.
The risen sun dazzles her as she looks along the tire tracks. Nobody is in sight. The sky is sharper than usual, less of the muddy brown, more of the pale grey with a rumour of maybe blue. She turns back to the robo and makes a thorough search for anything resembling the spare connector: nothing. "There is no spare part for the solar field," she says, and pauses. Is there any point in stating the obvious?
Yes. For the record. For history. To give value for money to the carrion-bird watchers on that other planet who subscribe to this one-of-a-kind show.
"If we do not find the solar power connector, I estimate we have electrical power for life support only one more day." It will be sometime in the night, she knows, when the fans and heaters die and base air will start going foul. By the next morning they will be using their suit tanks, maybe running ECLSS when there's solar power. But the system will freeze up overnight. After that, the Sabatier reactor and hydrolyser will be the only possible route to fresh oxygen, but they are both power-hungry devices. Then there's the question of recharging the suit batteries. It will be very, very close.
There's no point in elaborating, not out loud. She says no more, and gets into a steady, loping stride that will converge with the tire tracks. All three of them agreed that she will not attempt to use the robo to make more speed: its battery level and state of repair are unknown, and really it doesn't cover ground much better than she can like this.
The terrain is easy for this sort of stride: loose rocks, pebbles, boulders, shelving layers, gravel and fines, but not so crowded to pose a danger to her footing. It's mostly just flat dirt. She keeps enough concentration to steer her gentle leaps through level ground. Where the tire tracks disappear on solid rock, she heads forwards and picks them up not far ahead. Now and again it's not obvious, and she slows her pace, then the tire marks show up further on. At a few points she's tracing the path from hints and guesswork, faint depressions in the hardened dirt or a crushed piece of rock. But overall it's following the same heading.
"Base, Komarova. Making progress. All is well." She checks in every few minutes and gets an okay from Don or Annika.
Soon she can follow the tracks without much conscious thought, and she becomes more aware of the landscape. The contours of Arcadia Planitia are like a never-ending rocky beach, or a little like the steppes of Kazakhstan
At times the tracks follow near a faint ridge, and then they dip through a depression or skirt a rill. Mostly it's a gradual up-crest-down-trough.
She is content. She has found what she didn't even know she was looking for. She could live out here, in the wild wastelands, away from the irrelevant babble and corruption of that other planet; all the cluttering ugliness that she's put up with for her whole life. If the reason for their coming here is to build a new world, she will be a voice for the desolate spaces. People who come here should not always be locked up underground like blind worms, or in glass bubbles, looking out.
Cresting a gradual, shallow rise, she slows and walks carefully down a shale slope. A pang of hunger passes through her, but it's a healthy hunger born of exertion. She knows her body well enough; there's plenty in reserve. She sucks some water from the tube in her helmet.
As for Marco da Silva, she always knew that he was impulsive, genius or not. His death will be a blot on her service record, but at least this way he hasn't yet finished them all off in one stroke of misguided brilliance.
Yet his plan did contain elements of greatness. He improvised his own mobility and found a way to reach the spare electrical connector, presumably. If only it had made it back to base with the roborover, she could have judged his plan to be a success. Perhaps he hung onto the spare part.
Hopping up the far side of the trough, it occurrs to her that he may have been right. She always hates that, and now she sees her mistake in dismissing his ideas so abruptly. Perhaps – who knows – he could have planned for this scenario. Perhaps he carried extra oxygen. Surely he would not have been so stupid as to secure his whole supply on that robo's scoop and then become separated from it.
She reaches the vague crest and sees the tracks curving around the traces of a small crater ahead. She follows. The hills are still a great distance away, too far for her to reach today with any margin for safety. Something unexpected may have happened to him, but she knows he had thorough training. He should have formed some back-up plan for accidents like this, if it was indeed an accident.
She strains her vision ahead, trying to pick out any distant movement, any shape or reflected light that's not part of the landscape. How would the connector appear? Would it be in a bag or a box? What colour? Where is da Silva?
"Base, Komarova. I'm going further. He must be out here somewhere."
"Roger, Commander. Take care."
- + - + - + -
It was turning into another all-nighter, and now that Nowal was wide awake with the disappearance of Marco, and they had done the little that they could do from several light-minutes away, she had retired to her office and was chasing three contacts by phone: the solar field contractor in California, a well-connected crowd-source supporter in Sydney, and an antagonistic journalist pacing up and down the departure lounge of Frankfurt Airport. She had come out of a video call with Marco da Silva's parents feeling more drained than she could remember, even though Mr and Mrs da Silva had spent most of the call trying to comfort her.
All but the essential Mission Control staff had gone home half an hour ago, since tomorrow was Eid al-Kabir. Hazi had assured her that there was little point in keeping everyone on alert during the crisis. She had an invitation to dinner with her cousin Hind at her twenty-third storey apartment overlooking the sea, but nothing before that. She was planning to catch up on budget forecasts then nap a few hours at noon until the time of al-Asr prayers. That was, unless the situation at Arcadia Planitia reached out its long tentacles for her again.
Another call came in, this time from an office of the Ministry of Commerce in Al Jaffiliya district. They firmly requested her presence immediately to answer urgent questions regarding SSI's Operational Safety policy. It was obviously in direct relation to the events that were constantly on her mind. There was a veiled threat about revoking SSI's business license if the matter could not be straightened out quickly.
She sighed, tied up some loose ends and called Izhaq her driver. In the corridor she gathered her Yemeni bodyguard, Mohamed Abdul Mo'nem, and she was soon in the car, waiting to depart. These conflicts were all part of the job, and she had become used to them.
Izhaq, a balding Egyptian Copt, waddled up to the car and settled his stocky frame into the driver's seat with a subdued groan but without a word. He was unfailingly cheerful and charming, but this night a mix of sleeplessness and a sense of the current crisis seemed to keep him to the minimal exchanges required of him. Mohamed slipped into the front pasenger seat just as the Lexus EK-5 edged out of the ground-level parking garage, sharklike in its silent slimness.
She was rehearsing in her mind the questions she expected from these self-important officials and the responses that should satisfy any reasonable person, dimly aware of the streets flying past outside her window and the flutter of street lights. She made some notes on her phone. Mohamed and Izhaq muttered to each other about what they planned to do on the day of the Eid. Izhaq, as at least nominally a Christian, would not be celebrating the Islamic feast, but could at least hope for half a day to get together with friends and to talk with family on the phone.
Then Izhaq steered the limousine into the narrower streets behind the Ministry offices. His interrogative grunt and the abrupt braking of the car caused Nowal to glance up.
Ahead, the road was blocked by two black saloon cars. With a screech of rubber, a third car shot out from a side street and stopped directly behind the Lexus. Mohamed was already instructing Izhaq to reverse and get away, but there was suddenly nothing to be done. They were blocked in. And the four men in gleaming white thawbs striding towards them were ambiguously, possibly armed: each of them held one hand inside a bulging pocket.
The street they found themselves in was lined with the rears of businesses, everything locked, nobody around. Mohamed calmly began dialling a number on his phone, assuring Nowal that they would soon have this 'stupidity' sorted out. Izhaq sat very still and breathed deeply, mumbling a prayer under his breath. The engine was still, but she knew that the driver was ready to rocket away at a moment's notice.
Nowal rolled down her window as the first man approached. His face was as lean as drought, with thick camel lips. As he began speaking, she burst out rapidly, "I assume you know that the office of His Highness Prince Jamal is following our progress very closely, and therefore the people who sent you here in this illegal action are in conflict with him." A second man, moustached, with dark puckered cheeks, attempted to interrupt her, but she raised her tone and went on as loudly as she could manage. "The recent political power plays are well known, so it will not be hard to discover your employers. Right now you must be very sure of yourself, but be assured that what you are doing will look very bad on your record. Especially bad if either of these two honourable gentlemen are mistreated in any way at all." With that, she slid the window up again, even as the pucker-cheeked man was beginning to speak.
"Step out of the –" he began.
"Lock the doors," grated Mohamed's voice. "My friends will be here in two minutes." She saw that her door was already locked.
Nowal was well aware what Mohamed's 'two minutes' could really mean, but she was encouraged that both men were staying cool.
The men standing in the street conferred briefly, then Camel-Lips bent low as if examining the left headlight, and they felt the car lurch streetwards by five or ten centimetres. Then another of the men slashed the front right tire.
Pucker-Cheeks struck Mohamed's window with a tool the size of a small flashlight and it shattered with a crump. Fragments sprayed at Mohamed, who had just turned his face away in time, and onto the floor of the car and the road. "Tell the lady to step out of the car," the man said, managing to inject a calm menace into his voice as he bent near the bodyguard's ear. "Nobody gets hurt." Mohamed's eyes blazed at him in eloquent silence.
Nowal sighed. She had heard of this sort of thing. This was an extension of some men's squabble over taxes or appointments to high positions, and she was caught in the metaphorical crossfire. The crisis on Mars was merely a convenient pretext. But it was all like one of the twenty-minute rainstorms which occasionally swept over the Dubai Marina waterfront. All traces of it would evaporate almost as soon as the drops ceased to fall. "Mr Abdul Mo'nem, please comply with this man's demands. Let us play their game for now, then we will clean up on them later. Unfortunately, violent action rarely reaches a happy conclusion in cases as trivial as this. I will see you back at the office in a short while." She unlocked and opened her door, then stepped out. Mohamed and Izhaq began to protest with animated persistence, but she reassured them with further quiet words. They would need to walk back to a busier street and rouse a recovery truck driver from sleep. They would be lucky to enjoy their Eid day as they had planned, but she felt confident that they would not be roughed up or injured.
She turned and walked rapidly to the nearest black limo, the one which had blocked their route to the rear. The men tried to direct her to one of the other cars, but she strongly desired to keep at least a little of the initiative. Happily the front passenger door was unlocked, so she opened it, got in and closed the door. The driver, a youth with a sparse, carefully trimmed goatee, stared at her in something like shock. "Drive on!" she commanded. He frowned, flustered, and looked around for whichever of the men was his superior.
After further argument, shouting and her gracious acquiescence to the request of Camel-Lips to at least sit in the rear seat of the car, they were off through the streets at racing speed. The rear windows were so heavily tinted that she could see almost nothing of the dark back streets through which they careened. She lost track of their whereabouts, so when the nervous young driver swerved into an underground car park, she had no idea of where they had arrived.
After a hustle through the almost empty parking level, Camel-Lips led her and Pucker-Cheeks to an elevator, in which they stood in silence as it rose. She threw some obvious questions at them, to no avail. She glanced at both men. The completely humourless masks of their faces forced an amused giggle to spill out.
Camel-Lips glared down at her but did not speak.
"I was just thinking," she said, "you two could get perfect walk-on parts in the next Bengali Gangster movie. You know, as the bad guy goons who never shoot straight."
Neither gave a reply, but she could hear the irritation in their breathing and in the way they shifted inside their thawbs.
She and her two uncommunicative abductors emerged in an unadorned, windowless corridor. They ushered her through a door, and locked it behind her before she could turn and protest. It was completely dark inside.
She fumbled for the light switch. She was standing alone, slightly breathlessly, in a room about twice the size of her office but with much less furniture. There was a threadbare couch against the wall, a single wooden chair lying on its side in the centre of the room, and a small fridge humming in one corner. A framed calligraphic print of the Fatiha hung at a careless angle in the centre of one wall. It was the sight of the orphan chair, dropped there alone like a sleeping child, which did most to disassemble her composure. It was many minutes before she could make herself step nearer, set the chair on its feet opposite the door and facing it, and lower herself into it gingerly. It held her weight. She took a deep breath and let it out pensively.
They had taken her phone and almost everything else. They could not so easily take away her dignity.
- + - + - + -
Read on... Alfarroba
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